Hemispheres (33 page)

Nice weather for ducks Danny, he said.

A flake of light spirals down like a sycamore seed into the husk of a man floating upon the water. The rise and fall of the
ocean, inbreath and outbreath. The gentle applause of water in the eardrums and the wind riffling through wavetops. Herds
of cumulus mass above him miles up in the clean sky, moving and migrating according to the rules of their kind. Black voices
rumbling in the void beneath him, blind fish groping for their prey.

I was once a man, walking on the earth.

Cornelius, says Johann. How did you come to be on the streets? You would like us the story to tell, yes?

The fire splutters, threatens to subside. A thick rime of frost on the ground, on the piles of rubble and the sprawling brambles.
Michael Cornelius – the name’s in my passport. It was in my jacket pocket, along with a heavy brass lighter, when Johann and
Franz Josef pulled me out of the Rhine that night. The night I was born.

I don’t remember me, I tell him. I don’t have a story.

Desperation, he says. Yourself in the river to throw.

I was running, I say. Down the stairs, away from a flat. I don’t know why.

Johann shrugs.

Look, he says. The little pigdog. He steals the fire. I follow his
pointing finger to where a small ash-grey bird is hopping away, tail and rump blazing russet like sycamore leaves in autumn.

In his tail, Johann roars. Like a red-hot poker.

He laughs and I can smell his rotten breath crackling with alcohol. In agreement, the fire begins to choke and collapse inward,
flames dwindling and shrinking.

Be damned, Johann spits, and throws a stone at the little bird.

It simply hops away, head on one side, regarding us quizzically, and then carries on feeding.

Since fifteen years, since I here came, have they my fire stolen, he says. But one day, one day soon, I will him catch, and
I will him slit and his tiny heart out-pull. No bigger than my little fingernail, he croons, raising a pitted nail crusted
with filth. And I will it in my mouth pop like a bonbon, sweet and pure. And no more will this bird our fire steal. From now
on, every wino, in every concrete city, will warm feet have, until the end of the world.

I look at him, plastered blond hair around his red and lumpen face, a stinking overcoat tied with string. Raise the half-empty
bottle of raw spirit to my lips and drink. Small grey birds hop across the surface of my brain with scratchy claws. I look
around at the graffiti and the rubble, the railway tracks over to our left and the tenements beyond. It could be any city,
any corner of the earth.

What is this place Johann? I say.

Behind him the old man, Franz Josef, chokes with laughter behind that big white tobacco beard.

It is a watchmaker’s factory, he rambles. I many times told him. Straight up and no mistake. But he declined to listen. Lick
me on the arse. Lick me on the arse I tell you.

Johann rolls his eyes at me.

Cologne, he says. In the Federal Republic of Germany. Although you should yourself remember.

Cologne, I say. But why speak we all English?

Johann roars with laughter, flashing big yellow teeth like a horse,
deposits of calculus stuck to them.

Cornelius my friend, we speak not English, he says. We speak German. You have it quite well picked up, since you on the streets
were. But your accent is shocking.

He holds out a hand for the bottle and I reluctantly pass it to him. The U-Bahn rattles past on the tracks, raddled with graffiti.
The old man climbs unsteadily to his feet. He is wearing a padded jacket as an extra pair of trousers, with his skeletal legs
thrust into the arms. The hood flaps obscenely down in front of his groin. He begins to sing.

I am, from head to foot, wrapped around with love.

Yes, that is my world, and otherwise nothing.

Later, when Johann is unconscious, the old man sits down next to me.

The little bird, he says. He doesn’t steal the fire. That one, that Johann.

He makes a gesture indicating a screw loose, rolls his eyes.

It was after the war, you see. There were great open spaces like this, from the bombing and the firestorms. It was a terrible
thing, I heard. All the oxygen out of the air by the flames sucked. Women and children in the houses trapped, screaming.

He pauses and shakes his head.

Many of us came into the city then. Vagrants and broken men. And the grey bird with the burning tail came too. He was a bird
of the villages and the farms, but after the war came he to the broken cities, and he liked what he found. So he stayed here,
nearby the rubble and the railway tracks. He is one of us.

