Hand Me Down World (28 page)

The lights changed. We crossed the road and walked beside the tramlines and the early-evening traffic. Whenever I came to an intersection Jermayne said ‘left' or ‘right'. Soon we came to the busy road where I had surfaced with the Frenchman all those weeks ago. He pointed to the television tower in the distance. ‘That's where we are headed,' he said.

We walked for half an hour, in the same formation. Jermayne didn't say another word until we reached the square around Alexanderplatz. There he stopped me and told me to turn around and to listen to what he had to say. His face was covered with sweat and his eyes were calm. But there was bitterness on his breath. He repeated some of what he'd said earlier. What had happened that afternoon could never happen again. If it did he would not hesitate to telephone the police. If he ever saw me with the Frenchman I would never see the boy again. He asked if I understood and I nodded. Then he surprised me. Did I have any money? I shook my head. ‘You haven't thought about anything, have you?' he said. ‘Look at what you gave up. A perfectly safe and respectable life in the hotel. Now look where you are. Do you think this is better?'

‘It's the boy I wanted to see,' I said.

Jermayne didn't reply—unless silence counts as a reply. The silence went on a while. I wondered if he might be reconsidering everything so I did not dare interrupt that silence. When at last I thought to look behind me he had gone.

I walked across the square to the station. With my last euros I got change from the receptionist in the toilets. I found my old cubicle. I sat down and stared back at the white tiles. Soon after that the banging on the door started.

thirty

I had no idea about the steps you might take in order to give up. If someone had pointed out a door with the instruction ‘Go through there,' I might have been tempted. I might have drifted towards that door and taken a peep to see what lay on the other side. But pulling me back from that door was the idea of seeing the boy again—and Bernard. I had two people to think about now. Two people in the world who I cared about enough to go on sitting in those toilets and wandering in circles around the railway station.

I noticed the changes since I was last there. The warmer weather had brought out more people. Some of them were strange-looking young men with yellow-and-purple hair. There were men and women with winter in their faces. Dogs who kept their heads down. The dogs I noticed always seemed to know what they were doing and where they were headed. Once I found myself walking behind a man with a large trombone strapped to his back and when he turned round it was not the Serb.

I kept the last of my money to pay for the cubicle in the station toilets. I washed there. I brushed my teeth with my finger. I'd left the plastic bag under Bernard's bed. I was confident of finding my way back, but I kept thinking,
What if Jermayne sees me?
Although I never saw him during the day, the feeling that he was there haunted me. He was about to poke his head between the clouds and wave that stick at me.

I was back on the trains at night, travelling up and down the same line, half hoping I would run into Bernard, half hoping I wouldn't in case a sleeping passenger suddenly pulled a hat back off his face to reveal Jermayne.

Whenever Ramona gets me back to thinking about what I would do and wouldn't do under certain circumstances—hunger or love—I tell her I have known hunger. I have watched people eat at the station kiosks the way tourists line up to watch sunsets, and yet I have never found it in myself to beg.

Instead I stole fruit. I ate leftovers off the kiosk tables. I swooped on crusts ahead of sparrows.

One morning I was sitting on a bench on the park side of the station. An old white labrador I'd seen hanging about, ownerless, came and sat on the ground by my feet. The dog paid me no attention. It just wanted that patch of ground in front of me. People walked by. I sat unnoticed, whereas the dog drew glances and smiles. Those who missed it the first time slowed down to look back over their shoulders. Some stopped to pat it. One woman fed it a sweet. She had to unwrap it and the dog gulped at it, then the sweet seemed to become lost in its mouth. It chomped and chomped, and in the end spat it out so I bent down and picked the sweet up and ate it myself. The dog lay down with its head on its paws and its eyes floated up in the direction of someone approaching. I tried the same—only with women though. I didn't want any of the other business.

