Saffron and Brimstone: Strange Stories (25 page)

But they were seemingly as happy as people ever are. I began to take my sketchbooks with me when I walked, and I would sit in a cafe or a park and draw. I found that I could draw Philip from memory. I began to draw other things, too—the lindens, the ugly modern buildings elbowing aside the older terraces that had not been destroyed by the bombings. There were empty fountains everywhere, and again, in the eastern part of the city there had been no money to restore them or to keep the water flowing. Bronze Nereids and Neptunes decorated them, whitened with
bird droppings thick. Lovers still sat beside the empty pools, gazing
at drifts of dead leaves and old newspapers while pigeons pecked around their feet. I found this beautiful and strange, and also oddly heartening.

—

A few weeks after my arrival, Philip called. It was easy to find me—I hadn’t replied to his e-mails, but when my cellphone rang I answered.

“You’re in Berlin?” He sounded amused but not surprised. “Well, I wanted to let you know I’m going to be gone again, a long trip this time. Damascus. I’ll come see you for a few days before I go.”

He told me his flight time, then hung up.

What did I feel then? Exhilaration, desire, joy: but also fear. I had just begun to paint again; I was just starting to believe that I could, in fact, work without him.

But if he were here?

I went into the bedroom. On the bed, neatly folded, was another thing I had brought with me: Philip’s sweater. It was an old, tweed-patterned wool sweater, in shades of umber and yellow and russet, with holes where the mice had nested in it back in the cottage. He had wanted to throw it out, years ago, but I kept it. It still smelled of him, and I slept wearing it, here in the flat in Schoneberg, the wool prickling against my bare skin. I picked it up and buried my face in it, smelling him, his hair, his skin, sweat.

Then I sat down on the bed. I adjusted the lamp so that the light fell upon the sweater in my lap, and began, slowly and painstakingly, to unravel it.

It took a while, maybe an hour. I was careful not to fray the worn yarn, careful to tie the broken ends together. When I was finished, I had several balls of wool, enough to make a new sweater. It was late by then, and the shops were closed. But first thing next morning I went to the little store that sold only socks and asked in my halting German where I might find a knitting shop. I had brought a ball of wool to show the woman behind the counter. She laughed and pointed outside, then wrote down the address. It wasn’t far, just a few streets over. I thanked her, bought several pairs of thick argyle wool socks, and left.

I found the shop without any trouble. I know how to knit, though I haven’t done so for a long time. I found a pattern I liked in a book of Icelandic designs. I bought the book, bought the special circular needles you use for sweaters, bought an extra skein of wool in a color I liked because it reminded me of woad, not quite as deep a blue as indigo. I would work this yarn into the background. Then I returned home.

I had nearly a week before Philip arrived. I was too wound up to paint. But I continued to walk each day, finding my way around the hidden parts of the city. Small forgotten parks scarcely larger than a backyard, where European foxes big as dogs peered from beneath patches of brambles; a Persian restaurant near my flat, where the smells of coriander and roasting garlic made me think of my island long ago
.
A narrow canal like a secret outlet of the Spree, where I watched a kingfisher dive from an overhanging willow. I carried my leather satchel with me, the one that held my sketchbooks and charcoal pencils and watercolors. I wanted to try using watercolors.

But now the satchel held my knitting too, the balls of wool and the pattern book and the half-knit sweater. When I found I couldn’t paint or draw, I’d take the sweater out and work on it. It was repetitive work, dreamlike, soothing. And one night, back in the flat, I dug around in the bureau drawer until I found something else I’d brought with me, an envelope I’d stuck into one of my notebooks.

Inside the envelope was a curl of hair I’d cut from Philip’s head one night while he slept. I set the envelope in a safe place and, one by one, carefully teased out the hairs. Over the next few days I wove them into the sweater. Now and then I would pluck one of my own hairs, much longer, finer, ash-gold, and knit that into the pattern as well.

They were utterly concealed, of course, his dark curls, my fair straight hair: all invisible. I finished the sweater the morning Philip arrived.

—

It was wonderful seeing him. He took a taxi from the airport. I had coffee waiting. We fell into bed. Afterwards I gave him the sweater.

“Here,” I said. “I made you something.”

He sat naked on the bed and stared at it, puzzled. “Is this mine?”

