David Szalay - All That Man Is

There was a falling-out the previous day, over the travel plans.

Simon had wanted to take an early train to Prague. Ferdinand had not wanted to do this. He had wanted to take Otto up on his offer of showing them a fun time in Berlin.

Simon had, as usual, silently insisted on having his own way — and then it turned out he wanted to stop in Leipzig to visit the tomb of J. S. Bach.

He had more or less tricked him into the Leipzig stopover, Ferdinand felt, and it had been an awful experience. Ten hours in the station and the diesel-stained streets that surrounded it — the next train to Prague did not leave until the middle of the night — all for the sake of a few minutes in the frigid Thomaskirche, which Simon himself had described as ‘intrinsically unimpressive’.

Finally, at about midnight, no longer speaking, they sat down to wait on the station platform, where some young German Christians were singing songs like ‘Let It Be’ and ‘Blowing in the Wind’ as the rain fell past the tall lights and out on the dark tracks.

Simon seems not to have noticed the falling-out, let alone his friend’s efforts, in the morning, to patch things up.

He is looking out of the window, the low sun on his handsome profile, his hands shaking slightly after the dreadful night.

‘We get to Prague in about an hour,’ Ferdinand says.

‘Yeah?’ From somewhere an image has entered Simon’s head, an image of human life as bubbles rising through water. The bubbles rise in streams and clouds, touching and mingling and yet each remaining individually defined as they travel upwards from the depths towards the light, until at the surface they cease to exist as individual entities. In the water they existed physically, individually — in the air they are part of the air, part of an endless whole, inseparable from everything else. Yes, he thinks, squinting in the mist-softened sunlight, tears filling his eyes, that is how it is — life and death.

‘Where do you think we should stay?’ Ferdinand asks.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Hostel?’

‘Okay,’ Simon says, still watching the landscape, the lifting mist.

—

It all happens very fast. Desperate-looking men wait on the platform when the train pulls in. Their upturned faces pass in the windows smoothly as the train sheds the last of its speed. The English teenagers are the subject of a tussle as they are still descending the steep steel steps, and a few minutes later are in a Skoda which is older than they are, whose engine sounds like a wasp and blows prodigious quantities of blueish exhaust. The fumes have a heady, sweetish smell. The flowering trees also. Their driver, other than his native language, speaks only a few words of German. ‘Zimmer frei, zimmer frei ,’ he had insisted at the station, physically seizing their packs and making a dash for his vehicle.

They drive for twenty minutes or so, mostly uphill (and thus very, very slowly), into a spring-greeny suburb of disintegrating tarmac and faded dwellings in small plots of land, until they pull up, finally, in front of a single-storey house with a tree in front of it, the path underneath littered and plastered with fallen blossoms. This is where their driver lives with his wife, and she speaks some English.

Birdsong meets them as they emerge from the Skoda, and she is there too, opening the squeaky front gate with enthusiasm, even a kind of impatience. She is probably about forty and looks as if she has just got out of bed. Her hair — a sort of aureate beige — is loose and unkempt, and she is wearing a yellow towelling dressing gown and blue plastic sandals. She comes forward over the blossom-thick pavement in her blue sandals, through the shattered shade that leaves flecks of light on her smooth-skinned face, smiling, and sticks a pair of kisses on each of the young visitor’s faces. Then she hurries them inside and shows them to what will be their room — a single bed, a stained foam mattress on the floor, a leaf-filled window. She smiles at them as they take in the room tiredly. ‘Is okay?’ she says.

She tells them to leave their things there and join her for breakfast, so they follow her along a passage with a washing machine in it, past what seems to be a nasty bathroom, and into a kitchen.

Simon is still thinking of the dream he had on the train as he follows her into the kitchen with his friend. It seems more present to him than where he is, than the washing machine he has just walked past, than the sunny kitchen where he is being told to sit down.

the only where I want to be

She is doing something now, at this moment, she is doing something as he sits down at a small square table in the sunny kitchen. And the smile she showed him in his dream seems realer than the woman now taking things from the fridge and explaining to them why, in opting to stay with her, they have made the right decision.

The smile she showed him in his dream. It is possible he just inferred it. Her face was not actually smiling. Indeed, it had a serious expression. Pale, framed by her dark hair, it had a serious expression. Yet her doll-blue eyes were dense with tenderness and somehow he knew that she was smiling at him. Then he woke to the first daylight filling out the interior of the train, and the feverish sound of the train’s wheels.

She says she isn’t interested in money — that isn’t why she takes people in. She just likes people, she says, and wants to help them. She will do everything she can to help them. ‘I will help you,’ she says to them. The house, she admits, is not exactly in the centre of town, but she promises them it isn’t difficult to get there. She will show them how, and while they eat she does, spreading a map on the kitchen table and tracing with her finger the way to the Metro station, though most of the route seems to lie just at the point where the map folds and the paper is worn and illegible.

They are drinking slivovice from little cups the shape of acorns and the air is grey and stinging with cigarette smoke. She is also, as she leans over the tattered, expansive map of Prague with its districts in different colours, being somewhat negligent with her dressing gown, and it is not clear what — if anything — she is wearing underneath it, something that Ferdinand has noticed, and to which he has just tried to draw his friend’s attention with a salacious smile and a movement of his head, when her husband steps in, takes the cigarette out of his small mouth and says something in Czech.

She tries to shoo him away, not even looking up from what she is doing — tracing something on the map, a sinuous street, with her chipped fingertip — and they have what seems to be a short, fierce dispute.

Ferdinand is still smiling salaciously.

She is still leaning over the map.

Her husband stands there for a moment, simmering with displeasure. Then he leaves, and she tells them he is off to work. He is a former professional footballer, she explains, now a PE teacher.

She sits down and lights another cigarette and lays a hand on Simon’s knee. (She seems, in spite of his silence, to have taken a particular liking to Simon.) ‘My hahs-band,’ she says, ‘he know nah-thing but football.’ There is a pause. Her hand is still on his knee. ‘You understand me?’

‘Yes,’ he says.

Drinking spirits so early in the morning, and after such a terrible night, has made him very woozy. He is not quite sure what is happening, what she is talking about. Everything seems unusually vivid — the sun-flooded kitchen, the pictures of kittens on the wall, the blue eyes of the footballer’s wife, her fine parchment-like skin. She is holding him with a disquieting stare. His eyes fall and he finds himself looking at her narrow, naked knees.