Asunder (15 page)

‘Coffee or tea?’ he asked when I entered the kitchen at half past ten. I’d lain in bed an extra hour, hoping that perhaps I would find him at his desk by the time I came out for breakfast.

‘Tea’s fine,’ I said, reaching for the pot. He reached for it at the same time. Our hands met. Mine quickly withdrew.

He poured me a mug and turned back to his toast.

‘How’d you sleep?’

‘Fine,’ I lied. ‘And you?’

‘Like a dead man.’

I felt his eyes on me as I opened the jar of honey, so delicious it tasted of forest, and spooned some on to my plate.

‘The bread’s still warm,’ he said, passing me the basket.

‘Thanks.’

‘I was thinking . . . ’

He paused. I bit into my toast, dreading the end of the sentence, and stared down at the ugly vinyl tablecloth.

‘ . . . that we could go to the menagerie today, at the Jardin des Plantes. Have you ever been there?’

I shook my head.

‘It’s one of the oldest zoos in the world. I’d like to go. I have some poems in mind.’

‘Sure,’ I said, eager for some activity and distraction, and relieved that last night’s visitation had gone unmentioned.

A gravel path led us through a sweep of manicured gardens, past rows of thorny hedges and denuded trees, past the seated statue of Buffon, the great naturalist under whose direction the zoo had flourished. It led us past a large rotunda of vaulted green iron and glass reminiscent of a train station, past countless signs in assorted typefaces, their edges darkened by rust, and, finally, to the menagerie itself.

The first animals to arrive in 1793, our pamphlet said, were saved from the king’s private zoo at Versailles, pillaged during the Terror. Many, including a camel, had already been eaten or destroyed. In 1795 France acquired its first elephant and in 1827 its first giraffe (a present to Charles X from the pasha of Egypt), inspiring a craze that featured everything from songs, poems and vignettes to gingerbread giraffes and ‘
coiffure a la girafe
’, high chignons held aloft by a wire frame.

The first animals we stopped to admire seemed entirely removed from, in fact almost resistant to, this animated past: a giant tortoise in its domed brown carapace resting alongside a rock of equal size, the two locked in a contest of immobility, and a lone black yak dozing on the dirt ground of its enclosure, its eyes half closed and front legs tucked under, its shabby coat like a worn blanket, L-shaped horns pointed upwards as if waiting for signals from a mountaintop continents away. A pair of majestic eagle owls, or
hiboux grand duc
, seated on high branches like small, sad kings. Placid dromedaries with faded patches on their knees.

Daniel began to say something but I moved away, desiring silence while I looked, and motioned to him before stepping into the vivarium. Inside, three stock-still Nile crocodiles suspended in shallow water like strips of bark, a snake with an unblinking silver eye like a coin, a leaf-green chameleon on a branch basking in the ersatz glow of a sunlamp. A few paces behind, Daniel had followed me in, and once near he remarked on the effective camouflage of some of the reptiles, almost lost to the eye in their viridescent surroundings, too long a word for too simple a thought, and then fell silent. The stuffy air of the vivarium was only tolerable for a short while. After five minutes we emerged and took a path to our right that led us to the monkey section, where large skittish eyes hung over pairs of little black hands clasping the wire nettings.

The great aviary was filled with diurnal birds of prey, all kinds of landscapes of feathers inside, some moving and others very still. The only free birds we saw were a gang of pigeons loitering beneath, pecking at some fallen seed; even birds must understand that beauty has a price. Daniel began jotting something down in his notebook. Standing with his legs anchored apart, he looked up every now and then at the trapped brushstrokes beyond the bars, strokes thicker than the ones we were used to, and back down at his writing. If I didn’t know, I’d think he was sketching the birds rather than finding words for them.

As the afternoon started to thicken, his figure, especially when hunched over his notebook that way, took on a somewhat sinister aspect, much less attractive than any of the creatures around us, and I started to feel slightly annoyed too by the unevenness of his gait. In fact that day his limp, at such variance with his other movements, rattled me to such an extent I found myself silently, guiltily, willing him a headache. Anything to remove the limp: bring back the Hungarian and resummon, reconjure, resurrect the headache, I thought to myself as we walked more or less side by side, and at first I thought he’d read my mind when he quoted a poem about a caged panther forever pacing round one centre, its mighty will paralysed, its vision wearied by the bars.

