Hand Me Down World (14 page)

Whenever I tell people how I came to live in the room beneath Ralf and Ines they can't believe I could have been so naive as to walk into that trap. I can't believe it either. But thirty hours in an airplane will do that to you. It stretches the nerves, puts you beyond care. I'd left my judgment somewhere over the Himalayas. The euphoria of walking out of Tegel Airport into early autumnal sunshine had passed. My clothes were stiff with aeroplane filth. In the short commute from Hauptbahnhof, bobbing along in the carriage, imposing on the localness of others, my skin had begun to ooze sweat, and now all I wanted was a shower and to crawl between clean sheets.

As I finished reading the sign, the black woman reached for the old man's wrist and his great head, white and dim, eyelids lowered into bags of skin, wheeled about. All the movement we associate with curiosity had shifted to the region of his mouth. Now that bivalve opened and closed as if unsure for the moment whether it was asked to give or receive. The woman whispered in his ear. His head rolled back, his face came alive, as if to ask
What have we here?
‘
Sprechen sie Deutsch? Nein?
' His own English was confident, measured, and very quickly I found myself slipping into his easy cadences, so that to my own ears I began to sound measured and reasonable. He asked, reasonably enough, what had brought me to Berlin from New Zealand, a place so far away. I mentioned Dr Schreiber and the museum's collection of lungfish fossils. Usually I am more careful of the company before I bring up the topic of lungfish. But just then I was too tired to care. The old man's face lit up. He began pumping my hand. ‘Welcome,' he said. ‘Welcome to Berlin.' So that in a funny way I did feel expected. I should feel pleased, he said. ‘Ines'—and this was the first I had heard her name—‘Ines', he said, ‘isn't someone easily impressed.' Ines' smile made a brief return. And whatever misgivings I may have had left me. I felt absurdly good to have made a favourable impression.

I picked up my bag and we filed out of the station. I wanted to stop and look up at the neon-lit dusk and breathe the air. I wanted to linger. But the lights turned green and the other two marched across the road. Very quickly the traffic and lights were left behind. We were walking alongside a high wall and I would have said I could smell animal dung when out of the looming night came a roar, and here Ralf paused to announce, ‘The zoo, it's one of the places I like to visit.'

I hadn't thought to ask the questions someone more sensible would have. About the blind man's address, and to enquire about the neighbourhood, or learn how far away it was. Those questions came to mind only as we left the street and passed through a cutting. Cobbles and leaves took over. A series of lamps illuminated the dark, and through their white flare and dense clouds of moths I could make out the dark shapes of trees. The black coat in front plodded on. At his side, and slightly ahead, Ines in her white boots. Further on in the dark I heard a man's cough, a branch snapped. I looked behind. The other two walked on. I had to hurry to catch up. At last the path turned back towards the traffic. Headlights glanced off the tree trunks. Finally the road, with its hard lines of direction, the paint glistening up at the night. We crossed. Ines took hold of Ralf's arm to hurry him. His concession was to lean forward although his feet moved at the same pace as before. We passed under a railway bridge as a train roared overhead and the night was left ringing. Soon the traffic noise returned, then it too receded, became sporadic, almost a thing of the past, uninterested in itself, as we turned into a neighbourhood of older buildings with front gardens and lit doorways.

We stopped by an iron gate. First Ines, then Ralf, then myself with my bag over my shoulder, like some articulated creature coming to a complicated halt. Ines handed Ralf the sign while she fished in her coat pockets for the key. I glanced up at my new home. I counted five floors. An untidy fringe of winter ivy framed the entrance. The other two moved forward and waited for me inside the gate. There was the sound of the gate closing. Reunited we shuffled up to the front steps. In the lit ground floor window of the African Refugee Centre I saw piles of clothing and toys on the floor.

Inside the foyer, the two heads in front waited until they heard the door close, then a light came on, a harsh yellow light that scared the spiders down off the walls. A faded rosette struggled to hold its form among the crumbling floor tiles.

