The Apartment A Novel(27)

I’ve visited the park a few times. It’s not possible to experience it in a single day. It’s vast and variegated, with wide-open spaces and straight pathways, and secluded spaces with winding pathways. There are hothouses, rose gardens, a zoo, an amphitheatre, a natural history museum, some ruins, the American and British and French ambassadors’ residences. There’s a large hill where you can get a nice view of the city and the surrounding lowlands. There are tandem bikes to rent, and bikes with trailers for small children. There are fields for sports, soccer and volleyball, basketball courts, a field for throwing javelins and discuses. And on and on. But in winter, as I have seen it, it’s empty. Saskia tells me joggers flood the park in the mornings, but by the time I get there almost everyone has gone. It’s just snow and ice. The ponds are frozen. The fountains are emptied. The trees are leafless. Large parts of the zoo are shut down, and hardly anybody visits. It feels good to come here after a few days of immediacy and noise in the city. Manuela says, I think you should definitely come to Chambinsky. Maybe so, says Saskia. They look at me. I can’t think reasonably about anything beyond the apartment. Sure, I say, sounds fun. Even though it does not sound like fun. The train starts to rise from the depths of the walled trench, to the level of the surface, then higher, above the first-floor windows, and higher still, above the rooftops, so high that you feel a dreamlike disconnection from the city, which appears, to one side of us, as a silver-grey and irregularly blinking boundlessness under a snowy, fogged, silver-grey sky. There isn’t much light left in the day. Pretty soon, street by street, in dusk, the Christmas lights will switch on. When I first arrived, they were just beginning to string the lights up. Huts came out where the Christmas markets would be, but they were all padlocked shut. On the first day of Advent, in the evening, the lights came on and the markets opened, and instead of hurrying home to escape the cold people began to hang around for a few more hours, in the markets. The nights attained a state of extreme slow motion.

When we get to our stop, Saskia stands first, then Manuela, then me. This could be your stop forever, says Saskia, jokingly, but that word, forever, suddenly has the same effect as that man in black running at us. I ask her, Do you have all the documents? She pats her bag. Do you have the money? she asks. I sure do, I say. We’ll be a few minutes late, she says, but it’s nothing to worry about. Half my mind is worried we’ll miss the appointment, and half my mind is hoping we will. Half my mind has concluded that if I do not get this apartment, which I have never seen and which may be awful, it will be a failure so significant that I will have to pack my bags and go back to the desert. And half my mind is calm, telling me it doesn’t matter, that there are other apartments, that hotel life is better anyway. I slap my gloves together. This, I guess, is nervousness. I put my hat on. Here we go, my mind says. The last time it said that was upon my second arrival in Baghdad, my arrival as a civilian. We were corkscrewing in on a jet that had departed out of Amman, and the city, as the plane angled down and back for turns, rose and crashed out of sight like waves in heavy seas might look to someone who has fallen overboard. I set my watch one hour forward, to Baghdad time. Then I said, Here we go. A person says a thing like that when, I suppose, he’s decided to throw himself at the feet of the gods, without enough preparation, or when sufficient preparation is impossible. Saskia and Manuela put their hats and gloves on. The doors open and we walk down the platform. The station is elevated, and though we are in the middle of things, the height gives a false impression of remoteness. The station, too – which is just a green hut leading to a staircase – gives that impression. On days I know I’m going to use a lot of public transport –three trips or more – I get a day pass. Once the day pass is validated, you just hop on and off anything you like, as often as you like, and travel as far as you like. It works on buses, streetcars, trains, regional trains. You travel without impediments, and everything runs on time. I tried to tell Saskia once how impressed I was by the system. The system? she said. How could you live in a city without such a system? Exactly, I said. Why don’t you buy a monthly pass? she asked. I get too much joy out of buying the daily pass, I said. The walls in the little hut are green and white, and there are two huge maps of the city: a transit map, with perfectly vertical, horizontal, and diagonal lines, and a street map. Saskia stops at the street map to point to the location of the apartment. She wants to show us how close it is. Manuela says, I have a map on my phone. I see a small empty rectangle beside the spot Saskia points to. A park. A park, I say. A park! says Saskia. We take the stairs down to the street and walk through an arched stone gateway to a hectic little transport hub, with bus stops and streetcar stops. A streetcar halts right in front of us, and a handful of people get off. A few dash across the road to the staircase that takes you back up to the underground station. The green pedestrian light – a green man – becomes a red man just as they get to the street, but this does not deter them. They have already decided to cross, so they cross. They hold their hands up to the waiting cars as if to say thank you for waiting. The cars behind those cars honk their horns. Everyone crosses, and the cars move forward. We are underneath the wide, elevated tracks, from which very large icicles hang. Another train comes in the opposite direction and the tracks make a thundering noise, and the icicles shiver. I imagine what happens when a thaw comes, when drops of water fall steadily and with great weight, and the icicles detach and plummet, and shatter on the street.