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17.9.08
"Then love," she said, "may be described generally as the love of the everlasting possession of the good?" "That is most true."
Diotima to Plato in The Symposium of Plato, Jowett translation
When a man loves the beautiful, what does he desire?" I answered her "That the beautiful may be his." "Still," she said, "the answer suggests a further question: What is given by the possession of beauty?" "To what you have asked," I replied, "I have no answer ready." "Then," she said, "Let me put the word 'good' in the place of the beautiful, and repeat the question once more: If he who loves good, what is it then that he loves? "The possession of the good," I said. "And what does he gain who possesses the good?" "Happiness," I replied.
-- Diotima and Plato from The Symposium of Plato, Jowett translation
PARIJS
In an after-hours boozer, long ago lost in the Pigalle's old, hilly curvy cobblestone streets, ash cement buildings, cracked paint and steep lamp lighted stairways, I wandered into the basement of a candlelit club, seated myself at the first available table never once allowing my eyes to leave the girl I’d been following.
I'd followed her in. I'd followed her, my own little Edith Piaf who I recreated in the following as a tempestuous little street singer dressed in a black, hand knitted dress, a borrowed scarf hiding a missing sleeve.. I followed her walking through the red light district in full swing and with everything, the sex shows, sex shops and prostitutes clamouring for my attention, all the way from Place Blanche I'd followed her down Boulevard Rochechouart until she took a right on Rue des Martyrs and appeared to lose me near St Georges until I spotted her again on Rue St Lazare. I stopped when she did, to light a cigarette beneath a light rain and when she entered that after-hours boozer, so did I.
I hadn’t bothered once whilst I followed to wonder why I was doing so. Perhaps it started simply as a little game at first. Sure, she’d caught my eye but I as I settled in at an even pace a half block behind her I didn’t imagine that I was following her as much as I was following an instinct or perhaps just following to have something to do, a break in an otherwise monotonous series of drifting movements from one café to the next as the afternoon hours blurred into the evening and almost imperceptively into a nocturnal lagoon of listlessness that neither the drugs nor the drinking, fastidiously applied for just that reason, were able to overshadow.
And of course gradually, perhaps just after I’d become aware that I’d made a left when she’d made a left and made a right after she’d made a right, after I’d slowed when she stopped to peruse a shop window, gradually, I began to realise that there was a purpose in my following her.
Sure, it might have even started as a little game. See how long I could follow until she disappeared somewhere I could not follow. Imagine myself to be some secret agent tailing a suspected double spy. Find a little opening in a stranger’s anonymous existence, tear it open wider until I could see myself what was inside.
But she was attractive, of that I was certain. I had seen her face only for the briefest of instances but I could suss this out even from watching the back of her, watching her move from behind; her steps purposeful yet light, watching the ringlets of her dark hair bouncing with each stride against the back of that black hand knitted dress and covering the bare of her back where the dress opened just enough but not enough to prevent the briefest exposures of her skin which naturally high in melanin and yet bare for the mildest of warm Indian summer evenings and of course, breathlessly I might have taken in the curves as they realigned with each step, figuring and refiguring but always returning to a pleasing state.
And once I knew; having realised I was following and continuing to follow anyway, that there was some purpose to my following, some means to this end, I then allowed myself the luxury of imagination. I drafted the opening lines I might use to pry a smile or a spark of interest from her. I imagined her replies. I imagined her in innumerable different versions of her own life before my having met her, of her routines and schedules and of the hours and the days we would spend together and what we would be doing in the interim.
Oh it was quite an elaborate amount of daydreaming passing between my eyes to the back of her as she walked and then without warning, it came to an abrupt end as she stopped in front of the club, lit her cigarette and went inside.
My heart raced unimaginably. I passed the club and continued on in panic before finally stopping, taking a breath to gather myself, light a cigarette of my own and walk back to the opening of the club.
The first floor was a fog of smoke and bad lighting. Tables were filled with people, shadowy faces carrying on conversations in unintelligible languages, laughter and drinking and as I attempted with great concentration to unite myself with her again, this mystery woman I had followed for nearly 30 minutes of walking which had reached no conclusion despite arriving here to this club and amongst all the faces I could discern at these tables or standing idly impervious to the smoking and laughing of others I could not find hers.
Again I could sense a unmistakable panic although whereas the first had overcome me outdoors in attempting decide the next step to take, to carry on walking or to turn back and continue following, the second wave of panic was of loss or perhaps being lost as people stared at me sometimes openly, sometimes out of the corner of their eye as people do in the middle of conversations they’re only listening to one side of, the loss of my purpose, the mission of finding.
I had almost given up hope yet incredulous that she could have simply disappeared into thin albeit smoke-choking air, before I spotted the stairway and cautiously made my way down the narrow passage which led down into a cavernous sort of opening with another stage and a still-smokier area.
And there I spotted her once again, this time standing, alone at the far side of the bar, her back to the wall, that bare back covered from time to time by those dark ringlets of hair across her olive skin and having fixed my sight on her only for a second, I turned to try and find an empty table.
Seated I attempted take in more of her as well as the dim light and the requirement to be inconspicuous would allow. I imagined that the shadows muffled her beauty or imagined beauty where I could see no details. I could make out her head and the shape of her face at the other end of that bar but the details were entirely inaccessible. Not to mention the fact that carrying on a conversation with her, or even attempting to spark one to life would be rather impossible from the distance.
So then it became important not simply to sit there paralysed because failing to communicate or even attempt to communicate with her after following her over that time and distance would be not merely wasteful but humiliating. I rolled another cigarette with the nagging half-expectation that any moment another man would emerge from the shadows, her man, and they would embrace or perhaps kiss lightly on the lips and that would be the end of this ridiculous charade once and for all, before I had even gotten up from the seat or begun screwing up some courage.
I stood back up from the seat after the private, subliminal pep talk I’d given myself about seizing the moment and taking the bull by the horns and a half dozen similar clichés recited like a rosary litany. She had been talking briefly with the bartender but then stood alone, comfortably alone, and looked off into the general direction of the stage.
As I walked towards her in what in movies would have been slow motion but in reality was simply taking cautious steps forward careful not to angle too far in her direction yet still angle in that direction, I imagined what it might be like to be moving with the intention of ordering a drink and then suddenly discovering her as though I hadn’t just followed her all that way into this place to begin with.
To try and relax I considered my potential opening lines as though this were a game of chess and my opening line would be my opening move as White, a variation known as the Staunton Gambit which had been named after Howard Staunton who played it against Bernhard Horwitz in a match in London in 1846 and included in his famous Chess-Players Handbook published a year later.
The Gambit attempts boldly, by giving away White’s central pawn, to expose Black’s king and here, by giving myself away, walking slowly towards her, I would hopefully expose her vulnerability rather than my own.
Still, as I approached, I debated the merits of establishing early pawn control of the centre, to allow myself to linger at the bar with a glass of house red wine pretending that I hadn’t come there all along with the explicit intention of chatting her up. Dozens of ideas ran through my brain but before I’d even considered how to order the wine: to contemplate whether to simply address her in English in the hope that she wasn’t solely a Francophile or muster up some mangled mixture of what few French phrases I had attempted to memorise on the train to Paris earlier that morning.
In the end, I said nothing, muttering red wine please to the barman and standing there staring at the bottles arrayed along the back of the bar, whistling in the dark to a mindless tune and before I could even kick myself for myself she was beside me with an unlit cigarette between her fingers, wordlessly requesting a light.
Oh, I fumbled with the lighter at first but after the second try and trying to laugh the embarrassment, I regained some sense of verbal clarity and before she could edge away again I blurted out a breathless and disconnected dictum about "Le Bel Indifferent", Cocteau's play written for and starring Edith, perhaps still dreaming in a foggy, alcoholic trance that this woman in front of me was somehow Edith Piaf, or her ghost.
My sudden unravelling seemed to catch her off guard.. Perhaps she expected more sophistication from a man who had followed over many city blocks for nearly a half hour. She regarded me with a look of amusement, a carnival in her eyes, engaged, then disengaged, considering the rapid development of her own pieces.
"I will be going soon to sing" she explained in heavily accented-English, nodding towards the tiny stage where currently sat an experimentational jazz trio who were still, it appeared to me anyway, tuning up their instruments. In all likelihood, what I mistook for tuning was the actual performance. I feigned interest for a moment but immediately extinguished any look of interest in the trio when it appeared she was inhaling again, preparing to finish a thought, it was difficult to discern. "Perhaps you will like to speak with me at a more opportune time, for example, when my singing is finished? Perhaps in one hour's time, or so?"
Aha, this had been too easy. Certainly, even though I couldn’t even remember my words, I hadn’t said anything particularly profound – I was confused and instead of catching her off guard she had made a move I hadn’t seen coming in staring at the pieces assembled on the board. I’d expected a polite brush off perhaps or a slight flicker of interest at best. Certainly not an appointment.
Sure, I said hesitantly, watching her out of the corner of my eye. I didn’t realise you’d be singing, I found myself apologising. I’ll just have a seat and…well, watch the performance, I shrugged.
But she shook her head lightly as though I’d lost myself in the translation. I could not discern the colour of her eyes which somehow lost anyway in the shadows.
I must explain…I cannot bear singing for the first time in front of people that I know. I can only sing for strangers. Otherwise I get too nervous. But I will meet you instead. There’s a little café at the corner, one street over from here called Café Saint Amant. Why don’t you wait for me there? It’s just a short distance from here. I can meet you inside or just outside the entryway between one and one and a half hours from now...
Well, sure…I answered in the voice of a man pretending he didn’t realise he was being brushed off. Her voice had the effect of intoxicating me, the room felt unbalanced and out of focus. I’ll meet you at Café Saint Amant, I said as though it was something we did on a regular basis. In an hour or two.
Sure, I thought to myself. I’ll sit there. I’ll wait and wait and wait. I shall place myself in the trust of her honesty. I will beat back the voices of derision in my head and wait patiently as though doing so would be enough to guarantee her appearance.
Ok, I’ll see you there? Her eyes did not hide from me even though it was apparent her thoughts were already moving from me to thinking of the set she would perform. It was the possibility of meeting her where she suggested, when she suggested that compelled me into compliance even though I doubted the outcome. I was curious to hear her sing yet the facility with which she had first allowed me in, then made arrangements for later, then turned back to the business at hand of the stage with barely a second thought, was unnerving and I convinced myself that I’d be better off leaving before my nerves got the better of me.
Yeah. See you in a bit, I greeted, backing off and leaned in the direction of the entrance. I wanted to look back to catch her looking at me but instead I imagined her gaze stayed fixed to the stage, focused without giving me a second thought.
"I'll wait until you get there." I noted, suddenly enthusiastic. The experimental jazz trio had morphed into one tune together, at the same time, something vaguely familiar before it hit me: The "West End Blues" 1928 recording performed by Louis Armstrong, Earl Hines, Fred Robinson, Jimmy Strong, Mancy Cara and Zutty Singleton. Or perhaps it was the jukebox. The room was far too smoky to discern the stage any longer. She was smiling at me blankly as though she knew I was already supposed to have turned around and left but in seeing me still standing there she had no idea what sort of smile to leave me with and had decided, at the last minute, to remain neutral. Had I remained standing there, I imagined there was quite a good chance her smile would melt, her eyes would hiss and a few strong-arms would grab me and dump me outside the door without further notice, back out into the spattering rain and the cold and the strangers.
"See you then..." I waved, turned on my heel in an effort at careless optimism and headed for the exit. Fate indeed. Whether our conversation went any further or not was entirely her decision.
**********
It wasn’t too difficult to find the Café Saint Amant. Especially considering I only half-expected it to exist at all. I knew there could have been a myriad of potential road blocks. Was it the corner one street over to the left or to the right, one street further down before being on the left or right? Did it exist or would I just wander the rest of the night in search of it?
But there it was, as soon as I’d reached the corner, one block over to the right, lights on, a few people scattered around the outdoor tables, fewer still inside. I took a seat outside, nearest to the sidewalk and waited, taking in the neighbourhood around me.
Toulouse-Lautrec had once painted the surrounding area into a district of cabarets, circus freaks, and prostitutes and at this hour, with the remaining stragglers lurking and leering and drooling a dazed sort of enthusiasm as they passed and bumped into me and threw up in the alleyways, I imagined I could see what he’d have seen, the nocturnal circus of haphazard humanity.
I’d read somewhere that Toulouse-Lautrec, because he’d broken both of his legs in his early teens, and neither had ever properly healed, both had stopped growing. It could have simply been urban legend but I couldn’t help wondering that this Tom Thumb genius had abnormally short legs as an adult and was only 1.5 meters tall. I’d read that he’d been a heavy drinker in Montmartre and that because of his heavy drinking he was eventually confined to a sanatorium, battling the drink, battling his insecurities and his pain.
I spent my waiting time in the café in a variety of fashions. First, the effort of waiting for the waiter. At first I tried looking at other customer who were sat around me trying to decipher their conversations. A pair of middle aged women speaking to one another in secretive tones, laying out, no doubt, the case against the lover of the other. Another lone man sipping a beer and engrossed in a book whose title I could not make out. A pair of young students speaking to each other in German, battling philosophies.
With no one to speak to I thought instead about the things I'd lost forever due to my own carelessness or apathy, or by virtue of someone else's fuck up. I began to sketch a list of them, a dispassionate list because you had to become dispassionate about such losses in order not to let them gradually destroy you like the slow leak of air from the pinprick of a rubber inner tube. In the end, it is about denial and the acts and losses which deny you are like angry, self-loathing little people who derive great pleasure from denying you over and over again. The list grew impossibly longer as I thought about it further and stared past people seated around me as though they were ethereal, temporary visions. As I choked down an Anise aperitif served with water that I'd ordered solely to appear as though I knew what I was doing, I began to feel sickened at the losses and resolved to make up for the losses with gains. Monumental gains that dwarfed the world. Explosions of personal insights and epiphanies.
The list I'd begun to sketch had become a doodle, an incomprehensible, unhinged triptych growing darker and darker with each subsequent swoop of my recollection: childhood toys destroyed in fits of rage, writings and drawings ripped to shreds in frustration, musical instruments bent and dented beyond repair at the most subtle, corrective hints from strangers when I played on street corners, friends discarded because of distance or because they'd grown intolerant of appeasing me, lovers, dead in the heart, wilted, ashed and forgotten. An entire gawking collective of memories and strangers mocking me. My blood pressure was rising, I was sure of it. The anise tasted terrible and the water was as warm as piss. However intrigued by this girl, I didn't know if I could bear it even another minute of sitting alone in bitter recollections that stormed in from out of nowhere.
"So there, you've found your spot and look, you've even begun to sketch the customers!" She seemed delighted to see me, far more delighted than a stranger would be meeting another stranger after a few seconds of introduction and a completely blank history of conversation. But the cloud which had stuffed my head and my ears and was adumbrating everything around me passed suddenly and quickly as she removed an imitation velvet cloth coat with a fake fur collar and shook the rain from it before setting it down along the back of her chair. "May I have a look?" She attempted to remove the sketch from beneath my hands as she seated herself across from me but I kept my palms flat on the table, the paper snug inside.
I cannot allow strangers to see my drawings, I teased, reminding her of having to leave the club for her, relegated to this table alone for nearly two hours yet secretly joyous that she’d arrived after all.
"Do you know that Toulouse-Lautrec used to sit like you in this neighbourhood, in crowded nightclubs, drinking and laughing with patrons and drawing sketches. Then he would take those sketches with him to his studio and work on them as bright-coloured paintings. Is that what you’re going to do, take these sketches of yours back to your studio and turn them into paintings?”
