The Apartment A Novel(4)

The bus stop is beside the little café where the Italian kid works, but he’s not there today, because it’s Saturday. I’m hungry, but I don’t want to delay us. I don’t want to walk inside and order a piece of bread, and watch the bus go by. The bus arrives every fifteen minutes on a Saturday, and that’s a lot of time in weather like this. A sick feeling rolls through my stomach, which is hunger, so I decide to smoke a cigarette. I pull the box from my coat pocket and show it to Saskia. She says, Okay, but you light it; I’m not taking my gloves off. So I light hers, then my own. I have often wondered when, if at all, I might consider quitting, but now that I am here I have decided there’s no point. It would be different if I had a family, or if I played a sport. But all I do now is walk, and I don’t want to live an especially long time.

From the top of the road, coming slowly, is a blue bus – our bus. The traffic is slow because of the weather. The roads are fine, but the visibility is poor. Saskia smokes the cigarette I have lit for her without hands, just holding it between her lips, breathing in and breathing out. She crosses her arms and looks down the road, at the bus, which is stuck in the traffic it towers over, wipers moving slowly across its windshield, and the whole scene is white and grey and lit up and smoking. I don’t know how long we wait. It is probably a minute, but it feels like ten. Saskia is thinking that we should have taken the underground, and I can see that she wants to say something about this, but also that she doesn’t want to complain. I say, I wonder if the place I get will have a balcony. Do you want a balcony? she asks. I’d like one. That would make our list smaller, she says. It’s not a necessity, I say.

Finally the bus stops in front of us. I take a seat by the window and wipe a streak in the fogged glass so we can see outside, and Saskia sits beside me. And the bus departs, and we watch the street through this small aperture, and we don’t speak. I worry that she may find me too quiet, or boring. I could fill the silence by talking about the past, but I try not to think about the past. For much of my life, I existed in a condition of regret, a regret that was contemporaneous with experience, and which sometimes preceded experience. Whenever I think of my past now I see a great black wave that has risen a thousand storeys high and is suspended above me, as though I am a city by the sea, and I hold the wave in suspension through a perspective that is as constrained as a streak of clear glass in a fogged-up window.

Saskia takes her gloves and hat off. I pull the collar of my coat down and pull my winter hat off. She looks at me and says, I don’t think I’m ever getting off this bus. Saskia has a dark complexion. Her eyes look very tired, and the circles under them are blue sometimes, in certain light. I used to have trouble sleeping. It wasn’t anything in particular, just a fear that I ought to be doing something, that something needed being done, or that something was wrong. I had bad dreams. The dreams were often about showing up to places unprepared, or being asked to do something that I didn’t know how to do. And other times I just lay there, twisting and rearranging pillows, or got up for a glass of water and then stood by the window for a while. But I sleep now. I’ve never slept like I sleep here. I never believed this kind of sleep was possible. I am forty-one years old. I don’t drink as much as I used to. I hardly drink at all here. I like to be awake in the mornings, and thinking clearly. My alarm goes off at seven and I lie in bed for a while. I feel rested. I feel like I’ve been asleep for ten years. I smoke cigarettes and listen to the street. I read a book. The book I’m reading now is something Saskia gave me, an old book of sights to see in the city, with some historical information. The print is tiny and the translation is bad. It says things like, You are pleasing to see the statue. I’m going to learn the language and buy some novels soon. I want to read very long and old ones. They don’t have to be great. I’m going to buy a chair that’s comfortable, and when it’s cold I’m going to set it by the window, and when it’s warm I’m going to pull the chair onto my balcony, if I have one, and read outside in the sunshine, and listen to birds. I am also going to listen to the radio, and I hope my balcony will look over some trees and a street, one where people honk their horns at each other.

When is the last time you slept? I ask her. She doesn’t know. Weeks, she guesses, maybe never. She pauses. I don’t mean never, she says, just that it feels like never. She yawns. You’re making me tired now, she says. Can I see the newspaper? I ask. She hands it to me. It’s damp. I peruse the ads she has circled. I realize my mistake and hand the paper back to her. Saskia could have telephoned these places from my hotel room, or she could call them now, but she doesn’t. It’s the whole experience she wants. We shall sit in a café and have some coffee or tea and she’ll make calls there, then plan our route. I like that we’re not rushing anything, that everything is pointlessly ritualized. The bus is beginning to fill now. Bodies begin to push backward, and a man with a backpack bumps Saskia on the head. She rolls her eyes. That was nice of him, I say. The man turns around and gives me a dirty look, a look that says, Where am I supposed to go? So I give him a look that says, You could at least remove your backpack. Saskia, realizing I’ve become perturbed, says, to me, You must be used to lots of space. The guy mumbles something. I ignore it. I can’t speak the language. I’d look like a fool if I tried to start an argument, and anyway it might be the wrong argument. The man turns back around and Saskia gets hit by the backpack again, so she quickly and quietly unzips its small back pocket. Revenge, she whispers. The reason the bus is getting crowded on a Saturday morning is that everyone is going into the centre to shop, and to visit Christmas markets and drink and have cakes. The economy is bad, but there is only this weekend and the next before Christmas. The streak I wiped in the glass beside me has fogged up again, so I wipe it again. I realize we are moving fast now – we must be in a bus lane. This is a nice time of year, says Saskia, if you don’t mind crowds. I say, Sometimes I like crowds. Good, she says, because it’s going to be crowded. We cross a large suspension bridge, and the sound of the tyres on the road changes considerably. The change nearly creates the sensation of floating. My ears pop. Saskia leans across me to wipe a larger streak in the glass. A long way below is the river, wide and black. The surface of the river is choppy, and snow is falling everywhere, in many directions.