The Apartment: A Novel (13 page)

Estelle served me some coffee. She saw that I was a little unnerved by the animals. It’s what happens, she said. You collect, and one day you wake to realize you’ve turned your home into a mausoleum for your desire to have lived and died as a mother. She did not say that exactly. She may not have said anything at all. She offered me some food and I declined. I was starving, but I didn’t want to eat in front of her. The coffee was weak. I took a sip and pushed it to the side. I’m glad you contacted me, I said. I’m surprised you came, she said. Me too, actually, I said. When was the last time? she asked. Christ, I said, who knows – was I sixteen or seventeen? She smiled and shrugged. We realized simultaneously that we had no personal connection to re-establish, and it seemed, therefore, pointless to go on avoiding the subject of Josephina. It’s been a long time since I thought of Josephina, I said. I stood up and looked at those photographs. They were all the ordinary pictures of a child’s life. I said, It’s an incredible shame. She said, You and her were very close. Yes, ma’am, I said. I believe she was my only real friend here. She’s the only person I ever missed. Estelle looked out the window at her back yard, which was large, green, and reasonably clean, and had not changed since the last time I was there. She said the same thing about you, said Estelle. Do you mind if I ask you something personal? I asked. Not at all, she said. Are you sick? I asked. She turned from the garden to me, in half-astonishment, then realized what I was asking. No, no, I’ve been hunting you for years, she said. Ever since Josephina’s death. Really? I asked. She said, You wrote a very nice letter to her. You read it? I asked. Yes, she said. I don’t quite remember what I wrote, I said. I still have it, she said. I said, I’d rather not see it, to be perfectly honest. Did she say anything about it? Nothing, said Estelle, she just handed it to me and asked me to put it with everything else.

Estelle stood and placed both our coffee cups beside the sink. Did Josephina ever come to visit you, after you left? No, I said. Were you not boyfriend and girlfriend? We weren’t, I said. Estelle put her hands in her pockets and walked very close to the back door, still looking outward. Whatever she wanted to ask now, she was not prepared to ask it. She seemed a bit embarrassed, so I said: I think I still have her letter to me. Would you like it? Estelle took her hands out of her pockets and crossed her arms. After a while she said, What was that? The letter, I said. I could make a copy. Yes, she said, that’d be nice. Then she opened the back door and said, Follow me. We walked outside, into the warm sunlight, and she said, Remember this yard? I do, I said, and it’s strange to be back. I bet, she said. We walked to the detached garage. There was a little staircase that led up to the apartment’s front door. There was a padlock on it. Estelle took a small key out, opened the padlock, then took out another key and opened the deadbolt. She turned the knob and opened the door. The door opened inwardly, and she stepped inside, and I followed. I cleaned a bit this morning, she said. All the curtains were closed, so the room was black, except for the oblique rectangle of sunlight on the floor that the opened door had allowed. She turned a lamp on. She’d had to replace the bulbs earlier that day, as well. The apartment was a single large room – a converted attic over the garage, with a sink and a fridge and a bed and a desk and an old television set. Boxes were stacked three high against the walls. She was fascinated by the past, by her family’s past, said Estelle. Absolutely fascinated. If she had not been sick, I would have taken her to a therapist. I don’t know why she set herself a task she knew she could not finish, and that nobody else would take up. What kind of struggle is that? She sat on the chair beside the desk and shook her head.

