For a time afterwards we were able to forget about it, the photograph and Otto and the impending sense of mortality that the death of a parent brings forward, especially now that Ralf’s blindness had accelerated. There is a window to the right of his desk. It looks out to a tall chestnut growing at the side of the building. One morning he called me from his office. I found him in a state of great agitation. He wanted to know what had happened to the tree. On whose authority had it been cut down? Why hadn’t we been told of its fate in advance so we could do something about it? ‘My dear Ralf,’ I said. ‘You are looking at the wall.’ It is impossible to know how one will respond to such news. With anger? Astonishment? Followed by a quick decline into a depressed state? Anyone would be forgiven. Ralf chose laughter.
There were other incidents that we classified as ‘humour’. Tea was poured onto the floor. Sugar was sprinkled over the salad. I found him naked and wrestling with the doors of the linen cupboard. He was trying to get into the shower. He had been a few years retired from the university. His morale had to be carefully managed. So when we talked about the future it contained the same life we had known and took no account of his condition. To keep up appearances, for my sake, yes, I believe so, he would place things, clothes, books, objects, and measure their proximity so that he could move towards them with the same confidence as a seeing person. I would never describe Ralf as vain, yet it seemed at the time a strange kind of vanity had gotten hold of him.
One morning—wait, I can be more precise, it was April 23, the previous day I had walked through the city marvelling at all the new colour and scents in the air—well on the morning of April 23 I woke to find him sitting on the side of the bed. He heard me stir. He said he couldn’t get to sleep. It must be in the middle of the night. He was desperate to get back to sleep. He was sorry if his restlessness had woken me. I told him it was morning. He lifted his head in the direction of the window. At least he managed that much on his own. I have not forgotten his look of grief. Then his pride got the better of him. He smiled— said he had been joking. And I too entered into this make-believe. I pretended it was still night. What is that saying? The blind leading the blind.
Well, after that his deterioration became a private matter. He was careful to avoid making declarations about the state of a world he could not see. His pride demanded more caution from him. And now, it really did become a case of the blind leading the blind. The blind issued orders. I had to bring him this, bring him that. Read this, deliver that. I became his factotum. My limbs and capabilities were turned to his ends. His blindness made me into a slave. I should have felt more sympathetic. Well, I like to think that I was for a while. But it didn’t last. Ralf’s neediness didn’t court sympathy. He didn’t allow me that response. Instead, I felt resentful. He claimed still to have a vague sense of the object or the presence of another. I think that might be true. I would catch him looking at his hands, at his face in the mirror. When I asked what he was doing he said he was committing his appearance to memory. This became an urgent task. Before blindness erased his world he was determined to draw up an inventory of things he wished to study, to furnish his blind world with. He was like a traveller packing for a long journey. He had to decide which memories and knowledge of things he wished to take into this new world he was headed for.
There were some sweet moments. For example, my husband looked at me as he had when we first met. He looked at me intently. He was surprised to discover that my eyes were green and not blue as he had once declared. I should have corrected him way back then. I thought perhaps he was colour blind. Then, much later on, I realised he was selective in his looking. Even when he appeared to be looking he might not have been. He was just presenting his eyes to the world. To me. While his thoughts were elsewhere. Now he combed my face with a jeweller’s eye. He had to bring himself very close. It was a very intimate experience. It was nice, flattering I suppose, to know that I too was being packed away with his father’s woodcuts, which he stood under, gazing at, and the books that he passed by with a finger trailing against their spines.
We went to places he had never shown any interest in before. The flower shop, for example. He wished to see a flower. He peeled back the petals and peered in. We visited places—Schloss Charlottenburg—that were in the film Love in Berlin. Ralf and I were filmed walking hand in hand. It didn’t make the cut. Alexanderplatz. Tiergarten. We caught trains and trams into the old neighbourhoods in the east, Friedrichshain, Prenzlauer Berg. We visited art galleries, museums. I had to describe the city passing in the tram window. In the Bode I led him around his favourite sculptures. There were times when it felt like one big long farewell. But, as I say, it was quite the opposite. He was packing a lot away.
