Hand Me Down World (30 page)

She led parties of tourists around the dead. The blind gentleman knew all about them. He could talk about the dead as if they were relatives. But none of them interested him in quite the same way as she did. He never said why she didn't live with him and I didn't like to ask. But after reading her testimony I think I know because some of the impatience the blind gentleman showed with her carried over to me.

She is a small woman with the quick movements of a small dog. I think blindness has made the gentleman slow. Everything he did looked thoughtful. As he stood up from a bench in the cemetery he rose as if he was thinking about the movement of doing so every inch of the way until he achieved his full height.

‘Is she here today?'

That's the question he always asked. It was our reason for coming to the cemetery. And he never tired of asking it.

Sometimes she would come and speak with him. Afterwards he would ask me how she looked. ‘Good,' I might say. She looked good. Then he'd snap at me, ‘What does “good” mean?'

‘I don't know, sir. She just looks like she did the last time.'

‘And?'

‘Well she looks good, sir.'

‘Is she wearing clothes?'

‘Of course, sir.'

‘And?'

So I would have to dress her before his eyes One afternoon she left the tourists photographing each other around the headstones. She came flying across to where we stood. She hardly gave me a look before she started shouting at the blind gentleman. I don't know what that was about. Afterwards he wouldn't say.

One afternoon the trains aren't working and we are late. The tourists are already moving out the gates of the cemetery to the street. I see Hannah and I am about to alert the blind gentleman when I pause. A car is parked across the road. The driver is an older man. He has wound down the side window and he is smiling up at the blind gentleman's wife. His eyes follow her around the front of the car. She gets in and through the window I see her lean across and kiss the driver on the cheek.

‘Well?' he asked.

I told him we were late. We'd missed her. Slowly he breathes out through his mouth. A minute ago he was high with excitement. Now his body has turned into a sack that can barely hold him upright.

What will we do now? What interest does the day have left? I often experienced the same thing after handing the boy back to his father. The highlights had been experienced; now there was all the rest of the day to get through, and the night, maybe two or three days, longer when the money was hard to come by, before I would see the boy again.

In the blind gentleman's case the day still held another possibility.

First I would lead him to Wertheim for cake. He would give me money for two cakes. I'd buy just the one
apfelkuchen
and it was for him. The money meant for my cake went towards the money I needed to see the boy. Then I'd sit opposite the blind gentleman and make eating noises. I became good at pretending to eat cake. Your teeth must click and the sigh of contentment must come from a closed mouth. The small fork must bang against the plate, then at last there is the sound of the fork laid to rest. The scratching noise is the chair leg moving back to move a full stomach out from the edge of the table.

After eating cake at Wertheim I'd lead the blind gentleman to the cafe across the road from Hannah's building. We always took one of the tables at the window. And there we waited—with coffee and hot chocolate—for Hannah to appear. She usually did between five and six in the afternoon. Whenever she failed to turn up the blind gentleman grew silent. He sat shrunken inside his coat, his hands slumped down in their pockets.

The only way to bring him back to life was to describe a woman who hadn't passed the window yet, but she might as well have, because the blind gentleman didn't know the difference between her passing and my description of her doing the same.

Did he need to know that I had not eaten any cake? No. I don't think so. If I was blind and had to be led to the park in order to see my boy I'd rather my minder provide me with a picture of him. That's how I had come to think. A lie had to be better than disappointment.

And, when I consider it, isn't this what Defoe was doing when he spent his mornings looking at the outline of something in rock? Wasn't he trying to make up the whole out of a few details? I did exactly the same when I wasn't with the boy. I drew him up in my head from an impression put together from all the other times we'd spent together. Often, on our way home across the park when we fell into one of those long silences, it was almost as if I was walking with the boy; the boy was at my side, not the blind gentleman. Now I am in prison I am left with the fossil remains of all those times together. I don't have to try hard to conjure him up.