I scoffed. Hardly worth the bother. Besides, I don’t have a studio. I don’t even have a room for the night.
Oh, she said quietly. I didn’t mean to pry. I didn’t realise…you are homeless?
I suppose, in a way, yes. But not in the way you’re imagining. I’ve just arrived here this morning and in the excitement of being here, I guess I just sort of forgot to look for a place to stay. I don’t really mind actually. There’s something romantic about going to a place without a plan, not knowing where you will end up when it’s all said and done, wandering around a new place without a specific purpose…
Ah, but you seem to have had a specific purpose, haven’t you? After all, you followed me for quite a distance, yes, I knew it, but I wasn’t sure why and then when you appeared again in the club, well, I was rather curious to know why you’d been following me. I thought perhaps you knew me and in the club, as dark as it is, well, it was difficult to tell whether or not your face was familiar and yet now that I see you here it seems quite apparent that I don’t know you at all, so still, I am curious. Why were you following me earlier?
I didn’t realise you’d been aware I was following you, I began with embarrassment. I guess I wouldn’t make much of an undercover cop, would I?
She laughed nervously and I imagined I could sense her reassessment of having agreed to meet me at all in the first place. Any minute I expected her to realise the business of solving the mystery of my having followed her was no mystery at all, merely one lonesome man prowling the streets who happened upon her and decided to see where she was headed for lack of anything better to do. I expected her to allow the mistake to sink in for only a few moments before politely excusing herself mentioning the lateness of the hour and disappearing back into the night she’d emerged from, gone forever. But she didn’t appear eager to go anywhere.
So tell me, stranger, she asked, touching my hand lightly, why have you come to Paris then and why did you chose to follow me?
For the same reason you agreed to meet me here, I replied easily, relief in the knowledge that she wouldn’t be taking her leave of me just yet, that the interview wasn’t quite concluded, I was curious.
Her eyebrows were raised remarkably, the habitual, beaten path lines of comers-on etched in the cynicism of her expectations.
And so tell me then, stranger, what precisely were you curious about?
Unfortunately, I had no good answer. I suppose in the world of flirtation, male bravado and self-confidence there are answers that lend momentum to a snappy, comfortable rapport which would have fallen from my lips as the tongue of a panting dog, But in this world I inhabited, there were no well-honed comebacks. I was like a heckled comedian who lost his nerve on stage.
She must have sensed my unease because her hand returned to mine again with reassurance and she smiled, turning her head slightly as though seeing me from a different angle might provide some clue.
You could begin by telling me your name….mine is Anastasia.
And so it began, the stuttering lack of timing and grace gradually succumbing to an unexpected outpouring of detail beginning with Albert’s arrival on my door step, flowing into the personal injury claim, the departure for Utrecht to discover ourselves, the success of one gig that made us believe we might actually be able to subsidise ourselves through a combination of guile and music, waking up the other morning suddenly with that dream still lingering and deciding to take the train, just on the whim of the dream, finding myself here almost as suddenly as I’d decided to come, wandering aimlessly all afternoon in expectation that something unexpected would happen to justify my having come at all.
It’s funny. I was readying myself to pack it in for the night, find a room and start again tomorrow in a different arrondisement, wander more until that inexplicable something would reveal itself to me. I mean, it’s odd because I had faith in it, faith that it was bound to happen, bound to be discovered, if only I were patient and diligent…and then, I spotted you.
So, she said cautiously, am I to infer then that I was the dream? She laughed to herself softly, amused by me in a way that a mother is amused by some unexpected expression uttered by her child.
Well, not entirely…certainly if I wandered long enough, something was bound to grab my attention, fulfil the expectation of finding something, whatever it was. For all I know it could have been a painting or the view as I turned down a particular side street. As it turns out it was you. Not the dream of course and not even necessarily the purpose of being here. But when I saw you, I wanted to know where you were going because perhaps where you were going held some answer…
And as it turned about, a jazz club, she inserted. How ironic, for a jazz musician.
Well, not that I got to hear any of it, I answered shyly.
Perhaps there is some sort of internal yet cosmological magnet between musician, singer, you know, all that jazz, she giggled, feeling clever.
I can’t deny we would certainly be aided by a chanteuse, Albert and I, but somehow I have the feeling there’s more to it.
Her cheeks pinkened and her pupils dilated slightly, perhaps a reaction to the fatigue of the evening or perhaps out of the game of the curiosity, I wasn’t in a position to tell.
Strands of sweat still lightly tinged her eyebrows and even the nape of her neck was damp. I wondered what her singing voice had sounded like. I wondered what those other dark and anonymous faces had registered as she sang.
Well, there’s always a chance of almost anything happened, if you’re in the right position, she teased, smirking, took a cigarette from the pack she'd tossed down next to the ashtray and lit it quickly before the act registered in my brain and my hands could reach for my own lighter. She exhaled quickly, tracing an absent circle with her index finger in a small pile of salt that had spilled several diners before.
I knew she wanted to witness me squirm from the discomfort of having been misinterpreted. I knew it was a little game she was playing with herself, but I wasn't feeling generous any more. Verbalizing the train ride had disembowelled a section of the dream yet again, reality had crept back. She was little more than a desperate urchin. She'd take me back to her apartment, finish me off with a bottle of Absinthe back in her rent-by-the-week apartment in some still seedier section of town, take off enough clothes for the later dream sequence to appear as though we'd actually fucked, then allow me to pass out before stealing my wallet, grabbing what few personal belongings she had in the room that she wanted to keep and then disappearing forever into the buxom night of Paris. I felt sick and lonely all at once, a wave of self-pitying nausea. I stood quickly, clearing my throat.
Well, I suppose we’ve had our fun…your curiosity is satisfied, I know where I can find a jazz club and perhaps I should be pushing on…
"I'll go with you." She volunteered, dropping the cigarette to the floor and grinding it out with the toe of her shoe before standing. The top of her head barely reached my stomach. Suddenly she seemed harmless. "Besides, what do you know of the city? You don’t know what neighbourhoods to steer clear of, you don’t speak the language and you have no place to stay. I couldn’t very well just leave you to wander through the mysterious night of your Paris dream without a guide, could I? Besides, I’m always wound up when I finish over there. I can’t sleep for hours. Usually I just go home alone and sit quietly in the dark, drinking wine and listening to music. It would be interesting to try something different.
Her questions ran along with her trying to keep up with me as I pushed out into the night air which I gulped with great relief and satisfaction, the dyspeptic dread finally departing as though I'd already showered and changed and was seated on a living room sofa with my feet up on the coffee table, a pipe in my mouth and the evening paper beside me.
"You were magnificent" I said suddenly, taking her by her tiny shoulders and looking down at her.
"How? What do you mean? Did you spy on me this evening?"
Nothing of the kind. I meant to say, you are magnificent. I feel better already. Maybe I won't even bother with the train back to Amsterdam after all. What would you say if I told you that? What would you say if I said I wanted to stay a few days, or a week even? Would you let me hear you sing?
I began walking again without waiting for her reply. The night air had suddenly filled me with unassailable buoyancy. I kicked myself inwardly nevertheless for having made the decision to leave the horn behind. Now would have been the most appropriate time! I could have latched onto the banks of the Seine just as the dawn began and lent my own dissonant blaring to bounce off the hours and airs of Paris. All the while Anastasia followed behind, or as closely to my side as possible, double timing her half steps to my determined yet absent-minded strides as we went in no particular direction, street corner after street corner until she finally begged, in exhaustion, that we stop, that the incessant marching cease..
“Le seul honnête homme est celui qui ne se pique de rien” – La Rouchefoucauld
It was late, the sky was littered with traces of dawn.
So if you are a horn player, why have you no horn, she asked as though just making the observation as she pushed open the vaulted front door of an apartment building. I had no idea where we were. She had led me through a labyrinth of winding, ascending streets, alleyways and across sudden boulevards to get here.
I left it behind in Utrecht. I didn’t see the point of bringing it. I hadn’t been intending on performing any serenades although in hindsight, that lack of foresight seemed crippling. Not that I’d have impressed you with my playing anyway, I admitted as we ascended the stairs leading to her flat.
She opened the door, flicked on the light and tossed her keys on the table beside the door which was already overflowing with things having been tossed on that same table without having been picked up. There was smallish front parlour and to the left a kitchen nook that further led down a slight hallway. In the very front of the parlour, facing the door was a television set which had been gutted and then stuffed with as many teddy bears as could possible fit inside, all crammed in with the same blank expression of teddy bear enlightenment, despite the cramped quarters.
What do you think about strangers when entering their flats? A quick glance at the wall coverings before making a beeline for the bookshelf. That’s what Albert taught. Nothing reveals more about a person than their books.
In Anastasia’s case, there was no book shelf. But the studio reflected her passion for collecting, certainly. The teddy bears stuffed into the empty television screen, a few posters on the wall announcing gigs in cafes I’d never heard of by musicians I was utterly unaware of and then, the photographs, everywhere, spread out on tables, on the floor, clipped and cropped, pasted on boards, everywhere little scraps of lives and even glancing at them casually it was apparent that none of those pictured where Anastasia.
Shall we have wine or coffee she asked, already moving into the kitchen and taking a bottle from the cupboard.
As it transpired, we spent a great deal of time looking at photo albums, scrapbooks of strangers even she didn’t know, more photographs from piles of postcards with 50 year old postmarks. I collect photos, she admitted sheepishly but without further elaboration.
I read somewhere, she said finally, that there are two types of refugees. Those with photographs and those without. Which one are you?
I am without photographs, I admitted, although not a refugee, merely the world’s immigrant. Not one, not even in your wallet? Nada, save for my passport photo, I suppose.
Well, my parents were never really ones for taking photographs…we didn’t even really take holidays. Trips out to the ocean some weekends, once, a trip to the mountains upstate, but more or less, we spent our time in our neighbourhood and didn’t really leave very often. There were occasions for photographs, I suppose – birthdays, anniversaries, parties…but my parents weren’t interested in photographing their memories. Frankly, I think they believed there wasn’t much all that memorable to begin with.
She stared at me a long time without a word, her green eyes through which I imagined I could see the neighbouring candlelight flicker, focused on my face as though looking for a hint of a break in the stoic poker player’s face. My defences were taut, disciplined for even then there was something about Anastasia that told you to keep up your guard. Perhaps it was simply the mystery of why. Or that lack of trust in why. It wasn’t as though I didn’t believe I belonged with her – it could just as easily be me as anyone. More a question of why she had chosen me when just as easily, I could have failed to advance past the initial introduction.
I, on the other hand, had merely shown up, having followed her without any particular reason or purpose. I felt certain it wasn’t as simple as a matter of timing – well, perhaps timing in that she was between relationships rather in the middle of one, but certainly not that if I had arrived through the doors of the café a day earlier or five weeks later all chance would have evaporated.
*****
How often I stared with placid imagination at buildings, hundreds and thousands of windows and the goings on going on behind them. Have you ever wondered, I asked her, stopping for a second in mid-pace to stare up and down a building of flats, admiring the dull brick, the identical windows located in identical places one floor above another above another, ever wonder what goes on behind each window? Ever think about the scenes of domesticity or violence or love or boredom playing out, the undusted corners of lifetimes playing out to silence without recognition?
Yea, she said, her voice trailing. But what about the prying eyes outside? What if I step from the bath, fully naked and wander just for a moment, lingering, not with the idea of exposing myself to some pervert just standing there in front of a lit, uncovered window with his dick in his hand just waiting for my appearance, but with a sense of freedom, a sense that there aren’t thousands of gawkers and perverts and psychopaths, just people minding their own business, walking by without a glance…just for a moment so I could stand naked in the light of the window and watch them going by.
You’d see much better with the lights turned off, I offered. You can’t see much of anything coming from the vantage point of light, peering into to darkness. Haven’t you noticed that before? Stand in a room some night, well lit. Stand there and try to make out the darkness outside - ok, it can’t really be done in a city where light outside is everywhere - but the next time you are in the country, try it. You can’t see anything but then when you turn off the light, poof! You and the darkness are one. Once your eyes adjust you can see with clarity.
We were having a drink at a Café Vachette at the corner of Blvd St Michel and rue des Ecoles, far enough from the entrance of the cinema to digest a somewhat forgettable film we’d just seen (forgettable of course, the name has already left my memory and yet what if for her it was a significant, transitional moment? What if for her it was a night never to be forgotten?) without the predictable palaver of pedestrians ejaculated from the same cinema, discussing the same film with the same stunted background of a crippled culture to carry them or the same pompous yet false erudity clinging to their words like a stinking sweat to the underarms.
What I meant, I start in again as if the conversation about the humanity behind the windows we’d had prior to entering the cinema had never ended and instead had been carrying on continuously throughout the film in the back of our minds, was about those lives and what fascinates me about them - not the collectiveness of their existence but the individuality.
She frowned, having perhaps been thinking of something else or else digesting some forgotten fragment of dialogue from the film turning it over and over in her mind only to be intruded upon again with this talk about what goes on in buildings, behind windows.
Individuality? Whatever do you mean? That the lives of identical people with identical cultures, identical thoughts, who watch the same television shows laughing at the same time behind the canned laughter or crying on cue with the crescendo of the music? Or do you mean those flipping through the same magazines and photographs of celebrities, those same dull minds covered in some undulating film of repetition, watching the news broadcast the same story or slight variations thereof over and over? What is so individual about them? This collective humanity? This mindless beast in a mindless herd?
She has worked herself up into a minor froth. I place my hand gently on her wrist and then run the tip of my index finger from her wrist, tracing the outline of each finger.
Of course I didn’t mean those people, I scoff with a palatable albeit feigned contempt. I meant the woman stood in the kitchen worried about whether or not the man who she thinks she is falling in love with is thinking about her at that same moment as she’s stirring a couscous mix into boiling water on the hob.
I meant the undersexed 20-something still suffering the remnants of a devastating case of acne, awkward and skinny, silent and shy amongst his colleagues in some office building stuffed full with fit birds, unimaginable sexy in tight skirts and opened blouses, anonymous but for the jokes others snicker about him around him, just out of earshot, who comes home at night to some flat alone and surfs the internet sated with photographs and movie samples of pornography, maybe even violent pornography and indulges himself in fantasies about what it would be to be noticed and recognised, to have those flock of fit birds talking about him sotto voce to each other adjoined with half phrases about getting him into bed or doing him in the elevator, atop the copy machine…
I meant the man and the woman, one visiting the other’s flat for the first time, the gentle music in the background, the studio filled with 50 or 60 candles, the pullout bed, the silk or satin sheets, the meal that will be cooked but go uneaten, the inaugural sex, the romancing, the beginning - the things that happen between two people at the start of something, all going on behind those windows somewhere as we walk past a building oblivious.
And then we were talking louder, both to ourselves and to others, an impromptu performance art of sorts, ordering another carafe of red wine from the waiter with recklessness observing even his eyes, the flicker of something; amusement, disgust, befuddlement, we aren’t sure and we’ll never ask to find out but the second carafe arrives and Anastasia has now found the syncopation of the idea, delighted with a little game of imagination, thinking in the back of her mind perhaps that the others sat around us might have abandoned their own dull conversations and are now eavesdropping or listening clandestinely whilst still formulating the sentences they are speaking half in and half out of the game…
Do you mean also the heartbroken teenage girl who cries herself to sleep at night, hidden under the covers waiting for her stepfather to make some excuse to come in?
