Hand Me Down World (12 page)

Then the black woman. There was no mention of her until I saw him with her one afternoon. This was at Wertheim. Ralf has a sweet tooth. Wertheim was one of our highlights during those mad weeks of mopping up the city. Well, he was sitting at the table by the Roman fountain. The black woman sat opposite, silent, about as companionable as a vase, I remember thinking, and, poor Ralf. But by now our lives had moved apart. I was seeing another man. And that was the last thing I ever expected to happen, but it did. Ralf got wind of it. Interrogated me over the telephone until I told him there would be no more telephone conversations if he continued in this way. He shut up. So quickly in fact that it made me feel worse. What ray of sunshine I provided by that stage I cannot imagine. But there must have been something for him to shut up so quickly.

Some months passed before I saw him again. He was still with the black woman, and younger man, perhaps in his forties, who on closer inspection looked more like a tourist. I actually thought,
Yes, that's it
. The man is a tourist and Ralf and the black woman are directing him somewhere. But then I saw them again—and they were a threesome. On the Ku'damm, a little gang of three, completely improbable, mysterious in their own way, bobbing along in search of a favourable landfall. I am being grandiloquent. Ralf used to complain to me about these ‘flourishes' of mine. He only ever wanted the ‘facts'. The description of the thing itself. Not opinions. In this way, my personality was purged, deemed superfluous. It took me a long time, a year perhaps, by which time I had moved to my own flat, before my personality returned, before I became ‘me' again—all those parts that host memory and opinion were welcomed back from their exile.

The black woman stayed longer than the others. She must have found a way of living with the photograph. And with Ralf's special request. The constant surprise of a new young woman leading Ralf by the arm had become a thing of the past. Now it was just the black woman. It became impossible for me to imagine them apart. Then when I learnt about the boarder it was different again. The black woman, Ines, Ralf and this new person whose role wasn't clear. Another foreigner. It was possible to see as much at a glance. I have said so. Ralf squeezed and surrounded by foreign borders. I realised how different his domestic life must be now from the one I remembered when he liked nothing more than to be left alone for hours in his study. When the first young women arrived to help Ralf I used to imagine them wandering around the apartment. I used to wonder what they thought in this strange new space. Strange to them, but not to me. It's nine years now, but I imagined I could step inside the apartment and still know where to find everything.

The arrival of Ines changed it—changed the history of the apartment. Now it was a whole new thing I could not see into. And that helped, more than anything, helped to put Ralf's life and mine onto a completely different footing. For the first time we became apart in the real sense. It was as if Ralf had gone to live in a foreign country I knew nothing about.

thirteen

Ralf

Dear Ines. I regret to tell you, I am not much use. I cannot even tell you what Ines looks like. She was with me for two years. I know she is African. Where in Africa? Somewhere like Liechtenstein in Europe, the equivalent thereof, no doubt. She may have said where. Please disregard what I said about Liechtenstein. There was no milk in the fridge this morning for my coffee. It's the little things that irritate and beyond all reason these days.

Ines came into this household one August morning two years ago. Ines Maria Luis. I thought I'd forgotten that. Where does all this information sit? I wish I knew. But August is correct.

I needed a housekeeper. I imagine it isn't an easy job as far as jobs go. She could just as easily have worked in a cafe, but she chose to live here and work for me. I don't know what I can say about her. She was often close to me, in the physical sense, as a matter of inevitability and safety. In public she made a point of staying close by, her arm looped in mine. You would think that to be an easy task, to lead an old man about the city. Not everyone can do it. To guide requires judgment. You don't want to be dragged about like a sack of potatoes. She was a pilot fish to my whale—not very flattering in my case but it gets to the quality of her presence. There, but discreetly apart. Conversation was not her strong point. I would be hard pressed to recall anything of any substance said by her. Ines. That's a Spanish name. Is the rest Italian? Well I asked her once and got no reply. Whenever she did not wish to answer she would go silent, and then it would be as if she were no longer there, present. I'd wonder if I had been talking to myself. That's the thing about blindness. You become overly dependent on your ears. So I would be left to listen to the bird outside the window, the distant crawl of the traffic across the city, then, I'd hear a floorboard at the end of the apartment give up a clue followed by the soft close of the kitchen door.

