Hand Me Down World (15 page)

Where did she go on her afternoons off? I had no idea. There was nothing about her to suggest the possibility of another life. I could not imagine her out of that housemaid's uniform. I could not imagine her exercising free will. But when she left the building there was an intent about her. She was going somewhere. She wasn't out for a dawdle. She didn't glance up at the trees or stop to look at a squirrel. Ines wasn't ever slowed by a daydream. She walked faster than she did with me and Ralf. She walked as people do when late for work or an appointment.

For that matter, I had no idea about where she and Ralf went when it was her turn to take him out into the world. Which part of the city was she lighting up? What did she see that I failed to?

Whenever Ralf wished to complain about Ines he waited until her footsteps had trailed to the far end of the apartment, then he would lean forward and betray her without a second thought. ‘Today in Tiergarten, I asked her what she could see. She said, “Trees.” “And?” I asked. “And, Ines?” “Trees. People.” It could be China or the Amazon. I don't speak Spanish or whatever it is she professes to speak. Her English is that hotel English you've heard from her. Whole phrases from the hotel lobby flow out of her...'

I used to wonder if he complained to Ines in the same way about me. Sometimes when we were out together I'd get ahead of him. I didn't do it deliberately. I'd find myself stepping out, lengthening my stride and without any awareness, except perhaps feeling frustrated that I couldn't find a way to escape back to my work at the museum. Then I'd remember Ralf, and with a rising heartbeat I'd stop and look back in the pedestrian traffic to find him. As a boy, after placing a driftwood ‘boat' in the creek I'd run downstream to wait for it to arrive. This is how it often was with Ralf. Here he comes now—his face alert and on the brink of concern, his hands moving out from his sides, but there is a larger red-faced pleasure too. He could pretend he was out and about in the city under his own steam.

It was hardly ever just the two of us. Ines and me, I mean. There were the dishes—Ralf would remain in his usual post-dinner state of bored contemplation as we raced to clear the table around him—and Friday mornings when she dropped by my room with the flowers Ralf wanted thrown out. It was the scent that interested him, and his preference was for the younger scent. The promise of the thing itself rather than its slow decay.

Anyway I came to look forward to Friday morning. It never escaped my attention when she was late. It affected my concentration, and then I'd realise I'd been waiting for her. So what had happened to her? I'd get up from my notes and pace about the room. Then at last I'd look up at the sound of her light progress down the stairs. As she rounded the lift cage I would be standing by my open door.

In my room she moved about in a housemaidy sort of way, her eyes making contact only with the thing she dusted or replaced or picked up. Hands in pockets, I would find myself following her around. I would look for something to distract her with, to delay her. There was the proud chestnut rising from the courtyard. Ines looked so diminutive in the tall window frame the most natural thing in the world would have been to place my hands on her shoulders. Instead I crouched behind her in order to point out the male bird sitting under the eaves of the far building. Ines leant forward to see and I leant with her, whispering, ‘See the straw in its beak. Look. There's the nest in the higher branches.'

Stupidly, I tried to interest her in the lungfish. She picked up a drawing of a fossil and listened with polite interest as I described the creature's remarkable amphibian qualities. There were no questions. I'd gone on too long, as I always do. She set the drawing back on the desk and shifted her attention to the blue broccoli-shaped flowers which she'd already placed in the vase. She shifted the vase an inch, then looked up with a helpless smile.

There was a day in early December when Ralf was kept indoors with a cold and I invited Ines to come to the zoo with me, just the two of us. To my happy surprise she accepted.

Relieved of her usual duties Ines walked more leisurely, her gloved hands shoved down into her coat pockets. She held her face at a more observant angle. At the zoo we watched the wolves tear apart hunks of meat. We laughed at the sparrows pecking and pushing cigarette butts around the heels of people holding up cameras. We stopped to watch a crane lift off the treetops and climb into the city sky. Inside the lion house we stood shoulder to shoulder as a male lion walked to the gate separating him from the lioness and her cubs. He banged his head against the door and when he let go a mighty crowd-pleasing roar we could smell his breath. Ines pushed forward, the lines in her face were set firm. She didn't like the lion being locked up and kept apart from his cubs. It was wrong. ‘Cruel,' she said. It was the first time I heard an opinion from her.