Or perhaps the single mother of three, scratching out an existence without pleasure, the joy of these three once-beautiful children now deformed by the insistence of realistic choices; new dresses for that one, a new pair of basketball trainers for that one, worried to death the third is hanging out with the wrong crowd and any night there will be that call from the police…all the while squeezing meals out of such a tight budget like a fat woman into a dress two sizes too small, worrying whether she will have enough to last the week and wow, never once contemplating her auld fantasies of life sitting there in the kitchen with a glass of wine and a cigarette, feet up, children asleep or away, suddenly discovering she is now too auld, her stretch marks too wide, the lines beneath her eyes to deep, the jowls sagging too far gone to ever return to youth before she was ever a mother and dreams were a possibility not some city you’ve just departed from an aeroplane she knows she will never return to again?
I nod my head, pouring us both generous cups of wine in reward, indeed. There are all sorts behind those windows…a man whose wife has recently died who must now sit in the flat they shared an entire life in suffocated by memories and waiting out each day like a lifetime prison sentence waiting for his own execution, the release of death from misery having long ago forgotten what life had been capable of without her and not caring anymore as he had moored his boat of adventure to her so long ago for so many years there never was another lifetime to have contemplated.
And we carried on in this vein for some time, sipping our wine, trying to out-imagine one another, forgetting there were others around us at all, at ease that none of the lives we described or imagined were ours at the moment, no prisons, no death sentences, no slow crawl of endurance.
We were free!
And we left the café laughing, leaving money behind which could have fed the poor or given another drink to the homeless slug who was always sat on a cardboard box around the corner with his head bowed and a little can in front of him wearing a sign that might have proclaimed he didn’t drink or do drugs but needed money for food.
*****
Do you believe in fate, she asked me one afternoon when we were sprawled out, limb in limb, tracing the outline of each other’s skin, watching the shadows lengthen through the windows. Why do you ask – do you have us in mind? I stood up then to have a cigarette and pace but she pulled me back down again, nonono, she whispered, I just mean in the sense of where any of us are heading, the direction you chose, the direction I chose, why certain strangers walk past you on certain days but never again, why some are born in one country where there is poverty and starvation yet others in a market economy perfectly adept at handling the possibility of that individual’s economic potential, you know – in a vague yet not too general way…
I could quote Emerson, for example, I said, growing more uncomfortable and making another, more successful effort at releasing myself from the floor and the mattress and getting up to the table to roll a cigarette. Emerson said that fate was just deeds committed in a prior existence.
That doesn’t answer the question of whether you do or don’t believe in fate, Witold. What made you choose to leave NYC? And once you left, why Utrecht and once in Utrecht why did you leave your friend behind to come here and once here, why did you decide on entering my club and even then, that we were placed in the same place at the same time, something gave you the nerve, the verve, the desire to approach me and even though I wasn’t the most receptive possible, merely calculatedly mysterious, you were eager to see the possibilities through without worrying what disappointment might lie ahead. Was it fate, partially fate, partially choice, or just dumb luck?
There’s no such thing as dumb luck, only good and bad luck. In the instance of meeting you, I’d say it was more a matter of chance than of fate or choice. Is chance considered fate when chance is created in part at least, by your own choices? I think fate implies it is absolutely, utterly out of our hands – like the weather. You can dress up for the cold or for rain but you cannot control if it rains or becomes cold. I cannot control that I met you however, the circumstances were in part, created by my own actions – unknowingly at first, let’s say up to the point when I’d first spoken with you in the club – but thereafter, it is less a matter of chance or of fate than of two people with somewhat similar goals, even as broad and simple as getting to know each other.
Well then, let’s say it is a matter of fate or for destiny, her hand ran along her left shin bone and stopped at her knee. Fate would have been determined by something beyond our control as in, some higher power brought us together for a reason. Could be the fate of souls perhaps, souls which are destined, in the course of living to meet again and again through various stages of existence perhaps. You know, like perhaps in another life, if you believe such things of course, we knew each other very dearly and even though the lives that were the vessels of our souls had long expired, once new vessels were found, like this life we are living now, our souls were bound to be reunited.
Smoke tapered upwards from her cigarette left burning in the ashtray as she sipped at her wine. Fate, on the other hand, might be much similar in that those souls are still meant to be reunited but we too are participating. Perhaps we are doing so knowingly or unknowingly. You coming to Paris, my being on the street I was on when you first started following me.
If we did not follow this destiny, it would have been fate.
I exhaled and stared out the window of her flat overlooking Rue Mont Saint Genevieve. She had already stood as well, changing the disc from a sombre yet unknown jazz pianist to a wild and incomprehensible Ornette Coleman as though the cacophony might release us both out of the cocoon of the fledgling comfort of roads still on the horizon, yet untaken.
Well, most of these photographs are of people I don’t even know, she commented, turning page after page, stood in her panties in a brazen display of either self confidence or apathy. Her words, as I focused unflinchingly on the bulb of her buttocks the fabric of the panties couldn’t quite cover and then downward to the arc of her calves into her ankles, as much as those words were to have been cherished, were somehow lost, as though they weren’t being spoken at all, merely forming a background symphony to an visual presentation. And then I faded back in time to catch her continuing: Sometimes, she elaborated as though I’d been paying attention all along yet somehow sensed the impossibility of my concentration and hence her stance there in the twilight of the flat in her panties, lighting a cigarette of her own, it’s more interesting trying to interpret the lives of others through the memories represented by their photographs than it is reliving your own…
And without an introductory preamble she suddenly changed discs again and the Chet Baker River was flowing between the walls, carrying us on a fool’s errand.
*****
Nothing happened.
I stayed for two weeks in that flat with her.
The second morning I stole the keys, crept out in secret although secretly she was likely not such a heavy sleeper she would have no idea I was heading out, and got out into the streets of morning Paris.
Regardless of the last day and twelve hours, I’d had a yet unperformed desire to walk the streets alone. Especially at this particular moment when you need the space to reflect on all that was taking place inside the walls of Anastasia’s flat in that time frame from which we hadn’t left since entering.
Without wanting to break the yolk, the rhythm, the syncopation of bonding, I still felt compelled to get out - the air, the smells, the foreign language until now had consisted primarily of everything inside her flat and nothing of the world outside. Not that I minded, but it was getting unnerving as though without a backdrop of some sort of reality to add dimension, the entire encounter might well have been some sort of dream, a prolonged stare out the window in a moving train letting my idle thoughts wander into the woods, over the plain, of mystery.
I wasn’t gone long, mind you. I wanted to stretch my mind, like my legs, to ascertain what I was thinking – my thoughts had not been my own for the last day and a half. It was as though I had been sitting for a painting and now wanted to see what it looked like.
At first, it was just a roll up and a coffee in the first café I came across. But there was no real concentrating. Every fabric in my skin breathed her – I could smell her perfume, her hair conditioner, her sheets, her voice lingered in my ears – everything that had been in that flat had come with me in scented form and it was after all, impossible to escape.
And there was no real walking. Yes, the movements were similar but inside, I was floating – as though watching myself walk without having to actually perform the act, or incapable of it. This is what it is like in the last milliseconds of life, I thought – the experience often recounted of rising above the body, above the room, the earth beneath you eventually growing so distant it is but a speck as you are drawn to a greater light. This was infatuation in action.
The barman was saying something to me – no idea what – I had been speaking aloud to myself, muttering as though completely alone and now, caught in mid speech, I stamped out my cigarette, shrugged to the barman and headed back out of the café into the street again.
I was able to accumulate a few provisions before returning to the flat. Some eggs, several different cheeses, none of which were familiar and so like gambling, just as with the wine, placing bets based on the colour of a label or the way the words were assembled. Bread was easy enough and ham I was well familiar with, as were the smoked sausages and fruit.
When I returned to the flat it was as though we’d been living together for years. There was an air of familiarity which only a short period of time had woven yet a familiarity untinged by boredom or fatigue. These two lives were affixed, however provisionally, to one another, slapped together like a sandwich constructed from the remnants of the fridge until one of us would allow a larger hunger to gnaw at us and it would all be consumed. Was it prophetic or merely inevitable that one or the other would eventually wear this relationship like a stringy sinew snapped and twisted, a meniscus tear or rotator cuff gone off its wheels.
Already she had assembled herself prior to my return, fatigued with dreaming, too excited to lie still in contemplation, fidgety with the temporality of my disappearance. This is how it was at first – those first few drinks were just settling into the bloodstream and you could feel the effect of the alcohol in the head yet the vision was still clear, the speech, unslurred.
There was a hot bath running whilst she went about picking up the clutter of accumulation the last few days had assembled.
What did you bring me, she asked impatiently, reflexively leaving the sink and the dishes to greet me at the door as though we’d been doing this already for years. Proudly, I emptied the contents of the sacks – feasts for lovers, enough wine to set us into days of oblivion – on to the table for approval. The contents said all I cared to say: let us not leave this flat, not now, not ever, let us maintain this clean oblivion and nest herein forever.
Her reaction was mixed.
It wasn’t as though she didn’t necessarily share the enthusiasm but perhaps the enthusiasm, in hindsight, was tempered by reality – the reality of knowing her own life rather than flinging herself recklessly into this ritual as I was willing to do.
That’s a lot of cheese and wine, she noted, picking through the selection with expertise, rubbing labels with her thumb and forefinger as though hoping to peel away a more sublime quality. Starving artists, she shrugged to herself without further comment. But it did not escape her that this appeared to be a survival kit assembled to last for days, rather than hours. She wasn’t yet sure how that felt.
We shared meals although eventually, as though realising a hidden crime in spending the entirety of my time in Paris in her flat, Anastasia was able to lure me outside when the sun was brightest and the flat was growing stale.
Out we went for walks on clichéd tours of the bookstalls of the Quay, sifting through paperbacks and manuscripts, art histories, bartering prices when one struck either of us. We spent hours in museum cafés yet visited no museums, walked along the Seine, one bank to another, crisscrossing bridges with reckless abandon and spent token gestures sitting for hours in cafés, before eventually touring bars and allowing a different form of intoxication to overcome us.
And so it went most days and nights. Mornings, incapable of sleep once the repetition of traffic began outside the windows like the breaking of waves on the beach and before long I’d be standing, already accustomed to the reality that Anastasia would sleep well beyond the stirrings of civilisation outside the flat and there would be long hours alone for myself, these sort of moments I once longed for, bathing in the oil baths of solitude until I began waking up in her flat. Then it was simply a matter of killing time.
I killed time by walking as though boredom is a bomb waiting to go off once motion stops.
I began with short forays, circles around neighbourhoods with the spirals outward growing gradually. You could be utterly ignorant of history and still wonder through timeless unfamiliarity, overcome by the senses – Albert would’ve had to page through a myriad of history books and start each jaunt knowing precisely where he planned on ending up simply because that’s how he went about travelling. But I was content to move in a dreamlike sequence, imagining history without the facts, piecing it together in from the stories I imagined overhearing conversations I couldn’t understand in family-run cafés, butchers, cheese mongers and tobacconist shops.
Infatuation has a way of weaving its way into every moment, every sight and sound, every impression and no matter how many far I walked, I was dreaming in this web about a future with Anastasia spent here – that I barely knew her or her habits made little difference as I tiled together a mosaic of future moments walking those same streets, the moments and sights and experiences conjured up from an imaginary future with no basis in reality, no matter the wishing or dreaming it were already so.
I tried to rationalise that this was simply a temporary experience, following temptation, morsels of Anastasia left like crumbs throughout the day to nibble on. I knew at the bottom of the barrel there would nothing left eventually – I knew this simply for the historical precedents of other women that had already arrived and departed in the year long terminals of train station after train station.
But there was no stemming this benevolent rush of water overwhelming the emotional levy built in time to prevent precisely this sort of infatuation from overrunning me. There was only walking and dreaming and when once noon had come and gone I knew it would be time to head back to her flat, that she’d already be awake, drawn gradually back to consciousness by coffee with a tiny shot of anisette.
And when I returned, there was no cause for further dreaming because there I was, living the very dream I’d been walking through – a punctual kiss and back to the business of waking for already I was learning that nothing could be forced upon her and it was better still to leave the hints and suggestions to her lest those dreams start leaking from my head out of my mouth and into her ears and the entire hideous charade was exposed.
By early afternoon it was back out in the streets for a small lunch followed by another walk through one of many parks she seemed attached to. It was by no means solitude but there was still a unique intimacy that must surely have been apparent to strangers who might happen to have watched us from a distance.
I wanted to convince myself that we were like other couples we came across but there was little evidence – you sensed that those people around us had already had lengthy histories, had gone up and down a hundred different times, had loved and spat bile at one another. We were neophytes, tentative, hardly ourselves but the best impressions of ourselves.
And always it was me poking and prodding into her past getting desultory answers which made the piecing together all the more impossible. She showed occasional interest in my own background but for her part she appeared to prefer finding out my background via tactical philosophical questions, the kind of questions on computer programmes designed to evaluate your answers into a psychological profile.
She didn’t like talking much about the past. She’d dummy up immediately and between us it would seem as though a storm had suddenly blown in on what had moments before been perfect weather – sometimes she’d just change the subject abruptly, other times refuse outright to delve any deeper – in either case, I didn’t get much out of her save for observations of things going on around us or little historical miscellanea prompted by a turn around a corner, a building’s face, a street sign where a resistance member had fallen in the liberation of Paris.
In so many ways it was an odd experience that I should have either just broken away and returned to Utrecht before I’d become any more pathetic with a lack of emotional control like a premature ejaculator or should have somehow managed not to allow the emotion to pervade me, to deflect it one moment after another like swatting gnats around the head, late summer afternoon.
And thus I was in the unique position of constantly fluctuating state between joy and melancholy, my nerves jumbled by too many quirky stops and starts, too much caffeine, emotion on the fingertips like a match held too long and in some ways, when she would leave at night, I’d be relieved.
On the nights she had gigs, she always demurred my self-invitations to come along in audience. You would be too distracting, she’d deflect. I would forget the lyrics of songs and lose a note or two. This is my profession, Witold. You wouldn’t have wanted me hanging around with you in that law firm of yours, would you? Of course not, and so it is with me in my work place, even if it is just a dingy nightclub, even if you are on holiday with too many hours to kill. It would be too difficult for either of us to understand.
The enigmas of Anastasia were partly woven by odd phrases which I could never quite decipher whether they were meant to portray a deeper meaning than a twisted phrase in English, or were merely grammatical errors with no hidden agenda. How can you tell with a woman around whose every corner another unsettling inability to pinpoint lurked?
One afternoon we were walking and as we walked she started telling me about this Parisian girl named Amélie Hélie, a singer at the beginning of the 1900s. She was nicknamed the Casque d’Or for her lengthy, golden hair. The leaders of two rival bands in the neighbourhood, the Corsican Leca and his rival, Manda, both fell in love with her, madly, brutally. Their competition for her eventually grew into a big battle one day on this very street, rue de Haies. A big battle with knives and guns. They were arrested and then appeared before the magistrate. The magistrate keeps badgering Manda about why the battle grew in the first place, refusing to believe that it wasn’t over neighbourhood territory, but a girl. Manda said something to the magistrate like, we fought each other, the Corsican and me, because we love the same girl. We’re crazy about her. Don’t you know what it is to love a girl?
So what happened I asked, thinking the magistrate saw the logic of the explanation and let them free to fight some knightly battle for the girl’s hand. We both had stopped walking and were simply standing off to the side of the street as passers-by dodged us.
I think Manda got life and Leca got many years and they were both deported off to hard labour.
Hmmm. The magistrate wasn’t swayed toward violent demonstrations of love? Free will out the window?
