The Apartment: A Novel (17 page)

We continue upward. Snow covers every step thickly, and our feet make those great soft noises that feet do in deep fresh snow. No one has come this way for hours, at least, though I can hear a lot of noise from above. It is the sound of oblivious gaiety, shouting and singing and mechanized bell noises. A Christmas market? I ask. The best, says Saskia. We arrive at the top. The market is situated between two vast museums that face each other. There are bright amusement rides, a merry-go-round and a flashing Ferris wheel. Let’s go through it, says Saskia. There is a children’s choir singing on a large stage and, in a beer tent, about fifty men in Santa Claus suits, looking inappropriately sober. Everywhere else, the square is festive. People are drinking hot wine and stuffing their faces with sausages and pastries covered in icing sugar. Saskia suggests we scrap our plan to have a nice dinner and eat something in the market. That sounds to me like the best possible idea. The prospect of sitting down somewhere dark and quiet and being forced into an intimate conversation is completely unattractive, especially since I know that kind of conversation would lead to the question of what I plan to do on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and so on. The children’s choir is really awful. But they are having fun, and lots of people have circled around to watch them sing. And when they get any melody halfway right, the crowd cheers. I buy a small box of overpriced, gourmet green tea, throw the box away, and stuff the bags into the inside pocket of my coat. Green tea seems like a good first grocery item for the apartment. Something I can drink non-stop, unlike coffee. There are a lot of things here that I suddenly feel I’d like to buy, but I don’t want to have to carry a bag around for the rest of the night. For our dinner, we find a hut that serves hot sausages sliced on paper plates, with sharp mustard and brown bread, and we eat while standing in the cold. Saskia gets a drink after that, and I get a second plate of food, and she holds her mug in one hand and covers it with the other, to protect it from the snow. The crowd flows past us, and no matter where we move, we keep getting jostled. Some people are polite about it. Others are rude. In an attempt to find a comfortable and calm spot to stand in, we drift until we find ourselves standing beside a metal barrier between the market area and a cluttered parking lot of caravans and cigarette-smoking cooks and vendors. Beneath our feet are crushed and crumpled plates that have fallen out of a nearby, overfilled bin. People, seeing there is no more room in the bin, throw their trash at our feet. I pull the metal barrier back and walk through. Where are you going? she asks. I don’t know, I say, but I don’t want mustard on my new coat. She comes through with me and I close the barrier behind us. There is a nice emptiness and calm back there, but without the crowds it seems a degree or two colder.

Some of the men in Santa Claus suits start digging through the bowels of two black buses, pulling out instrument cases. You know, I say, maybe I ought to try and learn an instrument. Which instrument? she asks. What about the violin? I ask. Saskia shakes her head. Too predictable. Everybody here plays the violin. I like the piano as well, I say, but it’s too big. I want something I can carry. What about a guitar? she asks. A classical guitar? I ask. Exactly, she says, with twelve strings! And for a little while we go through a list of every small instrument we can think of. The Santa Clauses take out their instruments and prepare to step on stage. When I was very young, maybe ten or eleven, my mother took me to guitar lessons. She bought me an electric guitar, and though I liked sitting down with it, and looking cool, I disliked playing it. I never practised, and when I went to lessons, the teacher, whom I remember now strangely with some specificity, who had a salt-and-pepper beard, long hair in a ponytail, and wore, at least in my memory, nothing but red T-shirts with little breast pockets, sighed and sighed and sighed at my lack of interest. These lessons took place in a tiny white room he must have rented in a little strip of offices on the side of a road. I remember it was undecorated, as though he were one of many tenants. My mother drove a station wagon – a yellow Chevrolet with wooden panels – and my father drove a burgundy Jaguar XJS. Often, though, they swapped, because my father loved the station wagon. I remember various days of packing that guitar into those cars and fretting that I had not prepared even ten minutes for the new lesson, but lying to my mother that I had. These memories are sure and clear, yet I could not say how many months the lessons persisted. It must have been a while. One day, in a moment of frustration, the teacher took the guitar out of my hands and packed it in the case, and the two of us sat there in silence for a very long time. I was ten or eleven, and he must have been in his forties. We sat on the only two chairs in the room, facing but not looking at each other. And when our time was up, he said to my mother that he had to discontinue teaching me and wished me luck – that last session was free. When I think of my childhood, I remember it mostly as a series of attempts by my mother to get me interested in things. In one of her more desperate acts, she spent a lot of money on a set of encyclopaedias and demanded that I file a verbal report to her every day on a new subject. After a week of feeling very silly reporting obscure facts about distant countries or scientific discoveries to my own mother, I refused. So my father bought me a motorcycle. I wrecked it and broke my leg: I hit the only tree in a big, grassy field. It was a little 80cc Yamaha with an orange tank with a white racing stripe that did about forty-five miles an hour. I drove straight at the tree for a long time, and had intended, I think, to veer away with inches to go, to make a death-defying escape. I don’t really know what happened. I lay on the ground for a long while afterwards. I was in a lot of pain, but I was not afraid. I felt bad for my mother, who would blame herself, and my father, who would blame himself, and if my leg had not been so badly damaged that I could not walk, I would have gladly gone home without telling anyone – curiously the bike seemed unharmed. But the accelerator was stuck in the dirt and the engine was screaming and the back wheel was spinning and grey smoke was spitting out of the little exhaust pipe. It was so loud that it attracted attention. I propped myself up on my elbows and saw a man – just a guy who happened to be around at the time – sprinting across the field toward me. What a sight he was. For years I saw him in my dreams, that figure, frantically running. My memory loses sight of him beyond that. I have no recollection of him reaching me, or speaking with me, only of him running, only of him coming for me.

