Hand Me Down World

  So, hearing that, I drew up the chair next to his at the table. I reached for his hand and I laid it against my face. His fingers began to walk softly across my skin. He stroked the bridge of my nose with his finger. He brushed my lips with his finger. He rose in his chair and eased down again and made a sigh, a croaking to life or a dying, I couldn’t decide. I had beautiful skin, he said. ‘Good God,’ he said. Good God. His fingers wandered up to my eyes. The tip of a finger drew a circle around one eye, then the other. Bit by bit of me fell to his wandering fingers. I undid my uniform. I undid the bra I’d stolen from the Englishwoman. His fingers wandered and here and there they paused to catch their breath the way tourists do on a walk to take in the view. I wanted to be a special view that he could not do without. I wanted to keep my room. I needed the housekeeping money and what he paid me to pay to see the boy. So I had to be a beautiful view. The gentleman was standing up now, craning over me.

  That night I left the blind gentleman fast asleep. I went back to my room. I sat on the edge of the bed. I thought, I could steal the boy and keep him in the room with me. The blind gentleman would never know. I will teach the boy to turn himself into a ghost.

  The next night I am in bed when I hear the blind gentleman at the door. As the old man came in the idea of the ghost boy went out.

  The following night I heard him clawing at the door, and the night after, and then I began to lie there awake and expect him. And when he didn’t turn up I was angry I had stayed awake for nothing.

  One night he knelt by the bed and licked me from head to toe. Then he turned me over and licked me from my neck down my back between my legs, the backs of my legs, then he turned me over and licked again, went on licking me like a cat. For the third time he rolled me over onto my back. This time he moved my knees apart and entered me. And I wanted him to.

  Now the days were easier. When we went out for a walk the blind gentleman put his arm through mine and held me close. When we sat in the park the silences were no longer a problem. The blind gentleman was like a child with its favourite soft toy.

  Towards the end of summer those bad old silences returned. He would talk about his wife. He would talk about the things they used to do together, he could recall entire conversations, and what interesting conversations they were, on things which I knew nothing about. I began to worry again. Every child grows out of his soft toy.

  I didn’t know there was a room on the next landing until he asked me if I would object to another live-in companion. The person wouldn’t be on top of us. He or she, he said, would live in the room on the next landing. For a few afternoons a week the new live-in companion would give me a break. What did I think about that? When I didn’t answer quickly he said that, of course, I would have to choose the person on his behalf. It would be my choice, but he didn’t want any young men. It would be inappropriate. Young men, he said, were generally untrustworthy. An older man, yes, perhaps, why not? Another younger woman? Yes, possibly. But it would need to be someone around whom I felt comfortable.

  thirty-two

  The man the blind gentleman called Defoe irritated me. He thought of the world as a child does—as a place to play. He was like a tourist. He was always searching for something new to stare at.

  I don’t know anything about the world he comes from. He would drink all night with the blind gentleman. Sometimes he would try to help in the kitchen. Often he ate in a rush, then he’d sit there, his arms folded, while he waited for me and the blind gentleman to finish our plates. When he ate like that he would be wanting to get back downstairs to his fossils.

  The first time we all went to the zoo they forgot I was there. They forgot the flamingos and the seals. A giraffe could have come and sat down beside them and they would not have noticed because they were too busy talking about other animals—not the ones in the zoo—but lungfish and, in the blind gentleman’s case, butterflies. I don’t know why they felt they had to go to the zoo to have that conversation. In their talk I saw my own shortcomings. In Defoe’s company the blind gentleman talked in a way that he never did with me.

  For a few weeks I felt threatened. If I lost my position I would have to go back to the railway station.

  Bernard talked some calm into me. He made me see myself the way the blind gentleman might see me, and then straightaway I saw my uses. I kept the apartment clean. Defoe couldn’t do that. His own room was a mess. I made coffee and tea for the gentleman, I brought him schnapps. I cooked for him until he got sick of what I made and after that came into the kitchen to talk me through the cooking of the things he wanted to eat—meals that required certain ingredients which, if I couldn’t steal them, we could not really afford because money spent on a special ingredient could have been money spent on seeing my boy. What else? I was company. I didn’t tell Bernard what kind of company I was. Nor did I tell him—or Defoe—about the photograph.

  We had to wait until Defoe had left for the museum, then the gentleman would ask me to bring him the photograph. It was kept in a special place. Of course I knew where. In the gentleman’s office I would sit down and describe the photograph.

  The first time I thought I was looking at white slugs. But then I saw what those white slugs were. Some of the women are dead. But not all of them. Some of the women are curled up as they wait for the bullet that will end their lives. One woman lay on her front. I cannot forget her. She is raised onto her elbows like a sunbather at the beach, as her executioners approach from the rear, one man with a pistol, the other with a rifle.

  The gentleman asked the same questions as he did at the zoo. What did the women look like? And I would have to look carefully to find the birthmarks, the hair, and the heaviness or thinness of the torso. He had given each woman a name. The ones that were still alive, that is. That way, he said, they could not be mistaken for the garden slugs that I had seen the first time. The one he liked described the most was the sunbather. He wanted to hear about her flesh. How firm it was, and I told him until, to my ears, it sounded like I was describing meat in a shop window.