Something like that, but worse still, after all of this…she paused, waiting for me to light her cigarette. A friend of Leca, seeking revenge for his comrade, stabbed Amélie one night in the club where she sang. She didn’t die, but she could no longer perform as a singer. She’s buried at Bagnolet. Sometimes it isn’t sufficient in life not to let yourself fall in love because letting someone else fall in love with you can have equally damning consequences.
*****
Instead of ripping my fingers into her soil and digging further, the foreboding facial expressions, the slight change in pitch of vocal chords, which she must in any case, as a singer been a master of, all conspired to convince me to be satisfied with not knowing further, to accept with further innuendo, whatever was presented.
Left me to my own devises by the time rush hour traffic was hitting its peak as though the timing of it were meant not to leave me alone but united with the thousands of souls racing around the boulevards and traffic circles to keep me company in her absence.
It was then the thirst would overtake me. I needed conversations in a city whose language I didn’t speak.
Instead I walked from wherever we had been, the scent of her perfume still in my nostrils and headed for the Panthéon, the beginning of a long, winding journey through a bastion of student life forward to the Place de la Contrescarpe and then behind there, a few streets of misdirection and I’d find myself at Le Teddy’s for it’s bedroom-like salon of chess players and beer drinking, the ground through which I’d slammed my pole and flag of discovery as my local, my oasis and new-found reality all at once.
Walking worked well in the mornings but once the dark of day’s business end drew a curtain across the sky and the paths were more uncertain, the markings less clear, it was time to head indoors and as most places before and since I would discover, with time, persistence, a predictable presence, eventually humanity would return to me. Perhaps it was equally myself once a few beers had registered, oiling my jaw and mouth enough to dare speak to strangers without knowing the language of strangers and intimated through facial movements and hand gestures until inevitably, someone would show up or make their presence known and the roadblock to communication would disappear through translation.
There were delineated stages of the evening defined by the coming and going of customers and regulars whilst I remained planted at a key position in the middle of the bar, wandering through one conversation after another until the hours had filled up as simply as empty beer mugs and before I knew it, time to return to Anastasia’s flat for a midnight snack and a shower.
Yet even within the course of several nights haunting this same place I was able to discover revocable bonds with some of the locals, Didier, in particular.
Inside Teddy’s we are roaring to life beyond happy hour. Didier, as his comrades have fallen away, one after another yet somehow our space at the bar ebbs and flows until now, flooded as it is with humans, he must nearly shout his questions to me.
Do you feel as though you’ve been especially summoned, that there is a special calling for you as an artist? Are you particularly aliented with a pronounced sense of being misunderstood by conventional wisdoms, bourgeois moralities? He was asking me these questions, he the unemployed poet, the aspiring artist, the man who couldn’t simply allowing himself to drown in his drink and keep quiet about it.
What’s the point anyway, I ask pointedly. Isn’t this all some crutch you use to get through your daily misgivings your dissatisfaction with yourself in comparison to the accomplishments of the others? What purpose does your art serve other than a selfish mechanism of petty, egotistical indulgences?
What purpose does my art serve? He asked with incredulity. What purpose do you serve if we are speaking about purposes. What is your utility? Is there some very special yet hidden trait woven into your genomes that will come to fruition and blossom in the righteousness of your purpose?
Calm down, Didier, I caution, licking my lips nervously as other patrons are looking at us out of the corners of their eyes. What I mean to ask is what purpose do you propose your creativity to be used for other than yourself?
Why should my creativity serve any purpose other than for myself, he asked, clearing his throat of Gitanes phlegm like a plumber snakes a clogged toilet. I suffer enough from my choices, they make sure I do suffer indeed for not being one of their productive members of society…I could never calculate the psychological damage brought upon me by seeing the contempt in their eyes. And why then do you think I drink? Who wouldn’t under these circumstances? What are you saying, simply because I cannot subordinate my art into acceptable consumerist values like writing commercial jingles about disposable diapers or creating new superlatives for the unique comfort and absorption of a particular brand name tampon, I should crawl into my preternatural cave to wallow in my own isolation, fed on disgust, shat into neat little pellets that can be easily swept up and disposed of as if I never existed?
He was easily excitable this evening, either in a particularly foul mood or simply unreceptive to my line of questioning. In any case, the monologue was spat forth with great intensity, with barely a breath drawn. And just why are we suffocated with this doomed sense of having to justify ourselves and our utility to others? Do you think the pimply teenage bagging groceries in the Carrefour hypermarché is pissing himself over his lack of purpose? A paper-shuffler, lost in a bureaucratic labyrinth of spread sheets and interoffice memos is scratching his head wondering why he hasn’t yet soared to the heights of his corporate manager, fluent in corporate techno speak gibberish?
This silly question of yours, questioning the purpose of my forsaking the chain gang of subordinates, pacified by television soma, beaten into submission by the overwhelming nature of keeping up, this is nothing to me. I laugh at it. I am proud of being poet, a craftsman. Proud of not being nothing, beautiful for it, in fact. Look, Gautier once wrote that only things that are altogether useless can truly be beautiful; anything that is useful is ugly because it is the expression of some need and the needs of man are base and disgusting as his nature is weak and poor. -
And furthermore, he added, warming to his subject like a university professor unwittingly lured from the patina of his daily monologue in front of an unfocused group of students, Pessoa agreed, “Freedom is the possibility of isolation. You are free if you can withdraw from people, not needing them for the sake of money, company, love, glory or curiosity, none of which can thrive in silence and solitude. If you can’t live alone, you were born a slave. You may have all the splendours of the mind and the soul, in which case you’re a noble slave, or an intelligent servant, but you’re not free. And you can’t claim tragedy, for the tragedy of being born what you are belongs to Fate alone. Hapless you are, however, if life’s very oppression forces you to be a slave, Hapless you are , if having been born free, capable of being separate and self-sufficient, poverty then forces you to live with others, This tragedy, yes, belongs to you and follows you…”
And that is what the purpose of my art is. Not to cultivate myself out of egoism, not simply to avoid the plague of working for some other fat pig who will make profit from my sweat and leave me scratchings in return. The purpose of my art is to elevate me out of this slavery of civilisation…to free me to be myself, not just the self in front of you in physical disarray, but the self I am beneath all the surfaces, the subconscious, the bones, the gristle and blood, the ineptitude of years, deep down below all of this, like an object buried in a landfill which will never be dug out, lies myself, the self I am trying to discover, my only reason for living here, now drinking this beer with you, walking home – all of it seems entirely without purpose unless it is in the name of this search.
I heard Didier’s voice ringing in my ears all the way home, having finally extracted myself politely, excused myself, my existence, wondering whether I was beautiful or ugly, useless, or useful…the world was upside down and I was rapidly becoming a slave to the schedule of Anastasia. This was my sense of purpose.
*****
And sometime before dawn I would hear the key in the door as I lie attempting to sleep despite the racing of an adrenaline heart and the anticipation like a dog of his master coming home and I would hear her footsteps creeping quietly across the front room floor and after giving her time to pour a glass of wine and have a seat, I would rise as well, feigning as though I’d been sleeping all along and we would go through a predictable round of apologies for waking me as though I hadn’t been waiting like a predator all evening for this particular moment to arrive and my subsequent dismals of the apologies for wanting her company and pouring a glass of wine myself she would unwind her evening to me in great detail, each song that she sung, the reaction of the crowd at particular moments, whom she spoke with, whom she met, what she had to drink in between sets until every detail had been scratched into my imagination deeply enough that I could almost convince myself I’d been there as well.
She was often exhausted by the effort, the reliving and recounting but would relax more deeply asking me about the conversations I managed to remember from the evening, which characters I could myself recall through the hazy evening. Half the stories I made up from conversations I’d had before with Albert because the truth was, a great deal of the conversations I’d had, mired as they were in a lack of common language and the tilting back of glasses invariably meant that I’d spend most of those conversations determining the dialogue myself as though I were writing it now free from the slowing tactics of alcohol and translations.
Don’t you get bored of that place, those people, the same beers, the same faces?
No, they are like a human glue holding me together some nights. I suppose I could have found better uses of my time but the truth is, coming home to your empty flat with so much time to kill is like sitting on death row awaiting a stay of execution. I need these people, like I’ve needed all the people before them – if I am a juggler, their faces are the balls I am juggling and concentrating on those faces I am able to juggle.
Through the candlelight of the flat, I could see her staring at me – why you’re just a drunk, Witold; you don’t have to make excuses just for me. I can’t judge you any more than myself – it isn’t the faces as often it is the drink you are juggling and instead of helping the concentration it is merely distracting it. I know, I’ve done in for many years here and alone.
But we don’t have to be alone, I would protest as though arguing with a republican about the merits of the royal family. We’ve worn paths through ourselves in that pattern, being alone and just as easily, with time, we can wind paths through each other…
And the moat would be drawn back in and her feet would curl and her knees hugged closer to her chest. Not now, she would murmur. Not yet and maybe never but still always possible. There are a lot of years on that same path with too many false steps in wrong directions. That’s why I need this time alone even if the one thing I seem to want most is to be with you.
The value of life can be calculated only by the itemisation of the sum and intensity of experiences, she said.
One of the reasons I keep all these photographs of strangers, she was explaining early that morning after undressing and pouring a glass of cognac from a bottle purloined from the club, is because I try to abstract the particulars from the universal, the parts from this composite. I wonder all the time what it is that makes one or two men, say, out of a collection of them in one photograph, here, she gestured, handing over a photograph of black-faced miners standing below the photographer looking up as if from the bowels of hell, regarding God. Look at this photograph. Notice how one or two of the faces particularly grab you – why? Is it the angle of the light, the photographer’s vision, or some internal aura that the captured soul demonstrates for that one split second?
She calmed after this sales pitch of the individual over the collective and visibly decided that I could be trusted with her next line of reasoning. When I regard men I wonder what qualities about them I might admire, what characteristics might I absorb through being in their presence – of course, the obvious – the only qualities which are not intentionally hidden or cannot be hidden in our venal society, are the easiest, yet least accurate measure of judging. I cannot tell from looking at this photograph, any history of the strangers below. I cannot decided who would be the more caring lover, who would make the better father, who would be the drunkard or the wild spirit yet in their eyes, those little white circles peering out from the soot of their faces, I can tell who among them is a decent man…
The candour was overwhelming when it came spilling out of her like that so unexpectedly that I’d almost want to ask her to repeat it again to make sure it hadn’t been just another imagined bit of dialogue in my head on a morning walk of dreaming.
I wanted to believe her but I wondered instead, with a vague jealous passion, what she was doing. I wondered about friends which she must have had whom she didn’t introduce me to. I wondered if there was someone else allowed to attend her gigs, wondered how many lovers amongst the musicians she had taken or still took. I wondered who stared at her dreamily as she sang, who invited her for drinks between sets, who she shared jokes with and if of any of them, she explained my sudden appearance.
Her minute descriptions of her evening always pointedly ignored what was probably the reality of most of her evenings, whether it was merely in my imagination or not.
I have to admit, my heart was fairly limping along with me those nights. It was a rather unfamiliar feeling; queasiness, excitement, uncertainty. The hours we spent together seemed like part of the same stitched together during sleep and the moment we parted, reality loomed ahead again. I didn’t think about Utrecht or Albert or any other moment in my life. I was living solely for the moment when we would meet up again.
*****
I have something to tell you Witold, she mentioned casually as we sat in Jardin du Luxembourg tearing off hunks of bread from a loaf and stuffing it with cheese whilst washing the meal down with wine. I sat up, alarmed. Finally the penny would drop.
I’ve had a month-long gig scheduled for some time, a gig that I can’t really break or postpone and it’s not here in Paris.
No problem, I shrugged, I’ll come along.
No….she drew her words out carefully, shaking her head. We can’t really do that you see…first of all, the place that booked me allows me free room and board which isn’t to share…
I could find a place wherever it is and stay back, in the shadows-like, I smiled playfully, unable to mask the fear in my voice.
Well, you know how I feel about having you see my gigs…there just isn’t much point. Besides, I want to have some time alone. To digest all of this, she explained calmly, waving her hand somewhere in the vicinity between her and I.
Aha, I knew there was a catch to all this sudden happiness, I lamely attempted to joke. Boyfriend stashed away somewhere else?
She smiled patiently. No, no boyfriend stashed elsewhere in a secret cupboard in another town. It’s just like I said, time alone to reflect. Besides, aren’t your friends going to start worrying about you?
Ah, so it is your concern for my friends…I felt instantly and regrettably bitter. She caressed my head and looked deeply into my eyes as though willing my comprehension.
When I return, I will come up to Utrecht to visit you…
*****
There were, of course, untold questions I wanted to ask but I wasn’t sure I really wanted to know the answers. There were nights of unflinching truths I’d often heard my father express about things I could only imagine, truths which were usually better left unspoken, as he often impressed upon me about my mother.
Deep down the desire to pout and pull in as though doing so would alter the reality of the situation was overwhelming at times. Any inducement out of pain, any remedy for the imagination of incessant infidelities or worse still, apathy. I wanted to insist on coming along, verifying myself things were as innocent as they were being portrayed but I wasn’t certain I wanted to be around to find out they weren’t.
I wanted to say fuck the whole thing, sorry I’d come along for the ride, wanted to roll in a slough of my own bile, my own greed for more, my own in fatigable paranoias and distrust. But I didn’t want to feel this new limb severed, didn’t care for the idea of feeling the numbness set in, the futile blankness of knowing something that was once full with promise had been emptied, deflated, punctured. I knew better somehow, innately, not to want either extreme for neither extreme instinctively, was not the answer, merely a impatient conclusion.
Play it cool, coldly and calmly and play it warm, supple and with feeling.
*****
So the next morning, bitterest of mornings, reeking fear and regret, I was seen off. Anastasia seemed genuinely disturbed by the looming departure but I, as the entire time I’d been trying to piece her together, hour by hour, sleeping or awake, through gestures, facial expressions, hidden meanings in seemingly innocuous utterances, remained as confused as ever about whether there was any difference between what she appeared and sounded and felt and what she really was – what did I knew even after all these days and hours accumulated like rain water in a bucket left outside in a draught, was that I didn’t know her at all. I didn’t trust her, I didn’t understand her yet somehow I was able to convince myself there was something growing in me which she was unquestionably a part of – as though the root of an indigestion can be pinpointed through a specific meal, oh, it was the chilli dogs and sauerkraut, no doubt.
So departure was drawn out with a breadcrumb trail of promises and yet still somehow, even though I was apprehensive about it, relieved and heavily medicated from our farewell night that drew out into the early first train of the morning in the direction of Amsterdam, I wanted to leave the thread of this emotion at the station and let it unravel all the way to the end of the journey so that at any time, if either of us had been so inclined, we could merely follow the strand of thread all the way back to the origin, crawling through a tiny hole in the universe that had begun with a stilted conversation in a night club.
*****
Odd, what a difference a woman can make.
As Paris faded away and gradually made its way to Brussels, it was impossible to ignore the simultaneously twitching in my brain, staring out the window lost in reliving every memory I could manage to piece together as though relieving every note played in a show, the heavy eyelids of two sleepless nights holding sway in between the sticky familiarity of a train ride which was heading back to what was almost familiar yet still lacked the feeling of home.
*****
Was it so long ago pulling into the Utrecht Central Station with Albert, eyes brimming raw with excitement and now, one woman later, every kilometre left behind on the tracks was a deeper surge of the incommunicable pain racing through the veins, numbing yet simultaneously heightening the pain.
There was little to do in Utrecht but pine away, stuff two week’s worth of memories into every day to be replayed over and over, hour by hour like a television sitcom you’ve seen so many times there isn’t an unfamiliar episode remaining.
