Hand Me Down World

  It was in that cafe I told my story to Bernard. When I stopped talking I found his hand closed over the top of mine. He dropped his head, closed his eyes, then opened them, but kept his head down. When he saw I hadn’t touched the brandy he reached for it and downed it in one gulp. Then he looked up. It was dark in the cafe but I knew he wasn’t smiling. I couldn’t see the diamond. His black coat hung over the back of his chair. The lamplight caught his blue denim shirt and his flushed cheeks. He asked if I had a place to stay. I told him I have the trains. He gave a nod, looked down at the table. He was still nodding. The diamond flashed briefly in his mouth. ‘Ines,’ he said. ‘I would consider it a great honour if you would stay with me. Tomorrow we will look for your boy.’

  Prison has held no surprises for me. Perhaps I am unusual in that respect. Newcomers are usually heard to cry in the night. They call out the names of their loved ones. Then the sun rises and the names are gone. At the hotel I learned how to pass from one world to another. For long periods of the day I shared the foyer and the rooms with the guests. At night I followed the paths to the dormitories where we slept. At the last hotel we were instructed to brush our teeth before speaking to a guest. Our hands had to be scrubbed and our fingernails inspected by the supervisor before we could present ourselves in that other world. In our own world we accepted each other without teeth being brushed or hands scrubbed. We got around in bare feet, which was a sackable offence in the other world. It was hard to believe two more different worlds could sit so close to each another.

  I followed Bernard home to another world that night. As we left the cafe I thought I must try to remember the streets in case I need to find my way back to the world of trains. I tried to remember the name of each new street, but they were like the names of hotel guests. They did not stick. Within ten minutes I thought, I am lost.

  Ramona always asks what made me trust the little Frenchman. I start with his face, its absence of need. She understands that, but not his coat. That huge coat I clung to, stuck like a barnacle to the side of a barge, as we drifted along streets with too much life in them—cafes, bars, people—to be particular in a way that would make them memorable. I decided that, since I was lost, I would trust him.

  We crossed a road and arrived at a long wall. There we passed through a gap to another world which at first I could not see. The ground was rough underfoot and apart from the campfires and lit faces it was pitch black. Bernard produced a flashlight from his coat. I followed that beam of light down the side of a huge building to a door. Inside was as dark as out, but here there were small clusters of lights, single lights, fire-fly light, light as tiny as a lit match, but not a light that could be switched on at the wall. I saw sleeping bodies. I saw a naked woman astride a man. The light found a dog sniffing an abandoned mattress. We came into a better lit area. Here a man sat with his back to us facing a computer screen. In a dark corner near the computer man was Bernard’s bed. The light landed on a duvet and three pillows. Bernard passed the flashlight to me while he searched for clean sheets through four drawers all different sizes and stacked on top of one another. I took off my clothes. When he looked up from fixing the bed his eyes went blank. He showed me my side of the bed. He gave me two pillows, and kept the small one for himself. After I lay down he switched off the light. Bernard did not get into bed. He lay on top, on the other side, in his coat. When I woke the next morning I was able to see that he had taken off his sneakers. His eyes were closed. He slept without seeming to breathe. I looked up at the pigeons roosting in the rafters. I saw a white dove, and then another. I counted three children’s party balloons caught against the rafters. I listened to babies and small children waking. I heard tiny feet and the complaints of tired parents. A small face appeared next to mine and then ran off.

  twenty-six

  Thanks to the man with the computer it turned out to be easy to find Jermayne John Hass. John was his father’s name. His father was an American soldier. Jermayne took his mother’s maiden name for his own after John returned to Detroit. I told this to Bernard as we crossed the bridge into Jermayne’s neighbourhood. He replied with something in French. I asked him what it meant and he said it didn’t matter; it was something mean and I didn’t need to know. He was letting out the viper that lived inside him. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘I will be perfectly behaved.’

  Bernard’s head turned to follow a green van moving slowly along the street. He asked me if I had a passport.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you have any ID?’

