Going Home Again (11 page)

•  •  •

That we were still together, in some fashion, more than a year after his death, and possibly had a shot at being happy and sharing a life—wasn’t that hopeful, and even what he might have wanted? Nothing we did could be ugly or disrespectful. We were the two people he loved most. I didn’t think he’d want to take the chance of happiness away from us. It took a few months, but eventually we were able to lie in bed together after making love and talk about ourselves as a couple without feeling the world was about to crash down on our heads.

Miles’s name didn’t come up when Holly first started talking about going abroad for her master’s thesis. She saw opportunities in West Germany. We both knew we would always associate Montreal with our friend’s death. The thought of leaving grew stronger as we both began to see that this city would always hold that memory. He was everywhere we looked, in the streets, the cafés, in that small apartment the three of us had shared. He was a shadow we needed to outrun.

At night when I got home from teaching, I’d find Holly reading and curled up on the couch in her pajamas, with a pencil and an open notepad on the coffee table. As I threw together something to eat she’d read aloud in German. I understood nothing at all of that language, but I listened, in love with her voice and the expressions that moved over her face, and often wondered when the time would come when our friend would finally move off and leave us alone together.

•  •  •

We flew to West Berlin in the fall of 1987 and lived in a small apartment on the fourth floor of a five-story walk-up. The window in our living room looked down on the narrow street. There was a student bar down there, and every morning I saw a little round lady in a blue frock and Adidas running shoes sweeping the sidewalk out front. We went in there at night and watched the crowds of students and drank beer from enormous bottles. At each table there seemed to be a subject of great importance under discussion. The young men wore Palestinian scarves wrapped around their necks and smoked hand-rolled cigarettes and handed around flyers that called attention to their favorite causes.

Finally, after a few weeks, we were waved over to join one of these roundtables and provide the North American perspective. Eager faces leaned forward, but I had no positions or arguments on the matters at hand. I couldn’t talk about the arms race. I held no firm notions on the Sandinistas or the PLO or the Solidarity Movement in Poland’s dockyards. I was unable to stake a claim on one side or the other. It wasn’t indifference that bogged me down but an appreciation of the baffling complexity. Always present in my mind, if never clearly discernible, were the strands of truth and the limitless contingencies that spun out from the centre of whatever issue lay before us. At the heart of certainty there was danger, ideology, blindness. One evening I attempted to share this interpretation with three students who quickly pointed out the moral
cowardice of such an approach and drew parallels to Swiss neutrality and the complacency of the German citizenry in the lead-up to the war. I tried to articulate my position but was not invited to participate again.

Holly spent her days up at the university working on her thesis. Her adviser was a serious old gentleman from Dresden named Schreiber, who taught a course on modern German philosophy. She introduced us on a foggy afternoon in November.

“You are an English teacher at a record company here?” he said.

“That’s right,” I said.

A few weeks after we arrived, I’d been taken on by a small language academy that had contracts with a number of large corporations. One of them was a multinational recording company. After two weeks one of my students, the ranking executive, pulled me aside and proposed that we dump the middleman. He paid less money, and I made more.

“And do you like Berlin?” Holly’s professor asked. His bottom lip was quivering slightly, and he held a battered old briefcase in his right hand. He was probably close to seventy years old.

“It’s an exciting city,” I said. “Sure, I do.”

“Berlin is the new Galápagos,” he said. “It is an island populated by a fascinating new species of German.”

I fell in love with the way Germans spoke to me in my own tongue. There was an almost total absence of idioms and clichés in the English I heard there, and they couldn’t rely on partially formed thoughts
or vaguely expressed ideas like native speakers could. I’d noticed this at the bars and parties Holly and I went to when our nights ended in conversation about the Wall or the Green Party or Ronald Reagan, and I found myself as dazzled by the clarity of their expressions as I was hesitant to accept the absolutism of their declarations.

I went to the record company four days a week and spent most of the three hours I billed them for daily talking with my students’ secretaries. The executives were hardly ever around. I read magazines and newspapers and sipped from my bottle of Spezi until one of them waved me into his office to walk him through some phrasal verbs until something more interesting came up. The one who needed the most help was a Parisian named Marcel, and as outsiders we enjoyed pointing out to each other the peculiarities of the Germanic character.

Rolf, the man who had hired me, was forty-seven years old and liked to gaze out his office window and watch the parking lot below as he talked to me, in English, about his life. He was married and had two children, but that didn’t stop him from sleeping with prostitutes as often as he could. He told me this without compunction, as though it were the most natural thing in the world. I didn’t share my prostitute story, which was nothing I was proud of. When I thought back on that night, I felt uncomfortable and awkward that I’d stupidly let myself get pulled into a situation where I felt obligated, even pressured, to play along. Rolf, though, was proud of the number of hookers
he’d had sex with. He traveled once or twice a month and came home with stories of call girls crawling all over him at the Regency or the Groucho Club or some anonymous Marriott. He was a short man with silver hair and spoke explicitly about the sexual acts he’d performed on his most recent trip, whether to Hamburg, New York or Amsterdam. He didn’t recount these stories with any sense of titillation or sexual energy as far as I could tell, more like a frat boy bragging about the number of goldfish he’d managed to swallow live.

When I wasn’t sitting with one of my three execs or chatting up the secretaries, I claimed a cafeteria table by the windows on the second floor and took a stumbling swing at learning a bit of German. Most of the people I worked with spoke English well enough that I didn’t have to extend myself, but the staff here was different. They had very little English, so to this day my best German is located in the practical nouns and verbs used in a cafeteria. When not engaged in halting conversations, I’d sit there and watch the attendant in a small glass-and-aluminum station at the far end of the parking lot or read or sketch something, all the while thinking that trying to learn a new language was like climbing up a mountain into a rock slide.