  Since reading Hannah’s testimony so much more is clear to me. Now I think I understand his questions in a way that I didn’t before. He liked to ask me, and he never tired of asking, what I thought of the person who had taken this photograph. What kind of man might he be? He leant forward, concentrating, and his face still as death itself as it had been when he asked for the truck driver’s details.

  I looked at the photo, and I thought there could only be one answer. ‘A bad man,’ I said, and he eased back in his chair. He turned away.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But I cannot afford to think that.’

  He would disappear in one of his silences so that all I was aware of was the dimness of the office, the closed blinds, the stillness of everything. He shook his head, and when he stopped shaking his head he would sigh heavily. Then he would lean forward and then ease back, and then maybe shake his head one more time. ‘What are we supposed to see? What is it we are supposed to think?’

  So with my eyes he got to see what he didn’t when in the company of Defoe, though when the three of us went out it was always Defoe’s eyes that reported the world back to the blind gentleman. Defoe’s were the trusted eyes. I was just an armrest or handrail on those outings. It was up to Defoe to decide what was of interest.

  When it was just me and the blind gentleman we went to the cemetery. Defoe came twice, the first time so he could be shown the headstones. When it was just the two of us the blind gentleman hardly paid the headstones any attention. All he was interested in was his wife, Hannah.

  She led parties of tourists around the dead. The blind gentleman knew all about them. He could talk about the dead as if they were relatives. But none of them interested him in quite the same way as she did. He never said why she didn’t live with him and I didn’t like to ask. But after reading her testimony I think I know because some of the impatience the blind gentleman showed with her carried over to me.

  She is a small
woman with the quick movements of a small dog. I think blindness has made the gentleman slow. Everything he did looked thoughtful. As he stood up from a bench in the cemetery he rose as if he was thinking about the movement of doing so every inch of the way until he achieved his full height.

  ‘Is she here today?’

  That’s the question he always asked. It was our reason for coming to the cemetery. And he never tired of asking it.

  Sometimes she would come and speak with him. Afterwards he would ask me how she looked. ‘Good,’ I might say. She looked good. Then he’d snap at me, ‘What does “good” mean?’

  ‘I don’t know, sir. She just looks like she did the last time.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Well she looks good, sir.’

  ‘Is she wearing clothes?’

  ‘Of course, sir.’

  ‘And?’

  So I would have to dress her before his eyes One afternoon she left the tourists photographing each other around the headstones. She came flying across to where we stood. She hardly gave me a look before she started shouting at the blind gentleman. I don’t know what that was about. Afterwards he wouldn’t say.

  One afternoon the trains aren’t working and we are late. The tourists are already moving out the gates of the cemetery to the street. I see Hannah and I am about to alert the blind gentleman when I pause. A car is parked across the road. The driver is an older man. He has wound down the side window and he is smiling up at the blind gentleman’s wife. His eyes follow her around the front of the car. She gets in and through the window I see her lean across and kiss the driver on the cheek.

  ‘Well?’ he asked.

  I told him we were late. We’d missed her. Slowly he breathes out through his mouth. A minute ago he was high with excitement. Now his body has turned into a sack that can barely hold him upright.

  What will we do now? What interest does the day have left? I often experienced the same thing after handing the boy back to his father. The highlights had been experienced; now there was all the rest of the day to get through, and the night, maybe two or three days, longer when the money was hard to come by, before I would see the boy again.

  In the blind gentleman’s case the day still held another possibility.

  First I would lead him to Wertheim for cake. He would give me money for two cakes. I’d buy just the one apfelkuchen and it was for him. The money meant for my cake went towards the money I needed to see the boy. Then I’d sit opposite the blind gentleman and make eating noises. I became good at pretending to eat cake. Your teeth must click and the sigh of contentment must come from a closed mouth. The small fork must bang against the plate, then at last there is the sound of the fork laid to rest. The scratching noise is the chair leg moving back to move a full stomach out from the edge of the table.

  After eating cake at Wertheim I’d lead the blind gentleman to the cafe across the road from Hannah’s building. We always took one of the tables at the window. And there we waited—with coffee and hot chocolate—for Hannah to appear. She usually did between five and six in the afternoon. Whenever she failed to turn up the blind gentleman grew silent. He sat shrunken inside his coat, his hands slumped down in their pockets.

  The only way to bring him back to life was to describe a woman who hadn’t passed the window yet, but she might as well have, because the blind gentleman didn’t know the difference between her passing and my description of her doing the same.

  Did he need to know that I had not eaten any cake? No. I don’t think so. If I was blind and had to be led to the park in order to see my boy I’d rather my minder provide me with a picture of him. That’s how I had come to think. A lie had to be better than disappointment.

  And, when I consider it, isn’t this what Defoe was doing when he spent his mornings looking at the outline of something in rock? Wasn’t he trying to make up the whole out of a few details? I did exactly the same when I wasn’t with the boy. I drew him up in my head from an impression put together from all the other times we’d spent together. Often, on our way home across the park when we fell into one of those long silences, it was almost as if I was walking with the boy; the boy was at my side, not the blind gentleman. Now I am in prison I am left with the fossil remains of all those times together. I don’t have to try hard to conjure him up.

