While I was thinking about this, a woman came up to me waving an unlit cigarette in her hand. She was wearing a blue dress and asked if I had a light. Her short blond hair was so light it was almost silver. Her eyes were the palest green, like glass washed up on a beach. I reached into my pocket and found the metal Zippo lighter I always carried with me, a windproof, old-fashioned, clunky version of the lighter the American military used in the Second World War – later in Vietnam. She grabbed my hand with the lighter in it and peered at the initials carved into the carriage. I explained that it had belonged to my father in the days he used to smoke while he was having his monthly bath. He had died recently and I was taking a small portion of his ashes in a matchbox to bury in communist East Berlin. My hands were shaking as I spoke. I asked her to sit with me for a while, and she did, perching on the wall of the EMI studios, our shoulders touching. I could hear her inhaling and exhaling. Smoke was coming out of her nostrils like the dragon embroidered on Jennifer’s kimono. She asked if I was a jittery person.
‘Nope.’
‘Nervous then?’
A fragment of a poem I did not know I knew came to mind. I spoke it out loud to the woman smoking her cigarette.
‘We are the Dead. Short days ago,
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved …’
She nodded as if I were being normal, which I wasn’t.
‘It’s by John McCrae,’ I said. ‘He was a Canadian doctor but he signed up as a gunner in the First World War.’
I turned my face towards her and she turned towards me while the wind blew a plastic bag from a supermarket around our feet.
‘That’s odd,’ she said, kicking it away. ‘Isn’t Wal-Mart American?’
We kissed on the wall like teenagers, her tongue deep in my mouth, my knee wedged between her thighs. When we finally pulled apart, she asked what kind of perfume I was wearing. ‘Ylang-ylang,’ I said, as she wrote down her telephone number on the palm of my shaking hand. When she walked away, I read the words on the back of her blue dress. It was a uniform. I realized that she was a nurse and that in the song ‘Penny Lane’ there is a nurse who sells poppies from a tray.
3
When I arrived home I picked up the telephone and asked a local florist to send a bunch of sunflowers to Hamilton Terrace. I wanted Jennifer to receive them on the day of her graduation show. ‘We only have roses’: the florist sounded indignant, as if no other kinds of flowers existed in her world. She even seemed offended to hear that although sunflowers were at their peak in August, they were still widely available in September. It was odd to speak to a florist who was terrified of flowers. When I told her that just as sunflowers were coming into bloom, other sorts of flowers were nearing the end of their season, such as poppies, she sounded like she was about to burst into tears.
‘We have yellow roses, white roses, red roses, striped roses from China and Burma. Any good? We have a lot of white roses in stock at the moment.’
White roses. Die Weiße Rose – ‘the White Rose’. That was the name of the anti-Nazi youth movement in the early 1940s that had started in Munich. I was translating a leaflet for my students, written by the leaders of die Weiße Rose in February 1943.
The Hitler Youth, the SA, the SS have all tried to drug us, to regiment us in the most promising years of our lives.
Perhaps I should order twelve white roses for Jennifer? After all, she was in the most promising years of her life.
No, they had to be sunflowers. They were the only sort of flower she liked to look at in a vase, mostly because of their dark centres, which apparently reminded her of an eclipse, though I’m not sure she had ever seen an eclipse.
I rang another florist and they too did not have sunflowers in stock. Third time lucky I found the sunflowers. This time the florist was a man. He told me he was from Cyprus and that his name was Mike. When he asked me for the message to write on the card, my voice came out strangely shaky and high-pitched. I did not recognize it.
‘Sweet Jennifer, good luck for the show, from the careless man who loves you.’
The florist called Mike cleared his throat. ‘Sorry, but could you speak in English?’
I couldn’t work out what he meant. I repeated the message, along with my name and credit card details. This time my voice was less feeble. There was a pause, then Mike said, ‘I don’t speak German. I think it’s German anyway, but whatever it is you’re saying, remember we won the war.’
I could hear him laughing as I kept repeating the message. While he laughed I realized I was thinking my message in English but saying it out loud in German, so I switched to English: ‘Sweet Jennifer, good luck for the show, from the careless man who loves you.’ After confirming that careless was not two words, as in care less, we were home and dry. Mike said it was a pleasure doing business with me and that his real name was not Mike. What’s more, if he had known I could speak other languages, he would have told me his full name. ‘But anyway, take care, Saul.’
That day I had had two people say, ‘Take care, Saul.’
When I turned on the shower and washed the blood off my knees, I found myself appalled that Jennifer had not noticed my body was actually grazed and bleeding when we made love. I could smell her ylang-ylang oil on my skin. I am so turned on by ylang-ylang. Afterwards I got on with ironing the shirts I would pack for East Germany. It took a while to set up the ironing board and fill my vintage iron with water. It was either too hot or too cool but it took my mind off things to point the heavy steel tip at the sleeves, work my way to the cuffs and see the steam rise. I unbuttoned the cuffs and turned them inside out so that I could iron around the buttons. It was crucial not to iron over the buttons, which always leaves a mark. It took me a while to unbutton all the buttons. Frankly, what with the car accident and my first ever offer of marriage being rejected, it felt like I had been beaten up. That was what Stalin most hated, the beatings from his father. I hung up the shirts and stepped on to my balcony. A crowd of sooty ungainly crows were hopping around on the grass of Parliament Hill Fields. One of them suddenly took off and flew towards a bird bath. It was carrying something in its beak and then it dropped it in the bird bath. Maybe it was a mouse, which reminded me that Stalin loved his daughter, Svetlana, as a cat loves a mouse. How did I love Jennifer and how did she love me? I’m not sure she loved me at all. She was definitely the cat and I was the mouse. This made me think that I should have a go at being the cat for a change, but it didn’t feel very arousing.
So far, I had kept my part of the deal – to never describe, in words, how amazingly beautiful she was, either to her or to anyone else. Not the colour of her hair or skin or eyes, not the shape of her breasts or lips or nipples, or the length of her thighs or the texture of her pubic hair, or whether her arms were toned or the size of her waist or whether she shaved under her arms or painted her toenails. Apparently, I had no new words with which to describe her, but if I wanted to say, ‘She is amazingly beautiful,’ that was okay with her because it didn’t mean anything. Given that she was always going on about my own sublime beauty, I wondered if it meant anything. To her. She was making it mean something in her photographs, but she said these weren’t really about me, it was the whole composition that was important and I was just one part of it. Why had she outlined my lips in red felt-tip in that photograph above her bed? I knew how much she loved to kiss me, so why did she write, DON’T KISS ME? It was as if she thought that having sex made her vulnerable and gave me too much power. Jennifer did not want to give me that sort of power, so I just had to busk it with her. She was quite interested in a male student at her art school called Otto. He had blue hair and was her age. Even if she believed that he was destined to become the new most famous artist in the world, I knew that black was the colour of her true love’s hair.