Chloe Aridjis: Asunder

Dusk fell at four thirty — from elsewhere, a loud squawking of parrots — and we followed the painted wooden exit signs and passed through the turnstile. On the way home, Daniel stopped several times to write in his notebook and answered in monosyllables when I asked what we were having for dinner or doing tomorrow. That afternoon there could’ve been a glass pane and two rows of bars between us; perhaps I had imagined his voice and the open door.

And then, that very night, he arrived. At half past ten, in a dark blue suit. Daniel was at his desk and I was heading to the kitchen for something sweet when the outside buzzer rang. We looked at one another, puzzled. We weren’t expecting anyone. From the window facing the street, we saw the figure of a man paying a taxi. On the pavement beside him, a suitcase and a briefcase. The taxi drove off. The man dragged his luggage over to the door. He was no longer visible from where we stood.

The buzzer rang a second time.

Minutes later, the bell to our flat. Someone, possibly the concierge, had let the man into the building and he was now right outside. Our doorbell again. I followed Daniel as he went to investigate. He peered through the peephole, shrugged in response to whatever he saw, and opened.

Outside stood a slender man with bags under his eyes and a white, heart-shaped face. He wore a suit and shiny brown shoes and his dark hair was combed into a side parting with each section slicked down, the furrows of the comb still visible. Early to mid-fifties I would say, though it was hard to tell.

‘Gregor?’ the man said.

‘No, he’s in Ljubljana.’

The man looked surprised. He rubbed his forehead and craned his neck to look past us, as if checking to see whether Daniel was telling the truth.

‘He’s not here. Can I take a message?’

‘My name is Pierre,’ the man said forlornly. ‘From Stockholm. I expect Gregor.’

Daniel’s face lit up. ‘Pierre Zekeli?’

The man nodded.

And our trip slipped away.

‘Well, I am Daniel, Daniel Harper, from London.’

More astonishment.

‘The poet?’

‘Yes!’

At this word, Pierre lunged forward and threw his arms around him, the seams of his suit nearly bursting, the smell of pine cologne rising off his clothes.

‘Come in, my friend,’ Daniel said, and helped him with his suitcase.

I closed the door and followed.

Pierre scanned the living room as he walked in, his eyes resting for a moment on Daniel’s busy desk. After setting down his briefcase he excused himself and headed towards the bathroom, and on his way back detoured into the kitchen for a glass of water. He was clearly familiar with the place.

‘Daniel Harper,’ Pierre muttered to himself in a funny accent, smiling.

I cleared my throat and held out a hand.

‘And I’m Marie.’

‘Oh yes, this is Marie,’ Daniel echoed.

Pierre shook my hand with his cold one.

‘But where is Gregor?’ he asked Daniel.

‘Gregor’s in Ljubljana.’

‘Why?’

‘He’s getting divorced.’

The smile disappeared. ‘From Barbara?’

Pierre went to the sofa and steadied himself on an armrest.

‘But they were together since sixteen.’

‘Well, that’s probably why.’

In order to lighten the news, Daniel went to the kitchen and returned with a good bottle of whisky we’d bought at the shop on the corner.

After knocking back a tumbler, Pierre asked for three hangers. He opened his scuffed leather suitcase, a fine make and well travelled, and hung three dark blue suits like the one he was wearing in the closet by the door. That was the most he would ever unpack.

Daniel asked whether he was hungry.

No, Pierre replied, the only thing he required was an ashtray.

Once a saucer had been provided (we couldn’t find an ashtray despite our guest insisting Gregor was a heavy smoker himself) Pierre poured himself another tumbler and produced a dented cigarette case embossed with two griffins from his jacket pocket. He lit his cigarette with a match. Once he’d taken a few puffs, inhaling deeply as if savouring every particle, he turned to Daniel and asked whether he knew anything more about the divorce.

No, Daniel said, he knew nothing, in fact he had never met Gregor; the particulars of his life were unknown to him, apart from what he happened to mention in letters.

Pierre topped up his tumbler, turned the bottle towards him to study the label. His nails were manicured and he wore a gold ring with some kind of emblem on his little finger.

Once Daniel had poured out two more tumblers for us, we all sat down at the kitchen table, by then the designated focal point of the flat, and over the next two hours, over a litany of questions and answers — how was so-and-so, had Daniel seen the latest anthology of French and Czech poetry, or the Finnish journal with the piece on Celan, and many other things I couldn’t possibly relate to — Pierre finished off our twelve-year-old Johnnie Walker. I watched as the bottle’s coppery contents sank from three quarters to half full to a quarter to empty.

With the last remaining drops, to which he added an inch of tap water, Pierre swallowed three pills, two pink and one white, which he extracted from his briefcase, kept at his feet at all times like a small, obedient dog. Within minutes of ingesting them, his head began to droop and his cigarette started missing the saucer, small mounds of ash accumulating on the table.

Just as his eyes were closing like the shutters of a bookshop, Daniel showed him the sofa. He offered to make it into a bed but in a last flourish of energy Pierre raised his hand and said he liked sleeping on hard surfaces.

And there he slept, for eighteen hours. As far as I could tell, he didn’t even get up once to use the bathroom. Don’t worry about him, Daniel would say each time he caught me looking over. Are you sure he’s fine? I would ask, to which Daniel would answer, Of course. He’ll wake up when he recovers from his trip. But Sweden’s not that far away, I’d say, to which Daniel would reply, somewhat enigmatically, Depends how you measure distances .

As it turned out, Pierre spent half his visit asleep. Even when awake, he seemed in a permanent state of tilting into sleep, and when asleep he continued to look impeccable, his face as smooth as his hair, everything in place, elegant and unruffled. In many ways, he was the perfect guest.

He didn’t cost us much either, since he barely ate. At dinner he would take a few polite bites, fork always in left hand, knife in right, and discreetly push the unwanted food to one side of his plate. He’d then rise from his chair and walk over to the bookcase to fetch the saucer, sit down again and smoke through the rest of the meal. I knew Daniel disliked eating amidst fumes but he never protested, instead listening attentively as Pierre spoke to him about poems he had written, ‘L’après-midi d’une nuance’ and ‘Pour en faire de grands parkings’, and how the lukewarm reception of these early attempts in French had made him turn full-time to translation, although at the back of his mind he still harboured plans to write ‘ le poème total ’.

Every now and then Daniel would turn to check on me, but mainly his attention was riveted on his friend. Pierre’s English was bizarre, an invention seemingly his own, unlike the English of Scandinavian or Eastern European visitors to our Gallery whose origins were betrayed as soon as they came up to ask a question. When I commented on Pierre’s use of the word catarrh (he’d arrived with a mild cold) Daniel leapt to remind me that English was his fifth language, after Romanian, Swedish, French and German.

Towards the end of dinner, or, rather, as Daniel and I were finishing ours, Pierre would wash down a few pills with his wine and half an hour later, like clockwork, crumple into his chair. Sometimes we would leave him in this position, which looked far from comfortable, but usually Daniel would slip his hands under his armpits and drag his friend to the sofa and stretch him out horizontal, then remove his shoes and place them by the briefcase at his feet.