  He stopped walking then to ask me where I was from. I told him I was from the Four Seasons Hotel. I waited for the next question. But he didn’t bother. We carried on, and then the questions arrived. Did I have a photograph of the boy? ‘No.’ Would Jermayne recognise me? I wasn’t sure. What about his wife?

  ‘What wife?’ I asked.

  I had waited a long time for this moment, yet why was I dragging my feet? Why did I feel so unhappy? I’d spent every waking moment thinking about what might lie around the next corner. Why the tears? I don’t know. ‘Why?’ That is the little Frenchman asking. ‘What is this? Look at you.’ Through blurry eyes I saw the diamond. I told him I was sorry. ‘Sorry for what?’ he asked.

  ‘For everything.’ I was thinking about the woman lying at the bottom of the steps. In the here and now of the grey-misted traffic in Berlin, a stranger with a diamond in his tooth was smiling and cooing at me as strangers once had at the parrot through the bars of the birdcage.

  We came to a canal. As we started to cross a small bridge Bernard put his arm around my shoulder. He held me close to him, as if we might be lovers, and that was the point. Trees. Cobbles. Buildings with ancient bearing. We were in the right street. We walked quickly, faster than before. Bernard told me to look straight ahead. Think of France, he said. I thought of France. I’d once had hotel sex with a man from Tours. A vain little man who liked to slap his cock in his hand. Bernard looked up the street—to France, except for a brief moment when I was aware of him staring into my face. I hoped the man from Tours didn’t show up there. He walked me a little faster. At the corner he stopped. He said we’d just walked by Jermayne’s building. Now what? What did I want to do?

  We walked on down to the next bridge, crossed the canal and walked back the other way under the trees. Near the first bridge Bernard put his arm around my shoulder again. He pointed out the door of the building. I counted up five floors. I looked in every window. Bernard led me to the cafe on the corner. We chose a table by the window so I could look back at the building that held my boy. He ordered hot chocolate for me. He asked if I was cold. He said I looked cold. I did not possess the kind of feeling that registers cold or hot. I had lost that capacity. I was two eyes and a beating heart. He told me to stop staring. ‘Just look like a normal person,’ he said.

  We were two hours in that cafe. That afternoon the door to the building on the other side of the canal opened just the once, and when it did my heart rose to my mouth and dropped back into place—all in the space of a second—as a white man got his bike out the door and pedalled off under the trees.

  Before we left the cafe Bernard produced a woollen hat from his coat pocket. He told me to put it on. I pulled the hat down to my eyes while we sat on a bench above the canal under the trees. Swans glided by on the dark water. Joggers ran past. Cyclist after cyclist. Once I heard a child cry out. Bernard got up to walk his feet back into feeling. He asked if I was hungry. I shrugged. I didn’t want to leave the bench. We saw the man with the bike return to the building. We looked up as a light came on in one of the third-floor windows.

  We went back to the cafe. Two women were sitting at our table. They looked up at me. Bernard apologised and led me to another one. We sat there until all the lights had come on in the building. Bernard left the cafe to cross the bridge on his own. I watched him return, head down, hands in his pockets. He nodded and I got to leave. This time we walked over the bridge, we crossed the cobbles and walked up to the doo
r. Bernard pointed to the names above the intercom.

  I pressed Number 14 and waited. I pressed again. This time a male voice answered. ‘Hello?’ I saw Jermayne as clear as day. I saw him more clearly than I’d ever been able to remember. I saw him and heard again that same lazy put-at-ease tone of voice as he told me he was just taking the baby out for a walk. I was back at the hotel bar. I was beneath him. I felt his hand holding me afloat. I saw his white teeth and laughing eyes. I saw the confident manner in which he moved across the lobby. I heard him say he wouldn’t be long. When I heard him say hello I said nothing. In the end the little Frenchman pulled me away from the intercom. He put his arm around my shoulder and led me up the street.