It’s not like we ever had that much to do to distract ourselves with in the beginning.
Considering our cramped quarters, it was a relief to pick up black work through a friend of a pub friend, if only to get out, focus on something other than memories and clear some space in the head.
My apprenticeship as an electrician interrupted, I had retained enough familiarity with a job site through the summers with my father to be able to work my way around Arjen’s when it came to carpentry and basic electricity and so passed most days working off the steam of infatuation with my hands.
At first it was more than sufficient as a distraction. Day over, I would gather myself back to the flat, filthy from head to toe and exhausted. If he wasn’t already in a pub or café, Albert would be drinking steadily in the flat, chain smoking and listening to music through the flea market stereo he bought the first week we’d moved in.
The flat itself was above a Somali takeaway on Amsterdamsestraatweg, one flight above the kitchen where food was prepared we shared the bathroom and shower facilities with the cook and her staff and then another flight above it, the top floor of the building which opened from a kitchenette into a 10 x 15 metre bare wood floor flat.
We’d partitioned the space as best as possible but it was a small space for two people. A large kitchen table never used for eating on, just dumping stuff on – books, papers, empty beer bottles, clothes, rags and whatever else found it’s way into the flat but no further – the kitchen table like a border guard, was off to the right clearing a vague path into what we determined to be a combination of a front parlour and makeshift bedroom made up of a futon which I slept on although usually only it’s sofa form, rarely bothering to even pull it out lest the trouble of having to push it all back in the following morning. Just before entering the parlour there was a small ladder leading to a small crawl space within which Albert had tossed a mattress and a few small drawers. It wasn’t of such a height that he could stand up straight in it but in most cases he didn’t seem to care as it was enough work to crawl up into the space and onto the mattress to snooze away the hours.
We had no television – like freaks without societal connections, our only method of newsgathering was via innuendo and gossip in Marktzicht and even then, limited. The familiar faces that took the favoured places in the café gathered there every day as if following through on a daily reservation, other workers coming in from a long day with plenty to complain about, observe and contemplate, all within the half pint amsterdametjes that were poured down their thirsty gullets.
Everything had a method in the day of a worker. Following work there was the obligatory shower although some either too lazy or too impatient for drink would go directly to the café and start in. In either situation, by 6, the café was flush with workers sat around tables, depending on the weather in or out of doors, drinking beers and gossiping, filling the air with themselves, their voices, their laughter.
And then as though deflating, they would one by one, get up and head home for dinner content that they were sufficiently buzzed to make it through dinner, an hour or two of blank stare television and then bed.
The first night out with Albert I attempted explaining the meeting with Anastasia. I’d sent a few cryptic postcards to him that I wasn’t coming back straight away but beyond that, I hadn’t mentioned anything. Now I was a faucet that couldn’t be turned off.
In time it was up to Albert to shut me up. Nothing’s more annoying than listening to someone going on and on about some girl, some infatuation, some inability to shut one’s mouth for a moment long enough to allow the other to get a word in edgewise. So you see, there is nothing more boring. We have an entire world here to talk about, gigs to rehearse for, side streets to explore, people to meet. I can’t stomach the idea of spending the next few weeks listen to you waddle on about some girl you just met as though you’d already had five kids with her and you were reliving your memories on a deathbed fifty years later. Enough already. I get the picture. I’ve got every detail stored away in my head. Now seeing as how the situation won’t be changing any time soon, might I suggest we go back about our business and end this incessant warbling about love and women?
He was right, of course. At this rate I would drive away every friend we’d met since we got here so I directed this passion and enthusiasm to writing letters to her instead. Fucking encyclopaedias they were, devotionals, hymns, scraps of poetry, lyrics, new Dutch words I’d learned, things I saw in a given day that reminded of her in every blade of grass, every shift in the wind, changing of the sky, dawn to dusk as though there was not a droplet of a single second I wished to pass without her having knowledge of it.
Anyone can tell you such obsession is not only unhealthy, but bound by its very nature to disappoint, he went on, perhaps feeling a tinge of guilt for his recriminations. Unless of course, you can imagine a reciprocal relationship where the emotions of one are equal to the emotions of another, in depth and intensity – puppy love, if you will, which is not bound to last. For every pair of high school sweethearts there, rolled out like a line of custom-made Rolls Royces, there are five times as many crap cars manufactured whose shells you will see littering streetscapes – just like these false senses of love and harmony. We aren’t meant to spend our time wallowing in love with one another; we aren’t wired for it because it’s too self-destructive. What would man ever accomplish if he spent all his time trying to fall in love rather than merely trying to get laid?
Albert was one to often preach the utility of whores – lamenting the simplicity with which man’s second most difficult labour after the effort to acquire power, the effort to get laid, could have been made if the world had merely embraced prostitution rather than try to sweep it under the carpets of morality. Can you imagine, he would struggle breathlessly with the potential of this fantasy of his, can you imagine if everywhere in the world were like Holland, if getting laid was merely a matter of walking around the corner with 100 guilders and a hard on in your pocket? Can you imagine all the broken hearts that would have been saved, all the fucking time and trouble we men could have been spared all these years? Fuck. You think man has progressed and advanced so far in this space of time and yet you wonder what he might have been able to do, far greater heights in far less a period of time had he not been consumed with constructing methods and schemes for getting laid….
But Albert, I said, deciding to play the devil’s advocate solely because I had a flutter of infatuation in my heart and because it was still early afternoon yet I was already feeling light headed from beer, uncertain I would last the night. Certainly you can’t imagine all of those girls being enterprising young capitalists who don’t mind exchanging a series of sucks and fucks over a period of several years in exchange for financial security? Surely you recognise that the majority are there against their will, or against their nature, forced by circumstances into a life of prostitution. Surely you can understand how unsavoury it must be for them, day in and day out to take men into their bodies, no matter how clinical the method is with which they deal with these bodies who have little or no personalities, just hard little dicks to compel them. I mean, do you imagine them all merely nymphomaniacs who found a sound financial mechanism through which to express their nymphomania?
Albert scoffed. It is volunteer work, he muttered into his beer. Sure, maybe the idea of servicing a dozen disgusting men a day isn’t so appealing but I’ll tell you what IS appealing…the money they make afterwards. I’ve spoken to them in great detail about this because I’m fascinated by their lifestyles. Do you realise that here, out into the light of freedom rather than the dark shadows of some moralistic insanity that forces prostitutes into true servitude; pimps, beatings, rapes, the whole nine yards, here, it is a simple matter of paying your rent for a room for the night. You pay the rent and the rest is yours, the decision on how much you make, how many you are willing to fuck, is entirely your own. It’s free enterprise, he stated, poking his finger in my chest. Let’s say, and I know from having asked, that a room costs a girl the equivalent of 200 bucks a night. In an eight hour shift, and, ironically, EU human rights labour laws play a role in this, a woman can take, on average eight to sixteen men at let’s say a going rate of 50 dollars a pop. Do you realise the money involved? Hell, if I were a woman, I’d do it. I wouldn’t care. Keep your eyes closed, let your mind wander, what’s the difference? At the end of the night you’ve got a fat bankroll of cash to keep you company.
You’re going to absurd lengths to justify visiting whores instead of trying to meet the local girls, I pointed out.
Bah, he spat. Meet the local girls. What for? So I can waste hours of my time trying to impress them? So I can spend my own money on them, to treat them like royalty, let them think their own shit doesn’t smell, say anything just to impress, just to convince that I should be allowed between her legs? Why the stultifying conversations alone make that a withering proposition. I don’t want to talk to women. It’s been my experience that women, once they believe they have you in their clutches and no longer have to be interesting, will immediately fall back on the old clichés of shopping and nagging, nagging and shopping, planning the nest, blablabla. The whole thing makes me sick to contemplate. And for what? Just to get laid? I don’t want to have any children. Do I look like husband or father material, he asked with a laugh, standing back, holding out his arms so that I could regard his full character. No, of course not. And so what am I left with? Lies. Acting. Convincing myself that wasting a several hours of my time in a bar with a complete stranger is somehow worth it all just because on the periphery of it all lingers the faintest hope that perhaps this stranger will be convinced or perhaps this stranger will become drunk enough that she no longer requires any further lubrication and there we go. Just the possibility mind you. Now what kind of investment is that?
He took another long gulp of beer, wiped his lips with his shirt sleeved and let a low, subtle belch escape him. On the other hand, he whispered conspiratorially, I can pay my wages and cut right to the chase. God, I love it here, he emphasised again. Suck and fuck they say, right down to business. Can you imagine if we could all be that honest? I want a suck and fuck, how much?
But it’s crass, Albert. These aren’t cattle or pigs we’re discussing, they’re humans. There’s a certain finesse required when dealing with our equals. You couldn’t by that same token, walk into a bar and point out a few burly men and say, hey, let’s go – there’s a farm house up the road I’ve had my eye on and I need a few men to help storm it. And think about this, Albert – if all that was ever required for sex was a few guilders in your wallet, wouldn’t the lustre erode over time? Sure, the novelty here of the concept here, for you at this moment is enthralling, more so than I can really comprehend frankly, but that’s beside the point. Once the novelty of a world of whores wears off, what are you left with? Wouldn’t you then go out in pursuit of pure women, virgins even, who are yet untainted by the experience of other men? Wouldn’t you then, sated with sex on demand, begin to ask yourself what love is?
Bah, he waved his hand at me dismissively. You’re love sick, that’s all. That’s all you think about, the girl. It’s unhealthy to put all of your emotions into one sack like that which she could just as easily drop off the side of the Pont Neuf and never see again. Who needs it, he mumbled.
*****
Fortunately, between the black work day labour, cleaning off and passing the rest of the night drinking somewhere or rehearsing in the flat, there managed to be some time spent other than devout letter writing in an abundance of unanswered correspondence which would be piling up through the mail slot whilst she was away in an incessant effort of connecting myself with her even when she was nowhere to be found.
There were times in the first few weeks when I toyed with the idea of returning to Paris, even for a weekend, as though to be within its borders would be near enough to her but invariably, Friday nights after working would become night-long debaucheries which culminated in the early hours of Saturday morning and an entire afternoon sleeping with the shades drawn, the window slammed shut to try and block out the sound of traffic, white noise CDs playing all afternoon at low volumes from the stereo left over from the evening-ending post-pub-closing beers Albert and I would stutter through, already leaking through the pores with beer regardless.
By mid or sometimes late afternoon once of us would begin to clatter around and by then it had snuck into the subconscious that the early trains to Paris had been missed long ago and there was no sense in just getting up there with enough time to turn around and come back in time for work on Monday. I was too broke for that. I earned a decent wage working black but most of it, ninety nine percent of it anyway, was poured back into the pubs and cafés of town, consumed in late-night halal meat takeaways and crates of Grolsch brought up the stairs at some point nearly every day.
Money doesn’t last long in drinking binges which is to say nothing of the effort involved following a cold shower, of clearing your head of enough of the molasses to be able to pedal a bike around the streets in and out of traffic, around pedestrians and other bicyclists, every potential obstacle in your furry state of mind a disaster waiting to happen.
Yet I kept on feeding it to myself in a rapid cycle to burn the hours I would have otherwise haemorrhaged through, bleeding internally thinking about her, wondering what she was doing, whether or not she was giving me any thought.
*****
But the more I thought about Paris the more I realised there was no possible good outcome. If she was there, she obviously wouldn’t have wanted my communication. If she wasn’t there, what was there for me? A city of memories? A city to mope around in reminded at every turn of Anastasia?
It was almost too much merely being in Utrecht because even in its own stunted way, Utrecht was reminding me of Anastasia, reminding me of the euphoria upon my triumphant return – the train station arrival over a month ago imagining how one afternoon she would be here and we would be walking along Amsterdamsestraatweg out for a stroll from the flat, stopping in for a small beer or a glass of wine.
So if there was no clean slate, at least I could avoid what reminded me of her. Great lengths I’d go. For example, every time I passed the Smakkelaarsveld just outside the station I’d think of the first time seeing it in my return back to Utrecht from Paris.
As the bitterness and disappointment festered day after day without reply I couldn’t bear the sight of it any longer so I’d take an elaborate route to escape the view, taking the back way out by the bus station, down Moreelsepark, across the Catharine Baan along Mariaplaats then wander back to Weerdzijde, Oudegracht overlooking the cafes bursting with tourists and locals relaxing over lunches and drinks, all the way down to Kaatstraat before turning onto Oudenoord, Stroomstraat to Kerkweg then left on Blokstraat until I hit Amsterdamsestraatweg near our flat, a feat which took a good thirty minutes longer than simply walking straight across to the Amsterdamsestraatweg and having to see the field – stupid, I know, especially since we hadn’t actually spent any time there, but indicative nonetheless, of the fruitlessness of trying to venture to Paris without her.
*****
I developed elaborate rituals in her stead. After work, after showering, after grabbing a quick meal, I’d head off by myself to a place Willemstraat to a pub decorated with local regulars, presuming as such as they greeted one another like family, played cards around large tables or sat quietly reading newspapers. It was here I could normally find a good sized table to myself because other than regulars, not many others came in and although the regulars numbered quite a few at times, there was always sufficient space, if you could drown out the slot machine and the Dutch folk music playing in the background, to sit down and compose my letters to Anastasia.
And there I would order my beer, set it down on a fading Leffe coaster which existed even though the Leffe didn’t, and from my pack take out the French/English dictionary, the pad of paper, set the pen down, all an elaborate ritual as if preparing the table she would soon be joining me at although instead it was merely my obsessive thoughts of her and the paper and pen.
Sometimes it would be snatches of lyrics or poems, but more often than not, it was a breakdown of the minutia of the day, what the weather was like, what the work that day had been, conversations with the builders, the lunch, perhaps a few glasses of wheat beer at the Ledig Erf after we knocked off work, snatches of local politics I’d gleaned from listening to conversations…it was all quite boring I’d imagined, sprinkled with memories of Paris, excerpts of historical passages I’d read.
And when I wanted to wander further, I’d wander back behind the train station again, moving westward along the Moroccan and Turkish shops of Kanaalstraat through the residential yet occasionally seedy public housing Lombok neighbourhood, down Coenstraat past the Molenpark and the big windmill, left on the Leidsekade along the Leidsche Rijn past the boathouses until I reached Kanaalzicht, a café pub set across from an ugly factory complex which was equally spacious though somewhat louder but with a bigger outdoor café area to write.
From the Diaries of Witold Kasmersky, cahier 2, p 331.
It’s now that I begin to devour the history of Paris trying to pry little figs of information through obtuse channels I flick through trying to find images of Anastasia. I’m not sure what the siege of Paris from September 1870 to January 1871 in the Franco-Prussian war had to do with it other than September was fast approaching and I could see myself laying siege to Paris myself. But the intrepid men using hot-air balloons to take messages in and out of the surrounded city certainly intrigued me in the absence of a word from her.
Or perhaps this was the Paris of August and September of 1914, when the second German attempt to take the city was stopped by Gen. Joseph Gallieni –a prostate cancer-ridden, retired officer who saved the city by staying and fighting when he responded “Nowhere” to the question of where the line of retreat would be in case they were overwhelmed. Instead, 600 red Renault taxi ferried troops to the spot in the front of the German line where a gap had been left and each taxi making two round-trips a day until the enemy was stopped.
It takes ingenuity to overcome a sort of crisis.
*****
After three weeks we had finally managed to convince ourselves to make another go at an open podium performance. The last one had been so underwhelming that the crowd’s distaste for our style was politely palatable. Not one came up to us afterwards to offer any encouragement as though by their collective silence, they might will us out of their recollection of the evening.