As if in answer to this sudden burst of quotation, we arrived at the snow leopard. Judging from the enraptured crowds circling the enclosure this animal was the zoo’s main attraction. People held up their children, murmured and exclaimed, snapped dozens of pictures. The metallic light at that hour, a bluish silver, made the cat look even more powerful and mysterious, and before long I too succumbed to its spell, transfixed by the glacial green eyes flecked with sparks of boredom and irritation, pride and captivity impossible partners, and the fluid, elegant movements of the large spotted paws. It was the only creature that day that looked straight back at us, silently hissing—ears pinned back and jaws sprung open—and for a heart-stopping second I forgot there was a pane of glass between us.

Dusk fell at four thirty—from elsewhere, a loud squawking of parrots—and we followed the painted wooden exit signs and passed through the turnstile. On the way home, Daniel stopped several times to write in his notebook and answered in monosyllables when I asked what we were having for dinner or doing tomorrow. That afternoon there could’ve been a glass pane and two rows of bars between us; perhaps I had imagined his voice and the open door.

And then, that very night, he arrived. At half past ten, in a dark blue suit. Daniel was at his desk and I was heading to the kitchen for something sweet when the outside buzzer rang. We looked at one another, puzzled. We weren’t expecting anyone. From the window facing the street, we saw the figure of a man paying a taxi. On the pavement beside him, a suitcase and a briefcase. The taxi drove off. The man dragged his luggage over to the door. He was no longer visible from where we stood.

The buzzer rang a second time.

Minutes later, the bell to our flat. Someone, possibly the concierge, had let the man into the building and he was now right outside. Our doorbell again. I followed Daniel as he went to investigate. He peered through the peephole, shrugged in response to whatever he saw, and opened.

Outside stood a slender man with bags under his eyes and a white, heart-shaped face. He wore a suit and shiny brown shoes and his dark hair was combed into a side parting with each section slicked down, the furrows of the comb still visible. Early to mid-fifties I would say, though it was hard to tell.

‘Gregor?’ the man said.

‘No, he’s in Ljubljana.’

The man looked surprised. He rubbed his forehead and craned his neck to look past us, as if checking to see whether Daniel was telling the truth.

‘He’s not here. Can I take a message?’

‘My name is Pierre,’ the man said forlornly. ‘From Stockholm. I expect Gregor.’

Daniel’s face lit up. ‘Pierre Zekeli?’

The man nodded.

And our trip slipped away.

‘Well, I am Daniel, Daniel Harper, from London.’

More astonishment.

‘The poet?’

‘Yes!’

At this word, Pierre lunged forward and threw his arms around him, the seams of his suit nearly bursting, the smell of pine cologne rising off his clothes.

‘Come in, my friend,’ Daniel said, and helped him with his suitcase.

I closed the door and followed.

Pierre scanned the living room as he walked in, his eyes resting for a moment on Daniel’s busy desk. After setting down his briefcase he excused himself and headed towards the bathroom, and on his way back detoured into the kitchen for a glass of water. He was clearly familiar with the place.

‘Daniel Harper,’ Pierre muttered to himself in a funny accent, smiling.

I cleared my throat and held out a hand.

‘And I’m Marie.’

‘Oh yes, this is Marie,’ Daniel echoed.

Pierre shook my hand with his cold one.

‘But where is Gregor?’ he asked Daniel.

‘Gregor’s in Ljubljana.’

‘Why?’

‘He’s getting divorced.’

The smile disappeared. ‘From Barbara?’

Pierre went to the sofa and steadied himself on an armrest.

‘But they were together since sixteen.’

‘Well, that’s probably why.’

In order to lighten the news, Daniel went to the kitchen and returned with a good bottle of whisky we’d bought at the shop on the corner.

After knocking back a tumbler, Pierre asked for three hangers. He opened his scuffed leather suitcase, a fine make and well travelled, and hung three dark blue suits like the one he was wearing in the closet by the door. That was the most he would ever unpack.

Daniel asked whether he was hungry.

No, Pierre replied, the only thing he required was an ashtray.

