Hand Me Down World

  On the beach in the early evening we let Ralf wander confidently ahead, socks and shoes in his hand, guided by the line of the tide. A naked man and woman (a jaunty cock and floppy tits) walked hand in hand across us, and before long we found ourselves in a crowd of naked flesh, and Ines slid her fingers into mine.

  I spent that night with her. She slept lightly. She was always very alert to those internal shifts in others. Every so often she would wake and remember where she was and go back to sleep. I spent most of the night listening to the voices from the boardwalk, then it was the quiet murmur of the Ostsee pushing up the beach. At a very late hour she stirred beside me, reached for my hand and placed it between her legs.

  nineteen

  Within a day of our return to Berlin I noticed a pair of silver plates gone from the cabinet and a number of scrimshaw pipes that had belonged to Ralf’s grandfather, a seaman who used to sail between Hamburg and British ports. I had decided to tell Ralf. I would not spare myself. I would tell Ralf everything.

  I waited a week. Another week spent brooding on how best to proceed. I needed to get Ralf alone. That was the first thing. Again it was as if Ines sensed my intentions. She stayed near. I don’t think she went out alone all week. She visited me on three nights and asked for nothing in return. But afterwards, we lay apart in the dark.

  It was the weekend of the European Cup final. A Saturday or Sunday—I forget which. Otherwise the details of that day remain deeply etched.

  I took my time with everything that day. I was uncharacteristically methodical—the way I showered, the way I made a cup of tea, even the way I ate my muesli.

  Late morning I visit the museum of natural history for coffee with Schreiber. I’ve come to show him my drawings of the lungfish. He puts on his glasses and stares. He likes what he sees. Apart from the lungfish butchered by the museum’s taxidermist, which I have faithfully copied—imperfections and all. Schreiber didn’t think that drawing resembled a lungfish. I smugly agreed. ‘But that’s the one on display,’ I said. Schreiber wants to talk football. Germany has defied the pundits and the odds to make the final, dishearteningly for some fans, against a flashy and in-form Spain. Schreiber is quietly pleased by the team’s progress. He is just a few years younger than Ralf. When I tell him I will be cheering for Germany he is surprised, and then delighted.

  That afternoon I follow the colourful crowd up Unter den Linden to Brandenburg Gate, where a massive screen has been erected. The game is still a few hours away. Trumpets sound, whistles blow, drummers pound away, and thousands, tens of thousands, draped in red, yellow and black, swarm through the city to arrive there in larger and larger numbers. Half a million I heard it reported later.

  Everything about this day was different. Fading, I would say. A solitary disengaged soul carrying a filthy sack picked up refundable empties. Retracing my footsteps down Unter den Linden I join the tail end of the crowd, late arrivals, girls with their faces painted black, red and yellow, the faces of their boyfriends covered with glee. At Bebelplatz, where on most days tourists stand around groping for the book-burning moment of 1933, a young father crouched by his son encouraging him to kick a miniature soccer ball.

  I wandered on enjoying the empty streets in a city whose concentration had been captured and drawn singularly to the one event. The way back through Tiergarten felt countrified. A solitary cyclist passed me, like myself, mysteriously untouched by the business of the hour.

  I had changed my mind about watching the game in a bar. I would head back to the apartment and share the moment with Ralf. He’d sent Ines out to buy champagne in the event of Germany winning, all of which would help to lift his spirits before I passed on Ines’ shoplifting, her purloining of the apartment’s chattels, their sale, and the proceeds. I wasn’t sure what to say about the proceeds. Perhaps I would leave it to her to explain the ghastly business of purchasing time with the kid I’d seen her with in Tiergarten.

  I turn into Ralf’s street. A van is parked up ahead. I kick at a plastic container and then swing my foot through a pile of rusty leaves. I am dreading the moment ahead. Ralf will think differently about me. Whatever he says, he will wonder, as he is entitled to wonder, what took me so long. What prevented me speaking out until now? I still haven’t figured out what to say. There is always the truth. It just doesn’t sound right. It doesn’t sound flattering. This is the moment I glance up. The first thing I notice is the van. It is a police van. And the two guys dropping down the steps of Ralf’s building are policemen. With them is Ines. One of them is handcuffed to her. Now another policeman gets out of the van to open the back door. He helps Ines and the handcuffed officer up the step and closes the doors behind. The other officer takes off his gloves and gets in the van. He is followed by the driver. The van moves out from the curb. I watch its ponderous three-point turn. In no hurry it bumped along the cobbles towards me. A drooping willow brushed against the roof. I turned and watched it to the end of the street. There it rolled and bumped in the direction taken by the rubbish trucks.

