Hand Me Down World (10 page)

When people ask me about the Roma I never include my story about Ines. Although Julia did ask. She was interested to know what had happened to her. I couldn't really tell her. I was able to lead my aunt up to the door of the refugee centre. After that—I don't know.

The following summer I came to Berlin with the cinematographer Harry Porter Lee. I was there to show him the traps, to lead him around Alexanderplatz, to point out the familiar faces. The Roma were back. And without any lead from me I noticed Harry gazing up at the Berliner Dom. The ring of green oxide and the black feathers came briefly into contact and parted. He kept asking me what I was smiling about.

It was hot that day so we wandered through the station to the shade of the trees on the other side. Harry was complaining of sore feet. We ended up at Neptune's fountain, where Harry took off his shoes and socks and gratefully sank his feet into the dirty water. We sat there a while. The floating starfish turned out to be a soggy sticking plaster. A punk lumbered around the fountain with a beer bottle extended from a hand raised in salute. The solemnity of Neptune holding the triton did not suffer a bit.

When Harry's feet had recovered we wandered down to the casino hoping to find somewhere to sit. A number of Roma sat fanned out across old grass. One was breast-feeding. Three more, and a younger one with a baby, arrived. One of them fished a pink baby's garment out of a beaten-looking bush and with the help of the other two fitted the garment over the baby's head. Behind the breast-feeding woman an older Asian man in denim jacket and jeans, a commissar from the glory days of the GDR (I wonder), tugged free a small pink whistle and peed in fits and starts over the grass.

Harry was pointing to a place for us to sit, and that's when I saw Ines; she was sitting with two men, one older, blind—that was immediately clear. But was it her? She didn't have a plastic bag, and without that plastic bag it did not seem possible that it could be her. She seemed to be more still, but in the right way, composed is probably what I mean, less of a hunted look about her. Instead of a plastic bag a large paper bag of cherries sat on her lap. She passed the bag across the blind man. The other man helped himself. Then the blind man returned the bag to her lap.

I could feel Harry's agitation. He was desperate for somewhere to sit. I told him to go inside the station where it was cooler and buy himself a drink. I'd find him. Now a woman in a tartan skirt approached the trio, clasping a baby to her chest. Her hair was reddish brown, her skin light. She might be a child of some other child of a previous generation from Manchester, say, who had journeyed barefoot across Europe in the heady days of make-believe emancipation to find herself drawn to the fires of a gypsy camp on the outskirts of a city in the Levant. She was almost attractive except for her missing some front teeth. The teeth that remained had to bear a greater responsibility and so suggested the vestiges of something once proud. A miniature idol in the jungles of Java. The Roma woman held out her hand, lay her head to one side and produced a gauzy smile. Pigeons by the dozen flocked around their ankles. The blind man kicked at them, unaware of his companion breaking up a bread roll to feed them crumbs. The blind man went on kicking. I don't think he was aware of the young Roma woman hovering. Ines passed the cherries back to the blind man. As his hand dug in he leant his ear to listen to her. He nodded and held out a cherry between his fingers. The young Roma mother took it, dipped her head and thanked him. She stepped aside and stood eating the cherry, her eyes on the Berliner Dom.

The blind man reached in the bag and held up another cherry and the young mother flew to his hand. Now two small girls came running over. The blind man gave each child a cherry. The young mother returned for another. Now one of the women sitting on the grass picked herself up and wandered over; her smiling face shouted something to the other woman. The mother with the cherry in her mouth nodded. The younger man seated to the other side of the blind man stood up. He was white, his sideburns were unfashionably long. He was heavy in the shoulders, a bit plump to be wearing a T-shirt. He wasn't comfortable with all these mouths to feed. He wanted to shoo them away. He couldn't do that while the blind man continued feeding them so he sat down again.

