Munich Airport (25 page)

I went across town to see her. It was raining. If she'd let me know in advance that she was coming, I could have set aside a little bit of time and taken her to some museums, lunch, dinner, anything. I spent a lot of time in London wondering about Miriam, and wishing to see her, and I was quite deflated by the idea that she could make a trip to London but not spare the time to see me. But now, because she hadn't given me any warning, I was annoyed that I had to drop what I was doing and come take care of her. I was swamped. I was working to exhaustion, then studying, and I thought I could very easily have a nervous breakdown, if I bothered to stop and observe the pace I was at. But when I got there, I saw that she was really ill, she needed somebody to take care of her. I had to knock several times. She opened the door, but she did not say hello, she merely turned and crawled back into bed. The hotel was musty, cold, cheap, and it didn't have a view. There was a window, but it opened right onto the wall of another building. The distance between the two buildings was the width of a rat. She crawled under her sheets and closed her eyes. I felt her forehead. She was really burning up. Is it bad? she asked. You need to see a doctor, I said. Don't make me move just now, she said. I gave her some soluble acetaminophen. I sat beside her. Within about twenty minutes she was a little more alert. There was some color in her face again. Her eyes were a little brighter. You look good, I said, for somebody so sick. And it was true. She wore a healthy weight, she was probably twenty pounds heavier than she had been when she moved to Berlin, and I thought it suited her. Her hair was long. I checked my watch, it was ten in the morning.

Thanks for coming, she said.

We're going to the doctor, I said.

Let me just rest a little longer.

What are you doing in London?

Oh, something really stupid, possibly a job, but it was all a fake, spent all my money getting here, I'm so stupid.

She glanced at my coat, a double-breasted gray mackintosh with large peaked lapel, and underneath it a gray suit, a sweater, and a tie, and she said, This is exactly how I imagine you dressed, you look so sophisticated.

She fell asleep for a while, and I was beside her in the bed, doing some work. Suddenly she started moaning and jerking around. She was trying to get the covers over her head, but she couldn't, because I was sitting on them. She woke, but all she could say was, I'm cold, cold, cold. So I got under the covers and held her very tight. I started to sweat immediately, because she was so hot to touch. But she was shivering. Her teeth were chattering. I'm freezing, she said. I packed all her stuff into her suitcases. You're getting out of this place, I said. I had to help her get dressed. I helped her put on some jeans, and a shirt over her undershirt. Her bag was heavy. She seemed to have packed a lot of stuff. She was also pretty heavy. I checked her out and paid for the hotel, got a taxi, went straight to my GP, got a prescription for some antibiotics—my GP checked the back of Miriam's throat and she said, Oh yeah, that's a bad one—and then we went to my place. She remained very sick the first night, and I let her sleep in my bed while I slept on the rug in my sitting room—my couch wasn't quite long enough to stretch out on. Her temperature kept spiking at 106 degrees, and every time it spiked she would call for me, and I would give her some acetaminophen and lie beside her, hold her very close, try to keep her warm. Then as the acetaminophen took effect and her fever started to break, she would throw all the sheets off and toss around the bed, sweating, trying to find dry spots to sleep on. The next morning she was a lot better. She was fatigued, could hardly move, and was spaced-out, but her temperature was more stable. She stayed for just over a week. She did not eat, which, at the time, seemed like a normal reaction to such a bad infection. I got lots of takeout and rented lots of movies, which we watched on my computer. I took some time off work. It was probably the best week I'd ever had in London. And one of the reasons I have remained so fond of that apartment, and probably why I like spending so much time there, is because that apartment contains the memory of her visit. I had hoped to show her around, especially Columbia Road on Sunday, when the flower markets were out, but she didn't have the energy for a walk. Then she decided to go home. I bought her a ticket. I took her to Gatwick and put her on a flight back to Berlin.