  That winter was a long one. According to the blind gentleman it wasn’t so cold, not by his standards. By any other reasonable human being’s it was freezing. I didn’t care for the cold, it was the lack of light that got to me. Up to now I’d never thought of light as a living thing. It disappeared in November and December and everything in the city died a little. People bundled up so that their faces were the only part of their body visible. In January the ponds in the park iced over. One afternoon I saw a reflection of the boy with me in the ice. I told him to look carefully. There’s the two of us. Just like in a photo. Now stick that photo in your pocket. I hope he still has it.

  Over that winter, late at night, I tiptoed barefoot or in socks out of the apartment and down the stairs so the blind gentleman and Defoe would not hear me. On the bottom stair I sat to pull on my boots. Then I went out into the aching cold to catch a train across the city. First I went to Jermayne’s and stood outside his building to make sure his lights were out. Then I crossed the bridge into the little Frenchman’s neighbourhood.

  Bernard was back to sleeping in his new coat. He had paid off the pawnbroker and the tooth was back in his mouth. I brought him leftovers from the meal I’d prepared for Defoe and the blind gentleman. I always left a bit behind. Bernard would eat it cold. Afterwards I didn’t mind his dog breath. I liked the smell of his new old coat around me. Inside the warehouse at that hour I felt like I was in a huge litter of warm bodies and smells.

  The blind gentleman had given me money for lessons in Deutsch. I almost enrolled, but when I worked out the hours it would buy me with the boy I decided I could not waste it on language. Ramona says she would have taken the lessons in order to talk to the boy. Well, I tell her, it wasn’t quite one thing or the other. I didn’t enrol but I did keep learning. I never left Bernard without a new sheet of words and phrases. Do you want to climb a tree? Do you want an ice cream? Are you tired? Do you miss me? The last phrase was the first one I learnt off by heart. Bernard said my pronunciation was near perfect. I never did get to ask it.

  thirty-three

  Some time in the new year the blind gentleman asked me to sit with him. He said he had some unpleasant news. It had been brought to his attention—that’s what he said, brought to his attention—that he didn’t have as much money in his savings as he had thought. He said the whole world economy was teetering. Once upon a time, he said, it took a week for the mail boat to reach Hamburg from New York. Now time raced at the speed of a finger to a computer key. Everyone was affected, including our household. It meant I wouldn’t be getting the same amount that I had been receiving. It wasn’t that I wasn’t worth it. He just didn’t have it to give. He said he would understand if I felt the position was no longer worthwhile, but he hoped I would stay on. He hoped the circumstances would change for the better. They usually did, he said.

  The weather had certainly changed for the better. Bernard was making money again. I asked him if he would take his tooth back to the pawnbroker. He winced, he screwed up his eyes. I wished I hadn’t asked. I apologised. I told him the tooth must never leave his mouth again, no matter what. I’d find another way. Now a different look entered his face—that old look of fear. In his panic he dug his hands in his coat pockets and brought up handfuls of euros and pressed them into my hands. I took the money, and I took more out of housekeeping. I stole money off Defoe’s desk and out of his trousers that hung off the back of his chair. I still had only enough money for one visit.

  One afternoon we’re in the cafe behind Wertheim waiting for the blind gentleman’s wife to show. A truck is parked outside her entrance. I didn’t pass that on, and a few minutes later I’m pleased I didn’t
. Around the side of the truck comes Hannah with two removal men. The three of them gaze up into the back of the truck. A third man joins them. I recognise him. It’s the man in the car I’d seen outside the cemetery.

  ‘Any sign of her?’ asks the blind gentleman.

  ‘No,’ I tell him. ‘Not yet.’

  He orders another coffee, then after he’s drunk that he orders schnapps. He has two glasses. Over the same time there is a procession of household stuff from the building out to the street, where it is loaded into the truck.

  Across the road, the entrance to Hannah’s building looks emptier than ever.

  ‘Well?’ he asks.

  ‘No sign of her.’

  He wonders if she is sick. He wonders if I should cross the road and hit her buzzer. She may have had a fall. She might be lying there. So I go across the road and pretend to hit her buzzer. Then I come back and give him the first honest information all day.

  ‘She isn’t home.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  We kept going back to the cemetery and on to Wertheim for the one piece of cake and then to the cafe opposite Hannah’s old address. For a week we did this. In the end it was easier to make her up.

  I didn’t need to look so hard, in the way he had insisted of me at the zoo. All it took were a few things—a hat, flowers, new shoes, no umbrella if it was raining, details which I pinched off the crowd in the window and he would make the rest of her up.

  All winter I watched a large bird build its nest in the chestnut tree outside my window. That nest looked to be a solid thing, but it was made out of the flimsiest of materials, straws which if they weren’t in the bird’s beak would have been blowing up the street.

  Out of scraps the blind gentleman created a picture of his estranged wife.

  Here are some of the scraps I passed on.