The Apartment A Novel(12)

Saskia was born in this city. Both her parents are dead – the mother first and the father a few years after. Her father was not from here, and when she was young she moved away. She came back after the death of her father, and I have the impression she came back in order to get a good job. She says there are two kinds of economists: the kind that own jets and the kind that ride bicycles. She doesn’t seem to think of herself as a person who wants a jet, so I presume this makes her an economist on a bicycle. Except that when she is pushed to defend a position, or when she talks about the assumptions her colleagues make about her because she is a woman, for instance that she will eventually want a child more than she will want a promotion, she reveals an ambition to succeed not just because she can but because other people think she cannot, or would not.

Somebody here asked me about my politics. I told him I had none. We were sitting in a bar, and he was drinking, and I was not drinking, not really, just a beer, slowly, and he said I was a liar. His name was Fritz. Everything is political, said Fritz. I said nothing, and Fritz, I suppose, realized I had not agreed with him, so he told me what I really felt was disillusionment with politics, and that’s not the same thing as having no politics. He seemed like a nice guy. We hung out for the rest of the night. He said, I don’t smoke, but all night he smoked my cigarettes, and then we went to an automat so I could buy more cigarettes, and he said, Get me a pack too, so I bought him a pack. He put that pack in his pocket and smoked the cigarettes in my pack. He talked almost entirely about himself, and the city, and about politics. He was comically short and had a very funny walk, like something out of the Ministry of Silly Walks, where every step off his right foot was a bounce, as though he was trying to see over a short fence. He took me on a long walk that ended at the parliament building, and there he shook my hand and said goodbye. Goodbye, I said, and I’ve never seen him since. Fritz. A good name. That was one of my first nights in the city. Or maybe it was recently. As time diffuses, or my preoccupation with it ebbs, I have lost my grip on chronology. I also forget things. I don’t remember anything about my flight from the US; I remember only standing before a huge board in the airport, here, looking at hotel listings. After Fritz said goodbye, he hopped in a taxi. He stood at the edge of a busy road right in front of Parliament, where there were hundreds of taxis on the road, all with illuminated yellow bars of light on their rooftops, coming at us in a constant swarm, and Fritz stuck his hand out and one dropped out of the swarm and stopped right in front of him. Throughout the night, Fritz had been telling me that his party – he was a local councillor in a satellite city – was going to storm a general election in the spring, and wipe out inequality by raising taxes and putting unemployed people back to work, and as I stood before the parliament building that night, with its enormous white columns, I realized he had brought me there in part to show me the trophy he prized but also to suggest the pointlessness of being apolitical. The building is impressive. It’s a wonder. During the day, tourists walk around it like the apes around the obelisk in 2001, and you cannot blame them. That’s the way I felt, staring up at it. But after a while you don’t feel wonder. You start to feel panic, because you realize that human beings are possessed by the idea that they must fill the world with objects and ideas that will outlive them, and you suddenly glimpse the fires that burn below human despair. I think of Fritz fondly, and the fondness comes from an instantaneous nostalgia – the knowledge that I’ll never see him again, not ever, and that he may not even remember meeting me, because every night he goes out drinking he finds somebody to proselytize to, to borrow cigarettes from, and to leave at the feet of the symbol of his hope for a transformed and just world.

Saskia and I have come to the outer ring road. It’s eight lanes wide, four in each direction, plus lanes for buses and streetcars. An underground passage runs below it, and there’s no way to cross it otherwise. There are posters up and down the white-tiled corridors for exhibitions, concerts and films, and advertisements for magazines, perfumes, and tourist destinations. There is also, curiously, at the halfway mark as you cross beneath the street, a chrome panel in the wall that is tallying, in red digitized numbers, the population of the world. It makes a ticking noise. I feel, though I can’t explain why, a desire to watch it – that last digit changes every half-second, the second-last digit flips every five seconds. Saskia doesn’t notice that I’ve stopped until I call after her and she comes back and stops and watches it with me for a while. She gives me a funny look. We stand there for maybe half a minute, and then it’s unreal, the numbers become merely numbers, and I can keep moving.