My memory of this day is tumultuous and murky. I do not trust a word of it. But a life is not a recollection of facts, and in Josephina’s impossible task I saw something that was, if not heroic, then at least refreshing. Her mother found it absurd because she could not understand an obsession with facts. But nobody obsessed with the past is concerned with the facts. In her letter to me, Josephina had written: truth has a qualitative, not a quantitative, value, and it is the very people ranting about the unattainability of truth who are most likely to utilize lies to squeeze, subjugate, undermine, and mutilate justice. So she lived here? I asked. Until she got too sick, said Estelle. Can I open one of these? I asked. Go ahead, she said. I went to a box and got my keys out and cut the tape open. A stiff scent of must and old paper came out of it. I dug through it. Amazing, I said. Maybe when I’m gone, somebody will want all this. Maybe some museum. Yes, ma’am, I said. So you weren’t her boyfriend? asked Estelle. Well … I said. I only ask, she said, because she said you were her boyfriend. Estelle wasn’t looking at me as she spoke, because this was no longer small talk. We were young, I said. I don’t mind that, she said, not at all. Well, yes, then, we were boyfriend and girlfriend. Estelle smiled, still without looking at me, stood and clapped her hands softly. I realized I’d been pursued all these years to say the very thing I’d just said, which, of course, was not the truth, not in the way that she wanted it to be, but it was a lie I was happy to tell, if it brought Estelle some peace. She said, I wonder if you’d do something for me. Of course, I said. I wonder if you’d just spend a little while on your own here, while I sit in the house. I said, Ma’am? She was looking at her feet, which were tapping the dark-stained wooden floor. She could not speak, or would not. I closed the box. Sure, I said. I’ll stay for a little while. She walked to me and took my arm and thanked me, and suggested that we say our goodbyes there. Goodbye, I said. Goodbye, she said. She held my hand again with both her hands.

When she closed the door, I lay down on the bed and fell asleep. I’d been working sixteen- and seventeen-hour days for many months, and I was exhausted. I closed my eyes and slept through the afternoon. When I woke, it was nearly five p.m. I got up. I felt rested, but groggy. I had a cigarette. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to be smoking. There were some glasses in the cupboard above the sink and I took one and used it as an ashtray. When Josephina had written me the letter, she was still living here, so what she said about noticing a place on the day you move in and out was, I supposed, a general comment about arriving and departing, connecting and separating. And I supposed that what she meant was that one’s identity, while one lives in a place, is inextricable from that place, and only when the self perceives the place as separate does one see it as it truly is.

I drove to my own house after I left Josephina’s. I parked a long way off and walked. I could not say whether I parked far away because I wanted to approach it slowly, or wanted to experience my old street as I had as a child, or both. The street was quiet. All the cars were gone or hidden in garages. There was, I realized, hardly a sound at all, and the whole world seemed to be slipping into darkness, superheavy, as though everything was being sucked into a point that existed in the centre of my house – where nothing out of the ordinary ever took place, where there was no meanness, no neglect, no lasting sadness, no hatred. Yet the massive weight I seemed to attain as I approached it – a grey brick house with an elm tree in the front yard, and a long white driveway, shining in the blue and orange light of late evening, with shadows of a neighbour’s trees stretched across the lawn – suggested an incomprehensible and impassable and monstrous guilt. It was a guilt that preceded me, that could not be denied or placated, and this was so real and agonizing that before I reached my house I turned around and got back in my car and left.

And it is this repulsive force I am pondering in a perfect calm, alone, smoking a cigarette, in Saskia’s flat. It is late afternoon, and already black outside. I’m in her bedroom, because her flatmate is making dinner and Saskia has refused to let me go near him. She is in her en-suite bathroom, and steam is coming through the barely cracked door – the extractor fan does not work, she said, so she has to crack it. The room is dimly lit by two lamps with dark blue, almost opaque, lampshades. I am lying on her bed with my boots off – I left them in the cold and damp stairwell. My jeans are wet at the ankles, from the snow, so Saskia has put a towel down rather than make me sit on a chair. My shins, ankles and feet are cold. It’s the first time my feet and ankles have been cold in a long while. Otherwise I am warm. I’m still in my coat and scarf. My hat and gloves are beside me. The music on the stereo, Saskia told me, is a Spanish pianist named Mompou, who, she claims, was Chopin’s only equal when it came to volume of sound in single notes. The music is slow, very slow, and seems to swirl and radiate in the dissipating edges of the steam coming from the bathroom. Saskia has been taking a shower for almost half an hour. She poured me a glass of wine and then poured herself a glass and went into the bathroom with it. And I lie here, imagining her wet arm reaching out from behind the shower curtain, feeling for the glass, bringing it in for a sip, then replacing it. This is the first time I’ve been in her flat, and the building is as grubby as Janos, back in the café, implied. The stairwells stink. The paint is peeling and the floors smell of mildew. The walls are so thin you can hear the heavy front door to the building open and close, four floors down. Saskia’s bedroom is messy and cramped, but in an eccentric, smart way. Books are stacked all over the floor, but her bookshelf is empty, suggesting that she is the kind of person who reads seventy-five books at once. In the stacks are the jagged, flopped edges of loose pages and stapled bundles of paper, which have come from years of evening courses. In many ways, she has admitted, she is not really reading books but working on thoughts, so that she might read a sentence in one book – a novel or a book of poems – and immediately need to leap to a history book, or an economics textbook, or an art book. Her small collection of paintings hangs on the four walls of the room. They are all so small that you have to get up and look at them closely to make sense of them.