This time we weren’t giddy and flush from the success of a surprisingly well-received gig. We were humbled and even though the majority of our free time was spent drinking there were moments of coherency well groomed enough to have managed three new songs to perform.
I tried to conjure up Anastasia to give me confidence but it merely unsettled me more as instead I had been busy calculating how much longer before she would return and would knowingly begin to doubt with each day nearer, that she would arrive in Utrecht at all – it was certainly a distraction from pre-gig butterflies and the gloomy uncertainty of how these three songs would be received, but it was merely a replacement gloom, a heavy gloom, a heart-wrenching worse than any potential embarrassment on stage.
Thinking of Coltrane’s solo in Walkin with Miles Davis on the same stage was no better encouragement. I was a little ant in comparison and a little ant that wondered what the hell he had planned going on a stage in public and playing. It boggled the mind, overwhelmed, suffocated. Who was I kidding?
This time we’d invited a few friends for morale support figuring that if we’d already been able to uncover a few souls who were unafraid, willing even, to accept us, certainly, if we hit the right songs, we could enlist a few more.
I spotted a few of them through the smoke of the club as the MC clattered on unintelligibly in Dutch before we finally heard ….De Deadbeat Conspiracy….a smattering of applause before Albert began plucking out the first few chords and I began a memorised preamble of the obituary of a Dutch politician, in Dutch for several sentences before emphasising notes that peaked at the wrong moments of the sentiment of the phrase as though driving us all backwards before pulling us forwards again. Albert punctuated these swings and the room was silenced as we went on, confused as to our direction yet drawn in by a vague familiarity.
It was a dark cavern we were leading them through. Albert’s thumbing bass notes were the stalactical tears to the wails I hit with the saxophone, raising my torso against it in effort as the sounds bounced off these imaginary, slippery walls in a damp cavern the crowd followed us through.
As usual, we didn’t know precisely where we leading them. Rehearsals were merely familiarisations with where would begin and end but for the playing in between, we were on our own, one off the other and back again as though our hands were holding a rope instead of an instrument and the rope was what was holding us both in the same line, the same line that the others were clinging to as we wandered further into some low and slow flow melodies, tiny hints of melodies really, suggestions as to directions which invariably led down dead ends to turn around and head back from.
And when it was over there was the familiar silence as though they were all expecting it to begin back up again until several seconds hung between us and the realisation that it had ended, unexpectedly – and just then, in that split second as they began to realise it, as though we were too afraid to wait to find out if the silence would last or melt into applause, we were already pulling them back forward again.
*****
I woke up two Saturdays later wondering what it was I should be expecting. For over a week the realisation that Anastasia was to have returned, at least to Paris, was a constant cloud hanging over me but for the hours I pined away drinking with Albert and friends and I could quell it for a time only to have it punch me again in the stomach without the slightest bit of forewarning.
There was no word from her.
Not that it had been all that well planned out. She taken down my address but did I really imagine in hindsight that the minute she got back to her flat in Paris after a month on the road she would repack her bags and set on the first train headed out to Utrecht?
In fact, when I went over it in my mind, it was hard to ignore the realisation that she hadn’t pinned herself down to coming immediately. She had merely said she’d come, not when she’d come. I found myself analysing key words. After I come back, she’d said. Not how long after, not soon after or years after. I’d been so over the moon when she’d said she’d come I hadn’t bother to read the fine print – WHEN?
I seemed to take quite a lot of pleasure out of kicking myself over that one. I was pinned down with just my King clinging to a corner, three moves from mate. I resolved to pretend the month hadn’t passed at all or alternatively, that I had imagined or dreamt the entire experience, that there was no Anastasia to begin with, I’d spent too many hours in a coffee shop, had smoked myself into a stupor.
But every morning I woke up again there was a thick knot of nausea in my stomach as though it weren’t the overindulgences and late meals that was doing it but some shattered dream that had collected itself in pieces all around me waiting to be picked up.
Every morning I made the coffee, sat in silence at the kitchen table after clearing a mound of clutter and rolled a cigarette so I could sit back and smoke whilst staring out the window down into the courtyard wondering how long I would manage to hold out before writing again or worse still, taking a train to Paris and paying an unexpected and unrequested visit.
Every morning, after the cigarette was stubbed out on the bottom of my boot I drained the remainders of the coffee in one long gulp and headed outside, unlocked the bike, got on and rode to the job, another afternoon of filing dirt and assorted particles underneath my fingernails, carrying wood from a pile, hammer nails into wood, measuring, cutting, hammering, stopping for a coffee break with the others at 10:30 and then lunch at noon seated on overturned plaster buckets eating sandwiches with filthy hands, washing them down with cold milk that offset the soot of destruction and construction combined with the stale taste of every cigarette break until finally we’d pack it all up again, get back on our bikes and ride off in different directions to different homes, different pubs, different understandings of the day.
I arrived home to the familiar strains of something bleak and evil leaking out of Albert’s headphones at full volume, sipping a bottle of Grolsch with hand, alternating with the Winston in the other, the smoke trailing from it like a plane that had been hit and was on its way to smouldering ruins on the ground.
When he managed to notice me, somehow the feel of the room must be different when all other senses are completely absorbed in the holy trinity of music in the ears, beer in the hand, cigarette to the mouth – there must be some perceivable alteration in space when I entered because no amount of noise I made could have penetrated that veil – but he noticed something changed in the balance of the room and so turned to see me.
He removed the headphones which for a split second before he also turned down the volume were as loud as the speakers might have been without the headphones plugged in, took a swig of beer and nodded in my direction. Good day?
I brushed off more dust and held up my hands. The day of a labourer, I lamented before leaning over the crate and plucking out a beer to pop open.
Oh yeah, Albert mentioned as casually as possible. Letter for you today.
*****
You know what the simultaneous experience of elation and dread feels like? As if two boxers, when clenching up between each other in the middle of the ring covered in sweat and pain, suddenly begin to kiss and I mean a deep, probing and soulful mashing of the tongues against each others’, held long enough for the passion to mount before one of the boxers reaches behind and delivers a razor sharp punch to the kidneys of the other.
I drained the beer whilst simultaneously hovering over the contents of the kitchen table, bottle opener, overflowing ashtray, Dutch advertisements for high tech electronics at low tech prices, empty packages of Drum, empty packages of Winstons, empty wine bottles with candles stuck in the tops like corks and melted wax hardened on their sides, yellowing copies of Metro and De Volkskrant, pliers, electrical wire, odds and ends of emptied pockets, lighters awaiting refills, and finally, there it was emanating like magic atop a musician’s magazine and a flyer for free pizza delivery – undoubtedly the letter, undeniably, the fate.
Of course, I couldn’t open the letter yet. After all these days and weeks accumulated waiting there would be at least one night’s festivities with a least part of the harness of doubt loosened – there I was, my name in her antiquarian script on an envelope, proof enough that I hadn’t merely hallucinated a few weeks of time. Evidence that I must have crossed her mind at least once in crossing the gulf between us. Enough for heel-kicking and a shower and a night out to celebrate the fate, whatever it was for at least for the moment, I was going to live…
*****
What should I have expected such a letter to say? After all, she’d promised to visit, not write. I could imagine nothing but a dark foreboding, her left handed scrawl conducting apologies and excuses simultaneously and between the lines, the truth that it had all been sort of memorable but unremarkable mirage of events which had transpired indeed, but had perhaps been blown out of proportion. Surely by now my daily letters had reached her, my unhealthy obsessiveness and oblique paranois apparent like some filthy secret I’d unburdened to her.
But even looking at the postmark I could tell it wasn’t from France at all, but Italy and as I tore open the envelope and read hungrily, I was overwhelmed with the realisation that the letter was only a partial answer – if she wasn’t in Paris it explained in part why she wasn’t here (logically, because she’d not yet returned) – but it didn’t explain more than some place where she was, the gig extended, a brief confessional of an exhaustive battle with mental demons.
In the end, her words were almost as nostalgic as the thousands I’d composed in all those letters but no regret other than her personal trials. So in the one sense, I could afford to feel elated – I wasn’t being rejected, I was being put off for a time, postponed. The gig was actually a big hit, she’d been singing in places throughout Italy it turned out, Milan, Rome, Napoli, Firenze – all over and as her status had grown, so had the demand for her, hardly surprising, I supposed, but disappointing nonetheless because what it all boiled down to was that she wasn’t coming back straight away and couldn’t even say really, when she’d be back at all, although promising definitely to be back and as soon as she was back, she hadn’t forgotten she was coming to visit in Utrecht.
Of course it was equally disturbing her casual questions like, have you thought of me at all, I don’t even know if you remember me any more, perhaps I was just a fling for you, killing time in Paris – (when all the while I’d thought it might have been the other way around,) and the uncertainty of when this string of gigs would finally end – she thought there might even be a small recording deal in the offering. All things I felt proud of, that she was that talented but also that amid all this excitement she thought of me, wondered how things were working out in Utrecht, wondered if I thought of her at all and imagined how much she missed our moment.
What it all spelled out in the end was that we wouldn’t see each other any time soon on the one hand, but that my hopes hadn’t been in vain, not necessarily, on the other hand. Just enough hope to be maddening.
*****
After all those months of unreturned letters, there was bound to be an answer eventually. I hadn’t expected to just run into her outside the flat though, I have to admit.
Yet there she was, seated regally atop one of her bags of luggage, casually smoking a cigarette and watching me with amusement as I neared and my eyes roared to life from a dull and listless stare.
And so here she was. Weeks, months of writing had conjured her as mystically as I had met her. She shrugged her shoulders at my incredulous gaze. I suppose I never really believed that all the writing would work. I suppose deep down I had prepared myself for the worst case scenario and despite the optimism bred in the act of writing all those letters, sharing all those thoughts had somehow grown with little nurturing like a cactus that needed little water.
I was away on holiday, she explained. I was gone three months, staying with some friends near St Etienne and when I finally returned to Paris, your letters were sitting there waiting for me, like an unfinished novel. For two straight days I read them all, word for word, stopping only to cat nap a few hours here and there. Your presence coursed through me like a hot shower. I decided to take the train here immediately.
I would love to have a chance to freshen up she mentioned when several moments had passed without my saying anything and had simply looked at her instead, dumbfounded. It was a long train ride…
Of course, I immediately stammered, picking up her suitcase and hurrying through the front door of the café. The men playing cards around a table stared up expectantly when we entered, amused by this sudden stranger who had declined their hospitality for hours and had preferred only to sit outside at the lone table and chair nursing a glass of tea and watching the flotsam of Amsterdamsestraatweg passing by.
I made brief discussions, as brief as possible: friend from Paris, stopping by a few days…but their curiosity would not release it’s clutches from us and they continued on with questions, bemused or perhaps encouraged by my impatience.
How long are you staying for?
Why are you here?
What part of Paris?
What do you do?
Did you come by train or plane?
Why are you with this one?
When we were finally released I clattered up the stairwell without waiting for her dreading whatever humiliating disarray awaiting us in the flat. When we reached the stairwell I stopped a moment in the kitchen which was devoid of the afternoon help peeling potatoes and the smells of cooking still hanging in the air like someone else’s memories.
You’ll have to excuse the state of this place I forewarned, pushing open the door to the second landing. She shrugged me off. You’ve prepared me quite well in fact she mentioned, reminding me of the degree to which I had described the flat and the lingering smells of the kitchen. So far it is precisely as you wrote. So far, I laughed to myself.
My, she stammered to herself taking it all in, stepping back and wiping a stray hair from her forehead which had fallen in the exertion of walking up the steep incline of the second stairway. My, she repeated, having a glance at the piles of accumulated bachelorhood; the vague indifference of the unwashed plates, piles of empty containers, newspapers, empty beer and wine bottles, the stale smoke hanging in the air like a dense fog even though all the windows had been left open.
Well, perhaps you underestimated the degree of your slovenliness, she laughed.
I had to set about explaining the contraption of the shower and toilet combination in the floor below, struggling to find clean linens and towels, bemoaning the lack of good mirrors and even the simple addition of a small table inside the shower for grooming. We weren’t particular after all. But she wore a face of pleasant indifference which in the effort to conceal produced a mixture of shock masked by a determination not to allow her disgust to register. She didn’t have to say anything. I was well aware of what any normal human being might begin to imagine seeing such squalor first hand. Albert and I rarely noticed – there were no guests invited in this hovel and thus how we chose to keep it had been precisely how we chose to keep it without the intrusions of keeping up appearances.
While she disappeared into the shower I quickly leapt back up the stairs into the main room to make some demented effort at straightening up; ashtrays dumped into empty pizza boxes and halal meal containers, bottles quickly collected, drained into the sink and placed neatly back into their respective empty slots in the crates they were once carried in, magazines and newspapers piled into one corner, clothing picked up and thrown into a pile within the makeshift closet.
However we had no vacuum and little more than a hand broom to sweep up the lingering odours and ashes, dust and stains, mildew and assorted filth. By the time she had finished freshening up the flat had taken on an almost unrecognisable order which despite the state of it’s interior, was vastly improved by any effort to render it back to it’s original state which quite frankly, had never been too charming or too clean to begin with.
Albert was no doubt already at the café and as I huffed and puffed around the room I remembered myself – that I too was covered in the dust and woodshavings and drying concrete, that my clothing hadn’t been washed all week and that I likely smelled far worse than the pong of the interior of the flat. I lit a few candles and several sticks of incense hoping carelessly to mask it all in perfume, the room and myself.
She wasn’t fooled. She made the best of it, put on a smile, pretended it was another world altogether and yet still one we were both in.
So we were fine. I just needed a shower and to let Albert know the one room flat being used by two people had now become three people.
******
Of course, it was Albert’s idea, one which had crossed my mind several times but never reached my lips, to include Anastasia in our rehearsal. We hadn’t done much for weeks until then but one night we’d stayed in, ordered Somalian food from downstairs and ate it on the table in the Styrofoam containers they were served in, plastic forks, napkins, washed down with a few bottles of beer.
So how about you sing a few with us? He asked grandly, pushing himself away from the table and tossing the remains of his meal in the large bag of rubbish that was opened just a few feet from the table. We haven’t had much inspiration these days, Albert explained and I’ve heard from Witold that you’ve got a beautiful voice.
Anastasia, not one for self-promotion, at least not from what I’d witnessed, rolled her eyes. But I came to see Witold, to get away from singing, she tried to explain.
Still, we’ve got to rehearse and well, don’t you have to keep your voice in shape?
I could tell he wasn’t going to let this one go although I wasn’t certain if he was making a big deal out of it simply to annoy the two of us, because he was sceptical, curious or just wanted to hear her. I started to beg off, not much in the mood to play myself but then an evil little grin crossed her face and she nodded sure, why don’t you play a little for me now and then, well, if the mood strikes me, I’ll join in. After all, I haven’t heard either of you play before…
We don’t know any songs, I fumbled, again explaining how we ad-libbed everything, never learned a jazz song and probably weren’t worthy of having her singing anyway. But Albert was having none of it. Oh hell, Witold, we haven’t needed to know songs before, let’s show your guest a little sample of what we can do…
He got up from the table and moved with sudden dexterity into the living room where the bass was leaning up against the side of the sofa. Reluctantly and knowing there was expectation in her bemusement, I too rose from the table and made my way into the living room, our little improvised studio with horrific acoustics. Outside the hustle and bustle of Amsterdamsestraatweg was audible. Anastasia made to clean up the table and light a few candles while the two of us tried to tune up and get into each other’s keys.
