The Apartment A Novel(22)

We drove back to the train station much more slowly than we had driven to the ruins, and this made me suspect that Early, the comedian, had grown sad. On the way I told him about something I’d seen on the rooftop of Saddam’s palace, a little bit of graffiti, all alone, written in permanent marker. It read, None of this is possible without Ireland. I paused after I told him that, and waited. Early, I suppose, was waiting for me to finish, but that was all I had to say. I figure, I said, with you as a history buff, you might have some idea of what it was about. He shrugged. Probably just some third-generation dickhead, he said, trying to rub his cock over everything. He dropped me at the station. It was the middle of the afternoon, and the sun was blazing, without heat, just above the horizon. I knew Early was going back to the city for his flight the next day, but I was glad he dropped me at the station rather than offer to drive me all the way. The drive to the city would take two or three hours, and we didn’t have two or three hours of conversation in us. We shook hands inside the Range Rover. Goodbye, I said. Goodbye, he said. And then I walked into the station and sat down on a bench and waited a few hours. A train arrived, and three people got off. They wore heavy black coats and walked cheerlessly. I boarded, having no idea where the train was headed, but having assumed, correctly, that trains from there went in only one direction, and a few hours later I was back in the restaurant of Hotel Rus, looking out at the street, smiling at Mrs Pyz when she walked by, and eager to get some sleep.

We are on the street again, and in the cold, and I am admiring the feel of the cut of my new coat and the warmth of everything but the scarf, which is not warm at all. Saskia says, We have about an hour before we have to see the apartment. It will take about half an hour to get there, but it’s a good thing to be early. Manuela says, Landlords are thieves and liars. Don’t be surprised if someone else comes along to look at the place and tries to outbid you. They’ll be the landlord’s friend. I say, You get them where I’m from, too. The street is wet and the gutters have grey snow in them. The sidewalks have been pounded into slush by shoppers. The unlit Christmas decorations strung between the buildings – huge chandeliers, sleighs, angels – rock excessively, like they are bursting to be turned on. I cannot wait for night. I cannot wait to walk under Christmas lights. Everybody has bags in their hands. There are beggars every hundred yards. They are mostly Roma, mostly women, young, with tiny babies. All you can see of the babies is little faces. Most of them are asleep but some are awake. The young women weep as you approach. They find someone to make eye contact with and weep all over them. And then you pass without giving anything and they say, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, until you are out of range. The other day I was sitting in a little café I sometimes spend time in, and on the pavement outside the window there was a little cluster of telephone boxes, all badly vandalized – since nobody in the world uses payphones any more. A young Roma girl, maybe sixteen and very pretty, sat outside, and glanced up at me with a really clumsy seductiveness every few minutes. I’d seen her before in that spot, and in the underground station nearby. I was inside having one coffee after another, reading Virgil – which I’d found in an English-language bookshop – for the lines Early pointed out. They are at the very end, of course, but one cannot understand them out of context. The girl was on a cardboard mat, as she always was when begging outside the café, kneeling inside a dirty sleeping bag, and she wore a puffy coat. A young man came by every so often – on each occasion I’d seen the girl, I’d seen him, too, drifting by at irregular intervals, watching her from a long way off – to collect money. They chatted coolly, like business partners, and when he would leave she would smile or laugh at whatever he had said in parting. Men seemed to give her a great deal of money, perhaps because she was so pretty. Older women knelt beside her, gave her a coffee, and spoke with her for a while – maybe they discussed her welfare, or her future, or fished for allegations of abuse – but for most of the time she was on that cardboard mat, she just sat and did nothing, interacted with no one, and stared into nothingness. I don’t think she’d ever noticed me before, but on this occasion, as I sat there reading Virgil, she, for whatever reason, kept glancing at me as though we were at opposite ends of a nightclub. I checked behind me, to see that there was nobody else she was looking at. And though it was merely one of those thoughts that go through your mind so fast that you have no idea they have arrived until they are gone, I considered the feasibility of walking outside, telling her I’d pay her for sex, and doing all the terrible sexual things I’ve ever wanted to do to women in my life, things my instincts wish for but I do not, in a long afternoon. That is a thought that takes some time to articulate but no time to think. And just as I was about to order a fourth or fifth coffee the young man returned. He kicked her in the face and I saw her jaw break – perhaps it did not break, but it seemed to move momentarily off her face. She fell backward and her head slapped the concrete. There were screams in the café. There were screams on the street. The young man stood over her, clenching his fists, the way Ali stood over Liston. She got up somehow, but she was staggering. People in the café were standing now, and shouting through the glass. The boy grabbed the girl and held her up against the telephone box and struck her so hard that blood splattered in the air, and she fell heavily and unconsciously to the pavement. A man on the street, an elderly man, tried to grab the young man. The young man pushed him back. People rushed out of the café to the street. The pedestrians on the street gathered, and they stood around the man in a circle and shouted. The boy shouted back at the crowd, then he jogged off. Then the crowd, for the most part, dispersed, except for three or four people who knelt beside the girl and two people who knelt over the old man, who seemed to be in shock, and who was the only spectator who had actually dared to intervene. But everyone else in the place had at least stood in order to express their horror, and some had rushed outside. I had stayed seated. I had never moved. I’d finished my coffee while he beat her. And it occurs to me only now, because until now I had isolated those memories from each other, that it was just an hour after this incident that I met Saskia for the first time, at the National Gallery. And now I remember the painting I was sitting in front of, while reading Virgil, when she approached and asked if I minded if she sat down beside me.