That winter was a long one. According to the blind gentleman it wasn't so cold, not by his standards. By any other reasonable human being's it was freezing. I didn't care for the cold, it was the lack of light that got to me. Up to now I'd never thought of light as a living thing. It disappeared in November and December and everything in the city died a little. People bundled up so that their faces were the only part of their body visible. In January the ponds in the park iced over. One afternoon I saw a reflection of the boy with me in the ice. I told him to look carefully. There's the two of us. Just like in a photo. Now stick that photo in your pocket. I hope he still has it.

Over that winter, late at night, I tiptoed barefoot or in socks out of the apartment and down the stairs so the blind gentleman and Defoe would not hear me. On the bottom stair I sat to pull on my boots. Then I went out into the aching cold to catch a train across the city. First I went to Jermayne's and stood outside his building to make sure his lights were out. Then I crossed the bridge into the little Frenchman's neighbourhood.

Bernard was back to sleeping in his new coat. He had paid off the pawnbroker and the tooth was back in his mouth. I brought him leftovers from the meal I'd prepared for Defoe and the blind gentleman. I always left a bit behind. Bernard would eat it cold. Afterwards I didn't mind his dog breath. I liked the smell of his new old coat around me. Inside the warehouse at that hour I felt like I was in a huge litter of warm bodies and smells.

The blind gentleman had given me money for lessons in Deutsch. I almost enrolled, but when I worked out the hours it would buy me with the boy I decided I could not waste it on language. Ramona says she would have taken the lessons in order to talk to the boy. Well, I tell her, it wasn't quite one thing or the other. I didn't enrol but I did keep learning. I never left Bernard without a new sheet of words and phrases.
Do you want to climb a tree? Do you want an ice cream? Are you tired? Do you miss me?
The last phrase was the first one I learnt off by heart. Bernard said my pronunciation was near perfect. I never did get to ask it.

thirty-three

Some time in the new year the blind gentleman asked me to sit with him. He said he had some unpleasant news. It had been brought to his attention—that's what he said, brought to his attention—that he didn't have as much money in his savings as he had thought. He said the whole world economy was teetering. Once upon a time, he said, it took a week for the mail boat to reach Hamburg from New York. Now time raced at the speed of a finger to a computer key. Everyone was affected, including our household. It meant I wouldn't be getting the same amount that I had been receiving. It wasn't that I wasn't worth it. He just didn't have it to give. He said he would understand if I felt the position was no longer worthwhile, but he hoped I would stay on. He hoped the circumstances would change for the better. They usually did, he said.

The weather had certainly changed for the better. Bernard was making money again. I asked him if he would take his tooth back to the pawnbroker. He winced, he screwed up his eyes. I wished I hadn't asked. I apologised. I told him the tooth must never leave his mouth again, no matter what. I'd find another way. Now a different look entered his face—that old look of fear. In his panic he dug his hands in his coat pockets and brought up handfuls of euros and pressed them into my hands. I took the money, and I took more out of housekeeping. I stole money off Defoe's desk and out of his trousers that hung off the back of his chair. I still had only enough money for one visit.

One afternoon we're in the cafe behind Wertheim waiting for the blind gentleman's wife to show. A truck is parked outside her entrance. I didn't pass that on, and a few minutes later I'm pleased I didn't. Around the side of the truck comes Hannah with two removal men. The three of them gaze up into the back of the truck. A third man joins them. I recognise him. It's the man in the car I'd seen outside the cemetery.

‘Any sign of her?' asks the blind gentleman.

‘No,' I tell him. ‘Not yet.'

He orders another coffee, then after he's drunk that he orders schnapps. He has two glasses. Over the same time there is a procession of household stuff from the building out to the street, where it is loaded into the truck.

Across the road, the entrance to Hannah's building looks emptier than ever.

‘Well?' he asks.

‘No sign of her.'

He wonders if she is sick. He wonders if I should cross the road and hit her buzzer. She may have had a fall. She might be lying there. So I go across the road and pretend to hit her buzzer. Then I come back and give him the first honest information all day.

