Hand Me Down World (18 page)

A few days after I began my inventory of the apartment I was asked to give a talk at the museum of natural history. I took myself off to the park that afternoon to gather my thoughts. It was a hot day, and I stood under the trees feeling miserable, wishing I had never agreed to the invitation from Dr Schreiber. But given his generosity and the access to the museum's lungfish fossil collection he'd kindly arranged, I couldn't decline. So my mind was filled with vistas of the ice plains and the flat slices of clouds that sit like layers of pancakes above the trans-Antarctic mountains when, across that great white sheet, ran an African man trailing a red kite. A small boy ran after him. The kite lifted and the man let the string run through his fingers. The small black kid followed the kite with his hands out from his sides. All his belief in the world moved to the surface of his face as the kite rose to the height of the trees, and then the kite went floppy—its nose came round and it dived back to the earth to land very near to the still and unexcited figure of Ines.

The boy ran first to the kite. Then he looked up and raised his childish hand to point to Ines. The man ignored him and solemnly reeled in the kite. All eyes were on the red plastic contraption sliding and sticking in the grass. Now, from my place under the trees, I saw Ines kneel down and hold out her arms to the small boy. The black guy was heavy in back and shoulders, soft around the belly, receding hairline, well dressed in khaki trousers and a short-sleeved knit shirt. He approached with his chin raised, an uneasy fit of surliness and acceptance. Ines stood up. She reached into her coat pocket and handed the man something. The man quickly pocketed it. So, yes, it was money. He held up his wristwatch and pointed. Ines shook her head. The man rolled his head. They began to argue. The small boy continued to stare at the red kite flapping in the grass.

There was a bit of wind about that day. The kite flapped like something dying. On the back of a gust I could actually hear Ines—her voice was cut up, a high note pitched and drifting. She went to place her hands on the man's shoulders but he stepped to one side. He reached inside his pocket to hand her back the money. Now it was Ines retreating, her hands out in front of her, and nodding to himself the man pocketed the money again. He knelt to whisper something in the boy's ear. The boy nodded. Then the man stood up and walked quickly away. Ines knelt down. The boy picked up the kite and walked towards her. As he got closer she raised her arms to him. The boy stopped, he dropped the kite and ran into his mother's embrace. About their relationship I was in no doubt at all.

For the next hour—I gathered that's how much time she had purchased to be with her child—Ines walked about the park pointing out things. She was interested in ways that she never demonstrated around me and Ralf. There was her outstretched finger, there the little boy gazed up at sculptures of composers and huntsmen. They walked hand in hand, the red kite trailing behind, almost forgotten, until near the path they stopped and they both stared at it flapping on the path thirty metres away. Ines took the string from the boy and hauled it in, hand over hand, until the boy was able to pick up the kite from her feet.

The leaves were shiny and bright. It was a blue sky. And although a wind was blowing it was from the east and very warm. There were a lot of people in the park. Cyclists wove around walkers and joggers on the paths. I wasn't at all concerned about Ines looking behind to find me. I could see just how removed every other part of her world was for her. She was so completely absorbed in the boy and what his eyes saw.

At a fork in the path he yanked Ines in the direction of the path leading around the edge of Neuer See. Near here they disappeared into the bushes. I thought the boy must need to pee. But then I heard laughter and shrieking. They duly emerged, both smiling, the boy first, then Ines. The boy ran off. His mother chased after him.

I know the path. It leads to the boat hirer and the cafe and restaurant on the edge of the pond. I waited until the two of them disappeared around the curve of bushes. I waited for a woman with a pram to overtake me, then I ducked into the bushes they'd come laughing out of. There was the black pond with its tree reflections and just back from the water's edge was a bronze sculpture of a bison. This must have been what all the high squeals had been about. A game of hide-and-seek around the bison. I wonder if they noticed the bullet holes in the bison from a different game of hide-and-seek fifty years earlier. I pulled back a branch. Across the pond I saw the boy licking an ice cream. His mother walked behind with folded arms, the red kite in her right hand. When she came broadside to the wind, which, as I say, was stronger than normal, she had to pull the kite back while her free hand flew up to her hair, and then to the boy, who, even when blown off balance, kept his face in the ice cream.