That day we ended up at the zoo beach. We pushed through two sets of gates to find ourselves inside an enclosure staring down a strip of trucked-in sand. A small mechanical wave washes up the beach every seven seconds. A number of ducks hovered behind the shore break. A stilt stood ornamentally on one leg and stared with heart-breaking faith towards a make-believe horizon. With Ralf we'd end up here towards the end of the day. As soon as he sat down on the stone bench he would slump forward, hands on knees. I would wonder if he was tired. He would never say. I didn't know what he was used to—or how much walking he could stand, or how much of the passed-on world he could absorb. But I had come to know the signs. The more tired he was the more talkative he became. He talked to delay the moment we would have to get up and walk again.

I thought of him back at the apartment coughing into his bed-sheets. Here at the zoo beach I sat with Ines on the same stone bench. The silence piled up. For a while there it was as though we were waiting for the world to end. I sat forward and began to name the birds down on the sand. And seeing at last I had her interest I made up some species, adding outlandish features and behaviours before she caught on. She laughed and gave my shoulder a playful shove, and in that cold, cold lair we found ourselves smiling at one another, and then quite naturally, well as naturally as it ever feels the first time, I reached behind her and drew her against me. She smiled down to where her gloved hands sat bunched on her lap. I withdrew my arm, again it felt like the most natural thing in the world. She was free to shift back to her former position. Instead she stayed put. On a slight lean towards me. A slight lean. It doesn't sound much, does it? But I felt happy. I remember the moment actually registering with me.
Yes
, I thought.
This is it
. I half expected an official to arrive with a certificate to mark the moment.

A week later we returned to the small zoo beach. But it wasn't the same. I don't know why but we couldn't recover the magic. I'd used up my tricks. The birds had been named, I'd explained away the mechanical wave. It wasn't that Ines appeared to be bored. She simply wasn't there, either in the moment or in body.

I thought she was on the brink of telling me something. I'd felt it coming ever since we left the apartment. Along the way, or in the zoo, perhaps, she must have had a change of heart.

Then later in the park I felt it, this lack of resolution between the moment at hand and what she was actually thinking. Perhaps she was preparing to tell me in the nicest possible way about a boyfriend or husband in another part of the city? I needed to distract myself. I thought of Ralf sitting in a shroud of silence, like some object of marble occupying a corner of a museum at midnight. I thought of his mouth dripping with anticipation whenever we went down in the caged lift. I paused to stare at a pair of women's glossy white panties, snagged on a high branch, exposed by the winter-thin foliage; how wretched they seemed. I looked up to find Ines way ahead. Ines in her blue coat and white boots. Her feet appeared to take separate steps from those taken by her boots, so that at times she seemed to wade. There she was, wading ahead of me.

I had no idea about Ines' life outside of the one where she looked after Ralf. In fact I found it hard to imagine her pursuing any other life than this one.

Not long after that occasion I came around the end of a dry-goods aisle in the local organics supermarket and there she was—a sight as surprising as the deer I saw in the carriage window at the edge of the forest outside Berlin on my way to lunch with Dr Schreiber. She was frowning at the label of a small jar. She looked puzzled. Now she turned her head in the direction of the checkout where the cashier was packing a brown paper bag and talking with a customer. I thought she needed help. I was about to make my move when Ines slid the hand holding the jar to her pocket. It was preserved garlic which we ate that night with pasta.

Later that same day I saw her holding Ralf's coat open for him to move into and I could not place this woman with the one I had seen shoplifting earlier in the day. I didn't tell Ralf what I had seen. I didn't raise it with Ines either. I didn't give it another thought until the new year.

As the winter drew longer I spent more time in my little room huddled with my notes and drawings of the lungfish fossils. If it was too cold to go out Ines would knock on my door with an invitation from Ralf to come upstairs for a drink.