The snow gets heavier, and Saskia and I decide to depart. We walk in no particular direction, but always tending away from the apartment. And in our wanderings, during which we speak very little, except to say how thick the snow is in places, or comment on the vision of the cold, still city at night, which seems to me intensely beautiful around every corner, my heart shrinks and expands a hundred times, expanding and shrinking at the realization that tomorrow I will wake as a citizen of resignation.

Later, much later, a little after three a.m., at home in bed in my new apartment, I find myself unable to sleep. The night is over. Saskia and I arrived at Chambinsky around eleven o’clock, after she started receiving messages on her phone from Manuela. The memories of the walk from the Christmas market to Chambinsky, from where I am remembering it now, come back to me like pieces of a smashed mirror, some dull and some glimmering. We stopped in a bar to get warm. We watched some kids sledding down stairways on large metal street signs. We walked across an old bridge with statues of saints on it and a bench upon which Saskia had slept one night, drunkenly. In the days when she could sleep, she told me as we paused at that bench, she could sleep anywhere, and for as long as she liked. The bench on the bridge was just an example. For years – this was when she first returned to the city – she liked to fall asleep on park benches. She said, Nobody knows this about me. What happened? I asked. She said, I was mugged, and I figured I had got lucky. We turned a corner at that moment and found ourselves on a small street – there seemed to be nothing but dark windows and grey stone, and suddenly, from a single spot in the long monotonous darkness, there was a bright light and some noise, with a magnificent intensity, as though the light and noise were splitting the stone open from the inside. We walked in the middle of the street, because it had been ploughed, and Saskia’s heels made huge echoing cracks on the road. Then we were at the light. This is Chambinsky, she said. Saskia opened the door and sound tumbled out at us. I was thinking, at that moment, that nine or ten hours before, when the idea had first been proposed, I could think of nothing worse than hanging out with a bunch of people fifteen years younger than me, introducing myself over and over, being a foreign nuisance or a foreign curiosity. But slowly that worry had diminished. By the time we arrived, I was looking forward, finally, to a drink, and Saskia, who was in a good mood, which had put me in a good mood, wanted to see Manuela.