Four or five years after that, I sent her an e-mail asking if she'd meet me in Cologne. I was heading there for a marketing conference. She said she didn't have time. So I telephoned. I'm going to be there for three days, why don't you come. You can stay in my hotel room. We can go out, I'll skip some talks, I can get tickets to the Philharmonic, I said. I can't get away, I don't have the time, she said. I said, I'll skip all my talks, I won't go to the conference, I'll buy your train tickets. She said, I can't, I'm sorry. I said, Just a day, come in the afternoon, have dinner with me, then get the red-eye home, I'll get you first-class tickets so you can sleep. She said, No, I can't. I was almost going to forget it, I was going to say, Okay, okay, you win, but then I became emotional, and I said something totally unexpected. I said, I'm lonely, Miriam, I am really lonely. When I made this call, I was somewhere in the city, I was traveling across the city to a client's office, and what I was thinking was that four or five years had passed since I'd seen her last, and very little had changed—or rather, much had changed, but nothing had improved.

She came to Cologne for a day and a night. She arrived just before lunchtime. It was snowing. I got a taxi to the station. The conference had been going on for two days and it was a waste of time. The idea was to network, but I could only handle so much of it. The first night there'd been a late dinner, then drinks until it started to get light. The next day I was very tired, muscled through some early talks, had a big lunch, made it halfway through the afternoon, then went home to sleep. I was asleep at four-thirty, before dusk, so naturally I was up very early, still the middle of the night, and anxious to see Miriam. I went down to the lobby at four a.m., got my laptop out and did some work. Some people from the conference came in drunk. I had been among them the previous night, but the lobby was dark, and they didn't recognize me. Then it was quiet again. At around seven I started to get tired, so I went up to my room and drank some instant coffee, watched BBC World News, and when I felt like I was definitely going to fall back asleep, I decided to leave the hotel. I arrived at the train station almost three hours before Miriam's train was due to arrive. So I walked around in the snow for a while, along the Rhine. I watched the snow fall into the Rhine. Then I returned to the station. I met Miriam on the platform. I had a croissant and a coffee waiting for her—something I got at a nice bakery, not at the train station. She stepped off. I waved. She was in a black coat and wore black snow boots, and she had a little rolling suitcase. As she got closer, I saw that she was quite thin in the face. Closer still, I saw that she seemed to have aged a lot since the last time we met, not five years, more like twenty. Then I realized she was emaciated. The train was full—it was just around Carnival, which I hadn't known when I booked the conference—so the platform was trampled by partygoers, many of them dressed in shiny, sequined outfits, or with feathers in their hats. And they had painted faces. They sang songs, and they smelled like beer. Miriam stopped right in front of me. The crowds went all around us, unperturbed. She put her hands on my face and said, My poor big brother. I embraced her for a long time. I thought I wasn't going to be sad, but I found that I was sad. There, there, she said. And after I let go of her, we spoke no more of my loneliness. I offered her the croissant and the coffee. She took the coffee—which was black—but said I could have the croissant. We stepped into a taxi outside the station. We departed. I was really happy to see her, but I didn't have a whole lot, suddenly, to say.

Cologne is nice, she said.

Is this your first time here?

It is.

Would you like to do anything?

Nothing in particular, she said.

What's got you so busy in Berlin?

I'm doing a degree in nutrition, she said.

You like living in Berlin?

It's probably the only place I can afford to live.

Are you still singing?

Still singing?

When you were in London, you said you were taking voice lessons.

Oh, no, that was temporary. Are you still in the same place?

Still in the same place, I said.

The drive from the station to the hotel took a long time. The streets were full of slow, drunk pedestrians, and the traffic was heavy. The snow fell into the city, into the light of the city. When we got to the hotel, some people from the conference were there. It was the last day of the conference, and I guess quite a few of them had decided to abandon the last talks and go out drinking. A man I recognized from our first night out saw me arrive with my sister and gave me a thumbs-up from across the lobby. I thought he was going to come over and invite us out with them, or introduce himself, so I hurried Miriam into the elevator and we went up to my room. She took off her coat. I said, Miriam, you're really thin, are you okay? She didn't want to talk about it. I didn't want to push her, because I didn't want her to leave. But I couldn't conceal my worry. Surely your nutrition course would wake you up to the dangers of being so skinny, I said. I'm fine, she said. You're obviously not, I said. She said that she didn't want to argue, and if I must know, ever since London she'd been losing weight, eating less, and she felt really empowered by denying appetite—the nutrition course was something to discover whether this denial of appetite, which became easier with each missed meal, could be sustained. You like not eating when you're hungry? I asked. But she said she didn't want to have to explain herself, and I could see that if we were to have a nice time together, I would have to change the tone of my voice. She went into the bathroom with some clothes, freshened up, and changed. I dozed off, I think, while watching television. She came out in an olive-and-black sleeveless dress, but wearing a gray polo-neck sweater underneath it, and black tights. You look nice, I said. In fact she looked sick. Her arms and legs were bony, and through the back of her dress, her shoulder blades protruded. She said, Thanks, I really love this dress. I stood up and took her hands in my hands. They were thin, too. Then I gave her another hug and said, Thanks for coming. I felt all the bones in her back.