In the lift I let the bag down from my shoulder, but then it didn't feel right—abandoned at my feet like that it felt careless, even presumptuous—so I hoisted it back to my shoulder. Ines closed the lift doors and with a jolt we began to move very slowly upwards. Ralf began to whistle tunelessly. I felt myself sink beneath layers of fatigue. As we arrived at the top floor another jolt rocked us onto our toes and the whistling stopped.

We kept the same creaturely form outside the door while Ines unlocked it and as the apartment lights came on different planes came into being—floorboards, some wall areas, paintings, books, a long table shining beneath a chandelier. Ines took off in one direction. Ralf in the other. Ines, he said, would make us some tea. I remained stuck to his shoulder as I had from the time we left the station. At the end of the room there was a high-back chair and a sofa. When I sat down it didn't immediately register. So I coughed, and with a breathless tension I watched him shuffle towards the armchair and grope for threads of proximity. His knees and the chair came into contact and suddenly he knew where he was and the rest was achieved with a swift confidence. He sat down. On the wall behind him was a large painting of a seascape. When he leant back he seemed to enter the painting and my impression of him as a tall and kept-indoors type changed into someone with more nautical qualities. Perhaps my silence gave me away. He leant his head back. He said the painting was a scene from his childhood in Rügen.

Ines joined us. She had shed the blue coat. The housemaid's uniform was a surprise, the white cuffs made her appear blacker; she'd tied her hair back. In her hands she carried a silver tray as a small child does entrusted to the task for the very first time, her eyes silently commanding the cups and saucers to stay put. She set out the teacups and saucers. Ralf with his dead eye-sacks listened and accounted for each sound. Only two teacups and saucers.

After Ines left he talked and talked, and I listened as best I could, but after two cups of tea and after sliding lower and lower on the sofa a yawn escaped me. The long dissertation from across the way stopped. From the other end of the apartment I could hear the shower running. Ralf hauled himself up to his feet apologising and protesting on my behalf. I must be exhausted. How thoughtless of him. He called out for Ines and she came running in a dressing gown, her wet hair wrapped in a towel. I picked up my bag, shook hands with Ralf and followed Ines out to the landing and down the flight of stairs to my door.

On my first morning in Berlin, in Ralf's household, I woke with the airborne velocity of the past thirty hours to the stillness of the room and the sound of an unidentified bird on the windowsill. The velocity slowed and the room grew around me until I could confidently say to myself,
Yes, here I am, in this room, arrived
. As I lay there the detail of the room emerged with the light through the lemon curtains. A desk and chair were shoved into the corner by the window. On top of an empty bookshelf stood a half-finished packet of cereal and a near-empty bottle of olive oil. Presumably things left by my predecessor. The onions in the plastic rack were sprouting. A coffee cup cracked and lined with ancient sediment stood by the kettle. I got up and opened the fridge, hoping for something to drink. Three eggs—that's all—sat on the egg shelf. Later that morning I would throw them out and buy new eggs—not because I actually desired an egg as much as wanting to fill the egg rack with my own. In this small way my occupation of the room was achieved. I spent the first week exploring the city. I caught trains and trams and walked in the dying sunshine. Everything felt pleasingly familiar or else just how it should be, which may be the same thing. At times the city was like the set of an old film that I had seen or heard about. I wandered past scarred buildings. Across the Tiergarten the public sculptures bore old bullet wounds. Here and there a patch of cement had been applied to fix the nose on a cherub or mend a shattered arm.

For a few hours every afternoon, in exchange for the room, my eyes were at Ralf's service. We had our beat. A walk through the leafy Tiergarten, the zoo, of course—it provided order in the form of a large number of set scenes arranged by pen and cage. Outside of the zoo the order quickly disintegrated into chaos— grinding traffic, accelerative noises, the whine of a bus and the blinks and beeps of technology replaced the bird shrieks and calls. Without the task of guiding a blind man I would not have noticed these things.

I hadn't been to a zoo in years. I'd forgotten the shock of walking in off a city street to confront an elephant. The surprise of the thing has to take its course. But then you see the Indian rhino with its preposterous head shaped like a boot and wearing layer upon layer of medieval cloaks. Was this of interest? Did ‘medieval cloaks' do the trick? This was the problem I never really got on top of—what to pass on to Ralf.