I gave her money for lessons in Deutsch. After two months I'd say something—
wie geht's
—and the silence would be followed by the trail of footsteps in the direction of the kitchen. Her ability to speak English happened to be one of the reasons for employing her. I enjoy English. Hannah, my wife, has some English. Russian is her other language, and lately, I understand, Italian. Anyway the English Ines had she spoke beautifully. But in quick time I realised she had perfected set-pieces. The way we can all get up and play the one piece on the piano or guitar. Her repertoire was disappointing, but I didn't want to replace her. I'd grown fond of her. I appreciated the quiet way she occupied the apartment. She was no cook, however. I don't know what she did with the housekeeping. I always considered it a generous amount. There was never anything to eat. I'd ask her to buy
apfelkuchen.
The next day she would tell me it was all gone. How did that happen? Well, of course, I asked that very question. Back came the predictable reply—silence, the sounds of the city, the traffic, all of that would fill up the apartment, then I would hear the door to the kitchen open and close, and I'd find myself alone.

I needed someone else, someone with language and conversation, an educated person, and that is how Defoe entered the household. There is a bedsit on the floor below which belongs with this apartment. When Hannah was here we used it as a spare room for guests; her niece from Cologne would sometimes come to stay. In exchange for that bedsit I gained a more able companion than Ines, someone with an eye for detail. Someone competent in English, someone with conversation in him.

Once we got to know each other better—I suppose once we had one another's confidence—I asked Defoe, our new boarder, to describe Ines to me. Naturally I was curious. She had been with me nearly a year by then.

Blindness forces one to become adept at translating the spaces between the words—the pauses, the silences. One pause is not the same as another. As for silence I could compile an encyclopedia on the subject. Taxonomy was my first love. As a boy I remember being entranced when a dragonfly rose above the bulrushes. I reached for it to claim it as my own. I wanted to possess it as a child is wont to do, and, of course, as nature is clever enough to arrange, the dragonfly eluded my clutches and led me on a merry chase through libraries in my teenage years all the way to the lecture halls of Humboldt University after the war.

When I asked Defoe to describe Ines to me there was a silence—a pause, I should say, and then a silence. I told him I don't want to know how much is in her purse. I would just like to know what she looks like. Then he started on his thoughtful description. He didn't use the word
schwartz
. That was interesting because everyone else had. Defoe said she had light skin. He spoke of a ‘depleted colour'. I liked that notion of colour being not what it is. ‘Like potato peel,' he said. I wasn't expecting that one. And attractive. He said that quickly. Curious. Because we tend to linger before beauty. It's why we look at a painting for as long as we do, or for that matter marvel at the extraordinary construction of a dragonfly. Potato peel, though. That was different. That was original. Never before had I heard a woman's complexion described in such terms. Now he volunteered more. He said she walked with a very straight back. The way he said that I could tell he personally found it very attractive.

In time I became more dependent on Defoe than on Ines. Don't get me wrong. In her own way she was dependable. I am old, officially old, although most days I don't quite feel it in my heart or bones. Dependability is a quality I have come to admire more and more. I can find no fault with Ines in that regard. Some of the helpers I had before Ines you would not trust to look after a goldfish. Defoe became important. He filled in those gaps Ines could not hope to. Nor did I find Defoe to be guarded, unlike Ines. In fact, he was quite the opposite. He spoke freely, alarmingly freely—that's how it struck me, then, but I soon got used to it. His forthrightness. The open-hearted way in which he offered himself up over a range of subjects, his marriage, everything really. I found that refreshing. Very un-European. Not very sophisticated, as my estranged wife would put it. But in light of the person I came to know and respect that kind of sophistication isn't worth much. We touched on the subject once. Sophistication. He wondered what the point of it was. I dare say I made a hash of trying to explain it. ‘Well,' I said, ‘sophistication is a way of being in the world. One keeps one's emotions in check. One presents a certain fixed view of oneself.' ‘Like the prow of an old wooden sailing ship,' he said.