And it was true I thought to myself, putting the reed in my mouth, I was curious and excited about the idea of her singing with us. We’d discussed it but never with any seriousness and she was here after all, why not?
But maybe it was the nerves or the outside noises or fear that the landlord would hear us down two floors and complain at the racket because normally we waited until late at night when they’d already shut down and the café was closed before starting to rehearse, normally well into a session of beer, reaching blindly for inspiration but here we were anyway and Albert looking at me expectantly, fingers poised. Goofing off to relax, I blew a long sequence to begin a sort of soulful snake charmer song, holding and blowing while Albert slowly filled in behind me, plucking furtively. In time we started to build on it a little more, lost a little deeper until I was no longer aware she was even in the room. We went on like this for quite some time before realising there was nowhere for her to step in, even if she’d wanted to. I stopped playing and stood there with the sax around my neck and looked up at her staring at us both with arched eyebrows, bemused.
I don’t think I’ve heard anything quite like, she stammered for a moment. I’ve never sung to anything like it, that’s for sure, and she tittered and we all guffawed, relieved for the moment. You guys are, well, a bit weird, I’ll say. I didn’t realise…
We tried a few more on for her, laying it out thick and experimentational until ever so slowly, sipping a drink of scotch Albert had poured her from his alcove stash, she stood up and made her way towards us, hips swaying slightly until I closed my eyes entirely and then I heard it: she wasn’t singing words, just trying to find a melody somewhere amid the confusion, her voice huskier than I’d imagined, having never heard it before and only conjured it in dreams. Soon I was trilling and Albert was slapping and we began to hear this mournful humming that gradually birthed into some sort of lullaby in French.
I don’t know how long it went on, maybe it was only seconds, or a few minutes, it was impossible to tell, but just as suddenly as it began, it ended and we all stood there in the room not saying a word, staggered not by a sudden genius but by the strangeness of the collaboration until Albert finally set the bass to the side, wiped his brow and lumbered back into the kitchen to pull a fresh beer from the crate and settled back down into his chair. That’s enough for me for the moment, he mumbled into his sleeve as he wiped it across his lips. I think I need some time alone, why don’t you two have a night out?
*****
None of us said anything about those few moments as a trio and several days went by before we were encouraged, by virtue of several bottles of wine, to do it again. In the interim, Albert stayed long hours away from the flat, giving us our space. Anastasia was much more animated out of her surroundings than she had been in them. She regaled our friends at Martkzicht with steamy tales of the clubs she’d been singing at in Paris and in Milan, embellishing, I hoped, for my benefit rather than that of the others. She revealed tiny shards of her past to me over days drawing out on canal walks, bike rides and afternoons sat on various café terraces soaking up the rare sun and sipping Belgian ales. She seemed to demur less and less as though whatever fears had held her back when we were in Paris had mystically evaporated. Don’t get me wrong, she wasn’t a sputtering fountain of information. What little bit I learned was drawn out over a long process but at least it appeared I was making headway, at least I was no longer feeling like an intruder on her secret life.
And then a few nights later, when we were sipping wine around the kitchen table, listening to a few CDs she’d brought over with her, she suddenly asked if we knew how to play any jazz standards. You know, she said, My Funny Valentine or Mack the Knife, or anything really, something I could sing to that wouldn’t require, hmmm, too much skill for you two to play. Not that I don’t think you could play standards well, I dunno, what do you think? Do you ever play something known?
Albert and I looked at each other with a mutual grimace. We’d never tried it before to be honest. What was the point for a double bassist and a saxophonist when we had no one else to back us? We’d been left with improv and weirdness out of necessity and even with lovely female vocals we doubted the two of us trying to slam out some jazz standard was going to sound very good.
But hell, Albert said. We can try it a time or two, just for the novelty. How bad can it possibly sound just because Witold can’t read music and I can’t play anything I didn’t make up on my own? He snorted into his glass. What do you think, Witold, are you up for a little Mack the Knife? I’ll do a smooth walking bass line to start – and you just start going from there…
But before we even started, Anastasia wanted to get us in the mood by telling us how the version we knew was nothing like the original murder ballad, the tales of Mackie Messer, Und Macheath, der hat ein Messer, doch das Messer sieht man nicht and she sings it with real sinister intent, the man with the knife no one sees waiting to spring it out and stab away, the cold hearted murderer…
And sure enough while she’s telling us this, setting a background, Albert began thumping the notes, slow and morose. And she sang a little more and then, struggling to find the right note, I blew a little – it was rudimentary, no doubt. Pitiful maybe, but Anastasia seemed to gain a little more life because our efforts. She let us walk through a few versions of it while she hummed the beat she wanted. Man, it was a lot of run throughs as I kept missing the note and trying to figure it out from a little memory and a little help from Anastasia’s humming but after awhile, it started to take form. Not any form that any of us had ever heard it in before because it was slow and melancholic and not snappy in the slightest. And we went through it several more times until it began to feel a little less stunted and then we were ready, from the top and wow, we were just blown away by Anastasia singing this horrible song about a murderer, changing the lyrics, switching from German to Italian to French, nothing like we’d ever heard with that low husky voice until she broke with a higher pitched warble, a plea, almost.
And again we were all a little overwhelmed, and it felt a little kinky almost, the three of us standing together there in that room past midnight, sweating and letting it all ooze into us and then breathing it back out slowly.
*****
The next morning we decided we would learn at least three songs, this Mack the Knife version, like a sinister milonga, My Funny Valentine and How Long Has This Been Going On. Each one had its own strange stamp to it, the tentative, nearly talent less version of our playing that she worked so hard to overcome and indeed, her vocals were quite capable of carrying us beyond. We forgot all about drinking for hours, simply rehearsing in that room over and over again until we all began to feel comfortable with it.
Between these three standards we sandwiched two originals – well, two songs that Albert and I sort of made up as we went along and which Anastasia showed an adept ability to sing around. I had to go to work during the day, Albert stayed in sleeping and Anastasia took trips alone to Amsterdam, unbeknownst to us, scouting around places we might play. It was if we all had some purpose – well, Anastasia had had a purpose in her mind all along, it was Albert and I who really felt the difference, really felt as though for the first time since we’d come here we were finally doing what we’d come to do. And Anastasia was the alchemist who turned our slovenly, drunken and pointless hours into quasi-disciplined sessions of rehearsals. I didn’t have the energy to drink. We would rehearse for a few hours at night after dinner and then I’d drop off to sleep sitting there on the sofa afterwards. And after a few weeks it began to feel as though we were really on to something. Just what, we weren’t quite sure but at least it had this tactile quality of accomplishment about it.
*****
Riding my bicycle back from work, covered in cement dust and paint, I found myself veering predictably for Marktzicht. After all, it was Friday, the week over and I was exhausted from the week of work and practice something no one else in the trio was undertaking.
Anastasia had her own wealth, I was certain of that. You don’t have a flat in the location she had in Paris without some resource hidden away somewhere even if everything about her seemed to exude material poverty. She bought her clothes from second hand shops, rarely seemed to eat and certainly was no extra strain on my budget staying with us. Both Albert and I were subletting our flats in New York but unlike Albert, I wasn’t charging the market value and making a neat profit on the side. I suppose I should have done but there are so many people in those neighbourhoods who come there with their stupid little dreams of success and fame that I didn’t want to be the first to gouge them. Let them learn on their own.
And so yeah, I was the only one working. We still had plenty left over from Albert’s settlement although my cut had been dwindling and this forced the work in a way, I still preferred working. Firstly, for the social aspect of it – I couldn’t sit around the flat all day listening to music and reading like Albert could. I’d had years of that already and frankly, I could have done that back in New York. I preferred this life of labour, it was in my blood just like these efforts at music. All in the name of the father, so to speak. And of the mother? My mother? I couldn’t think of her because doing so only worried me. I considered her dead. As dead as my father whether it was fact or fiction.
Swinging down Loefstraat, I spied Albert already out on the terrace entertaining himself with a few locals and locked my bike up against an iron post.
You’ve just missed Anastasia, he enthused, clearly in a celebratory mood. She’s gone back to the flat to change but stopping by here, she brought a little news with her.
I motioned for my usual Amsterdametje and took a seat, still covered in the day’s dirt. So what it is it?
A gig, he smiled. Anastasia’s gotten us a gig. In Amsterdam.
*****
I awoke that morning as I had each of the four mornings before it; for the first few seconds of consciousness I felt nothing - that delicious absence of pain – didn’t even realise the pain I would feel again coming on as slowly the fog in my head lifted and memory returned. But then in one millisecond I would remember where I was as I stared up at the browning stains of the ceiling, the cobwebs gathering in the corner directly to the left of the sofa upon whose arm my feet were resting and in that millisecond every would return like a cramping abdominal pain in a mid-spasm episode of irritable bowel syndrome. Well, not everything. Just the realisation that Anastasia was not here followed quickly like a right hook follows a series of penetrating and exploratory jabs looking for the opening, that I didn’t know when she would be back nor when I would see here again, here or elsewhere.
And then a psychosomatic pain would rub it’s way through my joints individually until I could feel myself involuntarily curling into a foetal position, inch by inch until my knees reached my elbows and the blankets were pulled not over a recognisable human form, but a cruel and tiny, curled char of a human being’s soul.
I could already smell Albert’s Winstons burning away in the room as he sat in the kitchen having his first coffee and vainly attempting to focus on the words of his dog-eared copy of the English translation of De Gedichten van Constantin Huygens. He had been reading the same book for three weeks, always at the same time of the morning, getting no further than the first dozen pages, reading, then rereading passages until eventually the caffeine would kick in and a few of the words began to focus. By then it was time to stand and face the day.
As I had every morning since she’d left with her unbearable little note, I contemplated a series of actions to ease the pain. I could sit up and reach for whatever dregs of the evening’s beer were left over in the bottle on the coffee table beside the sofa. I could continue lying on the sofa and practice squeezing my abdominal muscles until I could distract the pain out of me in yoga like fashion, or pretend to feel it leaving. I could try and imagine myself in a nightclub somewhere, imagine the inhale and exhale, the fingers along the saxophone, the people in front who were but blurs, passengers on a distant imagination train stuck forever in the same terminal. Any number of tricks employed to forget, none of which would work, leaving me with the uncomfortable conclusion that whilst lying forever on the sofa was perhaps the act of a man stricken with inertia, it was not the act of forgetting, nor easing and thus, inevitably, I would swing my feet off of the arm of the sofa and place them on the floor simultaneously pushing myself to an upright position.
You’re up! Albert chirped with annoying alacrity. For a man who himself greeting the onset of each new day like a new pain discovered, Albert had been disgustingly enthusiastic ever since we’d discovered Anastasia’s letter. Not because he was happy to see her go but that he believed, in his own misguided but well-intentioned way that somehow, by exposing this new, nearly criminal zeal for existence he could also influence me to embrace a like-minded approach to the impending disasters of the day, as though his sugar-coating misdirection of the pain I could not help but embrace and wallow in like a man infatuated with his own disgust would somehow similarly afflict me and remotely ease my burden.
I gave him high marks for the effort. It was not easy for Albert to feign enthusiasm when his entire being, as long as I had known it anyway, had been constructed for precisely the opposite, an appalling aversion to cheerleading, a sterile blanket of immunity and apathy that covered him and his flesh like a thin, ratty overcoat. I admired him for the effort – the first time I could recollect any such effort streaming out of him solely for the benefit of another. As I scratched my head and focused my eyes on first the coffee table, then the overflowing ashtray and the empty bottles in front of me, I felt vaguely appreciative for such efforts. But they were all for naught. The feigned enthusiasm merely underscored the severity of my situation as though he had come with a cheery countenance to my death bed to tell me what a beautiful day it was and how many more beautiful days there would be to follow.
I cleared my throat severely several times until I worked up a healthy wad of phlegm into my mouth, spitting it reluctantly into the ashtray. The day gives birth. I stood finally with aches and pains that one becomes aware of only in an ultra sensitised state of low esteem and made my way to the kitchen table where Albert sat, staring at me expectantly.
Gradually, I regretted to note, the scent of domesticity was ebbing from what had become a sort of breakfast nook during Anastasia’s stay and in its place reappeared the gruesome dishevelment of two miserable and sloppy men living in a miserable flat looking out over a busy street of passer-by strangers and impatient traffic. The few dishes we had were again piled unwashed from the residue of Indonesian and Somalian late-night take away meals, bottles were everywhere, ashes dumped in any convenient container, a general haze of smoke, a hue of greyish ambivalence pervaded and outside, another cloudy day to greet us.
It’s Saturday, Albert exclaimed as though revealing I’d forgotten having slept through Christmas Eve and a pile of presents waited for me under a childhood tree adorned with tinsel and blinking lights. No work, he added, as if I needed the reminder.
No work means nothing to do but wallow, I thought to myself as I stared at his ridiculously happy moon face finishing off the last of his coffee and lighting another cigarette. This Saturday means that last Saturday I was waking up with cowbells in my ears and Anastasia in my arms and it means that this Saturday I have woken to a grudging acceptance of a miserable fate awaiting me. What possible joy could be found in opening this unending bag of coal?
Wordlessly, I poured coffee while Albert watched me expectantly as though I were a pregnant cat about to give birth to a miraculous litter of kittens.
I sat down across from him and fumbled for a pack of Drum.
I was thinking we could go to the Saturday market, load up on herring and salmon and mature Gouda cheese and make ourselves some kind of feast for the afternoon, I’m starving, he recounted as I continued staring at him as though this new Albert were something of an alien who had taken over the previous Albert’s soul casing. And, he said gradually having elicited nary a sound of approval or disgust from me, I have a surprise. Two surprises, actually.
I rolled a cigarette and tapped it against the kitchen table before popping it between my lips and lighting. I inhaled deeply and almost immediately induced a brief coughing spasm before drowning it out with a quick swig of bitter black coffee.
Which surprise do you want to hear about first?
C’mon man, I chided, what the fuck are you talking about? Since when do you have surprises?
He stood up from the kitchen table, grabbed a bag from the floor just beneath the ladder leading up to his nook and produced two tickets. Voila, he stated smugly. Two tickets for tonight’s show at Tivoli to see Walter Trout and The Radicals. He waved them under my nose and then dropped them next to my cup of coffee while he leaned over and pulled a fresh Grolsch from the crate and popped it open for emphasis.
Damn. I wasn’t beside myself but grudgingly, I let some of my delusion leak out to be replaced by a vague enthusiasm. This kind of blues guitar could be just the tonic. I glanced over at Albert who was still watching me for a reaction. And oh yes, for the price of a ticket, I let a slow smile escape me.
***
So what’s the second surprise, I asked after enough coffee had entered me to send me on a morning colonic and refreshed, returned to the kitchen table to pop open my own Grolsch and pretend to feel human again.
I’m in love.
For some reason, this sent me into a spasm of hysterics. Albert, in love? With me kicked in the balls and groping for solid ground, Albert, the man with few discernable emotions has suddenly decided to find himself in love? What sort of sick irony was this at work?
With what, I asked reluctantly.
Not what, he corrected. Who.
Oh fuck off. What are you talking about?
Well, check your cynicism at the door my friend. This isn’t some ridiculous tale of meeting some fanatically self-referential Dutch woman last night in a pub last night and falling in love, oh no, this is much more beautiful than that. You see, I went to visit the whores last night (this is what he called it, frankly enough, visiting the whores…) and I came across an exceptional character whose honesty, forget about whose beauty, simply knocked me loose and sent all my change spilling out of my pockets.
I drank my beer faster shaking my head. Tell me you haven’t fallen in love with a whore, my god, what a cliché.