Now Ines was handing out cherries. Six ragged apparitions stood spitting out the stones. The pigeons had withdrawn to the lawn with a sad air of dispossession. Enthralled with their own sense of benevolence the blind man and Ines kept reaching into the paper bag. The Roma showed no sign of leaving. Once more the man with the sideburns stood up, as if to distance himself, though clearly he couldn't leave without the other two. By now the Roma were accepting the cherries with less ceremony. The popping sounds were the spat stones landing on the pavement.
Pop. Pop. Pop
. Some more Roma arrived. Ines took the cherry bag off the blind man's lap and handed it to a heavier woman in a woollen top. She took it from Ines and like a dog with a bone she walked to the grassed area with the other women and small girls dancing at her sides and with their hands held out, which they must have thought in their confusion had worked like a charm just a moment ago.

I wanted to stay. I would have followed them too. I was still thinking about that opportunity when I found Harry in the station. Sure enough he had gotten lost. He was talking to a drunk. I grabbed his wrist and dragged him out of the station. But they were gone. So were the Roma. Harry kept asking me what the hell I was looking at. There on the ground around the bench were red stains and a scattering of cherry stones.

twelve

Hannah

I am not particularly happy to be having this conversation. But, just so you know, may I say this? I never spoke to her. Well, I may have once when I rang the apartment. Usually Ralf was the one to answer. On occasion it was a woman on the other end. When you have been that woman it is odd to hear another picking up the phone, even though Ralf and I have been apart nine years, so there is a brief hesitation at my end. I assumed it was the African woman. Berlin is a large city. But I have found that one's occupancy comes down to a small number of streets, one or two trains, a handful of restaurants, a favourite book shop, cinema and a corner of the Tiergarten or the Volkspark. A pattern emerges. The pattern of our lives, yes, if you follow someone over a period of time you will get to know it.

Of course I am not referring to anything that I did or would approve of. After a forty-year-long marriage I can say with some confidence that I know, even now, where he is, depending on the hour. I have never followed him. To do so would be undignified. That is not a position which Ralf shares. Dignity of that kind requires a process of thought which unfortunately lies outside of his emotional capacity. You will note—I did not say ‘intellectual capacity'. No. Ralf is a very clever man. But even intelligence can run into brackish water if it is not carefully steered. My own pattern is known to Ralf and he has never hesitated to contrive an encounter. I have become used to them as one does to a bus turning up at a certain time. So we would bump into one another at Wertheim, at the Dorotheenstrasse
cimitière
where I work. I will turn seventy-one next birthday and I'm proud to say I still have a use in this world. I will continue my work until the day I drop, which I hope is still a way off but not so far as to be obscene.

I never minded seeing him at Wertheim or at Cafe Einstein on Unter den Linden, where we used to like to go for breakfast. You can no longer smoke. So I don't go as often as I once did. Dorotheenstadt was more problematic. With a tour or lecture group I did not have the time to talk to him. Working in a cemetery as I do, wandering around the headstones of geniuses and remarkable people, I am more aware than most, acutely aware, of not outstaying my welcome.

The entire postwar history of the GDR cultural pantheon is buried in that small cemetery. Think about that. Lifelong enemies lie head to toe in the ground. Old lovers, rejected lovers. One's status is always shifting. There they all are, arguing and quarrelling all the way to the grave. So, I would see him through the fog of history seated on the far side, on the bench by the cypress tree, often with the African woman and later with the man as well, I have forgotten his name. I think Ralf called him ‘Defoe' but Ralf often likes to give names to people which he thinks more appropriate than their own. Anyway, there they would sit on the edge of my vision, like graveyard ghosts, spectres. Under the circumstances he did not expect me to break away from my group to speak with him. And yet once I had spied him I remained aware of him. He must have known that. Yes. I think so. Think of what a window offers and how often we are distracted by a small fly spot. This is how it was.

After I got over the surprise of him turning up like this I began to look for him. That's when I started to take an interest in his helper. As far as I could tell she never spoke. She sat as one does in the cinema waiting for the main feature, that is to say with a certain obligatory air of boredom. Unlike my former husband, who appeared to sit in a state of rapt concentration, as if he could hear what I was saying. Always at the back of my mind I entertained a preposterous interruption from Ralf, a raised hand, an impertinent question from the far corner of the graveyard. It's true. The graveyard is a favourite place of his. I can hardly object to his visiting it. That he did so when he did is what I objected to, and I said so when I rang his apartment, and it was on one of those occasions that the black woman must have picked up the phone.

