Out of the Line of Fire (12 page)

We’ve been looking for you, Alexis said easily.

So have I.

We thought you must have gone out when it started raining.

No, I waited, then went out around the back of the building when I found the corridor was too crowded.

Elena remained silent as Alexis invented some alternative reality to account for the truth of those few separate moments together.

Alexis suggested we get some coffee and have something to eat.

No, I’ve had enough coffee for one night, Elena said. There’s a dance on back at our hotel. Let’s go there and see what’s happening.

When we got back there were still people sitting in the dining room. My parents were seated in the far corner talking to Alexis’ father and mother. His father waved to us when he saw us standing in the doorway. Alexis pointed in the direction of the music coming from the far end of the corridor. His father smiled and waved us on.

But the dance was fairly dull and we sat for a time watching what was happening without any real interest. None of us spoke much. We each seemed preoccupied with our own thoughts. I was trying to work out how I could get to the end of the beach the next morning without being seen. I looked across at Elena. She was watching Alexis, studying him, as he watched the dancers on the dance floor. However, since it was already late, we ended up saying goodbye to each other and after Alexis had left, Elena and I went up to our room.

The next morning, I awoke early. Elena was up already. She was obviously excited.

We were half way through our breakfast downstairs when my mother suddenly appeared in the doorway of the dining room. She looked upset.

We have to go, she said, her voice showing obvious strain. Omi has had an accident. She’s broken her leg. They’ve just brought your father a telegram. We’ve decided to leave immediately.

Now? said Elena.

Yes now. As soon as we’ve packed. I’m sorry Elena, but we were going to leave tomorrow in any case and your father and I are both worried about your grandmother.

But we can’t just leave like that. Not without saying goodbye to Alexis.

Okay, okay. Finish your breakfast and pack your things and then you can run over and see Alexis for a few minutes. But don’t be long.

As soon as my mother had gone, Elena turned to me and said.

Wolfi, do me a big favour will you. Pack my bags for me. I’ve got to catch Alexis. I’ll explain when I get back.

She jumped up and ran quickly to the door.

So, I thought to myself, if Elena was going to lose her virginity, it wouldn’t be in the idyllic setting of an arc of azure water flanked by golden sands with the gentle heat of the morning’s sun warming their young bodies. No, it would happen as a frantic embrace on an unmade hotel bed, without joy and more than likely without solace. And, what’s more, I would have missed out on the opportunity of a lifetime.

I got up from the table and dragged myself slowly upstairs.

Fifteen minutes later, when I had barely finished packing, Elena returned. I looked at her as she stood in the doorway. She had been crying and was crying still. I went over to her and she embraced me sobbing.

He wasn’t there Wolfi, he wasn’t there, she kept saying.

*

Now we are getting somewhere. When Kant says that, ‘the original and necessary consciousness of the identity of the self is thus at the same time a consciousness of an equally necessary unity of the synthesis of all appearances,’ he is specifically rejecting Hume’s proposition that events are ‘loose and separate’. Kant believed that if this
were
the case then not only would we be deprived of any insight into the
connectedness
of things, but we would have no unitary consciousness of any sort.

The thoroughgoing affinity of appearances (the fact that appearances are capable of being connected in a single experience), thus relates closely to the ability of the observer to recognize himself as a single person with diverse experiences.

There is in this then an element of consolation. It was, however, something existentialist philosophers came to reject. They rejected it because they rejected the logical structures upon which it was based. Ironically, they moved back to a pre-Kantian position occupied by Hume. For Hume, man is a creature who is half sensual, half rational. This is man’s central predicament. Sensual impulses are the determining factor in most of his actions and the role that reason occupies in a man’s life is the role of a ‘slave or servant of the passions’. Misunderstandings about existentialist thought transformed this into a pervasive nihilism. But, of itself, it is not entirely a bad thing. Goethe, for example, thought it offered the only salvation.