  And then I ran.

  I didn’t wait for the lift. I ran up the five flights of stairs. I found Ralf in a confused state in the middle of the room. He seemed to think the police were still there. Then he said, ‘Defoe? Is that you?’ His voice was shaking. I led him to the chair in the corner and tried to compose him. He said, ‘The police were here. They’ve taken Ines. They said it was a routine matter. They need to talk to her at the station.’

  The police had left him with a number to call but said he should wait four hours before calling, so that’s what we did. We waited. We watched the baby-faced Torres stroke the goal past the German keeper, and in the ecstasy of scoring Spain’s first and only and, as it turned out, winning goal, he ran to the corner of the pitch sucking his thumb until mercifully he was enveloped by his jubilant team mates. We sat through the final depressing minutes waiting for the damned thing to end. I poured Ralf a schnapps but he didn’t drink it. Then it was time. I brought him the phone and dialled the number.

  He spoke in German so of course I have no idea what he said except I noted the shift in tone. He started out with some authority but gradually demurred and by the end was giving cooperative sighs and nods. When he handed me the phone he looked utterly lost. How big and empty the apartment seemed just then. The vast floor area stretching away from the point of the cane held between his knees. How bare the walls looked. In a voice heightened by its own incredulity he said, ‘They say she killed someone. In Sicily. A woman. Ines someone. I didn’t catch the name. I should have listened more carefully. They say she killed this woman and took her identity.’

  She might be a thief. A thief with some justification. Who knew? But a killer? No, no, no. Impossible. With Ralf I found myself vying for greater conviction in her innocence. He didn’t know her—couldn’t possibly know her in the same way that I did. Who could possibly know her better than I did? But weirdly Ralf felt the same—for days, weeks after, we continued to believe in her innocence. It was a measure of our faith in Ines. That position would change, though it was never openly stated, as more information came to light. And then, as it happens, I realised that neither one of us knew her. We knew a small part of her, one side perhaps, the costumed part on her way across the apartment with the tea-tray, when for a moment the light from the window would capture her, enhance her theatrical effect, and you might think, as I did, and logically enough, Yes, here she is, here is Ines. She was what we expected her to be. It never occurred to me that there might be more. Only after it fell to me to pour Ralf’s tea did I appreciate the elegance she brought to the task. As much as it was amazing to think now how far that performance had taken her, it was embarrassing to think how willing an audience Ralf and I had been. I wonder if that was the reason we stuck with our agreed notion of Ines, while privately the idea of her as an innocent, a simple housekeeper was left to erode.

  On a more mundane note Ralf had to adapt to the loss of a housekeeper. He went through a period
of breaking everything he came into contact with, as if to say, Can’t anyone see how hopeless the situation is?

  All of Ines’ old chores fell to me to do. I moved into her old room, slept in her old bed and each morning woke to Ralf prodding his cane along the floorboards.

  On the second morning I was reaching under the bed to retrieve a shoe when I found the condom wrapper. Ines and I never used condoms. I’d had a vasectomy more than five years before. It was strange. Baffling. After all, there was just me and Ralf.

  Over the coming weeks more calls were made. We had the telephone number of the institution in Sicily where she was being held. Ines also attempted to contact us. Once I got up the stairs to Ralf’s to find the phone on the floor. There was a stumbling message from Ines. She gave the trial date. Then it was as though her old life reached out to her. Her voice changed. She reminded Ralf where his pills were. She asked me to remember to change the flowers. She hoped we were managing without her. I did not erase the message. I listened to it a few times, hoping to hear more. Perhaps I’d missed a tone that on hearing again I might identify as a trace of this other person, the one who was a mystery to us both. But what I heard each time was a reiteration of the old lines of trust and loyalty. As far as Ines was concerned, that is, from what her tone indicated, nothing had changed. We could still be counted on.

  Plans were made to travel down to Catania for what Ralf was convinced would be a ‘monkey trial’. He got me to contact likely places to stay. While I dialled he stood over me, an old biscuit crumb wedged into the corner of his dry lips. He wanted assurances that the rooms were non-smoking. He demanded descriptions of the surrounding neighbourhood. In one instance I had to ask the woman at the other end to stand by the window and describe the street below while Ralf bellowed from his corner chair that he wouldn’t tolerate noise.

  ‘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 rhinocero
s. 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.