The Apartment A Novel(33)

When she closed the door, I lay down on the bed and fell asleep. I’d been working sixteen- and seventeen-hour days for many months, and I was exhausted. I closed my eyes and slept through the afternoon. When I woke, it was nearly five p.m. I got up. I felt rested, but groggy. I had a cigarette. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to be smoking. There were some glasses in the cupboard above the sink and I took one and used it as an ashtray. When Josephina had written me the letter, she was still living here, so what she said about noticing a place on the day you move in and out was, I supposed, a general comment about arriving and departing, connecting and separating. And I supposed that what she meant was that one’s identity, while one lives in a place, is inextricable from that place, and only when the self perceives the place as separate does one see it as it truly is.

I drove to my own house after I left Josephina’s. I parked a long way off and walked. I could not say whether I parked far away because I wanted to approach it slowly, or wanted to experience my old street as I had as a child, or both. The street was quiet. All the cars were gone or hidden in garages. There was, I realized, hardly a sound at all, and the whole world seemed to be slipping into darkness, superheavy, as though everything was being sucked into a point that existed in the centre of my house – where nothing out of the ordinary ever took place, where there was no meanness, no neglect, no lasting sadness, no hatred. Yet the massive weight I seemed to attain as I approached it – a grey brick house with an elm tree in the front yard, and a long white driveway, shining in the blue and orange light of late evening, with shadows of a neighbour’s trees stretched across the lawn – suggested an incomprehensible and impassable and monstrous guilt. It was a guilt that preceded me, that could not be denied or placated, and this was so real and agonizing that before I reached my house I turned around and got back in my car and left.

And it is this repulsive force I am pondering in a perfect calm, alone, smoking a cigarette, in Saskia’s flat. It is late afternoon, and already black outside. I’m in her bedroom, because her flatmate is making dinner and Saskia has refused to let me go near him. She is in her en-suite bathroom, and steam is coming through the barely cracked door – the extractor fan does not work, she said, so she has to crack it. The room is dimly lit by two lamps with dark blue, almost opaque, lampshades. I am lying on her bed with my boots off – I left them in the cold and damp stairwell. My jeans are wet at the ankles, from the snow, so Saskia has put a towel down rather than make me sit on a chair. My shins, ankles and feet are cold. It’s the first time my feet and ankles have been cold in a long while. Otherwise I am warm. I’m still in my coat and scarf. My hat and gloves are beside me. The music on the stereo, Saskia told me, is a Spanish pianist named Mompou, who, she claims, was Chopin’s only equal when it came to volume of sound in single notes. The music is slow, very slow, and seems to swirl and radiate in the dissipating edges of the steam coming from the bathroom. Saskia has been taking a shower for almost half an hour. She poured me a glass of wine and then poured herself a glass and went into the bathroom with it. And I lie here, imagining her wet arm reaching out from behind the shower curtain, feeling for the glass, bringing it in for a sip, then replacing it. This is the first time I’ve been in her flat, and the building is as grubby as Janos, back in the café, implied. The stairwells stink. The paint is peeling and the floors smell of mildew. The walls are so thin you can hear the heavy front door to the building open and close, four floors down. Saskia’s bedroom is messy and cramped, but in an eccentric, smart way. Books are stacked all over the floor, but her bookshelf is empty, suggesting that she is the kind of person who reads seventy-five books at once. In the stacks are the jagged, flopped edges of loose pages and stapled bundles of paper, which have come from years of evening courses. In many ways, she has admitted, she is not really reading books but working on thoughts, so that she might read a sentence in one book – a novel or a book of poems – and immediately need to leap to a history book, or an economics textbook, or an art book. Her small collection of paintings hangs on the four walls of the room. They are all so small that you have to get up and look at them closely to make sense of them.

Propped up on my little grey Samsonite case is the painting we bought together. I still cannot tell which way is up, and I’ve forgotten the way Saskia has shown me. As soon as she is ready, Saskia and I are going to drop my things at my apartment and go find food. The woman – the landlord, or the landlord’s agent, I wasn’t sure – didn’t want to give me the keys, even though I had my bank documents. I had expected this. Saskia and Manuela offered to act as my references, but she required references from landlords. So I gave her a year’s worth of rent in cash. I went into the bathroom, pulled it out of my money belt, and placed the whole stack on the kitchen counter. I’d half-hoped the woman might find it suspicious, but money is money. She smiled, took the keys out of her bag, and said, This one is the deadbolt to your door. This one is the door downstairs. This one is the door to the side terrace, and this one is to the bedroom’s balcony. Saskia sat down at the kitchen table and smoked a cigarette. That was a lot of money to be carrying, she said. She was, I could see, disappointed after having seen it. I could not say if she was disappointed in me – because of the way I placed it on the counter, perhaps, like a gangster, or because of a suspicion on her part, which would have been justified, that I had added evil to the world in order to obtain it – or if she was simply disappointed by the fact that nobody could or wanted to resist money. I said, I just wanted to get this over with. This is why it’s good to be rich, Manuela said.