His face balloons in the firelight.

But, he splutters, his voice rising, I tell him to come back to the watchmaker’s factory and he does not listen. He does not
listen.

At dusk we wander into the city centre, find a department store with a deep entranceway making a sheltered pocket from the
cold. The old man is soon asleep under several layers of cardboard. Me and Johann squat in the darkness, out of the wind.
We have cigarettes, but no
matches. I finger the brass lighter in my pocket, but I know it doesn’t work. Needs a new wick, a refill of fluid. Johann
goes out onto the street, starts asking people for a light. I don’t see them, mushrooming out of the dark, but when I look
up he’s surrounded by boneheads.

Do you want a light junkie? Do you?

They crowd in, young and excited, spray-on jeans and knee-high boots and the shaved heads shimmering like pale moons on a
sea of streetlight. One of them clicks a lighter open and sends a flame shooting a foot in the air and they shrill with laughter.

Burn him, shrieks one of them. Do it Hank.

Listen, gentlemen, we only for a light asked, says Johann, hands raised in placatory manner. I have cigarettes. You are very
welcome.

He holds the crumpled packet out towards them. The sheltered entranceway now a trap, in which we are cornered.

Filthy habit, says one of the lads, casually smashing the packet out of Johann’s hand and stamping on the cigarettes until
they are pulped.

You look cold, says one of them. Poor things, out here all night. Perhaps can we you up-warm.

He has a bottle of spirits in his hand, schnapps or cheap brandy. Walks over to the pile of cardboard where Franz Josef slumbers,
unscrews the bottletop and splashes the contents all over the makeshift shelter. The others are giggling nervously.

Give me the lighter Hank, says the boy.

He only looks sixteen or seventeen. A puppy’s face, with big plaintive eyes below the shorn skull. Hank throws the lighter
over. The puppy looks at us.

Run junkies, run, he says. Unless you want in our bonfire to join.

We run as he lights the cardboard and leaps back, and there’s a roar of blue flame and splintering glass. The boneheads are
already sprinting away as the alarm system begins to wail, and Johann and I run helter-skelter in the opposite direction,
not stopping until we’ve covered several blocks. We stop on the apron of a busy road, cars teeming by into the night.

What about the old man? I say. Shall we go back for him? Johann shakes his head.

He’s dead. Sure as shit. It’s an occupational hazard Cornelius.

His haggard face is lit sporadically by the headlights of passing traffic.

He was on the Russian front, during the war, says Johann. Saw some terrible things. That’s what a wino of him made, right
back in forty-five. He was before that a watchmaker.

I was once a man, walking on the earth. When I stretch my feet out, down into the water, there is nothing. A yawning depth
beneath me. Sleep is no longer sleep, just an endless, wakeful treading of water. I long for a pillow of sand beneath my cheek,
moulding itself to the contours of my face. I long to lie on solid ground, on the fringes of some island.

Cornelius, says Johann. You are a golem. Not a man.

We are sitting on the U-Bahn platform at Ebertplatz, waiting for the transport police to throw us off for the night.

What is a golem? I know I have somewhere of it heard, but I don’t remember me exactly.

He snorts, slumps against the wall, momentarily losing consciousness. I shift my buttocks impatiently, where I’m starting
to get pressure sores from cold concrete.

Johann, I say, shaking him.

What? Oh right. Well, a golem is an empty shell, a man without the soul. A magician in the Prague ghetto made the golem out
of clay, and breathed life into it. He used it his bidding to do, secretly, for it would always its master obey, always to
him return.

I can see two policemen on the opposite platform, eyeing us up. It won’t be long now. Johann is looking at them too, his story
in abeyance. They head up a stairway and he continues.

You are an empty shell Cornelius. A man without a soul. A man without a story.

You’re just jealous, I say. You drink your soul to kill. You drink your story to drown. I have it already done.

You are my golem Cornelius, he says. I sculpted you from river mud. From the Rhine. And you will my bidding do.

Come on gents. The two policemen are in front of us. You know the score. The fat one with the moustache shells a couple of
cigarettes towards us, which Johann palms and pockets with practised ease. We haul ourselves to our feet and shamble towards
the stairs, Johann stumb ling and leaning heavily against me.