“It was. Try it on. I want to see if it fits.”

He shrugged, then pulled it on over his bare chest.

“Does it fit?” I asked. “I had to guess the measurements.”

“It seems to.” He smoothed the thick wool, October gold and russet
flecked with woad; then tugged at a loose bit of yarn on the hem.

“Oops,” I said, frowning. “Don’t worry, I’ll fix that.”

“It’s beautiful. Thank you. I didn’t know you knew how to knit.”

I adjusted it, tugging to see if it hung properly over his broad
shoulders.

“It does,” I said, and laughed in relief. “It fits! Does it feel right?”

“Yeah. It’s great.” He pulled it off then got dressed again, white T-shirt, blue flannel shirt, the sweater last of all. “Didn’t I used to have a sweater like this, once?”

“You did,” I said. “Come on, I’m hungry.”

We walked arm-in-arm to the Persian restaurant, where we ate chicken simmered in pomegranates and crushed walnuts, and drank
wine the color of oxblood. Later, on the way back to the flat, we ambled
past closed shops, pausing to look at a display of icons, a gallery showing the work of a young German artist I had read about.

“Are you thinking of showing here?” Philip asked. “I don’t mean this gallery, but here, in Berlin?”

“I don’t know. I hadn’t really thought about it much.” In truth I hadn’t thought about it at all, until that very moment. “But yes, I guess I might. If Anna could arrange it.”

Anna owned the gallery back in Cambridge. Philip said nothing more, and we turned and walked home.

But back in the flat, he started looking around. He went into my studio and glanced at the canvas on the easel, already primed, with a few blocked-in shapes—a barren tree, scaffolding, an abandoned fountain.

“These are different,” he said. He glanced around the rest of the studio and I could tell, he was relieved not to see anything else. The other paintings, the ones I’d done of him, hadn’t arrived yet. He didn’t ask after them, and I didn’t tell him I’d had them shipped from the island.

We went back to bed. Afterwards, he slept heavily. I switched on the small bedside lamp, turning it so it wouldn’t awaken him, and watched him sleep. I didn’t sketch him. I watched the slow rise of his chest, the beard coming in where he hadn’t shaved, grayer now than it had been; the thick black lashes that skirted his closed eyes. His mouth.

If he had wakened then and seen me, would anything have changed? If he had ever seen me watching him like this . . . would he have changed? Would I?

I watched him for a long time, thinking
.
At last I curled up beside him and fell asleep.

—

Next morning, we had breakfast, then wandered around the city like tourists. Philip hadn’t been back in some years, and it all amazed him. The bleak emptiness of the Alexanderplatz where a dozen teenagers s
at around the empty fountain, each with a neon-shaded Mohawk and
a ratty mongrel at the end of a leash; the construction cranes everywhere, the crowds of Japanese and Americans at the Brandenburg Gate; the disconcertingly elegant graffiti on bridges spanning the Spree, as
though the city, half-awake, had scrawled its dreams upon the brickwork.

“You seem happy here,” he said. He reached to stroke my hair, and smiled.

“I am happy here,” I said. “It’s not ideal, but . . . ”

“It’s a good place for you, maybe. I’ll come back.” He was quiet for a minute. “I’m going to be gone for a while. Damascus—I’ll be there for two months. Then Deborah’s going to meet me, and we’re going to travel for a while. She found a place for us to stay, a villa in Montevarchi. It’s something we’ve talked about for a while.”

We were scuffing through the leaves along a path near the Grunewald, the vast and ancient forest to the city’s west. I went there often, alone. There were wild animals, boar and foxes; there were lakes, and hollow caves beneath the earth that no one was aware of. So many of Berlin’s old trees had been destroyed in the bombings, and more died when the wall fell and waves of new construction and congestion followed.

Yet new trees had grown, and some old ones flourished. These woods seemed an irruption of a deep, rampant disorder: the trees were black, the fallen leaves deep, the tangled thorns and hedges often impenetrable. I had found half-devoured carcasses here, cats or small dogs, those pretty red squirrels with tufted ears, as well as empty beer bottles and the ashy remnants of campfires in stone circles. You could hear traffic, and the drone of construction cranes; but only walk a little further into the trees and these sounds disappeared. It was a place I wanted to paint, but I hadn’t yet figured out where, or how.