(Amongst the photographs included in Wolfi’s papers is one of what in all probability is ‘the new house’. It shows a large two-storeyed, free-standing building, quite imposing in its own right, its stonework pinkish in the mottled sunlight, set among a number of large trees. It has been photographed almost directly from the side, as though this were the view which confronted Wolfi as he stood leaning against the gate in the opening paragraph of what follows. Part of the balcony is visible although, for the most part, it is obscured by branches which hang low into the picture frame. In the background there is a high brick wall which appears to surround the house. In the foreground, the dark curve of its shadow sweeps up to intersect the left-hand edge of the photograph. Through this shadow a narrow path winds its way towards the front of the house. On the back is written: ‘April ’76’).

I unlatched the gate, glad to be in the cool shade of the garden after the hot walk up the hill to the house. I leaned against it for a moment enveloped in the pungent smell of rich soil that rose from the freshly turned garden beds and the scent of jasmine that drifted down from the walls of the house above. I could hear music coming from somewhere but because of some acoustic illusion I could not identify where exactly it was coming from. It seemed to hang there, suspended in the luminous pockets of air that surrounded each translucent leaf of the canopy of branches above me.

As I emerged into the sunlight again I looked up to the balcony. Through the squat, rounded, stone shapes of the balustrade I could see Elena sitting back in a chair with her head resting against the wall behind her. She had her legs propped up on another chair in front of her. Her eyes were closed and from what I could make out, as I moved slightly to change my vantage point, she appeared to be naked. Because of the sharp angle, however, my view of her remained obscured and, in any case, as I stood there the music stopped suddenly and she began to stir. Before I could retreat into the shadows she bounced up from her chair and disappeared into her room.

I walked around to the front of the house, unlocked the door and went inside.

Anybody home? I yelled. Any body, I thought.

I walked into the kitchen and put the jug on. Just as the water boiled Elena came down the stairs.

Make one for me too please, Wolfi. I’m so drowsy.

She now had on a bikini top and shorts and I watched as she stretched her arms above her head. She turned her back to the kitchen bench, then hoisted herself lightly onto it. She chatted away as her drowsiness evaporated into unexplained rapture. She hopped down with a half-pirouette and distractedly began a series of stretching exercises. Occasionally she interrupted herself to make some point or other. Increasingly however, her focus changed from what she was saying to what she was doing. Slowly she raised her arm and looked along its outstretched length. I could almost feel the gentle curve of her breast where it merged with her flank. It reminded me again of that morning the previous year when I had awakened to see Elena lying there in the half-light, her breast exposed.

I think I’ll go and finish cleaning up in the garden, I said.

She looked coquettishly at me.

Wolfi, I’m offended. You don’t love me anymore.

She blew me a kiss, pirouetted once again and ran chuckling up the stairs.

This was typical of the way Elena behaved at the time. It was as though she were well on the way to becoming fully aware of her erotic potential and of the devastating effect that this would have on the men around her, but was still a little unsure about how this effect could be achieved. I seemed to have become the guinea-pig for her experiments. She appeared to delight in teasing me and to enjoy my obvious confusion.

Elena’s behaviour, then, became part of what characterized the feeling that surrounded the new house and part of what increasingly troubled me. The other part of course was the state of my parents’ relationship, which had begun to deteriorate again and the toll this was now taking on my mother’s sanity.

Out in the garden, I began raking up the pieces of ivy I had trimmed from the wall the previous weekend. The day was warm and I soon began to lose myself in the mechanical rhythm of what I was doing. Elena had come back out onto the balcony and stood looking down at me as I wheeled the barrow out from under the trees to the pile of rubbish at the far end of the house.