Up to now my eyes had always been in my own service. Right from when I first spied the world through the bars of my crib, and later crawled up onto the arm of the couch to look at the sky and at clouds racing in the window, and saw a tree, perfectly still, like some unexpected visitor who knew everything about me. Up to now I had selected so much of the world for myself, first without judgment, then with judgment, choosing this face ahead of another's in the crowd—Ines', for example, back in the station— and with the apparent randomness of a fly.

What was useful? What was in poor taste? Once when laughter erupted from an Italian tour group I had to explain it was just a camel shitting. We moved on past the long-haired donkeys, who, as usual, were forlorn stationary figures looking for help—not just out of the zoo, you felt, but out of their wet shaggy manes.

‘Ostrich,' I announced and Ralf's ears shifted. The trick was not to overburden him with information. The eye of the ostrich moved back. Something was up—that was the feeling. Something imminent, and that's what kept us there. But as it often turned out, nothing was up. The ostrich was still, that's all.

It was exhausting.

It's not a big zoo. Yet by the time the zebras are darting away on their noisy hoofs the city outside is forgotten. Then, late afternoon, you glance up and there, beyond the pin head of a giraffe looming out of the grey, is the neon-lit logo of Mercedes. It was time to head home again. Out the gates, down the road to the cutting by the aviaries and across the top of the Tiergarten, into the neighbourhood I was working hard to call my own.

After the zoo it was always a relief to hand Ralf over to Ines. I would head back down to the street to collect myself. Restore my eyes. I needed to get on with my work. I needed to apply myself more seriously to the tasks I'd told everyone about. I needed to get on with my drawings of the lungfish at the museum of natural history. But as I stood there in the street watching Berliners—all strangers, as alien as sea lice, hurrying by on foot or bikes—I would spare a thought for Ralf, detached from his ‘eyes' and sloping back to the greyer world of memory. The curtain coming down. Apart from Ines' hotel English there would be no more conversation for him, no words for him to latch onto, words that briefly lit up his world, until tomorrow rolled around. Yet, whenever the time came to part, his handshake was firm, businesslike. Then, turning away, he would give the impression of someone who knows his way back to that other life and returns to it the way a dog does to its own backyard and kennel even though it has just discovered richer pickings at a neighbour's house.

I did not try to pass everything on to Ralf. For example, the T-shirt slogan of the young Polish woman who served us coffee at the zoo cafe—
access all areas
—I kept that to myself. There were boundaries, not necessarily declared but nonetheless understood. Dog shit over the pavements—he definitely wanted to know about that. The rush of air that froze a blind man into a state of alarm, I assured him, was just a passing cyclist. But other things that verged on or contributed to a mood, boredom, impatience, frustration of one kind or another, I kept those things to myself. The same with flashes of private fantasy when the cold mist of December and January lifted off the city's canals and turned into horses and chariots and creatures clutching tritons. I also kept to myself the vast number of discarded tissues, repellently white, piled at the base of the trees around Faggot's Meadow on our walks through the Tiergarten.

In the snap cold of February the sound of a trouser zip near the outdoor table-tennis tables where the queers hang out was enough to stop Ralf; his head would crane around, and I'd have to tell him it was just a guy in a black coat pissing against a tree. In the warmer months the sighs of missed shots and those coming from the bushes were indistinguishable and we passed through the area like single-minded pilgrims.

The discrete parts of this new life—me, Ines and Ralf— were hardly a natural association. And yet this is what a household achieves. It planes away difference. It also encourages small intimacies.

From any distance it will seem like an odd life to have drifted into.

fifteen

I was curious about Ines from the start. She said little to me. There was so little of her life to look into. Her door was closed whenever I passed it. As soon as I arrived upstairs to take Ralf out she would meet me at the door in her maid's outfit and smiling in that way of hers which I could not quite place until the day I passed a doorman outside one of the fancier hotels in the city.