As a child he had boarded a Chilean sailing ship visiting his home town of Wellington. Years later it was revealed that the
Esmeralda
had been used as a prison and a place of torture. It had the most beautiful prow. Wooden, carved, elaborate paintwork. This conversation took place at the zoo, early on. There is a small beach in the corner of the zoo, at the Tiergarten end. That's where we were. Seated together on a bench talking about sophistication while the noises of the zoo—the squawks and squeals, the plaintive roars of the assembled beasts—swirled around us. But where we sat was a gentle and quiet place. There was just enough warmth in the sun. It must have been late August or early September when Defoe first joined us.

There was a pause—not an uncomfortable silence, and that represented a tick in his box. With some of the helpers I've had silence is a threat, something to ward off. There was a girl from Prague. She found it particularly challenging. She would fill up a perfectly lovely silence with chatter and inanity, emptying her impoverished mind into that beautiful silence, which I think she must have viewed as a chasm she might fall in unless she produced a clamour of words to grasp hold of. Silences with Defoe were enjoyable. So after a pause he asked what I would prefer to know about the
Esmeralda
: about her beautifully crafted figure head or her use as a prison ship in the years after Allende was despatched. Which did I prefer—and here he used my own words—how it presented itself to the world or the truth we would come to know about it? I thought it was possible to hold onto both ideas. There followed another silence. Actually, a quite lengthy silence. An erudite silence. At the end of which, he said, ‘Yes, I agree.'

We talked about the lungfish. There was his marriage breakup. From time to time he alluded to it. He got the news in the Antarctic. I'll come back to that. On the subject of the lungfish he had interrupted a doctoral thesis to bring up a family. He worked in Fisheries; that's what had taken him down to ‘the ice', as he called it. The reason I mention the lungfish is the
Esmeralda
. At the zoo the conversation moved on. He talked admiringly of the capacity of the lungfish to hold two versions of itself. Apparently it can live in and out of water. Now he arrived at the question that interested him. At which point does it become the one thing and cease to be the other? In becoming that new thing how much does it retain of the other?

We moved onto cross-fertilisation. Something I happen to know something about. Genetically modified foods. And racial groups, a mishmash these days, a blend to which we applied the question asked of the lungfish, which brought us back to Ines. Those African features, described by Defoe, planted over a lighter skin. Skin the colour of potato peel. In that way a person carries her history. One of the ways, I should say. With Ines I never got further than that Liechtenstein place in Africa and I've since forgotten that information. One of the indignities of age is also an advantage. Any secret is safe with me because almost certainly it will be forgotten the next day.

Latency, that's what we talked about. And more. Defoe gave me new fields to roam around in. I'd never met anyone who had visited the Antarctic. When he spoke of the trans-Antarctic mountains—that single phrase lifted the idea of Antarctica off that flat grid of ice which up until that moment was all I had imagined there was to it. Defoe's area of expertise happens to be in fish quota management systems. That's why he was down there. But he knew a lot more besides—had seen a great deal. He'd touched with his own hands a fossilised bit of beech. He said it had been part of the great central Antarctic beech forests several millennia ago. Extraordinary, at least I think so, to hold in one's fingertips a remnant of a vanished world. And I said so, until he interrupted me to say it was wrong to think it had disappeared. The spore of the beech lay deep in the ice, beneath blankets of ice containing air breathed at the time of the Vandals and the Picts and long before. Beneath the ice lay a continent with the profile of another Europe: mountains, ridges, even lakes. He saw Antarctica in a form of preservation. For the moment comatose, but in a vigilant state of readiness for that time when mankind had spoiled every last clod of dirt and needed another continent to start over. Latency, you see. So I think I understand his interest in lungfish.