I had been working for perhaps half an hour, enjoying the garden’s smells and the music which again filtered down from Elena’s room, when I heard the muffled sounds of voices coming from the other side of the wall. I stopped to listen. It sounded like they were arguing. I pushed the wheelbarrow against the wall and by stepping into the tray I could almost see over the top. I reached up, gave a light spring and hauled myself up to sit on its lip. By grasping the lowermost branch of one of the plane trees I was able to turn and look down to the path that ran alongside the wall below. About ten metres away, heading slowly towards me, were two elderly stooped combatants dragging a reluctant dachshund on a leash. Despite the heat they were both wearing overcoats and while she wielded an open umbrella in one hand he carried a cane in the other. Every few paces they would stop and as she menaced him with her umbrella he was forced to defend himself with his walking stick.

Nothing happened, Lotte. Nothing, nothing. You
know
nothing happened. Nothing ever happens. Tell her, Püppchen.

The dog looked guiltily away.

Fifty years ago also nothing happened. And after fifty years, ach Du lieber Gott, suddenly she’s standing there on the street. Heinrich, she says. Heinrich Vogelschein. And after fifty years a little peck, that’s all, a little peck.

You wanted that something should happen.

When?

When when? Then when, Heinrich du Arschloch. Fifty years ago what you wouldn’t have given to get your rocks off with Gertrude Tannenbaum.

Lotte, such language I’ve never heard. You should be ashamed.

I watched them pass beneath me and continue up the street looking like two characters out of a silent movie. I turned to get back down and looked across the five or six metres towards Elena. She had gone. Suddenly I felt dizzy. Instantly my brain reeled through an entire scenario which set my whole body trembling. I grasped the smooth bough of the plane tree tightly to steady myself as I contemplated what had just raced through my mind.

My head was level with the bottom of Elena’s balcony and by pulling myself up so that I stood on top of the wall I could just see through the double doors into Elena’s bedroom opposite. Cautiously I stepped off the wall and climbed a little higher into the tree until I discovered a comfortable perch which gave me what could only be described as a bird’s eye view of almost her entire room. The reason that the plan which had instantaneously come to mind now appeared so tantalizingly feasible was that I knew that in summer Elena kept her balcony doors open at night so that she could enjoy the cool evening breeze. As I climbed down I realized that I had not been this excited since the morning of Elena’s thwarted assignation with Alexis on the last day of our holiday the year before.

That evening the meal seemed to drag on unendingly. Barely a word was spoken. The old tension had returned. The only noise came from the ticking of the clock on the mantelpiece as it scythed the oppressiveness into neat, one-second blocks. Eventually, I knew, something would have to give. I tried to escape by concentrating on a vision of a lighted square of window, a lighted square into which I would soon be gazing. The meal finally drew to a close and I excused myself and went upstairs. I went over the notes I had made that day. Rather than being unable to concentrate as I had anticipated I seemed instead to achieve a new state of lucidity.

One of the formal problems of any kind of logical investigation, I realized, is the problem of methodological circularity—the rules of inference which the completed investigation hopes to formulate and justify must be employed during the course of the investigation itself, so that its result is the product of the application of the rules to themselves. This kind of circularity is difficult to get around. It
is
possible, I realized, to say then, as Kant had said, that if the basis on which we have a priori knowledge is dependent on making the distinction between phenomena and things-in-themselves, then the fact that we have such knowledge is proof that the objects of our knowledge are, as a consequence, phenomena. This statement I recognized was also epistemologically circular.

Just after eleven I heard the door to the bathroom across the corridor close and the shower being turned on. Elena would be in there for at least twenty minutes so I leisurely packed up my things and jotted down a few points I would have to follow up in the morning. Then I went quietly downstairs.

After I had pulled the door of the house closed behind me I stood for a moment waiting for my eyes to adjust to the relative darkness outside. Gradually I was able to make out details in the garden around me. The night was warm and I began to feel quite exhilarated. I quietly made my way around to the back of the house where a weak light from the open doors of Elena’s bedroom illuminated the irregular pattern of leaves of the trees opposite and sculpted diffuse blocks of shadow into the shrubbery below. I stepped up onto the wheelbarrow, reached up to the lip of the wall and pulled myself up.