  He did not touch me that night. I lay in the dark waiting but it did not happen. I had to lift my head off the pillow to see if he was still alive. There he lay on the far side of the bed, in his black coat and socks.

  We rose early. We didn’t make a sound as we crept past people asleep, small children. The pigeons in the rafters blinked down at us. Outside we walked past other people huddled in blankets and sleeping bags by the fires. We went through that hole in the wall back into the world of early risers. A tall truck wobbled up a narrow gullet, its sides brushing the trees. A woman waiting to cross the road held the hand of a child. We walked back to the canal and waited in the mist rising from it. Out of that mist came a woman pushing a pram. Then there was the same young man with the bike we’d seen the day before. Bernard wanted a hot drink so we went to the cafe and sat at the table by the window. We were drinking hot chocolate when Jermayne came over the bridge walking with that slightly bow-legged walk of his; his shoulders lifted as he blew warm air into his cupped hands. A few minutes later he came by with bread and a newspaper. I watched him rise again over the bridge. Then we left the cafe to sit under the trees. It was the same grey day as before and everything about it followed the same pattern. I began to wonder if my boy lived in the building at all.

  The next day Bernard has a firm hold of my arm as I inch my way across the icy path on the bridge. I have on his woollen cap and I’m looking down at the ice. When Bernard’s fingers clench my arm I look up and he nods behind us. And that’s when I see my boy walking beside Jermayne. We’d passed each other on the bridge. Three years and two weeks. That’s how long has passed since Jermayne picked the baby up off my breast. We stopped there on the bridge. I studied his back view. Ski jacket, woollen hat, miniature legs in jeans. For the second time Bernard’s fingers dug into my bicep—this time to hold me still. He held me there until Jermayne and the boy disappeared around the corner of the cafe.

  The boy looked happy enough. Look at the way he walked, his hand in his father’s—and in a city I didn’t know, towards a future that excluded me. I did not exist in his mind. There was no reason for me to exist in that child’s head. Jermayne had seen to that. I often wonder if this was the moment I was meant to walk away. The first time I shared that thought Ramona sat up on her bunk and thumped her pillow. I wasn’t sure if it was Jermayne or my silly head she was thumping. When I say I often wonder, I don’t really mean it. No. And it didn’t enter my head either as I stood on the bridge staring after my child.

  I remembered that my mother’s brother made pots and he could recognise another man’s pots by the grooves in the clay. That boy would know who I was as soon as he set eyes on me. A blind dog knows which are its pups. Ralf’s physical world didn’t change just because he couldn’t see it any more.

  That night my little Frenchman shifted onto his side. He was still in his coat and on top of the duvet. I felt his hand stroke my cheek, stroke my neck, stroke my shoulder, and my neck and cheek again. In a far corner of that dark building a child was whimpering. From the fires outside I could hear someone singing. And close by the little Frenchman whispered his urgent songs in my ear.

  Here is the part Ramona likes best.

  The next day I press the buzzer. Jermayne answers.

  ‘Hello?’

  I say, ‘It’s me.’

  There is silence. I can sense Jermayne mustering all his authority. He replies in Deutsch. He waits, and then I hear the line go dead.

  I check behind me. Bernard is under the trees where I left him. He gives an encouraging nod, so I press the buzzer again. This time before Jermayne has the chance to speak I say again, ‘It’s me.’ I can picture his face drawn into calculation, aware of whoever else is in the background in his apartment.

  In English this time he asks, ‘Who is it?’

  ‘It’s me,’ I reply.

  And the silence returns, though this time the intercom does not go dead. When he next speaks his voice is almost breathless. ‘How the hell did you get here?’

  ‘I swam.’

  There is another silence.

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I want to see my child.’

  ‘Wait down there,’ he says and the intercom goes dead.

  By this point Ramona is rolling in her bunk, beside herself with joy, picturing bad Jermayne thumping down the stairs and across the landings. I have never told her the truth about that particular moment. About how terrified I was standing outside his building.

  The door swung back and there he stood in his slippers.

  ‘Fuck,’ he said. ‘Fuck.’

