…HAMBURG…
When tilders had gone, Anselm went out on the balcony and smoked a cigarette, watched him drive away. He looked down at the unloved roses and thought about his first days in the family house.
On his second morning, he had woken in fright from a drunken sleep and did not know where he was. He had been fighting the top sheet, twisting, it was tight around him. He’d lain back and felt his hair. It was wet with sweat. He got up. The pillowslip was dark. He stripped it from the pillow. It gave off a chemical smell, the smell of the pink fluid the doctor gave him to drink before he left the hospital.
In the huge tiled bathroom, pissing into the rusty water in the toilet bowl, the same smell had risen, richer now, it sickened him.
He showered, standing uncertainly in the huge bath. Water fell on him, a warm torrent, he was inside a rushing tube of warm water. He did not want to leave it. Ever. But eventually he went downstairs. There was bread and butter and tea, tea in bags, a box of leaf tea. He made toast and tea, that was an ordinary thing to do.
An ordinary thing on an ordinary morning.
Tea brewed in a china pot. In a kitchen. Toast with butter.
He had thought it gone forever.
He’d made two slices of toast, put them on a plate, and put the pot of tea and the toast and butter and a bowl of sugar on a tray and gone out onto the terrace. There was an old, dangerous chair to sit on and a rusty garden table. He’d gone back and forth to the kitchen and, in all, eaten seven slices of toast, toast with butter, just butter. He drank three cups of tea from the English china cup, roses on it.
Just eating toast and drinking tea, sitting in the sunshine in the wobbly chair, massaging the two fingers on his left hand, he could not remember more peace in his life.
Then he was sick, he could not reach the bathroom.
He had not left the house for two weeks. There was enough food and drink for ten weeks, more. He did nothing, existed. The milk ran out, he drank black tea. He sat in the spring sun, dozed, tried to read Henry Esmond, found on his great-aunt’s bedside table, drank gin and tonic from before midday, ate something from a tin, slept in an armchair smelling faintly of long-dead dog, he had a memory of the dog, a spaniel, one eye opaque. He’d woken dry-mouthed, empty-headed, drunk water, poured wine, watched television in the study, not very much of anything, often went to sleep in the chair, woke cold in the small hours.
His brother had rung every second day. Fine, said Anselm, I’m fine. I’m pulling myself together. He had no idea what together would look like. There were terrifying blanks in his memory of the years before the kidnap-big blanks and small blanks, with no pattern to them. They seemed to go back to his teens. It was hard to know where they began.
He’d exhausted his clean clothes. Where was the laundry? He’d remembered a passage off the kitchen leading to a courtyard. The washing machine was unused for a long time, the hose disintegrated, water everywhere. He washed his clothes with old yellow soap in the porcelain sink, found a pleasure in it, in hanging the washing in the laundry courtyard.
And every day, he’d walked around the garden, looking at the roses, smelling them. One morning, when he woke, he’d known what he was going to do. Before noon, he left the house for the first time.
He knew where the bookshop was. He had been there on his last visit to his great-aunt, on his way to Yugoslavia. He had bought her a book.
He walked a long route, up Leinpfad to Benedictstrasse and down Heilwigstrasse and through Eichenpark and on to Harvesterhuder Weg and through Alsterpark. He walked all the way to the Frensche bookshop in the Landesbank building. In the crowded shop, he was assaulted by fear bordering on panic but he found the book. It was waiting for him, twelve years old, never opened, an encyclopaedia of roses. He paid and left, sweating with relief.
He walked down to the Binnenalster, bought a sausage on a roll from a street vendor, sat on a bench in the sun and opened the book. His was the hand that cracked its spine. He looked at the pictures, read the descriptions, while he ate. Then he walked all the way home, too scared to catch a bus, and, exhausted, went around the garden trying to identify the roses. It was more difficult than he had imagined. He was sure about Zephirine Drouhin at the front gate, Gruss an Aachen on the terrace, Madame Gregoire Staechelin on the wall, and three or four others.
But that wasn’t enough. He wanted to know the name of every rose in the garden, and there were so many he couldn’t be sure of- the pictures were fuzzy, the descriptions too imprecise.
Like his memory.
Beate knocked on the glass. Anselm finished the cigarette and went in.