Propped up on my little grey Samsonite case is the painting we bought together. I still cannot tell which way is up, and I’ve forgotten the way Saskia has shown me. As soon as she is ready, Saskia and I are going to drop my things at my apartment and go find food. The woman – the landlord, or the landlord’s agent, I wasn’t sure – didn’t want to give me the keys, even though I had my bank documents. I had expected this. Saskia and Manuela offered to act as my references, but she required references from landlords. So I gave her a year’s worth of rent in cash. I went into the bathroom, pulled it out of my money belt, and placed the whole stack on the kitchen counter. I’d half-hoped the woman might find it suspicious, but money is money. She smiled, took the keys out of her bag, and said, This one is the deadbolt to your door. This one is the door downstairs. This one is the door to the side terrace, and this one is to the bedroom’s balcony. Saskia sat down at the kitchen table and smoked a cigarette. That was a lot of money to be carrying, she said. She was, I could see, disappointed after having seen it. I could not say if she was disappointed in me – because of the way I placed it on the counter, perhaps, like a gangster, or because of a suspicion on her part, which would have been justified, that I had added evil to the world in order to obtain it – or if she was simply disappointed by the fact that nobody could or wanted to resist money. I said, I just wanted to get this over with. This is why it’s good to be rich, Manuela said.

We did not spend too long in the apartment after that. Manuela, with errands to run, left us, and we promised we’d meet up at Chambinsky if we had the energy. I sat in my large living room, looking out the window to my small terrace, overlooking the cemetery, in a large, comfortable rocking chair, while Saskia paced around the apartment on the phone, trying to book a table for later. She came in finally and sat heavily on the couch. Every place she knew was booked out. She said, Why don’t you go get your stuff and bring it here, I’ll go home and change, and we’ll meet in the city? I agreed that was the smartest thing to do, but as we sat there pondering the consequences of separating, we did not seem interested in that, either. There was always a chance we might get sidetracked, get tired, and decide to raincheck dinner, and for my part, continuing the rest of the evening without her had, without my realizing it, become unthinkable. So I suggested we stick together and see what happened, and when she agreed I could tell she liked the idea.

Mr and Mrs Pyz were sad to see me go, but our goodbye wasn’t as emotional as I’d feared. They simply wished me well and told me to come back for dinner sometime. It was also easy to leave my little room. It might as well have been a bunk in sleeping quarters, for all the emotional attachment I had to it. Saskia came into the room with me, expecting to help me pack, and was shocked to see how little I had with me. When we left Hotel Rus, I turned around to give myself a chance to capture it in the condition of me leaving it, so that if I lasted in this city for another twenty years, I might think back on it one Christmassy night and remember the moment; but as soon as we left it the picture went hazy. We took a taxi to Saskia’s place with my belongings. It was snowing again, though not as heavily as before. I was getting hungry, and was eager to head into the city, find a place to eat, then maybe hit another Christmas market, hear some music, and figure out a way to skip Chambinsky.

The glass door between Saskia’s bedroom and the little shared balcony that runs in a square over the courtyard below is sweating badly with condensation. At the end of her bed, Saskia’s clothes are piled in three huge mounds, which she classifies as dirty-and-to-be-washed, dirty-but-to-wear-again, and washed-and-ready-to-iron. She irons a piece of clothing only when she needs to wear it. She told me that she irons against the wall, since there is no room for an ironing board and no other uncluttered hard surface. Against the wall? I asked. Like this, she said, and showed me. There is nothing hung up in her closet, except hideous dresses she bought in a fever and is too embarrassed to return.