Which brings us back to the photograph. Although it was in his possession, in the apartment, it could legitimately slip into invisibility because he could no longer see the detail in it. Blindness offered a way out. The thought momentarily cheered him. But then he decided, rightly, I think, that this was a cop-out. And so the photograph was added to the list of things he needed to remember. Of course he could not see the photograph. He needed me. I had to describe it, be tour leader. And this could not be done over one session. There were several hundred bodies in that ravine. I had to look for distinguishing features because his goal was to try to remember them as individuals. He was determined to see the photograph differently from how Otto, the photographer, had intended. Of course, it meant that I had to walk among the dead in order to pass on to him what he couldn’t see. It was a horrible experience, horrible many times over and in many ways, to throw oneself headlong into that ravine with its pile of bodies.
Then, I have to say, after days and weeks of wandering in that scene, it was horrible to acquire the kind of mind that I did, a statistical frame of mind. I wish I could state it differently, better, I think I must mean. I no longer saw the bodies for the individuals they were. I no longer wondered about their foreshortened lives. About the minutes and seconds preceding their tumble into the ravine. I even forgot the role of kind, even-tempered Otto in all of this. I had arrived at the same place and the same frame of mind that accommodates the dispassionate eye. The moment I recognised that pitiless place I withdrew. I refused to look at the photograph. I refused to have anything more to do with it. I told Ralf, I told him—no more. I will read to you, fetch things for you, prepare your meals, but this I will not do. He was furious. He called me names I had never heard from him before. Above all, he said, I was heartless. Why else would I deny him what he needed to see? Needed, he said. But what need is that exactly? What was he looking for that I had not already passed on to him? Further to that, as I saw it at that time, where might such a need lead? Pornography? Would I be required to pass on those sordid details as well? His needs, as he put it, were at loggerheads with my own dignity and self-respect. No, I told him. No more. I can’t do it. Someone else will have to. I actually said this. In a split second Ralf’s fury abated. I could almost see the idea bloom in his mind. It became attractive to him. New eyes would deliver new detail. He would get to see more—better.
So we began to advertise for home help. He wanted foreigners. Young women looking for somewhere to stay in exchange for guide-dog duties. That was our little joke. Possibly in poor taste. So these guide-dogs would visit on a trial basis. The zoo is nearby and that’s where he would take them to test their observational skills. It made sense to Ralf. The zoo was an ideal place to test their abilities to tell him something new about those things that were already familiar to him. Anyway, they came and went. Some stayed a week. Later, of course, after I moved out, Ralf would call up with a long harangue about their shortcomings. They were stupid. They couldn’t speak English or Deutsch. A Czech girl abandoned him in Tiergarten while she reconnoitered with her boyfriend, a French trick cyclist. A Polish girl smuggled her lover into the apartment. It was a week before he was discovered and Ralf hounded them both out. There were others.
Then the blac
k woman. There was no mention of her until I saw him with her one afternoon. This was at Wertheim. Ralf has a sweet tooth. Wertheim was one of our highlights during those mad weeks of mopping up the city. Well, he was sitting at the table by the Roman fountain. The black woman sat opposite, silent, about as companionable as a vase, I remember thinking, and, poor Ralf. But by now our lives had moved apart. I was seeing another man. And that was the last thing I ever expected to happen, but it did. Ralf got wind of it. Interrogated me over the telephone until I told him there would be no more telephone conversations if he continued in this way. He shut up. So quickly in fact that it made me feel worse. What ray of sunshine I provided by that stage I cannot imagine. But there must have been something for him to shut up so quickly.