eighteen

On our way to the museum that night I wanted only for the evening to be over, to be back in the apartment, in bed, waiting for Ines to come to my door. I intended to report back to her everything I had seen that afternoon, from the moment she was left with the boy, and it was smack on the dial an hour later, not a minute more, when they returned to the field to find the black guy waiting, just off to the side of the path, on the grass. When Ines and the boy appeared he glanced down at his watch. Ines released the boy's hand and let him go. The man stuck his hands in his pockets, he stood jiggling, he looked around in the opposite direction, and back, and when the boy drew near he held out his hand. The boy gave it a hard look. The man nodded at Ines, he dropped his hand onto the boy's shoulder, then he turned and left, walking the boy faster than he was used to, or capable of. Ines watched them as far as the trees, then she looked around herself, up at the skies that were so beautiful and warm that afternoon that everyone was to remember, for days after: what a special day it had been.

The talk was to an audience of managers and scientists with an interest in resource management. I wished I'd never told Ralf. But I had wanted him to know—I remember smiling shamefully at my vanity as I told him about the invitation. Of course he insisted on coming along. And that was the price for wanting him to know that elsewhere in the world my life had some standing. As the room filled, I stood in a corner with Dr Schreiber looking long-faced as Ines guided Ralf to a seat near the front.

I spoke in English. Dr Schreiber had given the talk an imaginative but accurate enough title—
A Poacher Turned Gamekeeper's Guide to the Toothfish Stock in the Ross Sea.

I had brought along images of the ice, which I spiced up with some anecdotal stuff about the early piracy of the fish stock, and the outrageous practice of some who threw sticks of gelignite into the jaws of whales to eliminate the competition. I told of the chef's party trick—usually after he had been smoking dope—of entertaining himself and everyone else on the trawler by shouting up at the cabin ceiling, ‘
Dissostichus Mawson.
' The toothfish has thick and well-defined lips and round unblinking eyes. The first one I pulled out of the sea looked angry, so did the second and third. These were very old fish. At the time I felt like I was dragging the elderly out to the back lawns of the retirement home and slitting their throats. After one hundred I stopped thinking of them as fish. Collectively they turned into ore which we stowed in the ice hold. On the way home that's what the conversation returned to. ‘Ore,' Ralf mused. ‘Ore. Yes. I can see that,' he said.

Ines pulled the cage doors back and we went up in the lift. I tried to catch her eye, but she stared dully and resolutely ahead. A face on a lower landing gazed up with evident annoyance as we rose past her floor. At our landing, where we all said goodnight, she gave me a quick smile that just as quickly left her face.

I lay in bed waiting for her to show up. I waited until the building was as quiet as a tomb then got up and climbed the stairs without a stitch on to find the door to the apartment locked.

The next morning, a Friday, there was a knock on the door. I'd left it open on purpose. It would be Ines with Ralf's old flowers. I called out to her to come in, the door's open. There was no reply. I had to get up from the desk. There on the landing she stood as she had on the very first Friday morning in her housemaid's uniform. She held a bunch of irises. She asked with the formality of the old days if she could come in and change the flowers. I stood aside. I followed her from the desk to the bathroom door. She filled the vase with water from the bathroom tap. I followed her to the desk piled with my papers and notebooks. With great care she cleared a small space for the vase. Then she stood back to admire the arrangement. As she folded her arms her right shoulder leant in towards me, and she turned to look up. I thought she was about to smile, only she became self-aware and the whole lovely possibility fell away.

‘Ines,' I asked. ‘Who was that man I saw you in that park with yesterday? And the little boy? Who is he?'

Her shoulders went still. Her whole person turned rigid.

‘You can tell me,' I said. ‘You can trust me.'

Instead it was as though she couldn't believe what she'd just heard. Her breath rose as high as her shoulders. Her eyes wouldn't settle.

‘No,' she said. ‘Whatever you saw in the park is not your business.'