The front room was very brown. There were wooden chairs and wooden tables. All the tables were taken, and all the seats, and people who had arrived too late to get a seat were standing in the large space between the tables and the bar, which was long and narrow. Do you see them? I asked. Saskia squinted, scanned the tables in the front space, and said she didn’t. She took her phone out and telephoned Manuela. They spoke for a few seconds, and Saskia turned and looked toward the back of the building. I followed her line of sight and saw Manuela, on the phone, waving. The space at the back, where the old theatre must have been, had tall, tall ceilings, too tall, in fact, to see them from the front bar, and there was a haze of the sort you sometimes notice in big hangars, which has a hum to it – not the space itself, but in your ears when you look at it. We took our drinks and walked to where Manuela was. When you came out from the front space to the back, you got a real vertiginous shock. To the left, there were pool tables, all in a row, more than a dozen of them. To the right, in a far larger space, were lots and lots of picnic tables covered in oilcloth. We had to walk right through the middle of the crowd. The boys wore beards and moustaches, T-shirts and ragged sweaters, little hats and cool glasses, and I felt like they were looking at me with the same mix of shame and animosity they might show if their fathers had suddenly walked in. The girls didn’t seem to be looking at me. Manuela was with a large group crammed around a single large table. I guessed she thought Saskia and I were in love, because she bore an expression of that friendly pride you feel when someone you like has found happiness. I didn’t get the sense that Saskia went around thinking about love much, or pursuing it. I gathered, having heard the story about her father, that she would always suspect that love was a kind of repulsive, debilitating madness, that, far from being the source of ultimate happiness, it was extreme unhappiness masquerading as happiness, a temporary euphoria that felt wonderful for a little while, then killed you, like freezing to death. Of course that’s not the truth. I imagine that Mr and Mrs Pyz are in love. I imagine that love is everywhere. I imagined, in the big room through which we walked, that love was teeming, that it spilled out of the pupils and mouths and teeth and tongues of more than half the people there. I imagine that love is some people’s whole reason for wanting to live. We arrived at the table. Manuela said, I’m glad you came! Saskia said, We’ve walked the whole city, it seems. The others did not pay us too much attention. They glanced, but they said nothing. Janos gave me a nod. You went shopping, he said. New coat, I said. It’s nice, he said, but you look a little like Adolf Eichmann. I looked at myself. Janos hadn’t intended the remark as an insult. He really meant it. He was probably right. In a few years, I said, it’ll be dirty and threadbare. Janos shrugged. His friend said something to him, and he turned to speak with him, and forgot us. No one else made room so we could sit. There was not room to make, really. Every inch of the table’s perimeter was covered with arms and elbows, and scooting out was impossible, since every table was like that, and the space between tables was small. Maybe, at a stretch, they could have made room for two good friends, but I was a stranger, and whoever got stuck beside me would have to speak with me, in English, and come down from the bliss of effortless and pointless chit-chat.

Let’s play pool, said Saskia. But all the tables are full, I said. She said, We just put some money down and wait. Do you play pool? I asked. No, she said, but it’s better than standing. Manuela said, I’ll come along. And all the guys noticed this, because Manuela, simply by being so beautiful, legitimized them as a group. The three of us went over to a table where a bleary-eyed guy with a mullet and a wrestler’s moustache was standing unsteadily over a freshly racked set of balls, holding a bottle of beer. Saskia spoke to him, and he answered. What did he say? He said you look like a Nazi. I looked at Saskia and Manuela. Why didn’t you tell me I looked like a Nazi in this coat? You don’t, said Saskia, you look nice. Manuela said, If you’re not wearing a T-shirt, people in Chambinsky accuse you of looking like a Nazi, but if you left your coat on a chair, they’d probably steal it. Will he let us play? I asked. The guy said, in English, Play you for a tenner. For money? I said. Yes, he said, I will break. So we played him. It started out as me and Saskia versus him, but he was so bad, and so drunk, that I let Manuela and Saskia play him, and I just stood and drank my beer. At one point I think fifteen minutes passed without a single ball being potted. Why did you want to play for money? I asked the guy. Because I hate Nazis, he said. A little while after that, Janos came over with a friend and said, This is Zaid. He doesn’t believe you fought in Iraq. Hey, I said. I put out my hand for Zaid to shake it, and to my relief he shook it. Nice to meet you, I said. So is it true? he asked. It’s true, I said. Then I said to Janos that I thought I wasn’t supposed to say anything about it, and Janos said, But now we’ve been drinking. At that point, Manuela shrieked. She’d potted a ball. Zaid said, I’m a journalist. Newspaper? I asked. I write for a website, he said. I’m the editor. Well, I said, I don’t imagine I could tell you anything about Iraq you’d find interesting. I don’t either, he said, I just never met anyone who fought in a war. I’m not in the military any more, I said.
Nevertheless
, he said, in a way that made me think that when he spoke English he overused the word. I said, So, what do you think? I thought you’d have a bigger jaw, he said. Another one of Janos’s friends came over, and I suddenly felt it was a good idea to go have a cigarette outside. Saskia and Manuela still had a few balls on the table, and it did not appear that the guy with the mullet had hit one in yet, so I told them to make sure they got the money if they won while I was away. Saskia came close and said, Are they annoying you? Not a bit, I said. You’re not leaving? she said. Of course not, I said.