The Apartment A Novel(41)

The journey from my apartment to the centre is nothing, not even ten minutes, and just a few streets past the ring road Saskia presses the button to stop and says she has remembered something I have to see. She adds, Another thing you have to see. The bus stops and we alight. The air outside seems strangely warmer than the air inside the bus. It is a quiet street, but shimmering in red and green and crystal-white light from enormous Christmas bells that hang everywhere. From another street, music plays. The bus drives away, through the slop of snow and grit and ice. And we walk another direction, through the same terrain. Saskia says, You must pass through this place. What place? I ask. Come on, she says. The road the bus has taken without us goes jaggedly upward, and we walk along the base of a steep and tall rock face that had once been a natural part of the city’s old wall. A narrow switchback stairway has been carved imperfectly out of the stone. Saskia says that on a cold night a long time ago a young and unknown poet, ascending this stairway, saw a woman with large eyes and white cheeks descending. Until that moment, he despised everything he knew, all the people he had met in his short life, and longed for the sack of the city and its consumption by fire. But at that moment, said Saskia, he decided that what he had felt all along was an extreme form of unworthiness, rooted in sexual desire and lack of fulfilment. The woman passed him, but not before she glanced at him with eyes so blue they were silver, then she disappeared down the steps, and walked, quietly, along the frozen canal circling the city wall. He immediately went home, composing, in his head, as he hurried through the city, a poem about the experience, and when he got home he told his flatmate what had happened. The flatmate went to every door in the building and demanded silence. When the flatmate returned, the poet was in his room, working. The next morning, the flatmate awoke to a knock on the door. It was all the tenants in the building, who demanded to hear the poem that would reignite love in their hearts. The flatmate then discovered the poet had slit his own throat in the night. He was lying in bed, covered in blood, and the blood had saturated his sheets and formed a large puddle on the floor. He left a note in which he explained that he had discovered, in the hallucination of three or four a.m., that his unworthiness was perfect, and any accomplishment or happiness would corrupt the perfection, that he must die a virgin that very night, before the sun rose. As for the poem, according to the note, he composed it and ate it. It was twenty-four lines long. He was seventeen.

Is that true? I ask. Saskia’s response is: What matters is that this stairway became, for our poets, the centre of poetic purity on earth. And no poet from here, major or minor, becomes a citizen until he or she has composed a poem about this stairway. Even the anarchists and Symbolists wrote poems about it, all twenty-four lines long. To be a citizen is the highest ambition of the poet. Citizen, she says, and I cannot remember if I told her what the historian said and this entire account is a response to that, or if it is just a coincidence. We reach a landing where the stone wall is covered in graffiti, tiny and intricate scribbles. Here, says Saskia, is hallowed ground for poets. It’s where the amateurs come to praise the young poet. The purpose, she says, is to subordinate oneself, to declare your inconsequence to the whole world.

We continue upward. Snow covers every step thickly, and our feet make those great soft noises that feet do in deep fresh snow. No one has come this way for hours, at least, though I can hear a lot of noise from above. It is the sound of oblivious gaiety, shouting and singing and mechanized bell noises. A Christmas market? I ask. The best, says Saskia. We arrive at the top. The market is situated between two vast museums that face each other. There are bright amusement rides, a merry-go-round and a flashing Ferris wheel. Let’s go through it, says Saskia. There is a children’s choir singing on a large stage and, in a beer tent, about fifty men in Santa Claus suits, looking inappropriately sober. Everywhere else, the square is festive. People are drinking hot wine and stuffing their faces with sausages and pastries covered in icing sugar. Saskia suggests we scrap our plan to have a nice dinner and eat something in the market. That sounds to me like the best possible idea. The prospect of sitting down somewhere dark and quiet and being forced into an intimate conversation is completely unattractive, especially since I know that kind of conversation would lead to the question of what I plan to do on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and so on. The children’s choir is really awful. But they are having fun, and lots of people have circled around to watch them sing. And when they get any melody halfway right, the crowd cheers. I buy a small box of overpriced, gourmet green tea, throw the box away, and stuff the bags into the inside pocket of my coat. Green tea seems like a good first grocery item for the apartment. Something I can drink non-stop, unlike coffee. There are a lot of things here that I suddenly feel I’d like to buy, but I don’t want to have to carry a bag around for the rest of the night. For our dinner, we find a hut that serves hot sausages sliced on paper plates, with sharp mustard and brown bread, and we eat while standing in the cold. Saskia gets a drink after that, and I get a second plate of food, and she holds her mug in one hand and covers it with the other, to protect it from the snow. The crowd flows past us, and no matter where we move, we keep getting jostled. Some people are polite about it. Others are rude. In an attempt to find a comfortable and calm spot to stand in, we drift until we find ourselves standing beside a metal barrier between the market area and a cluttered parking lot of caravans and cigarette-smoking cooks and vendors. Beneath our feet are crushed and crumpled plates that have fallen out of a nearby, overfilled bin. People, seeing there is no more room in the bin, throw their trash at our feet. I pull the metal barrier back and walk through. Where are you going? she asks. I don’t know, I say, but I don’t want mustard on my new coat. She comes through with me and I close the barrier behind us. There is a nice emptiness and calm back there, but without the crowds it seems a degree or two colder.