The last time I saw him we were up late in his back yard. He’d been drinking vodka tonics through the afternoon and evening. I came over after dark, because I heard loud music playing on his outdoor speakers. The police came by a few times to tell him neighbours were complaining, and he turned the music down for a little while, but then a song he liked would come on, and he’d turn it back up. After midnight, his wife started coming out every ten minutes to tell him the kids could not sleep. I was wearing a jacket, and he was in swimming shorts, bare feet, and a T-shirt. At around half past one, he started bouncing on his trampoline. He kept saying, Watch this, as though he was about to backflip, but all he did was bounce. Intermittently he delivered his philosophy on life as well as his philosophy on women. Finally his wife asked me to go home, so I left him there, bouncing on his trampoline, in the middle of the night, which was cool and starry. It was a few days later that I packed some things into a suitcase and got a taxi to the airport. I didn’t say goodbye. I suspected that he knew me as the kind of man who came by and had drinks, not the kind of man who said goodbye.
I say to Saskia, What were we talking about? Picnics, she says. I was saying we should have a picnic in the spring. Sounds good, I say. My favourite thing to do in spring, she says, is to go to a park with a friend on Sunday morning with all the newspapers and spend five or six hours there and not say a word to each other, except to comment on the nice weather. And then we go for lunch somewhere outdoors and drink white-wine spritzers for a long time. Then we go back to the grass and look at the blue in the sky until we fall asleep. Good Lord, I say, that sounds nice. Do you do that often? She pauses and watches the road for a few moments. No, she says. I don’t think I’ve ever done it, not like that. Everybody I know wants to talk. They read over your shoulder, and then they want to talk. Well, I say, I’m your man. She holds my elbow as though to thank me for saying something nice. If you get your apartment today, she says, tomorrow morning I’ll come over with food and we’ll have a breakfast that takes two hours to eat. I’ll bring bread and jam, and lots of butter. We’ll have an egg each – every course is small, and we eat them slowly. We’ll have mushrooms and sausages. We need buttermilk, meat and cheese. We’ll get very smelly cheese. We need fruit. And some newspapers. And lots of coffee. During breakfast, we’ll smoke lots of cigarettes, and when we’re done we’ll open the windows and air the kitchen out. After that, we’ll play some music and look at the city guide. God, I say, I hope I get the apartment. We could do it at my place, she says, but somehow it doesn’t feel the same. She has a flatmate. He’s from Montenegro, and he works and plays video games and spends a lot of time on the phone to his mother. She looks up at me and her mood has sunk a bit, because she is thinking that this is her life, to share a small flat with an adult who plays video games, so she thinks of something comforting. At least he pays his rent on time, she says.
The road levels out, and the streetcar accelerates. We pass the palace and enter a large white square. All around us is massive white imperial space. It really takes your breath away – still, even though I’ve seen it many times now. The inner ring is at the other end of the square, four or five lanes in both directions, always swamped with traffic. Two large avenues, one leading into the centre and one leading away, have curved in along either side of the streetcar tracks. Cars are backed up on the avenue leading into the city, as far back as I can see. The avenue out of the centre is nearly empty, and the odd car flies by. Today, because it has snowed so heavily, there is almost nothing that is not white, except the red lights of cars that are ahead of us, and the black, gritted streets, and various flags flapping over hotel lobbies and on the tops of buildings. The lights in the hotel lobbies are red and gold. They look empty and extremely peaceful. We pass the first stop that is on the ring road, between a school for actors and a school for musicians, and Saskia tells me a little bit about them, that it is very difficult to get into these schools, and that the drama school is for teenagers but the music school is for children as young as six. If you are six, she says, and you have not been identified as a musical genius, it is probably too late for you.
Just before the next stop, as we are waiting at a traffic light, she leans down and sees someone, and starts knocking loudly on the glass. Manuela! she shouts. A girl in a big fur coat and big pink combat boots turns around. She’s got dark red hair. Saskia waves. Manuela smiles and waves back. The streetcar starts to move again and they both point up the road – presumably to the next stop, where we will rendezvous. What a coincidence, I say. You’d think so, says Saskia, but I always run into people I know. You’ll like Manuela. She’s very pretty. I look back, and Manuela shrinks into the scrolling scenery. We stop and get off, and have to readjust to the cold – I put my hat on and she puts her gloves on, and we zip and button up again. Shall we wait or go to meet her? I ask. She’s going in our direction, says Saskia, so we should wait. Yes, I say, but it feels odd to just wait here. Let’s walk very slowly. Okay, says Saskia. We begin to walk back toward Manuela as slowly as possible. And she – I can see her now a long way off – is hurrying in our direction. I see that she is tall and thin. Saskia has mentioned Manuela to me before, and I have, I suppose, expected that she would be cool and stern, but I can already see that she is sort of goofy. She takes short, quick steps, with crossed arms. She holds her head down and looks up only when she nearly bumps into somebody. I know that Manuela used to work with Saskia and now works for the central bank. She’s more interested in her work than Saskia is. She is always working late, writing papers for conferences, having power lunches. Saskia is happy to stay in research, working hard in rare bouts to write reports only five or six people will read in their entirety, and is always dreaming of new things to do outside of work. Saskia says that Manuela sometimes irritates her, because she has no interest in books or art or history, but then admits that without Manuela she’d have an uninteresting social life. There’s a small park beside us, in which there is a statue of a huge seated figure – a poet. On the other side of the ring road is another figure – Saskia tells me this is a philosopher. They are real historical men, friends and rivals, who lived at the same time, about three hundred years ago – aesthesis versus theoria, Saskia says. Manuela is close enough now to wave. Then she looks down again. Saskia stops, so I stop. There is no reason to keep walking. Manuela gets to us and is out of breath. She and Saskia talk for a bit, and I don’t understand anything but hello and how are you, and the cold. Then Saskia says, We have to speak English. So Manuela switches to English. We’re going to buy him a new coat, says Saskia. And then we’re going to look at an apartment for him. An apartment! says Manuela. How exciting. Where? Saskia says the name of a street, or an area, I suppose. You must be rich, says Manuela, but not in the way Janos said it. You were in the Navy? she says. I nod. Saskia says, I’ve just learned he was on submarines. You don’t look American, Manuela says. Sorry, I don’t mean there’s anything wrong with looking American.