‘Hello. Mrs Stechler’s phone.’
‘Who is this?’
‘My name is Saul. I’m a neighbour.’
‘It’s Isaac.’
A pain shot through my chest.
‘Mrs Stechler is not in. Can I take a message?’
‘Saul who?’
The words Saul who? filled me with terror and dread and regret.
All the same, I made an effort to speak clearly and softly into the phone.
‘Saul Adler.’
I could barely speak at all.
I realized that I was heartbroken. The Wal-Mart carrier bag that had flown in with the wind on Abbey Road was connected to America in another time, and the name Isaac was connected to America, too.
The line went dead.
Someone was breathing close to me.
I turned around and looked straight into the startled eyes of an animal. A black poodle had jumped on to the arm of the sofa. Its eyes were wet and it was whimpering. Leaseholders and tenants are not supposed to keep animals in the flats. I’d had no idea Mrs Stechler had a dog. Her purchase of raw meat instead of poppy-seed cake now made sense.
I sat on the sofa and held the poodle in my arms. The telephone started to ring again. As I stroked the dog’s warm head, I became calmer. Our breathing had somehow synchronized; we were breathing together as we waited for the phone to stop ringing. It was very tranquil to hold the dog in my arms and to breathe in time with it.
I was hungry. Ravenous. Maybe I had forgotten to eat since the near collision on Abbey Road. Sitting on the turtle-green sofa in what might be an emergency (the suspected fire) made me think of my friend Jack, who had told me he never wanted children. Jack thought that parents were aliens who spoke in weird voices to their children, and anyway, he wanted to be the centre of attention, especially the sexual attention of his lovers. No way did he want that attention stolen from him by the needs of a child or the now-endless needs of the alien parent.
I had heartily agreed with him. Jack was ten years older than me but looked younger than his thirty-eight years. He wore stylish linen jackets with black teenage sneakers, which I had always thought was a good look.
I wasn’t so sure I thought so the day we were eating moules frites in a French bistro in West London. I was aware over that lunch that we regarded ourselves as cultured, sophisticated, good-looking men, a cut above the exhausted fathers who probably had not had sex for a long time. Or not with their exhausted partners anyway.
Yet, even then, I did not totally believe myself as I agreed with Jack. Although he was droll and amusing, he was somehow lacking in feeling. I said this out loud to the dog who was now asleep on my lap.
‘He was somehow lacking in feeling.’
When Jack looked over at my plate of moules, he noticed I had left some of them uneaten. He asked if he could polish them off for me, as if he were doing me a great favour. I pushed my bowl in his direction, watching him guzzle everything, slurping the shells and chewing very fast – he thought this slurping of my leftovers made him very lovable. Which was odd. (I said this out loud again to the poodle: ‘It was odd.’) I was enjoying reminiscing about Jack with a decorative, illegal dog on my lap. If there was a fire after all, perhaps I should save its life? It was true that I could smell something acrid, bitter, but was it smoke?
I had more thoughts on handsome Jack to gather in.
I took the dog’s paw in my hand and squeezed it. After Jack had eaten my moules, he turned his attention to the bill that had now arrived on a saucer. He glanced at it and, instead of us splitting the cost equally, he insisted that as I had ordered extra bread and they had charged us for it, I should cover the cost, despite him participating in the extra bread. At the same time, he was eyeing a portion of lemon tart the man sitting solo at the table next to us had left unfinished on his plate. Jack wanted to reach over and gobble up that, too. When he glanced conspiratorially at me, I asked myself why he was so unlovable. I think this question was on my mind when I was tapping the wall with my fist. The answer was obviously because Jack himself was unloving. I had asked the wall a question and, in its way, it had answered. I was suddenly worried that Jennifer might think that I was unloving. Jack was supposed to be playing tennis after our meal. He told me he had taken a few extra lessons from a coach to perfect his serve for this particular match. I couldn’t work out why he would gobble a large lunch before a tennis game, but he was very thin. I supposed that he himself was the child he so deplored. A child that needed feeding up.
In the meantime it was possible that while I was sitting on the sofa, stroking an illegal dog, the apartment block was in flames. I stood up and dropped the black poodle to the floor. It made an indignant sound as I picked up the paper bag with the Brie in it and slammed the front door. Again, I limped down the stairs, but I could not smell smoke. Everyone was huddled outside the block, pointing at various windows. They were all relieved to know that Mrs Stechler had not left the heater on. I told her that someone had called for her.
She took off her thick spectacles and looked confused.
‘I don’t think so. My phone has been cut off.’
She started to blow on her spectacle lenses and then scooped up the hem of her dress and wiped her eyes.
‘By the way,’ she said, ‘I am Jewish, too. I was born in Kraków.’
The engineer tapped my shoulder.
‘Thank you for doing the health-and-safety check, Mr Adler,’ he said sincerely. ‘It has put our minds at rest.’
I wondered why Mrs Stechler was wearing gloves and what kind of spectre lay beneath them, but I didn’t want to think about that so I ran across the road and called Jennifer from the payphone on the corner.
‘How are you, Jennifer?’
‘Why are you calling me?’
‘Because the firefighters are on strike.’
‘Who says the firefighters are on strike? First I’ve heard of it.’
I was holding the bag with the melting Brie in my hand. Jennifer was speaking in a friendly, casual sort of way, as if she had not turned down my offer of marriage, and, after making use of my body, had not more or less turfed me out of her bed, still bruised and bleeding from the accident.
‘The photographs came out well didn’t they?’ She started to talk about light and shadow and the angle from which she had taken the photos and how in the original photograph of the real Beatles, for the album Abbey Road, there had been an American tourist standing under a tree who just happened to be there at the time. I was peering at the paper bag with the wedge of Brie melting inside it. There seemed to be some kind of message written on the right-hand corner of the bag.
‘Are you okay, Saul?’
The shop assistant with the gentle hands had written the price of the cheese in biro and underlined it twice.
‘No, I am not okay, not at all.’
‘It’s like this, Saul Adler: fuck off.’
‘It’s like this, Jennifer Moreau: that’s exactly what I’m going to do.’
That night, when I packed my bag for East Berlin, I realized I had forgotten to buy the tin of pineapple.
6
East Berlin, September 1988
I spent a lot of time laughing with Walter Müller. It was a relief to hang out with someone whose life was not about material gain. Walter was a master linguist. He taught Eastern European languages to East Germans who were heading off to work in other socialist countries, and he was fluent in the English language as well. I liked him as soon as I saw him waiting for me at Friedrichstraße station. He was standing at the end of the platform, holding up a piece of cardboard with my name written on it. He was about thirty, with shoulder-length mousy hair, pale blue eyes, tall, broad shoulders. Muscular. There was a kind of energy in his body, a vitality that was relaxed but exciting. I told him about the nightmare train journey to the British airport and how the train had run out of fuel and how I’d had to wait for a replacement bus. Walter Müller shook his head in a vaguely mocking way to express the depth of his sympathy. Obviously, in his view, I was paddling in the shallow end of life’s problems.