  He looked back over his shoulder. He levelled his eyes into the dark behind me. He pulled on the collar of his black leather coat. He grabbed my arm and walked me quickly up the street. I managed to turn my head without Jermayne noticing and across the canal I saw Bernard move out from under the trees. We walked to the end of the block without so much as a word exchanged. Then he led me across the cobbles to the shadows beneath the trees.

  I’d given him time to think, to consider his strategy, because now I heard the old charming Jermayne of the hotel bar. He wished me to understand that the boy was happy. That his life was here in this city. He said things were fragile at home. My turning up the way I had was like a rock thrown against the window. I had to understand that he had only the child’s interests at heart. When people are panicked they talk just like Jermayne did. Words, thoughts. The doors swing wide open on their hearts and minds. They let everything out and hope that something they say finds the mark. Not once did I hear him say sorry. But then Jermayne is smarter than that. He wouldn’t want to concede that much. As he spoke I looked at the face I thought I knew and I saw something I did not recognise at all. His mouth was swollen. Not from anyone hitting him—no, it had come from within. I couldn’t take my eyes off his mouth. If I had seen the same mouth three years ago I would not have slept with him. I would not have ended up in Berlin or in prison; the woman would still be alive, and most likely I would still be supervisor, smiling my hotel smile and sympathising with the guests’ sunburn.

  I said to Jermayne, ‘I want to see my child.’

  ‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘Have you not heard anything I just said?’

  ‘I want to see my child,’ I said again.

  He told me to shut up. He had to think. ‘If I let you see the child,’ he asked, ‘what then?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I replied.

  ‘Will you leave us in peace?’

  I told him I had no wish to cause trouble. That wasn’t why I was there.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I need better than that. You must promise never to speak to Abebi.’

  ‘Who is Abebi?’

  ‘My wife.’

  ‘It’s the boy I want to see.’

  ‘Do you understand? You are not to speak to her. Ever.’

  He took a step back. Under the streetlamp I saw how angry and scared he looked.

  ‘I’m going through a very difficult time at present,’ he said.

  ‘I just want to see the boy.’

  ‘Yes. Yes. You’re like a fucking parrot. You have no idea.’ He glanced back up at the building.

  ‘When can I see my boy?’

  ‘All right. All right,’ he said. ‘You can see him. But I advise you not
to tell him you are his mother. Because you’re not. Promise,’ he said, and when I didn’t answer he said, ‘Those are the conditions. Take them or leave them.’ Still I didn’t say anything and he added, ‘You’ve forgotten something that is important and not entirely irrelevant. You signed the adoption papers. Abebi is the boy’s mother. His legal mother.’

  ‘Tomorrow,’ I said, ‘I want to see my boy.’

  ‘And if I don’t allow it?’

  ‘I will still see him. Only,’ I told him, ‘it will be a time and place of my own choosing. And you can forget any promise I have made.’

  Jermayne’s eyes widened. I thought he would hit me.

  ‘I don’t remember you being like this,’ he said. He turned his head slightly to view me from side on. ‘Are you here alone?’

  ‘Yes.’

  His eyes shifted. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Quite sure.’

  Then his face softened in a familiar way. ‘You are still pretty,’ he said.

  He reached to touch my cheek and I slapped his hand away.

  ‘The paw of the lioness,’ he said, and he laughed quietly. ‘Everything has changed, hasn’t it. Very well,’ he said. ‘There is a playground further along the canal. Twenty minutes’ walk along the bike path you will see it. Tomorrow at four o’clock. There are some things you need to know. His name is Daniel. He speaks only Deutsch. So. How should I introduce you, as my friend?’

  I said, he can call me Ines.

  twenty-seven

  The next day I sat on a bench next to a red plastic slide and waited. Bernard had written down some words in Deutsch to say to the boy. He didn’t know about my promise to Jermayne and had put down ‘mother’ as well as How are you? Are you happy? Do you know a song? Bernard had written down what he said was a nursery rhyme.