‘She isn't home.'

‘No?'

‘No, sir.'

We kept going back to the cemetery and on to Wertheim for the one piece of cake and then to the cafe opposite Hannah's old address. For a week we did this. In the end it was easier to make her up.

I didn't need to look so hard, in the way he had insisted of me at the zoo. All it took were a few things—a hat, flowers, new shoes, no umbrella if it was raining, details which I pinched off the crowd in the window and he would make the rest of her up.

All winter I watched a large bird build its nest in the chestnut tree outside my window. That nest looked to be a solid thing, but it was made out of the flimsiest of materials, straws which if they weren't in the bird's beak would have been blowing up the street.

Out of scraps the blind gentleman created a picture of his estranged wife.

Here are some of the scraps I passed on.

She is in a hurry.

She appears to be in a daydream.

She looks preoccupied.

Here in each instance is what he said.

‘She is in a hurry? Really? Interesting. No, that is interesting. She must have forgotten something. Perhaps she is late for an appointment. She usually has that nice leather briefcase my father gave to her before he died. He adored her. And she adored him. She did. Sometimes I think she adored him more than she did me, and in my case perhaps the word “adore” is a bit strong. After all, do wives adore their husbands? Ever? Beyond a year or two? Before the general absteentee-ism of the husband takes over and all that remains is the flawed replica of the object once adored?'

‘She is in a daydream? Well it wouldn't be Hannah otherwise. Comes as no surprise. Really, I am amazed she hasn't been run over. Have you noticed the way she crosses the road? Have you any idea of the faith it requires to wander across the traffic, to believe that they will actually stop? Well, I have never believed they would for me, and at such times I could feel her draw away from me and the abyss grow between us.'

‘Preoccupied? Yes. Is one leg crossing the other? She dawdles. She doesn't when she is walking alone. Then you've seen how she walks. But with me it was as though she had suddenly forgotten how to walk. It used to cause terrible rows. I was always waiting for her to catch up. Then she would ask, accusingly, why I kept walking ahead. I would reply with a question of my own. Why did she have to walk so slowly, so deliberately slowly? She would say there was nothing deliberate about it, she wasn't walking slowly, she was walking how she always walked, so what was I trying to prove? Firmly, but patiently, I would tell her I am not trying to prove anything. I am just wanting to get from A to B and if we walk any slower I will fall over.'

I try to imagine, were the positions reversed, what I would prefer. To be told the boy has left the city or to go on believing.

thirty-four

In June that year Jermayne put the price up to sixty euros. He mentioned the same thing as the blind gentleman had, though in the Jermayne way—‘The world is on the brink of sliding into a shit hole of its own making.' I asked him what that had to do with me. Jermayne shook his head. I was back to being dumber than I looked. ‘What happens,' he asked, ‘when you get caught out in the rain without an umbrella?'

‘You get wet.'

‘You got it.'

I snuck across to Bernard's that night. In the dark he lay with his coat on, without his trousers. I lay my hand on his chest and I walked my fingers down the way the blind gentleman had walked his across my face. Down to Bernard's navel. Over his boxer shorts until I felt him stir and I whispered in his ear, ‘Bernard, I need your tooth. Please. Just this one more time.' He took my hand and put it back at my side. He told me I was confused in my motivation. What did I want from him—to make love or to take his diamond-inlaid tooth? ‘Both' was the honest answer.

Now to a different day, a Sunday. I am out with the blind gentleman and Defoe at the market under the railway line in Tiergarten. The same stuff as in the apartment is displayed over tables. Books, paintings, drinking horns, knives, mugs, ornaments of every kind. And people are buying it.

The next morning while Defoe was at the museum I took the vases out of the apartment. I went to a shop in Bernard's neighbourhood. Not the pawnbroker, a different shop. The money I got for the vases paid for two visits with the boy.