Hand Me Down World (20 page)

‘Ask her about the criminal element!' he shouted.

His questions and his need for reassurances became more and more eccentric. Then, a week before I flew out, I pulled back the drapes from the window by his chair and saw below car tops heaped with leaves. With that fall everything changed. There was a new world to pass on. That afternoon, as we left the apartment the sharp air bit our faces. We were on our way to the cemetery. But halfway to the S-Bahn Ralf had a change of heart. ‘I feel like the zoo for a change,' he said, and off we went. Inside the zoo gates he stopped, and held up his face to the fecund smells. Then he took hold of my elbow, and said, ‘Let's hear about the elephant.'

twenty

The evenings were dreadful. Ralf sat with his elbows on the armrest, his chin perched on his knitted hands. Every now and then he nodded or growled at a private thought. The only thing to do was drink. My own empty glass was a constant surprise. We sat in bonded silence, me on the sofa, Ralf in his high-back chair, still as a moth in darkness, and as I blurrily glanced up at the bare walls behind him I kept thinking,
I still need to tell him
.

Then I stopped thinking about it. I had a bigger and more urgent problem to think about. I needed to find someone to replace me.

When I asked Ralf for the contact details of his friends he refused to give them to me. He did not wish to be a burden on his friends. I didn't push it. It was a mistake to have asked. The last thing I wanted was all his friends pouring through the apartment and gasping up at the bare walls. I thought about contacting a German social agency. But my German wasn't up to a telephone conversation of that kind. On further reflection, I didn't want to encourage official curiosity. My visa had also expired. There, I was beginning to think like Ines.

Quite by chance, in a kitchen cupboard, I found the cardboard sign advertising ‘Room in exchange for light domestic duties.'

I talked it over with Ralf. Something needed to be done. My departure date was fast approaching. He knew about the situation at home and was sympathetic. Of course that sympathy was tempered by the knowledge he would need someone else. He couldn't live by himself.

So one afternoon we set off for Zoologischer Garten. I had wanted to go in the morning, but Ralf, that wily old fisherman, said afternoons were better.

The first time I ever went fishing I could not believe that a fish would be fooled by our dry land preparations. I watched my father assemble the rod and feed the line through shiny hoops, and then attach the tackle, and the lure—this shimmering metal with a tiny tongue of red plastic. I was still doubtful up to the moment he cast, and out to sea I saw the fake bait make its splash. Seconds later there was a strike, the top of the rod bent and delight broke over my father's face, at which point I became a believer.

So when we entered the station with the cardboard sign I had already convinced myself we would attract someone in the crowd. All I needed to do was to copy Ines' example.

We didn't have long to wait, fifteen minutes or so, while I studied the faces coming down the escalator. All the while Ralf stood as still as a cave mystic. Then I saw her. The face had a framed innocence, fresh complexion, light brown hair fell to her shoulders, a woollen jersey with red-and-black koalas crawling across an ample bosom, jeans, sneakers. I smiled up at her. At first it had the scattering effect of a stone thrown into a pond filled with small nervous fish. I kept smiling. I waited—and sure enough—as her face turned back from the exit doors she managed a reluctant smile. I managed to hold her smile down the escalators. She hauled her pack through the crowd and when Ralf heard me speak in English he came to the mouth of his cave and peered out, and said, ‘Who have we here then?'

Julia is her name. She'd flown from Sydney to Frankfurt and hopped on the first train up to Berlin. She was pleased to find another from her part of the world. Someone whose trust she could assume as a matter of tribal fidelity.

I'm confident she has the necessary qualities: calm, practical, able to laugh off Ralf's piss-and-miss occasions around the toilet bowl.

I moved Julia into Ines' old room. I walked her to the window. We stared down at the courtyard filled with old chestnut leaves. I pointed out the bird's nest. I showed her the bathroom. I knew all she wanted was for me to leave so she could tear off her clothes and stand in a hot shower.