The parking attendant was a Turkish fellow named Gorkhan, whose German seemed to be very good. He’d been in the country for sixteen years, raising and lowering the red-and-white barrier that blocked traffic access to all but paid employees and registered visitors. A man trapped in a glass box all day long these days
will spend his shift talking on a cell phone, but not then. Gorkhan was an island. He referred to his outpost as Checkpoint Charlie.

One night I woke up and saw Holly standing at our bedroom window holding a piece of paper in her hand, a letter, I thought. In the morning I found it under her pillow. It was the Ezra Pound poem Miles had taped up on the living room wall back in Montreal. That’s when I began to understand she could never leave that place—not with my presence constantly reminding her of what we’d both lost. I was the problem. With me at her side she could never break the pattern of her grieving. Whenever she looked at me, she remembered our friend and the life they’d had together. I think I knew what I needed to do well before admitting it to myself. What it meant horrified me. I did all I could to push it aside, to wait, to come up with excuses. But I was always drawn back to the same conclusion. I had to leave. I was in love with Holly and knew I would be forever. But that love would never be as strong as the sadness that ruled her.

We were standing in front of the Brandenburg Gate when I told her I had to leave. But I didn’t give her the real reason. I was restless, I said. I was just going through something.

“You’re a strange boy,” she said.

A light snow was falling around us, the flakes melting in her hair and against her face.

“Sicily, maybe. Or Morocco.”

“My head’s all over the place, but you know I love you,” she said. “You know I want to be with you.”

“I know,” I said.

“Maybe Tunisia. I’d go to Tunisia if I were you.”

“Okay. I’ll go there.”

“And when you come back, I’d marry me if I were you.”

“I’d marry you, too,” I said.

“Tunisia.”

“I don’t even know what language they speak there.”

“Tunisian?” she said.

“It’s probably as good a place as any to dig up those essential moral dictates in life.”

She pinched my arm and smiled. “I’m never going to live that one down, am I?”

The Kantian philosophy she’d rolled out for me at the Montreal diner was still something I teased her about every once in a while. But it was also something that had started to make a lot of sense to me.

I put my hands on her face and kissed her. “I’ll probably be back in no time,” I said.

 Six

It was a cowardly way of ending it.
I didn’t tell her I could never come back, since I could hardly believe it myself. So there she waited while I stepped into the current of life and was swept away from her until we met again that day years later in Toronto. I thought about her each and every day but didn’t call her. That was the hell of it. I was the problem, and the farther away I kept myself, the better off she’d be. My love for Holly itself became the shadow we needed to outrun.

It was mid-March 1988, the days short and cold and miserable. I spent time in Amsterdam and Paris writing postcards I didn’t send, drank a lot of cheap wine and finally moved along through a series of small Dutch towns. In one of them I met a med student in a bar who said he was leaving for the Costa Brava, where he’d cram for finals with friends for ten days. He said he had room for a passenger if I helped him out with gas money. The next morning we met in the town square, with his car loaded for the trip. We talked nonstop as we drove. I was in love with a girl who could never be happy with me, I told him, because I reminded her of a sad time in her life. Near the end of our trip he asked where I was staying. The plan was
to sleep rough in a bus station or park, I said, since that’s what I’d been doing for weeks. He told me I’d get robbed if I didn’t get killed first.

I stayed on the coast for a few days in a villa owned by the parents of one of the girls studying there that week. I didn’t bother anyone during the day, just wandered around the village, tried to read and looked at the sea. Everything I saw brought Holly to mind. I hadn’t spoken to her since I left, though I’d finally posted a card telling her I was fine. I didn’t tell her where I was or what my plans were. I didn’t have any. A small library of books had been left behind by various people who’d rented the villa over the years. Most were in German, but there was also a shelf of English novels and poetry and translations. From eight in the morning to three in the afternoon the place was deathly quiet. I sat in a lounge chair overlooking the Catalan hills and discovered Herman Hesse, whose writing reminded me of the torment of my own soul. He understood. I could practically feel his hand reaching up through the page. If someone else could know and write so well about what I was feeling, I wasn’t losing my mind after all. Suffering from the widest, deepest heartache I’d ever known, I almost turned around and headed back to her. But I knew what I carried in my heart for Holly was the very thing that was destroying her.

After a few nights at the villa I hitched west across the northern coast of Spain and landed in a small city called Santander. I rented a room in a drafty flat in the centre of town, a fifteen-minute walk from the ocean. The flat’s owner, the Señora, was a nurse. When she
wasn’t at the hospital working the night shift, she sat in the darkness of her small kitchen smoking and turning over cards in a perpetual game of solitaire. She was raising a son on her own, a boy named Baldomero, and while fully employed still had to take in the occasional renter to help get her through to the end of the month. She was an attractive woman, and in her early thirties, I guessed, but a sense of greyness and gloom hung over her. Her floors smelled of bleach. Her younger sister, an equally distracted woman, lived on the same floor at the end of the hall, and she prepared her nephew’s evening meal and made sure he got to bed on time.

I’d told the Señora that I was studying at one of the city’s language academies, but I wasn’t a student anywhere anymore. I’d given that up in Montreal. Now I spent my days walking the streets and looking for cheap places to eat and wondering if leaving Holly had been the right thing to do. Could I be sure I’d been the cause of the melancholy that drew her down into those depths?