Some months passed before I saw him again. He was still with the black woman, and younger man, perhaps in his forties, who on closer inspection looked more like a tourist. I actually thought, Yes, that’s it. The man is a tourist and Ralf and the black woman are directing him somewhere. But then I saw them again—and they were a threesome. On the Ku’damm, a little gang of three, completely improbable, mysterious in their own way, bobbing along in search of a favourable landfall. I am being grandiloquent. Ralf used to complain to me about these ‘flourishes’ of mine. He only ever wanted the ‘facts’. The description of the thing itself. Not opinions. In this way, my personality was purged, deemed superfluous. It took me a long time, a year perhaps, by which time I had moved to my own flat, before my personality returned, before I became ‘me’ again—all those parts that host memory and opinion were welcomed back from their exile.
The black woman stayed longer than the others. She must have found a way of living with the photograph. And with Ralf’s special request. The constant surprise of a new young woman leading Ralf by the arm had become a thing of the past. Now it was just the black woman. It became impossible for me to imagine them apart. Then when I learnt about the boarder it was different again. The black woman, Ines, Ralf and this new person whose role wasn’t clear. Another foreigner. It was possible to see as much at a glance. I have said so. Ralf squeezed and surrounded by foreign borders. I realised how different his domestic life must be now from the one I remembered when he liked nothing more than to be left alone for hours in his study. When the first young women arrived to help Ralf I used to imagine them wandering around the apartment. I used to wonder what they thought in this strange new space. Strange to them, but not to me. It’s nine years now, but I imagined I could step inside the apartment and still know where to find everything.
The arrival of Ines changed it—changed the history of the apartment. Now it was a whole new thing I could not see into. And that helped, more than anything, helped to put Ralf’s life and mine onto a completely different footing. For the first time we became apart in the real sense. It was as if Ralf had gone to live in a foreign country I knew nothing about.
thirteen
Ralf
Dear Ines. I regret to tell you, I am not much use. I cannot even tell you what Ines looks like. She was with me for two years. I know she is African. Where in Africa? Somewhere like Liechtenstein in Europe, the equivalent thereof, no doubt. She may have said where. Please disregard what I said about Liechtenstein. There was no milk in the fridge this morning for my coffee. It’s the little things that irritate and beyond all reason these days.
Ines came into this household one August morning two years ago. Ines Maria Luis. I thought I’d forgotten that. Where does all this information sit? I wish I knew. But August is correct.
I needed a housekeeper. I imagine it isn’t an easy job as far as jobs go. She could just as easily have worked in a cafe, but she chose to live here and work for me. I don’t know what I can say about her. She was often close to me, in the physical sense, as a matter of inevitability and safety. In public she made a point of staying close by, her arm looped in mine. You would think that to be an easy task, to lead an old man about the city. Not everyone can do it. To guide requires judgment. You don’t want to be dragged about like a sack of potatoes. She was a pilot fish to my whale—not very flattering in my case but it gets to the quality of her presence. There, but discreetly apart. Conversation was not her strong point. I would be hard pressed to recall anything of any substance said by her. Ines. That’s a Spanish name. Is the rest Italian? Well I asked her once and got no reply. Whenever she did not wish to answer she would go silent, and then it would be as if she were no longer there, present. I’d wonder if I had been talking to myself. That’s the thing about blindness. You become overly dependent on your ears. So I would be left to listen to the bird outside the window, the distant crawl of the traffic across the city, then, I’d hear a floorboard at the end of the apartment give up a clue followed by the soft close of the kitchen door.
I gave her money for lessons in Deutsch. After two months I’d say something—wie geht’s—and the silence would be followed by the trail of footsteps in the direction of the kitchen. Her ability to speak English happened to be one of the reasons for employing her. I enjoy English. Hannah, my wife, has some English. Russian is her other language, and lately, I understand, Italian. Anyway the English Ines had she spoke beautifully. But in quick time I realised she had perfected set-pieces. The way we can all get up and play the one piece on the piano or guitar. Her repertoire was disappointing, but I didn’t want to replace her. I’d grown fond of her. I appreciated the quiet way she occupied the apartment. She was no cook, however. I don’t know what she did with the housekeeping. I always considered it a generous amount. There was never anything to eat. I’d ask her to buy apfelkuchen. The next day she would tell me it was all gone. How did that happen? Well, of course, I asked that very question. Back came the predictable reply—silence, the sounds of the city, the traffic, all of that would fill up the apartment, then I would hear the door to the kitchen open and close, and I’d find myself alone.