I moved my things back downstairs. I didn't unpack. I didn't feel like an occupant any more. I didn't feel like I was a part of Ralf's life or the city's. I spent the days standing at the window staring out at the bare branches. I tried to read but couldn't concentrate. I found myself visiting the home news sites, scrolling through the detail of the weather and utterances of politicians and rugby coaches. When I tired of that I got up and stood before the window. I waited for the afternoon to pass. On dusk I left the building and crossed the top end of the Tiergarten and stood in joyless ranks to eat at the wurst stand by the station. I walked back outside the zoo walls and beyond until the noises and shrieks settled into the background of that old abandoned life.

Five days after she moved in Julia stood outside Hauptbahnhof with Ralf, waving up at my face in the airport bus window. She stood as I had seen Ines so many times, with her arm looped through the old man's. As the bus moved out I noticed Ralf's head turned in the wrong direction. He seemed distracted. In the old days it would have been for wondering,
What has happened to Ines?

part four
:
Ines

twenty-one

The inspector is my only visitor. Every visitors' day there he is. He sits across the long table from me. He places both hands on the table. He sits half turned, as though there might be a fault with the chair. That's what I first thought. Now I realise it is because he wishes to see more. I am used to it now, but in the beginning I felt as though I was a disappointment. He'd come here hoping for more. And now I sit before him, and this is all there is of me. It is there in the way he turns, and then looks again, which makes me believe that there might be more. I have seen people at the zoo with the same expression as the inspector's. The bear is a disappointment. Look at the rhinoceros—it is not doing anything. It is just a rhinoceros. It is just being a rhinoceros. It was like that with Defoe at the zoo beach. He felt he had to compensate for the disappointment of the beach by making things up or telling me stories about another beach from his country on the other side of the world. He used to talk all the time about that country as if it meant something.

But what is more important than one's own child? Countries don't mean anything. Not to me they don't. I can no longer tell countries and zoos apart.

When he visits, the inspector will sit back inside of himself. There are his limbs, his face, his clothes, the outer appearance of the man, but that was just to get him in the door and seated across from me. The other part of him sits deep inside looking out of his kindly eyes, which I have come to believe are his real eyes. The inspector has another set of eyes for professional purposes. These eyes sit further back. These are the eyes that are so easily disappointed with what they find. He was expecting a full tin of biscuits, only to find a few crumbled leftovers. You cannot hide that kind of disappointment. Even in a man who has no eyes. Ralf had no eyes. So his mouth carried the load of disappointment. Whenever he was disappointed his mouth dropped open. It could do so with high expectations of good things such as food or schnapps, in which case his lower lip was lighter and didn't tug on his cheek bones, dragging them down into the pit of disappointment along with his heart and bones. Whenever Ralf's mouth dropped with disappointment it was like his heart was looking for an opening to escape through.

The inspector sits across from me and stares. I am a small animal in its pen. He has information about that animal. And there I am, captured, caged, the living, breathing example of the creature he has read up on.

At the zoo the animals stare back. So I look carefully at his white shirt. It is clean and ironed. The top of the collar is beginning to fray. He has seen me looking and once or twice followed my eyes there, tucked his chin against his chest in order to see what I see. He reacts to such a moment like a truck driver discovering a dead end. He will rub at his eyes, rub away the unsatisfactory aspect of the world. Then he will blink at me. He blinks until I am back in focus. I am back where he first saw me, seated opposite, across the table from him. Now he unbends his legs. He sits up straighter, moves himself into the edge of the table. He is back to wishing there was more of me, more to see.

The inspector's eyes are olive brown. I remember once waking up beneath a canopy of trees and looking up at a pale sky through overhanging brown branches. Sometimes I think I see two yellow flares. It is the harder set of eyes bursting through to settle in the inspector's kinder trusting pair.