“I’m tired.” Philip yawned. Sun filtered through the leafless branches. It was cool, but not cold. He wore the sweater I’d knitted, beneath a tweed jacket. “Jet lag. Can we stop a minute?”

There were no benches, not even any large rocks. Just the leaf-covered ground, a few larches, many old beeches. I dropped the satchel holding my watercolors and sketchpad and looked around. A declivity spread beneath one very large old beech, a hollow large enough for us to lie in, side by side. Leaves had drifted to fill the space like water in a cupped hand; tender yellow leaves, soft as tissue and thin enough that when I held one to the sun I could see shapes behind the fretwork of veins. Trees. Philip’s face.

The ground was dry. We lay side by side. After a few minutes he turned and pulled me to him. I could smell the sweet mast beneath us, beechnuts buried in the leaves. I pulled his jacket off and slid my hands beneath his sweater, kissed him as he pulled my jeans down, then tugged the sweater free from his arms, until it hung loose like a cowl around his neck. The air was chill despite the sun, there were leaves in his hair. A fallen branch raked my bare back, hard enough to make me gasp. His eyes were closed, but mine were open; there was grit on his cheek and a fleck of green moss, a tiny greenfly with gold-faceted eyes that lit upon his eyelid then rubbed its front legs together then spun into the sunlight. All the things men never see. When he came he was all but silent, gasping against my chest. I lay my hand upon his face, before he turned aside and fell asleep.

For a moment I sat, silent, and looked for the greenfly. Then I pulled my jeans back up and zipped them, shook the leaves from my hair and plucked a beechnut husk from my shirt. I picked up Philip’s jacket and tossed it into the underbrush, then knelt beside him. His flannel shirt had ridden up, exposing his stomach; I bent my head and kissed the soft skin beneath his navel. He was warm and tasted of semen and salt, bracken. For a moment I lingered; then sat up.

A faint buzzing sounded, but otherwise the woods were still. The sweater hung limp round his neck. I ran my fingers along the hem until I found the stray bit of yarn there. I tugged it free, the loose knot easily coming undone; then slowly and with great care, bit by bit by bit while he slept, I unraveled it. Only at the very end did Philip stir, when just a ring of blue and brown and gold hung about his neck, but I whispered his name and, though his eyelids trembled, they did not open.

I got to my feet, holding the loose armful of warm wool, drew it to my face and inhaled deeply.

It smelled more of him than his own body did. I teased out one end of the skein and stood above him, then let the yarn drop until it touched his chest. Little by little, I played the yarn out, like a fisherman with his line, until it covered him. More greenflies came and buzzed about my face.

Finally I was done. A gust sent yellow leaves blowing across the heap of wool and hair as I turned to retrieve my satchel. The greenflies followed me. I waved my hand impatiently and they darted off, to hover above the shallow pool that now spread beneath the beech tree. I had not consciously thought of water, but water is what came to me; perhaps the memory of the sea outside the window where I had painted Philip all those nights, perhaps just the memory of green water and blue sky and gray rock, an island long ago.

The small still pool behind me wasn’t green but dark brown, with a few spare strokes of white and gray where it caught the sky, and a few yellow leaves. I got my bag and removed my pencils and watercolors and sketchpad, then folded Philip’s jacket and put it at the bottom of the satchel, along with the rest of his clothes. Then I filled my metal painting cup with water from the pool. I settled myself against a tree, and began to paint.

It wasn’t like my other work. A broad wash of gold and brown, the pencil lines black beneath the brushstrokes, spattered crimson at the edge of the thick paper. The leaves floating on the surface of the pool moved slightly in the wind, which was hard for me to capture—I was just learning to use watercolors. Only once was I worried, when a couple walking a dog came through the trees up from the canal bank.

“
Guten tag
,” the woman said, smiling. I nodded and smiled politely, but kept my gaze fixed on my painting. I wasn’t worried about the man or the woman; they wouldn’t notice Philip. No one would. They walked towards the pool, pausing as their dog, a black dachshund, wriggled eagerly and sniffed at the water’s edge, then began nosing through the leaves.

“Strubbel!” the man scolded.

Without looking back at him the dog waded into the pool and began lapping at the water
.
The man tugged at the leash and started walking on; the dog ran after him, shaking droplets from his muzzle.