Within two days I had attracted the help of the Englishwoman the inspector spoke to. Her testimony is filled with stuff about gypsies. It says nothing of the money I stole from her. The stealing didn't start at her place. It started when I risked Jermayne's face suddenly appearing in the moonlight on the night I snuck back to Bernard's neighbourhood. I was hoping to see the little Frenchman and hug him. I slipped through the hole in the wall. I kept to the shadows and avoiding the light from the fires crept into the warehouse. Bernard wasn't there, but my plastic bag with my hotel uniform, toothbrush and sticking knife was still under his bed. I felt under the mattress where I had seen Bernard stick his own plastic bag with money. I took half the money—I hoped he had paid off the loan and got his tooth back—and I slipped out of there. I didn't breathe until I left the hole in the wall. I walked up the same block where Jermayne had driven me with his stick. Under a streetlamp I counted twenty euros. Another thirty and I could see my boy.

When someone picks up a stray there is no telling where it has come from. From the point of view of the dog and its saviour this is good. There is no history to speak of. Without any history there is nothing to worry about, no dark shadows to fear. Dog and saviour start out as new.

So I did not tell the Englishwoman anything of my past— Jermayne, the boy, Bernard, the Four Seasons Hotel and the whole story of how I had come to Berlin—all of that had to stay unsaid. I did not want to be somebody's problem to solve any more. I preferred to be a stray dog.

The Englishwoman made me up a bed on her couch. She fed me. I took hot showers. I used her soap and her shampoo and her toothpaste. I stole two pairs of her underwear. I stole the ten-euro note I saw sitting under a glass on the kitchen table. The next morning there was another ten euros—in the same place—and I took that too. On the third morning there was a twenty-euro note. I took that and made my way to Jermayne's building.

When he heard my voice the very air itself seemed to be sucked out of the intercom. So I got in quickly. I told him I had fifty euros.

We sat under the trees above the canal. ‘Look.
Ente
.
Ente
,' I said. The boy's eyes stared at his feet. We went to the playground. I put him up on the slide and in the swing. His weight felt dead between my hands. He went down the slide without his hands in the air. He sat on the swing with his little body collapsed in on itself. I wished I had some chocolate. I wished I still had Bernard's list of things to say. We needed to start over, and to do that we would need the football.

I was planning to visit Bernard the next night. That same morning, the Englishwoman said she had some people she wanted me to meet. She didn't mention the African Refugee Centre.

The pastor was a black man. He sat me down in his office. He asked if I was hungry. I wasn't. Did I need something to drink? ‘No,' I said. I kept looking around to see where the Englishwoman had got to.

The pastor asked me what I knew best in the world. I told him I knew how to be a hotel maid.

He sat back in his chair and folded his hands beneath his chin. His eyes were warm, though, and I didn't mind them peering at me.

‘I'd be interested to learn,' he said, ‘what a hotel maid knows.'

So I listed the things—how to clean, how to fold sheets properly so that they don't get a crease, knowing when to look the other way rather than cause a guest embarrassment. I told him a guest lives their life more openly than the rest of us. We make the same filth, but no one else gets to see it.

The pastor listened and thought about what I had said, then he asked me if I had God in my life. I said I like to think He is there but He hasn't been paying me much attention lately. The pastor laughed and shifted in his chair and became round-faced and kindly again.

He wanted to know what had brought me to Berlin. I didn't mention the boy. When I told him I had drifted here on the tide his smile slipped from his eyes and teeth. The pastor had a willing laugh but he didn't want to be taken for a fool. Then as he thought more he began to nod his head.

He asked me if I had any experience working with blind people.

‘Just myself,' I said.

Again the pastor laughed. He picked up the phone and began dialling. The person at the other end answered and as the pastor talked his eyes didn't leave mine. He was like an old concierge showing off that he could talk to the white people. After a few minutes he put the phone down.

He looked at his watch, then back at me. Very politely he asked me if I had time to meet a blind gentleman. He sat with his arms fanned out from his sides, half out of his chair as he waited on my say-so.

I thought we would go off in a car or walk up the road to catch a train. But we didn't leave the building. We went out to the foyer, where we got in an old lift and rose to the top floor. As we came out of the lift the old gentleman was standing by the door to his apartment.

The pastor introduced us and the old gentleman shook my hand. He was tall and sagged down through his shoulders. It was as if he had been looking forward to meeting me for some time and here at last we were. I have known hotel guests like him. They are so polite it is as if they need to prove that the pecking order that exists in the world does not apply to the moment at hand.