I wondered about the food she served. Ralf sometimes wondered aloud about the amount of housekeeping money Ines went through. I might have said something then but I didn't.

Two days before Christmas the three of us went ice-skating. A temporary rink had been dropped onto Bebelplatz on Unter den Linden. The cold rose up through the soles of our feet and passed out through our glassy eyes. At the
markt
Ralf merrily urged more
Glühwein
down our throats and bullied us onto the ice. Despite all the time I have spent down at the Ross Sea I have no talent for ice-skating. At least it's not the foreign substance for me that it was for Ines. She didn't often seem afraid but she did when she looked out across the ice. Ralf turned out to be surprisingly able. For purposes of instruction the creature reassembled. Ralf went to the front. In order to guide him about the rink I stood nervously off his shoulder. Best of all, Ines slapped her hands on my hips. Through layers of coat and gloves I could feel her touch, and once when she laughed with nervous delight at us moving across the ice I felt the trembling of her pass through her fingers. I felt her warm excited breath against my neck, and her slight weight transmitted through her fingers.

The excitement lasted only while we were on the ice. For the trip home I went back to hanging off Ralf's shoulder, my eyes rolling after the white leather boots of Ines as they waded ahead in the dark up Strasse des 17. Juni past the troubled souls gripping the steering wheels of their parked cars. Their eyes rose from dark pits and turned to follow us, or, at least, Ines in her white boots. Behind us we heard doors opening and closing. Voices from the trees. Shadows. Ralf's frozen face and the plodding motion of his shoulders as we passed through a world he could not see.

sixteen

For months on end it was hard to believe in spring, in the very idea of its existence, but then it came without warning. The winter-shaded branches were in sunlight now, and their green was the scum kind, the bog green of the unlit world. There was a preternatural glow about the apartment buildings. Pale faces that had come through the long winter squinted in the white and lime glare. On our way across the city we passed old bodies stuffed into wheelchairs and buried beneath blankets. The big rusting gates of a nearby beach bar were thrown open and a man raked up leaves from last autumn. Across Tiergarten crocuses began to unfurl. On the street more people than ever were out and about, their thin white limbs poking out of T-shirts and summer dresses. Cafe staff rushed to get tables and chairs out to the pavements to catch the passing trade. We stepped around the feet of corpses with tight little smiles leaning back in chairs. Ines had shed her coat. Now she wore her own clothes instead of the housemaid's uniform—a light blue cotton slip and a dark skirt that accentuated her hips and curves—and a new idea of her emerged.

When things started going missing from the apartment…No, let me begin that again. When the blank spaces began to appear on Ralf's apartment walls, although I could spot the absence of something I was at a complete loss to remember what it had been. It was the absence of the thing that caught my eye and, in a way, that had completely eluded the woodcuts and to a lesser degree the painting. I could not recall a single detail of the woodcuts. They'd left a general impression, a line of them like a line of geese. The change of season had had a similar impact. From late April, overnight as it seemed, my coat stayed on the hook by the door. Those bitter afternoons when I wished I'd bought a longer and thicker coat from Strauss were a thing of the past. The line of white spaces along Ralf's walls produced a similar amnesia. I could remember their flat oak frames and a squiggle, the suggestion of something, but nothing else.

I could have asked Ralf. It should have been the most natural thing in the world to ask after the painting and the woodcuts, but I didn't, because of a vague disquiet. Very little happened in that apartment without Ines knowing about it. I could have asked her. Again I felt uncomfortable. I would be lifting a scab on the flesh of another. So I didn't do or say anything.

For a while this seemed to work, and then those telltale blank spaces came between us. I found it impossible to ignore them. The longer I sat on my silence, the more those spaces appeared to glower back at me. And when Ines brought in the tea or schnapps or arrived at my door with Ralf's old flowers I could hardly look at her for thinking she would almost certainly see those spaces reflected in my eyes. Out and about, our creaturely silence had a more distinctive and unpleasant quality. I told myself over and over, I have to tell Ralf even if it means, as I suspected it would, implicating Ines.