His hair is dark. There was a maître d' at the hotel in Tunisia who used to dye his hair black. You felt he was dying of something. Vanity that has lost the ability to see itself. The inspector's hair is dark at the roots but lightens towards the ends. The kelp does the same thing in the sea as it rises towards the light. My pale skin is from my mother. Light is wish fulfilment, she used to say. I was born pale but at night I become the night. During the day my skin lightened—and around white people, to my mother's joy and relief because I would now be saved, my skin became like theirs. When she said her goodbyes she expected me one day to return from the hotel world transformed, as white as the tablecloths. When my baby was born I saw him gifted with my skin. His father looked puzzled. I had to tell him, to put his mind at rest, the baby was still trying out his skin. I laughed at the stupidness of that remark, but Jermayne's face scrunched up. He looked down at the baby as if it was a problem to fix or solve.

There are high windows in the visitors' room. Whenever the inspector stands to leave, the light from those windows finds his hair. What was dark turns reddish brown, his hand brushes the top of his hair as if he too felt that change, then it turns back to dark as he steps away from the light. There are creatures in the sea who are happiest out of the limelight. Stuck in a crevice of rock or mud they stare back at the floating world. Even at the hotel some guests would refuse a table in the middle of the restaurant. The man would look pained, the woman anxious. She might finger her jewellery. The guests sitting along the wall seemed to have everything in the world they could wish for. If only they could have what those people have, a table by the wall on the edge of the restaurant. I imagine the inspector seated at a table by the wall. I imagine the staff confused. No one knows who seated him there, how he came to occupy that table. This is how I arrive at the visitors' room to find the inspector waiting for me, already seated, his hands arranged with fingertips pointing in and resting on the table top.

After the yellow flares die his eyes moisten. I find myself wishing I could reach across and touch his moustache—to see if it is as soft and warm as it looks. When he smiles lines break out from the corners of his eyes, and then I will feel pleased with whatever it is I have said.

He always comes in the same royal-blue blazer. A darker blue would suit him better. A dark blue would better serve his brass buttons. If he'd shown up to the hotel in that royal-blue blazer we would have taken him for a package tourist.

He wears dark slacks. Whenever he stands to leave I always look to see the overhead lights reflected in his black shoes. Then the lines break out from the corner of his eyes. He knows I know his vanities. That moustache, the creased line in his slacks and his expensive shoes.

This is also the moment in which he will give me something over and above the cake his wife has made. Yesterday it was writing pads and pens.

The inspector is not my only friend. But he is my only visitor. Sometimes I think I can feel the heat of the outside day coming off him. That is a gift. The inspector has brought that world inside the visitors' room with him. Sometimes I see a bit of ash on his shirt front. When he sees me looking he looks down and brushes the ash away; without realising it he has both given and taken away the moment I imagined where he sat alone in the car waiting for the gates to the women's facility to open.

Yesterday I came into the visitors' room to find him as I usually do, already seated, but this time a pile of paper was set on the table before him. That pile of paper is now in my possession. The inspector explained what it was. Testimonies, he said. Testimonies from people I came into contact with or who claimed to know me on my way to Berlin to get my boy back from the baby thief Jermayne. These testimonies I read in one gulp and I felt the same as I did the first time I saw a worm casting. How did a creature so soft and flexible leave behind, almost in passing, something so set and hard?

It feels like a long time ago now. The day the men in green uniforms came and took me away from the blind gentleman's house. The men in green were polite to start with, and then silent. Silent as concrete is when used to guard against the wild elements. There was a grille between where I sat in the back of the van and the men in the front. One man sat in the back facing me. But he kept looking away to the small window in the back door. He looked like he would rather be doing something else, boating or playing table tennis. I looked out the same window and saw a patch of grey, a tree. I saw Defoe like some storm-flung thing struggling to hold his feet against a gale. And then I was that same thing I saw, I too was uprooted and now I was being taken in by the authorities. The panic I felt was for my boy. Everything emptied out of me. I felt as light as a husk. I wished I had said something to my boy. The last time I handed him back to Jermayne I said ‘goodbye', with a lightness and confidence I would see him again soon. And now I was being torn from him. It was happening all over again.