Not just any whore, Witold. An honest whore. An honest whore who told me everything I ever wanted to know about the psychology of whores without ever having taken my dick out my pants. A whore who told me things I never realised not about herself, but myself.
What the fuck are you talking about?
I have too much ego, Witold. This is what the whore told me. She wouldn’t fuck me. She wanted me to go until I insisted I’d still pay her even though she wouldn’t fuck me. I wanted to hear why she wouldn’t fuck me.
How hard could that be to figure out? You stink of beer, you have no respect, you can’t get hard? What was it?
She told me that as a rule, she only fucked cripples and ugly men and men with no egos. She said for a beautiful woman, her profession would be disgusting if it were merely the money and the act itself. She was looking for redemption and she found redemption only through helping lost causes, like a saint, or a nurse. Her logic was that any man who had too much ego sullied the goals she had in mind. She wants to give comfort to those less fortunate not to give comfort to horny, drunken men. Not to give a suck and fuck to a man too lazy to find love on his own but only to those who could never find it on their own and had to pay for it because no other woman but a whore, would fuck them.
And this was enlightening?
Well, hardly at first. It pissed me off, quite frankly. But in the middle of listening to this good faith whore who only fucks lost causes, this patron saint of pussy, it suddenly dawned on me that this was precisely the woman I’ve been looking for all these years, if I’ve been looking at all. A woman who isn’t out to take my money and feign pleasure for a fee. A woman who doesn’t even want to give me the time of day because I am not needy enough. Do you get that? Not needy enough? The audaciousness of such an attitude from a whore. It fascinated me. So I paid for her for hours, just to discuss things with her. Not just the aspect of being a whore, but everything. It turns out she’s a medieval history major at the university in Delft. Working on her doctorate. Can you imagine that?
You’ve lost me somewhere Albert. Somewhere between not getting laid and paying a whore to talk to her. And to pay her all night to talk to her no less.
No, you’re missing it entirely, Witold. It isn’t anything about that, it’s about finding someone who is real. Someone who is both a scholar and a saint.
You believed some line about you not being needy enough? That she only takes money from gimps and pathetic cases, a whore with a heart? Is that what you’re telling me? Am I hearing correctly?
It was amazing of course, getting lost in this absurd conversation. For awhile I completely forgot my own misery, let it slip away as though reading the news about someone else’s misfortune and shrugging it off.
And I’ll tell you something else, Witold. I’m going back again tonight to her after the show. I want you to come with me. I want you to meet her.
You’re out of your fucking mind, Albert? Do you hear what you’re saying?
Sceptical little man with a broken heart, yes, I hear what I’m saying. I’ve lived years waiting for this moment that I never knew was expected of me. There is hope for me yet. I have found the saintly, intellectual whore and I intend on finding out more.
*****
The weirdest thing to me is that this language, the lack of a common one – fascinates me. Here, take the Dutch word gift which means like, poison or venom, the opposite connotation of the word in English. It’s as though the word connotates some psychological feeling in one language different from another. They use the same word and mean something different, having a different feeling to the same word I use in English to mean practically the opposite.
You’ve been to the coffee shop, I see.
Look, coffee shop too. Think about what image coffee shop elicits in small town America and then think about the image of coffee shops in Holland splashed with fresh coats of the yellow and green painted colours of Jamaica, music buffeting the door way and the subtle clouds of Dutch reared sativa like a dry ice mist as you enter. Same words strung together altogether different meaning. It’s difficult to feel responsible when everything linguistic seems familiar and yet the deception lies in these different meanings for the same word. And that doesn’t even count the fact that otherwise, the same meanings have different words completely.
You only think it’s confusing because most of your time in public is spent drunk or getting drunk or starting to get drunk from simply drinking. Your entire perception of reality is gnarled, like the discs of a spine which need to be straightened into place.
The whore approached the table. She’s celebrating her birthday and just yesterday Albert had been celebrating his. They both find this absurdly fascinating. But that connection wouldn’t be put into gear until later. At the moment, she made her way to the table with determination, her left hand was curled into a ball and only moments before she had been staring dreamingly at the stained photo wall before she began to overhear us.
This conversation you’re pretending to have is not realistic enough, she accused, stopping just before our table. I don’t believe either of you are sincere. Why don’t you talk about your feelings instead of vacant eyed ideas? She held up Albert’s glass to the light. What the hell is this you’re drinking? What could possible compel you to prattle on like that about the fact that languages are different? Are you so completely inebriated by facile observations that you can no longer hear the difference? What are you doing here anyway?
We’re musicians; Albert smiled, taking his glass back. These facile observations are in fact a furthering of our communication on stage between my bass and his saxophone. Our musical is predicated on simple thought. We believe repetition in sound is the finest method of building faux spirituality. Or perhaps barbaric spirituality. None the less, we were merely rehearsing with words as our musical notes. Imagine coming into this café and finding two dolphins in lounge seats at this table chattering away in dolphin saying exactly the same thing I was just telling Witold here about language. The same story sounds more fascinating in a language you don’t understand. And that’s precisely what we intend on portraying on stage.
*****
Ova, she says much later in the evening where the three of us have been taking turns trying to out drink ourselves. The feminine suffix of generally every woman’s surname in Czech is ova – which means daughter of or belonging to, and is tacked on to the end of the surname of the father.
What about it, Albert shrugged, puffing luxuriantly, splayed across the back of the pullout sofa I slept on in the living room Doesn’t it allow you to be immediately identified as a female, branded, open to attack from all sorts of perverts with a telephone book?
It’s demeaning, she huffs, sipping a snifter of claret.
But you’re not even Czech! Albert sits up suddenly knocking over an empty beer bottle with his elbow and ashing on the floor unintentionally, limbs akimbo.
She watches him with curiosity, the suddenness of Albert’s detangling from the sofa and coffee table paralysing her a moment before regaining consciousness, not literally of course, but almost stunned in a way. She had never witnessed one of Albert’s face dives into the coffee table high on absinthe. At least this time nothing was broken.
No, I’m not Czech but I’ve been there before and when I found out about this –ova- business, I turned right around and left.
If you’re not Czech then what are you?
Slovakian, hahaha. She burst out laughing as though on the verge of manic hysteria. I don’t think Albert understood what the fuck she was laughing hysterically for but it was infectious. Albert, from the floor, laid his head back down and held his belly, his body trembling with the effort to burst out laughing. And then, like some sort of airborne virus, I too became infected, laughing, hey it’s ok, laughing what the fuck are we laughing about anyway?
*****
Albert and Marie became an item in a short few days. I shadowed them like a sole paparazzo lost from the flock, every intimacy recrucifying me with memories. I watched them with a masochistic yen feeling closer to Anastasia for the pain. But eventually it was too much. Consummation needs privacy, so I decided I was going to head out of town, find a train going somewhere and get away, romanticise the travel as a sedative.
They bid me good bye with their arms around each other’s waists, probably muttering don’t hurry back to themselves as they shut the door behind me.
Where was I going to go but of course Paris. Not the touristic Paris but the no alternative Paris wherein I’d prowl the streets thinking about every fifth corner that just around the block was a girl who looked just like Anastasia, enough so that I’d gasp audibly. I know this because I caught myself hearing it and thought what the hell kind of weird thing it was to actually gasp at the thought of the sight of her. If I had been any weaker I’d have needed a wheel chair and someone to push it otherwise at that very corner I would be stuck standing as the image walked past me and what I thought had been Anastasia had been some other waggish beauty with an entirely different history, a completely different perspective, unawareness of my existence entirely, immune to me as she continued on the sidewalk. And this was entirely how Anastasia had once been. Non entities. Visions in an incomplete future. Parasitic souls searching for other souls to suck dry.
And what does a drinker do in a city like Paris with all the statues and parks and monuments and history beckoning like a lurid filmy cartoon whore? Why he finds a place with a good view of people, has a seat and orders a litre of wine, of course.
When you drink alone in an empty café on a weekday afternoon there isn’t anyone but the staff to socialise with. I wrote that down on a piece of paper and congratulated myself for forgoing the second litre when the first was empty, standing up and straightening out and walking aimlessly around the streets breathing in as many as I could take in without stereotyping. I ended up after a few trips on the Metro at Père Lachaise, watching people walking around looking at tombstones, an outdoor museum of the dead, the famous lumped with the infamous, what a fascinating collection of ghouls who walked hand in hand from section to section of the cemetery with maps in their hands to help them identify locations of names they weren’t even sure they knew but figured that if they were on the map they must be famous somewhere.
I caught myself fantasizing a life wherein this walk through this cemetery was eventually going to take me back to Anastasia’s flat, ringing the bell and hearing a tinge of excitement in her voice as she sang out and pushed the security buzzer to let me in.
And then I caught myself hours later in a jazz café off of a main boulevard, a candlelit cave with smoke and music. And listening to the band playing I sat back and poured a few more litres of wine down my throat, gradually of course, and let music and interpretations fill my head instead of realities which were thus far unrealistic.
*****
Albert and Marie together were not believable. How many months had I heard Albert disdaining the complication of emotions whilst simultaneously composing Te Deums to legalised prostitution.
And this is the same Albert who loved nothing more than to spend an afternoon on the terrace of café near the Oude Gracht sipping Belgian beer out of snifters and giving me little monologues on the history of prostitution in a vain effort to shrug out of the overcoat of guilt he felt for allowing himself such pleasures.
Even in the Middle Ages everyone was pretty pragmatic about it, he would shine, warming to the subject for the 100th time. I could recite the speech from memory I thought to myself as he continued. Of course, back then it was more encouraged because it kept all the perverts busy who might otherwise have been preying on the chaste women ripe with rape and defilement in their eyes. And then of course our dear friends the Protestants came along and started forcing people into crazy ideas like tolerating sex only within marriage. The Protestants made it a sin and a crime in the 16th century. Get it? The Protestants regulating Prostitution, likely only because people were getting the two mixed up.
Albert wheezed into his beer, grinding out a cigarette with an athletic vigour only a heavy smoker can muster. Anyway, as you can see, Prostitutants; whores disclaiming sex. God, I hate religion. He spits phlegm into a handkerchief he pulled out of his front pocket brought along specifically with such a use in mind. You can’t spit on the street, can you now, he asked at my somewhat repulsed expression. So never mind about what religion does to your dick, think about all the spitting and pissing in the streets that went on back then. Unpaved roads, probably. Cows and sheep and chickens all over the place. Open fires on the road side, soot everywhere.
What the hell are you talking about I ask suddenly as if only then realising he was talking about nothing at all just putting sentences in senseless organisation. This was how we practiced our music without ever using our instruments. We couldn’t imagine music as a skill because it was too much about non verbal communication, an on stage charades with notes until one picked up the rhythm of the other and there was a reasonable understanding of something, simply scratching the surface with repetition until the pattern became familiar enough to recognise.
*****
However difficult it was imagining those two as a couple, always on the brink of menacing the other, they were in fact, spending a lot of time together which meant that eventually we were becoming a trio.
Oh, Marie can play, Albert assured me as we were riding bikes back at night after a concert at Ekko, some sort of tango opera. Marie can play the accordion and congas. She could be very useful.
He knew quite well what I would think about it considering Anastasia was the real missing piece to the trio and without saying what we both knew, that this was just a crass replacement, an ornament to stick on the hood of a jalopy, and eventually, I succumbed to it anyway because frankly, I was outnumbered.
*****
Eventually I was back to going out alone simply because of the intensity of intimacy going on in the flat making me feel like I was in some suburban family room instead of a shabby flat above a takeaway on the Amsterdamsestraatweg. Then they would demure and demand that we practice in the flat instead of going out. We brought beers in from the corner market by the crate, each of us carrying our own along with a few bottles of Jinever to tinge the evening further.
These rehearsals were like séances each of us attempting to conjure up something that simply wasn’t going to make an appearance. Other nights, for some magical reason it would begin to appear as if it were coming together a time or two. We have to get used to her playing and she has to get used to ours, Albert complained in between sets, sweat pouring down from his face just before he slugged down a half dozen throatfuls of beer from his bottle. We pretended we were in clubs because we had no gigs. And we couldn’t have performed in such a state. Albert and I alone were barely credible but the three of us together, off key, out of sync, disjointed and confusing, were simply incomprehensible. We might have been forcibly removed from stage.
So we stayed in the flat at night and practiced. After weeks, we were back out in the night again going in different directions because night after night had made us sick of each other. Albert went to Marktzicht, sometimes with Marie in tow but sometimes Marie would go back to her flat and reality and spend a night away simply to clean herself of the soot that hung over all of us from so many nights in that little flat with nothing but those instruments, beers and smoke.
I would head for Fabriekzicht and sit quietly at a corner stool at the bar watching the people all around me out of the corners of my eyes.
*****
And then one day, it was all over before the first gig was even staged. All that hard work for nothing. Albert was fed up. Too much fucking touching too many reassurances required, he complained. I was right all along. People are too fucked up to have relationships. They should all just accept solitude and get on with creating something meaningful out of their living, something more meaningful than fucking reproduction and mass consumption.
They had one outburst and that was the end of it. She came back to Marktzicht one night and threw a glass of beer in Albert’s face. The punters around us all clapped with amusement as she turned on a heel and walked back out. Albert accepted the barman’s beer-soaked towel and wiped his face off with it, smiling. I’m glad that was your beer, Jan.
*****
Now the sensation of being in Utrecht was wearing thin.
Both of us had nearly had the last member of the trio in their clutches only to see them escape in the case of Anastasia and get relegated in the case of Marie. Now we’d both had an experience that involved all three of us and now there weren’t any more experiments to be conducted in this city. It was bad luck. We weren’t getting anywhere.
The place we should go, Albert suggested one night as we were spending thirty minutes trying to unlock our bicycles in mutually drunken stupors, is Prague. Prague is where we will find our trio, our muse.
******
Making matters worse was that Albert was beginning to grow restless. I like it here, he confided one afternoon when we were sitting out in a terrace swallowing beer and enjoying a rare sun despite the chill. But we aren’t getting anywhere with the music and I’m getting bored having the same conversations with the same people, playing the same game of cards over and over again. I’m beginning to think it’s time to move on.
Move on? But why? I thought you liked it here. It’s your heritage after all, isn’t it?
Well for one, I’ve been thinking a lot about Prague. The more I read about it, the more I hear others talking about it, the more I’ve begun to believe that it’d be a better place for us – it’s a lot cheaper for one – the beers are almost free, the culture is bursting, the women are rumoured to be angelic not to mention horny and well, it seems more conducive to jazz and just odd enough a place to accept us.
But we’ve been accepted here…
Oh, in bits, yes. But not overwhelmingly so. Besides, let’s face it, there aren’t that many jazz locales, not enough gigs, and frankly not enough inspiration. We’re pissing away scads of money every day we remain here – we’ve got to find something cheaper, somewhat western yet with a hint of mystery – and old communist stronghold, an historical nugget, my god, do you know Kafka lived there for example?
Well what would we do there? We don’t speak the language, for example and whilst that’s not a problem here, it could be a big hurdle there.
Hardly. I’ve read there’s some 20,000 expats living there – we should be able to straddle the border between expats and locals, find jazz venues, drink cheap beer and meet racy women. What more could be expected? I’m tired of whores, I’m tired of getting stoned to oblivion in coffee shops, I’m tired of drinking these little glasses of lager, tired of living above this hideous Somalian takeaway, the weather sucks and most of all, here you are moping around most waking hours, thinking about that girl. It’s not just for me, but for you as well. The change of venue will do you good.
2:45 AM
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