David Szalay: All That Man Is

his Philip Morrises, the health warning in German

her Petras, in a paper packet with a red sash

a Cricket lighter

‘You are very handsome boy,’ she says.

a glass ashtray, full

a plastic bowl with a few slices of stale bread in it

‘When I was young,’ she says, ‘I would like very much to meet handsome boy like you.’

a small plate with a piece of whitish butter on it

When I was young…

She tells them about her own youth.

And it turns out she is not Czech at all. She is Serbian. She and her husband met in Yugoslavia, as it then was — he was there playing football. She was a tall member of the local sports club that was looking after the arrangements for his team. Fair-haired, blue-eyed, talkative, lively, she would shepherd the team to and from meals, travel on the bus with them to matches.

Her husband was one of the stars of his team, she proudly explains. They first made love in a park, at night. Well, she still lived with her parents. He slept in a dormitory with his teammates. Where else could they go?

‘We were young,’ she says. ‘When you are young…Yes.’ She lights a cigarette. Sighs. Then says more briskly, ‘I was young, but it was not first time for me.’

‘No?’ Ferdinand seems interested.

She starts to tell them about how she lost her virginity with a swimming coach, in a hostel in Italy, when she was fifteen.

‘He was older than me,’ she says. ‘That was nice, you know.’

Simon sits with hunched shoulders, not seeming to hear, smoking.

‘It is nice, first time, with someone older,’ she says to him.

And Ferdinand tells her how he, at the same age, was seduced by his sister’s nanny, who was ten years older than he was, and how nice that was.

‘Yes,’ she says, with a serious look in her deep-set eyes, ‘is nice .’

‘It was nice,’ Ferdinand says, looking pleased with himself.

‘Is always the best way,’ she says, ‘with someone who is older, more experienced. Someone who is nice.’

Simon sits with hunched shoulders, not seeming to hear, smoking.

‘You understand me?’

The question is for him. She wants to know whether he has understood her.

They are waiting for him to say something, to indicate that he has understood, that he has heard what has been said.

And then the telephone rings, somewhere else, in some other room. The telephone rings and she stands up and hurries out through the eddying smoke in her knee-length yellow dressing gown, and they hear her answer it and start talking to somebody.

—

They spend the morning looking for Sun Hat. Looking for Sun Hat in the sun. Ferdinand puts some thought into where she is likely to be, into which tourist spots to loiter at, primed to seem surprised if she should make a sudden appearance. It soon seems hopeless. The city is huge, sprawling — even the tourist parts are all jumbled up into cobbled alleys and little hidden squares. He tries to think the way she would think, tries to put himself in the position of a young woman, his own age or a year or two older, not particularly intelligent, frequently lusted after, with turquoise-painted toenails, about to start secretarial school…An Australian pub? They spend two hours there, sinking lagers, hardly speaking.

Simon, too, seems preoccupied.

Sitting there in the Australian pub, he pictures to himself human interactions as the pouring together of liquids. Violent explosions, he thinks, pleased with the way he is elaborating his initial idea, or instant freezing were the worst forms of reaction. A simple failure to mix perhaps the most normal. And love?

Karen Fielding

Well, love, he thinks, would be something like this — a flicker in the middle of the liquids, which mingle so that they seem to be only one transparent liquid

Karen Fielding

the flicker steadying to a point, which strengthens slowly until the whole mixture emits a soft, steady light.

Karen Fielding

Yes, he thinks, that is love.

And the day slips away.

Soon it is late afternoon.

Ferdinand stands on the Charles bridge, in the hard wind, looking at the wide sweep of the banks, the roofs and spires stacking up away from the water. Sun Hat, somewhere, somewhere…Unless she has left the city already. And then how foolishly he has wasted the day, he thinks, while Simon waits for him, facing away from the view.

Simon takes up the subject of tourism’s pointlessness again in the next pub, a subterranean variation, vaulted, with lots of Gothic script.

‘Why did you want to do this then?’ Ferdinand asks, irritably, after a few minutes.

‘Do what?’

‘This trip.’

‘I thought it would be good,’ Simon says.

‘You don’t think it’s good?’

‘It’s okay.’

‘What were you hoping for?’

Simon thinks for a moment. ‘I don’t know,’ he says.

Still, he was hoping for something. He set out on the train from St Pancras station two weeks ago with some sort of obscure hope.

Prostitutes everywhere in the shadows of the avenue as they walk to the metro station, through the early night.

—

There is something almost nice about being in her kitchen again, under the neon light. It feels almost like home. She laughs through waves of smoke as Ferdinand tells her about the search for Sun Hat, tells the whole story starting with the meeting yesterday under the walls of St Vitus.

‘So you find a girl?’ she says, smiling at him.

‘And lost her again.’

‘And she was Czech?’

‘No, English.’

‘English! You should find Czech girl — she will not run away from you.’

‘Wouldn’t she?’

‘No. She think you are rich.’

‘I’m not rich.’

‘She think you are. And she was beautiful, this English girl?’

‘Well…She wasn’t bad.’

‘You will find beautiful Czech girl. And you.’ She turns to Simon, her expression somehow more serious. ‘You find girl?’

Simon looks down. ‘No,’ he says, and immediately lifts his cigarette to his lips. He looks up again, to find her eyes still on him.

She is looking at him intently, and with a sort of sadness. ‘And you are such handsome boy,’ she says.

Simon shrugs.

There is a silence.

Her eyes are still on him; he feels them even though he is looking at his own knees.

And then Ferdinand stands up and says he is off to bed.

‘Ah, you are tired,’ she says with approval. ‘Okay. You sleep.’

When Simon also stands, which he does a second later, with a sort of panicky swiftness, she takes hold of his wrist.

She frees it immediately when, with an involuntary movement, he tugs it away.

‘I’m tired too,’ he says.

‘You leave me alone?’ she laughs. ‘You leave a lady alone?’

‘I’m tired.’

‘But you are young — you should be wake all night.’

‘Stay and finish your beer,’ Ferdinand says unhelpfully.

‘Yes,’ she says, ‘stay.’

‘I don’t want it. Really, I’m tired.’

Simon has started to edge round the table to where the door is when she takes his hand. She does it in a way that is tender, not forceful. Tenderly she takes his hand. ‘Stay and talk to me,’ she says, looking up at him from her seat.

‘Tomorrow.’ He extricates his hand from the warm hold of her fingers. ‘Okay? We’ll talk tomorrow.’

‘Today is today,’ she says enigmatically, as if it were a proverb. Her hand is on his leg, on the denim somewhere near his hip.

‘I’m tired,’ he pleads.

Ferdinand is already leaving.

‘Stay with me,’ she says quietly, her face serious now, her hand moving round to the front of his thigh.

‘Please,’ he says, seeming nearly tearful. ‘I’m sorry. I’m tired.’