I needed someone else, someone with language and conversation, an educated person, and that is how Defoe entered the household. There is a bedsit on the floor below which belongs with this apartment. When Hannah was here we used it as a spare room for guests; her niece from Cologne would sometimes come to stay. In exchange for that bedsit I gained a more able companion than Ines, someone with an eye for detail. Someone competent in English, someone with conversation in him.
Once we got to know each other better—I suppose once we had one another’s confidence—I asked Defoe, our new boarder, to describe Ines to me. Naturally I was curious. She had been with me nearly a year by then.
Blindness forces one to become adept at translating the spaces between the words—the pauses, the silences. One pause is not the same as another. As for silence I could compile an encyclopedia on the subject. Taxonomy was my first love. As a boy I remember being entranced when a dragonfly rose above the bulrushes. I reached for it to claim it as my own. I wanted to possess it as a child is wont to do, and, of course, as nature is clever enough to arrange, the dragonfly eluded my clutches and led me on a merry chase through libraries in my teenage years all the way to the lecture halls of Humboldt University after the war.
When I asked Defoe to describe Ines to me there was a silence—a pause, I should say, and then a silence. I told him I don’t want to know how much is in her purse. I would just like to know what she looks like. Then he started on his thoughtful description. He didn’t use the word schwartz. That was interesting because everyone else had. Defoe said she had light skin. He spoke of a ‘depleted colour’. I liked that notion of colour being not what it is. ‘Like potato peel,’ he said. I wasn’t expecting that one. And attractive. He said that quickly. Curious. Because we tend to linger before beauty. It’s why we look at a painting for as long as we do, or for that matter marvel at the extraordinary construction of a dragonfly. Potato peel, though. That was different. That was original. Never before had I heard a woman’s complexion described in such terms. Now he volunteered more. He said she walked with a very straight back. Th
e way he said that I could tell he personally found it very attractive.
In time I became more dependent on Defoe than on Ines. Don’t get me wrong. In her own way she was dependable. I am old, officially old, although most days I don’t quite feel it in my heart or bones. Dependability is a quality I have come to admire more and more. I can find no fault with Ines in that regard. Some of the helpers I had before Ines you would not trust to look after a goldfish. Defoe became important. He filled in those gaps Ines could not hope to. Nor did I find Defoe to be guarded, unlike Ines. In fact, he was quite the opposite. He spoke freely, alarmingly freely—that’s how it struck me, then, but I soon got used to it. His forthrightness. The open-hearted way in which he offered himself up over a range of subjects, his marriage, everything really. I found that refreshing. Very un-European. Not very sophisticated, as my estranged wife would put it. But in light of the person I came to know and respect that kind of sophistication isn’t worth much. We touched on the subject once. Sophistication. He wondered what the point of it was. I dare say I made a hash of trying to explain it. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘sophistication is a way of being in the world. One keeps one’s emotions in check. One presents a certain fixed view of oneself.’ ‘Like the prow of an old wooden sailing ship,’ he said.
As a child he had boarded a Chilean sailing ship visiting his home town of Wellington. Years later it was revealed that the Esmeralda had been used as a prison and a place of torture. It had the most beautiful prow. Wooden, carved, elaborate paintwork. This conversation took place at the zoo, early on. There is a small beach in the corner of the zoo, at the Tiergarten end. That’s where we were. Seated together on a bench talking about sophistication while the noises of the zoo—the squawks and squeals, the plaintive roars of the assembled beasts—swirled around us. But where we sat was a gentle and quiet place. There was just enough warmth in the sun. It must have been late August or early September when Defoe first joined us.