The Apartment A Novel(42)

Some of the men in Santa Claus suits start digging through the bowels of two black buses, pulling out instrument cases. You know, I say, maybe I ought to try and learn an instrument. Which instrument? she asks. What about the violin? I ask. Saskia shakes her head. Too predictable. Everybody here plays the violin. I like the piano as well, I say, but it’s too big. I want something I can carry. What about a guitar? she asks. A classical guitar? I ask. Exactly, she says, with twelve strings! And for a little while we go through a list of every small instrument we can think of. The Santa Clauses take out their instruments and prepare to step on stage. When I was very young, maybe ten or eleven, my mother took me to guitar lessons. She bought me an electric guitar, and though I liked sitting down with it, and looking cool, I disliked playing it. I never practised, and when I went to lessons, the teacher, whom I remember now strangely with some specificity, who had a salt-and-pepper beard, long hair in a ponytail, and wore, at least in my memory, nothing but red T-shirts with little breast pockets, sighed and sighed and sighed at my lack of interest. These lessons took place in a tiny white room he must have rented in a little strip of offices on the side of a road. I remember it was undecorated, as though he were one of many tenants. My mother drove a station wagon – a yellow Chevrolet with wooden panels – and my father drove a burgundy Jaguar XJS. Often, though, they swapped, because my father loved the station wagon. I remember various days of packing that guitar into those cars and fretting that I had not prepared even ten minutes for the new lesson, but lying to my mother that I had. These memories are sure and clear, yet I could not say how many months the lessons persisted. It must have been a while. One day, in a moment of frustration, the teacher took the guitar out of my hands and packed it in the case, and the two of us sat there in silence for a very long time. I was ten or eleven, and he must have been in his forties. We sat on the only two chairs in the room, facing but not looking at each other. And when our time was up, he said to my mother that he had to discontinue teaching me and wished me luck – that last session was free. When I think of my childhood, I remember it mostly as a series of attempts by my mother to get me interested in things. In one of her more desperate acts, she spent a lot of money on a set of encyclopaedias and demanded that I file a verbal report to her every day on a new subject. After a week of feeling very silly reporting obscure facts about distant countries or scientific discoveries to my own mother, I refused. So my father bought me a motorcycle. I wrecked it and broke my leg: I hit the only tree in a big, grassy field. It was a little 80cc Yamaha with an orange tank with a white racing stripe that did about forty-five miles an hour. I drove straight at the tree for a long time, and had intended, I think, to veer away with inches to go, to make a death-defying escape. I don’t really know what happened. I lay on the ground for a long while afterwards. I was in a lot of pain, but I was not afraid. I felt bad for my mother, who would blame herself, and my father, who would blame himself, and if my leg had not been so badly damaged that I could not walk, I would have gladly gone home without telling anyone – curiously the bike seemed unharmed. But the accelerator was stuck in the dirt and the engine was screaming and the back wheel was spinning and grey smoke was spitting out of the little exhaust pipe. It was so loud that it attracted attention. I propped myself up on my elbows and saw a man – just a guy who happened to be around at the time – sprinting across the field toward me. What a sight he was. For years I saw him in my dreams, that figure, frantically running. My memory loses sight of him beyond that. I have no recollection of him reaching me, or speaking with me, only of him running, only of him coming for me.

The snow gets heavier, and Saskia and I decide to depart. We walk in no particular direction, but always tending away from the apartment. And in our wanderings, during which we speak very little, except to say how thick the snow is in places, or comment on the vision of the cold, still city at night, which seems to me intensely beautiful around every corner, my heart shrinks and expands a hundred times, expanding and shrinking at the realization that tomorrow I will wake as a citizen of resignation.

Later, much later, a little after three a.m., at home in bed in my new apartment, I find myself unable to sleep. The night is over. Saskia and I arrived at Chambinsky around eleven o’clock, after she started receiving messages on her phone from Manuela. The memories of the walk from the Christmas market to Chambinsky, from where I am remembering it now, come back to me like pieces of a smashed mirror, some dull and some glimmering. We stopped in a bar to get warm. We watched some kids sledding down stairways on large metal street signs. We walked across an old bridge with statues of saints on it and a bench upon which Saskia had slept one night, drunkenly. In the days when she could sleep, she told me as we paused at that bench, she could sleep anywhere, and for as long as she liked. The bench on the bridge was just an example. For years – this was when she first returned to the city – she liked to fall asleep on park benches. She said, Nobody knows this about me. What happened? I asked. She said, I was mugged, and I figured I had got lucky. We turned a corner at that moment and found ourselves on a small street – there seemed to be nothing but dark windows and grey stone, and suddenly, from a single spot in the long monotonous darkness, there was a bright light and some noise, with a magnificent intensity, as though the light and noise were splitting the stone open from the inside. We walked in the middle of the street, because it had been ploughed, and Saskia’s heels made huge echoing cracks on the road. Then we were at the light. This is Chambinsky, she said. Saskia opened the door and sound tumbled out at us. I was thinking, at that moment, that nine or ten hours before, when the idea had first been proposed, I could think of nothing worse than hanging out with a bunch of people fifteen years younger than me, introducing myself over and over, being a foreign nuisance or a foreign curiosity. But slowly that worry had diminished. By the time we arrived, I was looking forward, finally, to a drink, and Saskia, who was in a good mood, which had put me in a good mood, wanted to see Manuela.