Joanna Kavenna - Inglorious

‘You need to get a sense of what you want to do,’ he kept saying. ‘You have to do something. We all, we all have to do something. I feel I can help, at least with this.’

‘I just need to get back into the Polis,’ she said.

‘The Polis,’ he said. He sounded tired. They were wrapped in sheets. Theirs was a bed-bound romance. It did best at night. But now it was early morning, and they were both hung-over.

‘It’s hard to get back in,’ she said. ‘Once you fall out.’

He stayed silent, looking at her. Then he rolled over and folded his arms around her. She was pressed into his wide chest. He seemed to be smiling. He kissed the back of her neck.

I just wonder what it means, she wanted to say. Us, here, in this tentative version of romance, and before, Liam and I. These entanglements. All of us with our bare bones of knowledge. Not knowing what we are. The birth of tragedy. This smallness I feel deep inside myself. The Birth of Smallness. Yes, yes, after the Egyptians, the Greeks with their fetish for dying beauty, doomed greatness, comes the birth of smallness, the soaring rise of the insignificant. Here I am, thought Rosa, the living embodiment of the new age of minutiae. She understood it clearly. Gradually everything had been taken over by people like Rosa. In general, her kind were doing very well. She had been given a generous slice of the pie; it was just that she couldn’t quite eat it.

Andreas was explaining that he was naturally idle. It was only by an effort of will that he made himself do things. The key was to set yourself small goals, he said.

‘So there’s one thing we must establish — what are your small goals?’ he asked.

‘Oh, nothing much. Avoid the onslaught. Stay out of trouble.’

‘Well, that’s not quite what I meant. As goals, I am not sure they work. Because eventually something will come to you, debt or death, or something anyway. This onslaught, you can’t really avoid it.’

‘Why?’ she said.

‘Why can’t you avoid death? I don’t know, for pity’s sake,’ he said. He raised a long, thick arm and slapped his hand on his forehead.

‘No, I mean the everlasting why,’ said Rosa. He yawned, and turned onto his front. He crossed his hands above his head, defensively.

‘I thought it was an everlasting yes,’ he said into the pillow.

‘No, that must be something else.’

‘Anyway it’s not a goal.’ He scratched his arm. He had a hand on her back, she could feel the warmth and pressure of his hand.

‘Why?’

‘Let’s not go round again.’

‘No, I mean why is “why” not a goal?’

Now his head was buried in the pillow. His voice was muffled. ‘In the name of God,’ he said, ‘in the name of God in Heaven, “why” is a question, not a goal. It’s a goddamn question!’

‘Huh, profound,’ she said, but it wasn’t fair to mock him. Now he sat up and took her hand.

‘You say you are tired. Well, give yourself a few weeks, and then really get cracking.’

‘Get cracking?’ she said.

‘Is it not a contemporary phrase?’

‘No, it’s perfect,’ said Rosa. ‘It’s just the right phrase.’ And she kissed him, though she knew she was wasting his time.

*

He was vain, and his motions were sometimes contrived, the studied flick of his head, the way he moved his hands. She could see his health was immanent. She was sure any woman would like him. Because they saw each other so seldom, she was convinced he must have another lover, a batch of them. This made her distant and sometimes preoccupied. It wasn’t jealousy she felt. It was a relief, if anything, that he wasn’t hanging around expecting love. Still, in a few weeks she knew a lot about him. He filled her in on the basics, meticulously, sparing her none of the details. He came from Berlin. His father had been a diplomat, and had been posted to China and Morocco when Andreas was a child. So by the age of seven he spoke German, English, French and a little Mandarin Chinese. His English was grammatically impeccable, but his idiom was inconsistent. It was a sort of cinema slang, derived from English-language films. He was tall and pale, with a smooth, line-free face. His hair was slightly curly and he wore it long. He had fine muscular legs; he liked to run. He walked with great confidence; he stood upright with his hands resting in his pockets. He was rarely pensive or demoralised, as far as Rosa could see. In fact he seemed to possess a blissful sense of optimism that Rosa dimly remembered, and felt was bound up with youth. He always dressed well, in smart, freshly ironed clothes, and his underwear was striped. He had a slight accent, but it was not immediately possible to place him. Initially she had thought he might be American.

*

For all this, she wasn’t quite sure what he wanted from her. What meaning did he attack to their liaison? She hadn’t got round to asking him the question, but she was sure she should. He was far too robust to lie around droning on about the self. He was too young, too optimistic, too fixed on his as yet nonexistent career as an actor. He was reasonably interested in the contemporary novel, he said. He was good at entertaining himself. Other than jazz he liked Wagner and The Pixies. That seemed a contrivance to Rosa, but she didn’t mind. He moved with the grace of someone whose gestures have not yet become habitual, as if he would be quite capable of casting off his ways of speaking and moving, switching them suddenly for another mode.

*

Now she was at the peeling door of his flat. There was a Moroccan sitting on the balcony above, smoking a cigarette. She nodded at him, and he bowed his head. A mother and child were playing in a multicoloured playground behind her. She heard childish squeals, adult congratulations. ‘Very good!’ ‘Very very good sweetie!’ A TV was on in the flat next door, and she saw the colours shifting in the glass. She waited while the day continued, and when Andreas answered the door he said, ‘ROSA!!’ and weighted the word with exclamation marks. ‘It’s so nice when you come round,’ he said, smiling and kissing her cheek. ‘How are you? And what, what has been happening?’

‘Nothing at all. And to you?’ That was their chaste opening, and they stood in the hall with their hands in their pockets. He was wearing the whitest shirt she had ever seen. His body felt warm, and she grasped his hands. There was the cuckoo clock behind him and she saw her face was red in the distorting mirror.

‘It’s so boring, but I have to go out any minute,’ he said. ‘So boring. Just to the dentist, but I have to go. I’ve waited a month for the appointment and I’m in agony. My mouth is disgusting, I’m ashamed.’ He gestured at a tooth, and made a grimace. ‘But can I walk you some of the way home? The dentist is just by Ladbroke Grove. So you see, it’s perfect, if you don’t mind going back that way? Did you have something else to do over here? Are you on your way somewhere?’ A few stories came to mind, but she said, ‘No, I just did some shopping on Portobello Road, and thought I’d drop by.’

‘What did you buy?’ Her hands were empty.

‘Oh, window shopping, nothing.’

‘So you’ll walk back with me? As an unexpected treat before I go to my torture.’

‘OK, that would be nice.’

‘Just wait here, wait here just a second.’

He vanished along the corridor, and she heard him switching off a radio.

*

Hand in hand for a while, and then walking apart, they passed along the crescent of balconies, satellite dishes hammered up on the walls and washing floating on invisible currents of air. They neared the metal haunches of Westbourne Studios. She thought of Whitchurch at her meeting, speaking in a soft voice. She would be poised, convincing. Then she would leave, safe in the knowledge of her continued relevance.