Some chairs at the far end of a long room were waiting for us. The pastor and I stood back to watch the blind gentleman make his way. The floorboards were like a tightrope. At any moment he might make a mistake. But he found his chair and when he dropped into it I noticed small beads of sweat over the pastor's forehead. They hadn't been there back in his office.

The pastor talked me up. He talked up my success and hotel experience. He told the blind gentleman I had risen to ‘the trusted position of supervisor'.

The blind gentleman directed the conversation back to me. He wanted to know what I was interested in. Did I like to read? Did I have hobbies, interests? How many languages did I possess? After that he and the pastor talked between themselves. They talked about Tunisia. Years ago, the old gentleman said, he'd looked into a holiday there. He had a skin condition that only the sun made better. Psoriasis. Instead of going to Tunis he went to a spa in Turkey where he sat in a hot pool with other skin sufferers and tiny fish nibbled the dead skin.

The pastor talked about the therapeutic properties of salt water. He said a soul ready for baptism ought ideally to wade into the sea. A pond wasn't the same. And a bowl of water was just a gimmick. The talk returned to Tunisia. And on to Yemen. Yemen interested the blind gentleman and for a while they discussed mud buildings, Yemenite Jews, the Islamists. For a longer while still they talked about Iraq. The blind gentleman held out his palms to the pastor and asked, ‘But why would they lie?' The Americans, I think he meant. They went on talking until the pastor glanced down at his watch. The time gave him a surprise. He stood up. I went to follow but he put out a hand. I should stay put. Now he spoke in Deutsch. Then, in English I heard the pastor say, ‘So it is agreed. Excellent.' That rounded smile entered his face, eyes and teeth.

‘Our friend wishes to know when you can start.'

‘Now,' I said. The blind gentleman's cheeks rose as he smiled. The line of pleasure stopped just beneath his sightless eyes.

Before the pastor left the old gentleman showed me my room. My own room. I sat on the bed. I walked to the window. The two men stood in the door watching me, well, the pastor did at least. It's hard to see what the old gentleman did with his eyes. That part of him just seemed to droop from his face, but it drooped with kindness and the lived-in quality of old fruit.

I walked the pastor out to the lift. I thanked him briefly, but not nearly enough, no more so than you do someone who has picked up something you've dropped.

I saw the pastor only a few times after that. Each time I thought I must go and thank him again, thank him from my heart. I saw his face through the ground-floor windows. Another time I saw him getting into a car.

A week went by and I decided to go downstairs to thank the pastor properly. In the same office where I had sat watching the pastor on the phone a black woman looked up at me with unfriendly eyes. I asked her what had happened to the pastor. She said he had just been filling in for her. Now he was back with his parish on the other side of the city. After that I never went back to the refugee centre.

thirty-one

To lie down flat and sleep will sound like an ordinary privilege. I only mention it out of respect for the decision I made never ever to take it for granted. To lie down between clean sheets and with a pillow for my head. Apart from the cubicle in the station toilets I could at last be alone without anyone to see me and wonder what I was doing in their neighbourhood or how I had come to be. When I was alone in that room it was as though the world had forgotten me. The world could not cause me any more trouble. All I had to do was to stay in that room.

That is how I tell Ramona to think about prison. I tell her not to think about the world not letting her out to join it. I tell her it is better to think of the world being kept away in case it tempts her back into trouble. Knowing Ramona, she will meet a man and within a week will want to stab him through his armpit. The only way to get through where we are from one day to the next is to think of where we are as a better place.

For a time the world didn't spring any nasty surprises. I put on my hotel uniform and went to work. I made the old gentleman his meals, I made him his tea and coffee, it was up to me to go out into the world to buy the food and take him out for walks. He gave me money which he said was to pay for my housekeeping duties. On top of that money he gave me more for food. At the money machine I had to steer his blind fingers onto the right keys for him to draw money out of his account. He relied on me to count out the money. I never took more than what he wanted withdrawn. I discovered I could take from the money meant for food, but I couldn't go into his account and fill a sack with money. Three hundred euros a week went on food and the alcohol he said he needed. I made sure he was never out of alcohol, but I could be stingy with food.