4
I unlocked the postbox in the lobby of my apartment block to see if the Abbey Road photographs had arrived. These would be my gift to Luna Müller, the younger sister of my translator, Walter Müller. When I’d put the key into the lock, it had felt slightly loose, as if the screws had been gouged out and then hastily screwed back again. Yet when I’d looked at the postboxes for the other tenants, I could see they were also in a state of disrepair. The wood on all of them was chipped. Most of the brass locks, which were made in the 1930s, were missing screws. It had been more difficult than usual to align the key with the hole. The landlord raised our rents every year but did nothing to repair the building, which was more or less falling down. The old lady from upstairs, Mrs Stechler, stepped out of the lift and hobbled into the lobby, her gloved hands gripping the steel tube of her Zimmer. She seemed startled to find me on my knees, staring at the locks on all the postboxes. She wore a fur coat and started complaining about her arthritis, how the wet weather inflamed it and made her even more lame. ‘Rain is bad news for my bones,’ she said in her gloomy, deep voice. I glanced through the glass doors of the lobby. The sun was shining. The grass in the communal gardens was still yellow from the heatwave that summer. The autumn leaves were not wet.
‘Something wrong, Saul?’
‘No.’
‘I wanted to ask about your surname,’ she said.
‘What about it?’
‘On your postbox you have the name Saul Adler.’
‘Yes.’
‘Adler is a Jewish name.’
‘So?’
She waited for me to say more and I did say more.
‘Saul is a Jewish name, too. All right with you?’
Her mouth hung open as if she were searching for a bigger hole to breathe through. It would seem that my name was the spectre haunting Mrs Stechler.
I stood up because it was too abject talking to her on my knees. After a while, I asked if she could tell me where to buy a tin of pineapple.
‘Everywhere. Every shop has a tin of pineapple. Even the corner shop. Do you want slices or chunks? Syrup or juice?’
She stared at me through her thick spectacles, as if I were a thief intent on robbing all the postboxes in the building. I had found an envelope in my postbox and was curious to open it but didn’t want her to watch me. She told me she was going to buy a slice of poppy-seed cake at the new Polish shop, and while she was at it she needed to find something to remove the stain on her turtle-green sofa. I was thinking about turtles and what kind of green represented them in the upholstery business when she started to complain again about the pain in her joints and the weather. I could not recall a Polish shop in the street she had named. There was a butcher’s shop and a newsagent, and a hair salon that mostly catered to pensioners like herself, but nothing that resembled a Polish shop, unless the Bengali newsagent had started to sell Eastern European pastries. I was distracted because I had now opened the envelope and was staring at the photos, three of them, in black and white.
There I was, walking barefoot on the zebra crossing in my white suit with the flared trousers, my hands in the pockets of the white jacket. There was a note from Jennifer:
By the way, it’s not John Lennon who walked barefoot. That was Paul. JL wore white shoes. Managed to get you in mid-stride like the original, thanks to my trusty stepladder.
I did not remember taking off my shoes, but it was true, I was barefoot in the photograph. When I looked up, I saw that Mrs Stechler had left her Zimmer in the lobby, tucked behind the porter’s desk. Through the glass doors I could see her in her fur coat, walking at a brisk pace in the direction of the bus stop. Wasn’t she supposed to be crippled with arthritis?
I put the photographs back in my postbox, locked it and walked to my nearest supermarket to buy the tin of pineapple for Walter Müller. What would Jennifer be doing today? Probably sorting out her air ticket to America. Obviously, she’d be in the dark room at college, preparing for her graduation show, and later, much later, she would be lazing in the sauna with Saanvi and Claudia, talking about infinity and how a manically depressed mathematician called Georg Cantor found a way of notating infinite numbers. Meanwhile, I was trying to figure out whether to buy tinned pineapple in rings or chunks, in syrup or juice. In the end I bought two bananas, a baguette, a slice of steak, and then found myself lingering at the cheese counter. I began to feel some sympathy with the florist who only sold roses. If there was an infinity of roses to choose from, it was the same with cheese. Shropshire Blue, Stilton, Farmhouse Cheddar, Lancashire, Red Leicester, Gouda, Emmental.
I asked the male assistant to scoop me up a large wedge of oozing Brie. It dripped from his knife. He had gentle hands.
The sky was grey and so was the pavement. It had started to rain. A man in an African robe was struggling with a broken umbrella while the rain splashed over his sandals. I stopped for a glass of tea and a baklava pastry at a Turkish café. The pastry was sticky with honey. I asked for a napkin but the woman serving me did not seem to hear my request. She walked towards a young girl, about seven years old, reading a book at a table nearby, and whispered something in her ear. I thought she was asking the child to fetch me a napkin but she was adjusting one of the red ribbons in her daughter’s plaited hair.
‘It’s like this, Saul Adler: the main subject is not always you.’
It’s like this, Jennifer Moreau: you have made me the main subject.
5
Something was going on in my apartment block. People were running out of the building in a panic. The engineer who lived on the third floor was shouting about a fire. I couldn’t smell anything burning. There was a rumour that the firefighters were on strike, although it had not been officially announced. The landlord had advised us all to keep a bucket of sand at the ready just in case, and also to unplug all unnecessary electrical devices except for the fridge. Mrs Stechler came back with what she said was the poppy-seed cake, but I could see through the plastic bag she was holding in her gloved hands, and it looked like chunks of bloody chopped meat. When she collected her Zimmer from the lobby, she told me she thought she might have left her toaster plugged in, and come to think of it, she wasn’t sure if she had switched off her electric heater. Why would she have her electric heater on in September? I volunteered to run up to her apartment and check. There was a debate amongst the other tenants gathered outside the building about whether this was wise. It was decided that if there was a fire, I should not take the risk, but when I insisted, they advised me to at least avoid the lift.
‘He wants to die, so let him.’ Mrs Stechler actually smiled as she handed over her door keys. It was the first time I had ever seen her cheerful.
I did not run up the five flights of stairs; I walked slowly because I was still limping from the fall on the Abbey Road crossing. There was no sign of smoke when I opened her door with the keys. Everything was turned off in her flat. A heavy black telephone was positioned in the middle of the carpet. That was a strange place to keep a phone, particularly if she had arthritis and couldn’t easily lower herself to the floor. I tracked the cord and saw it was plugged into the wall socket behind the television. I made my hand into a fist and started tapping it against the wall. If I was looking for something, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to find. Was the wall hollow or was it solid? Is that what I wanted to know? I tapped again. It was as if this action made me feel important, which made me wonder if I felt unimportant the rest of the time. Did the Stasi feel more important when they were tapping walls with their fists? The telephone rang and I picked up the receiver.