When I went back to Miriam's apartment for the third and final time, during my last week—it turned out to be the day before her body was released—I looked for, and found, this dress. I propped a tall mirror against the wall and held the dress out in front of me. It was tiny. I really could not believe how small it was, now that I was standing with it. It was not olive and black, and it was not sleeveless, and it was almost nothing like the dress my memory described—but I was certain it was the dress she wore when she walked out of the bathroom in that hotel in Cologne. Later, after we'd been out, I pretended to sleep while I watched her take that dress off. We were both quite drunk. I was lying in the bed near the door to the room, and she was standing by the window, between the second bed and the big window that looked out over the city and the cathedral, clumsily undressing. She took her dress off, and she stood there for a moment in her gray polo-neck sweater. It looked to me like she was dying. Her hips were sharp, the only shapes in her legs were the joints of her knees. Then she fell down. I got out of bed. She'd only had two glasses of wine at dinner and, later, a cocktail, but it was too much. I tried to wake her. Her eyes opened. Come on, I said, trying to lift her. Let me sleep on the floor, she said. I ignored her. I put one arm around her shoulder and neck, another under her hips. She didn't weigh anything. She said, Let me down. I ignored her again. I stood straight up with her in my arms. What are you doing? she said. I said nothing, because it was obvious—I was putting her in the bed. Let me down, she said. I said, You're drunk. So what? she said, and she started to squirm. I turned to put her down on the bed and she started to claw at my face. She clawed at my cheeks and nearly got my eye. I dropped her. There was a big knock. The lamp on her nightstand fell over. I didn't know what had happened. But then I realized she had hit her head on the nightstand. Are you okay? I asked. She was rubbing the back of her head. I was just trying to put you back in bed, I said. She sat up a bit, asked for water. I went to the bathroom to get a glass, filled it with water from the tap, and came back. She was in the bed, asleep. I stood over her for a while, wondering how bad the knock had been, and if I ought to call a doctor. I was also furious. I did not understand why she refused to be lifted into her bed.

In Miriam's Berlin apartment, when I went back that third and last time, I took the dress I recognized from Cologne and sat down on a chair. I laid the dress crosswise on my lap and smoothed the wrinkles out. It was around five in the afternoon. Somehow I had got inside without alerting Otis. Maybe at last he felt that everything in Miriam's apartment was safely his. He had organized drinks with some people who knew Miriam, and I had promised to give him the keys. We were meeting around seven, somewhere nearby. My father said he would drop in later, probably with Trish. My father was completely listless, and kept saying morbid things. I sat in that chair with Miriam's dress across my lap for almost two hours. I didn't move. I guess it was a long time to sit. It started to get dark. Then my phone rang. It was Sedat, from the antiques store right down the street from our apartment. I answered the phone. He was outside. Very good, I said. I told him to ring the bell and I'd buzz him up. I reminded him to be absolutely quiet. I waited. I turned on a light. Sedat came up. He had a friend with him. I shook hands with them. I closed the door. Sedat looked at the furniture. I had already shown him some photos, but now that he was here and saw the furniture in person, he nodded. This is very nice, he said. His friend went around looking at everything else. When he was finished, he and Sedat spoke briefly, then Sedat came to me and said, Everything is in order. I asked him to place the keys in Otis's mailbox on their way out, and reminded him that he shouldn't do anything, shouldn't even leave the apartment, until he got a text from me saying it's okay. I had explained to Sedat about Miriam's death. I offered him all the furniture he wanted for free, so long as he cleared the place completely. When I told him to wait for a text from me, he became suspicious, but now that he was in the apartment and had seen the furniture up close, I was sure he wouldn't refuse it. Sedat's antiques store had very nice furniture in it, and the furniture was hugely, criminally, overpriced. He asked if I was taking anything myself, any books, any clothes—the dress I was holding. Nothing, I said.