‘Yes, but I can help,' I said. ‘If you are in some sort of trouble…' She shook her head.

‘And the money, Ines. All that money.'

She turned away towards the window.

‘But that was your boy I saw, wasn't it?'

She kept shaking her head.

‘And that guy. Who is he?'

I reached for her but she stepped clear of me. She walked to the door. She closed it quietly behind her.

The
kokopu
is a thick-shouldered fish that fancies sink holes, usually on farmland. It wriggles itself into a tight space and feeds until the hole it so gladly wriggled into cannot be wriggled out of. It has trapped itself. It cannot move to escape. This is the position I found myself in.

By the end of the month the heart and soul of Berlin had left for sunnier parts. A light sticky rain wouldn't go away. The trees across Tiergarten sagged under the accumulated damp. Ralf was getting over a cold. This was the first time he'd left the apartment since I gave my talk. Across the park the trees dripped on him. His nose was still red, but, thank God, he was over the fits of explosive sneezing.

As the day progressed the humidity rose and a feeling of over-heated abandonment stuck to everything. Then the clouds parted and out of a patch of blue came the scorching sun. In a heat-beaten shitless state we wade against the tide down Unter den Linden past the Tomb for Victims of Fascism, where two gypsy girls sit beneath the trees, their dry mouths open, eyes still. I think about giving them each a euro. I am still thinking about it as we walk past.

Halfway across the bridge we stopped for Ralf to catch his breath. We were staring down into the slow-moving Spree when Ralf came up with his plan. He said, ‘I feel like smelling sea air. Now I have an idea. It is this. Why don't we go up to Rügen? Ines too. We can walk barefoot in the sand. We can go this weekend. Leave Friday and return Sunday night.'

So that's what we did. We left for Rügen the following weekend. I didn't realise what a relief it would be to get out of the city. The plains of northern Germany flew by. Ralf's head nodded against the window. Ines sat opposite, arms folded, her face closed, without any interest in the landscape we were moving through. At some point I got up to go to the toilet. I opened the louvre window and felt the warm air on my face. Then I happened to catch a glimpse of myself in the cracked mirror. I did not like what I saw.

Whenever I think back to that first night she came to my door I still can't say why it happened, only that it did, inevitably and intensely, and with no other angle that I could discern at the time. But that was also the moment she moved away so that I was left permanently off-balance like a man about to fall. Now I was left with a flirtatious smile across the floorboards of Ralf's apartment. Conversation was back to the banalities of a well-drilled waitress hovering over the table of two loyal customers. And then that day in the park when I glimpsed a whole other world. With some resignation I found myself accepting my place in the scheme of things, a pair of eyes to Ralf, a source of money to Ines. Yes. I went on paying her. I took seriously her threat to tell Ralf. I would have found it embarrassing. Ralf as well, I suspect. It would change things between us. His memory would churn back these past months. Everything would be recast. In his mind I would be transformed into an untrustworthy figure. I was sure of that. Possibly someone to get rid of. So I was desperate to keep my ‘thing' with Ines (I don't know what else to call it) a secret. But that secret was not the only thing I was paying for. I continued to listen out for her footsteps on the stairs.

At Stralsund we switched trains and crossed an isthmus to the Rügen headland. The sea briefly appeared on both sides of the train. There in the distance were the white cliffs from the painting. Ralf perched above his seat pathetically trying to see through his blindness the place of his happiest years. Ines trained a steady eye on the open sea. She held that view until the sea was overtaken by farmland.

There was one more change of trains. A small toy-like train delivered us to the final station, a lovely old building behind ghostly GDR-built worker apartments that rose like blunt anvils into the sea air. Within five minutes' walk from the station we had put that blight behind us. There was the sea, stunningly suspended in the trees lining the beach. We leant forward in our eagerness to get there, to be there. I had my overnight bag, Ralf carried his own medical-looking brown bag, and a cane in his other hand which he tapped ahead of himself. Ines walked ceremonially in front, a plastic bag with her white-and-lavender housemaid's uniform swinging from her hand.