Once a saucer had been provided (we couldn’t find an ashtray despite our guest insisting Gregor was a heavy smoker himself) Pierre poured himself another tumbler and produced a dented cigarette case embossed with two griffins from his jacket pocket. He lit his cigarette with a match. Once he’d taken a few puffs, inhaling deeply as if savouring every particle, he turned to Daniel and asked whether he knew anything more about the divorce.

No, Daniel said, he knew nothing, in fact he had never met Gregor; the particulars of his life were unknown to him, apart from what he happened to mention in letters.

Pierre topped up his tumbler, turned the bottle towards him to study the label. His nails were manicured and he wore a gold ring with some kind of emblem on his little finger.

Once Daniel had poured out two more tumblers for us, we all sat down at the kitchen table, by then the designated focal point of the flat, and over the next two hours, over a litany of questions and answers—how was so-and-so, had Daniel seen the latest anthology of French and Czech poetry, or the Finnish journal with the piece on Celan, and many other things I couldn’t possibly relate to—Pierre finished off our twelve-year-old Johnnie Walker. I watched as the bottle’s coppery contents sank from three quarters to half full to a quarter to empty.

With the last remaining drops, to which he added an inch of tap water, Pierre swallowed three pills, two pink and one white, which he extracted from his briefcase, kept at his feet at all times like a small, obedient dog. Within minutes of ingesting them, his head began to droop and his cigarette started missing the saucer, small mounds of ash accumulating on the table.

Just as his eyes were closing like the shutters of a bookshop, Daniel showed him the sofa. He offered to make it into a bed but in a last flourish of energy Pierre raised his hand and said he liked sleeping on hard surfaces.

And there he slept, for eighteen hours. As far as I could tell, he didn’t even get up once to use the bathroom. Don’t worry about him, Daniel would say each time he caught me looking over. Are you sure he’s fine? I would ask, to which Daniel would answer, Of course. He’ll wake up when he recovers from his trip. But Sweden’s not that far away, I’d say, to which Daniel would reply, somewhat enigmatically,
Depends how you measure distances
.

As it turned out, Pierre spent half his visit asleep. Even when awake, he seemed in a permanent state of tilting into sleep, and when asleep he continued to look impeccable, his face as smooth as his hair, everything in place, elegant and unruffled. In many ways, he was the perfect guest.

He didn’t cost us much either, since he barely ate. At dinner he would take a few polite bites, fork always in left hand, knife in right, and discreetly push the unwanted food to one side of his plate. He’d then rise from his chair and walk over to the bookcase to fetch the saucer, sit down again and smoke through the rest of the meal. I knew Daniel disliked eating amidst fumes but he never protested, instead listening attentively as Pierre spoke to him about poems he had written, ‘L’après-midi d’une nuance’ and ‘Pour en faire de grands parkings’, and how the lukewarm reception of these early attempts in French had made him turn full-time to translation, although at the back of his mind he still harboured plans to write ‘
le poème total
’.

Every now and then Daniel would turn to check on me, but mainly his attention was riveted on his friend. Pierre’s English was bizarre, an invention seemingly his own, unlike the English of Scandinavian or Eastern European visitors to our Gallery whose origins were betrayed as soon as they came up to ask a question. When I commented on Pierre’s use of the word catarrh (he’d arrived with a mild cold) Daniel leapt to remind me that English was his
fifth
language, after Romanian, Swedish, French and German.

Towards the end of dinner, or, rather, as Daniel and I were finishing ours, Pierre would wash down a few pills with his wine and half an hour later, like clockwork, crumple into his chair. Sometimes we would leave him in this position, which looked far from comfortable, but usually Daniel would slip his hands under his armpits and drag his friend to the sofa and stretch him out horizontal, then remove his shoes and place them by the briefcase at his feet.

Lying there, just
lying there
. And yet, from the moment he appeared to the moment he departed, Pierre exerted his influence. How could it be that someone who spent most of his time immobile could have such a strong hold on my friend? From good morning to good night, Daniel was in some kind of a trance. It didn’t matter whether Pierre was awake or asleep or, as it appeared most of the time, somewhere in between. Was the temperature in the living room warm enough, Daniel wondered, or should he turn up the heating? Would the sound of the coffee grinder wake him, or the toaster’s chime?