Please don't take this the wrong way. But it is funny to think of Ralf with a black woman. I don't mean he was
with
her in that sense. Goodness me, no. She was young. Twenties, I suppose. Ralf turned seventy-three last May. I sent him a card. No, impossible. They are forty or fifty years apart. And besides, my former husband is discreet when it comes to exercising his libido. There are places in Berlin. Doorways that have the discretion of stone.

The task he needed the black woman for is the same one that came between us.

It was after his father died; we were clearing out his possessions. Ralf, at this stage, was not yet legally blind. He could still pick out an aeroplane in the sky, but not a bird in a tree. A word on a billboard but not a word in a book. He would see the car approaching but not the cyclist. His visual world was selective, random, but each day the blind spots grew. Slowly he became a menace to himself. Ultimately he could not be left alone. But before then, when he still had some visual power and independence, we were clearing out Otto's things.

Ralf's father was a lovely man. Ralf used to joke that I had married him but it was his father I was in love with. Perhaps there is some truth in that. He was gentle and attentive. From the time Ralf brought me home his father took a shine to me. I was attractive in those days. In a conventional sense, I mean. Blonde. Bright-eyed. It had its advantages. Do you know something? Ralf and I met on a film set. This is absolutely true. A promotional film on Berlin. I am the big gooey-eyed duckling from the provinces arriving in the city. Ralf is supposedly the city sophisticate. We meet on a tram and he arranges to show me around.
Love in Berlin
. That's what it was called. It was a device, you see—two young people together discover the newly built city of Berlin. There it is, arisen from the rubble and ashes. Anyway that's how we met. I really was from the provinces. It was the May Day holiday. I had nowhere to go so Ralf brought me home. Otto made a great fuss of me. He talked with me, not at me. He asked me questions and he listened carefully, not as his son did with an impatient flicker in his eye as if a meter was running. He listened to my responses. And his questions flowed out of my answers: always a sign. Ralf sat silently. An unwilling student in that regard, staring grimly down at his plate.

After lunch Otto took me to his glass house. He loved his plants, and loved to share his green-fingered passion. He collected woodcuts, folk art, not very good,
naïf
and not what I would call art, but that is beside the point; he delighted in his woodcuts of the forester, the fisherman, the beer drinker. I have barely mentioned Edith, Otto's wife. Edith Grossman. She was more guarded—perhaps like her son. She died of cancer while still in her forties. Then Otto met a widow, a fellow horticulturalist, and they moved to Hamburg. We saw less of him. Then, hardly at all, until he became sick with leukemia. He decided to try and make it to Christmas. He died the day after. We waited until the new year before we returned to pack up his things. I forgot to add—the horticulturalist had also moved on. She happens to be a very good plant artist, very much in demand. A publishing house offered her a contract to paint all the plant holdings in one of the museums. I forget which one. There she fell in love with one of the curators. I met him once and did not take to him. Though he and Ralf got on like a house on fire.

So, back to Hamburg. There is just myself and Ralf who have returned to clear out Otto's things. Old clothes that he couldn't bear to throw out. Shoes he had stopped wearing years ago. Nice shoes, their toes covered in thick dust. Ties. A drawer filled with them. That was a surprise. Neither Ralf nor I could remember when we had last seen him in a tie. Otto was a casual dresser. The only time I saw him in formal shoes was as he lay in his coffin. Shirts. Some still in their plastic. Two very nice shirts I had bought for his sixty-fifth birthday which he had worn when Ralf and I visited, then carefully put back in their packaging after we left. So we packed up all these things along with the pots and pans and crockery, old bowls with rustic scenes, the fish jumping compliantly for the cast fly. I remember those bowls with affection. We were almost finished when I discovered another wardrobe— Ralf, of course, had missed it—where we found his soldier's uniform on a hanger. In another box a very old camera. In a big yellow folder I found the photograph.