Cornelius, he says. You know, I am sick and tired of cold feet. Perhaps I will you command the tiny bird to kill.

I sigh, thinking only of the cheap schnapps we have bought and the too-short oblivion it will bring.

In the morning we shuffle past the department store where Franz Josef was incinerated. There are blue lights flashing, a police
line taped across the store entrance. Staff and customers are huddled outside the barrier and we shamble over to join them,
noticing how they edge away from the miasma of our stench. Johann bares his teeth at a group of young shop girls and they
stare, revolted. After a few minutes, medics come out with a prone figure on a stretcher, red blanket drawn over the face
and head. The crowd shudders. The back doors of the ambulance close behind the stretcher but the vehicle stays put, engine
idling, blue lights firing limpidly. I recognize the two cops who regularly kick us off Ebertplatz.

Hey boys, I croak. Have they another poor wino immolated?

The fat one with the moustache looks at me. Disgust mingled with pity.

Nah, he drawls, then lowers his voice. A skinhead bought it. Young lad.

The other one is wiry and blond, face blotched maroon by the cold. He leans conspiratorially towards me and Johann.

Ripped open from stem to stern, he murmurs with relish. Inside
out turned, pretty much. The scary thing is, it looks like somebody with their bare hands did it. No sign that a weapon was
used. Who would the strength have, to do such a thing?

He shudders delightedly. The fat one looks more pensive.

I won’t his face in a hurry forget, he says. Reminded me of my little ones at home. Just a little boy, big eyes like a puppy.

He shakes his head slowly, the pale blue eyes moist. Johann and I shamble away, winding through the morning crowds. I look
at Johann but he’s avoiding eye contact. Then he says it.

You did it, golem.

What?

I look at him again, confused.

Only a golem would have the strength to rip a man open with his bare hands. You, Cornelius, killed him. In retribution for
Franz Josef.

How could I have killed him? Been with you the whole time.

You wander in the night Cornelius. When I fall asleep, you are wakeful. An empty shell.

And you are full of shit, I tell him.

The sun against my face like the hot muzzle of a shotgun, bullying me into consciousness.

Cornelius, look. Cornelius. I’ve found him, shouts Johann excitedly. He is bouncing like a big stupid dog with a dark patch
of piss at his groin. He shakes me by the arm.

Lick me on the arse Johann, I say. I need to sleep.

I turn over. The weather is warmer now and sleep more comfortable. He shakes me again, this time angrily.

Golem, he booms. Awake. Your master commands you.

I stand abruptly and grab him by the mouth.

Enough of this golem shit, I snap, looking into his big stupid blue eyes. He shakes himself free, grins crookedly.

Come and look, he says.

We push between the big buddleia bushes which are scribbling
purple prose all over the wasteland, shooting out these long and rampant spires of doggerel. The other side of the bushes,
down a little slope, a burnt-out lorry is slowly rusting. Looks like it has been here for years, everything of value – wheels,
upholstery, engine – stripped away. A slowly subsiding island in a ragged sea of brambles.

Shhh. Johann has his finger to his lips. Through a tunnel of thorn we can see the back end of the lorry. I follow his pointing
finger and squint into the darkness underneath. A bird flits up and perches on the back axle, silhouetted against green vegetation.
It gives a twitch of the head, a flick of the tail, and there’s a high-pitched churring like a matchbox full of crickets.
The bird jumps to one end of the axle and I realize there must be a nest there against the corroded wheel arch, the adult
stuffing insects into the lurid gapes of the young.

It’s them, Johann breathes, excitedly. The fire-stealers.

The adult bird hops out from the darkness onto a pile of breeze-blocks and his body blends in with the soft greys of the rubble
but his russet tail is flaming like a Japanese maple with the light blazing through. The little black eye darts around and
the bird flickers away in search of insects. Johann touches my arm.

I’m going to do it. The chicks are there. The new year’s birds. I will them stop, now, before they grow and my fire next winter
thieve away. I will them in my mouth pop, one by one, and the bones crunch.