The Pages Read online

  No way, Lena says.

  Now I’m asking myself – why did he come to the gallery after all these years? Was it to show me that he had succeeded in defying my bullying?

  I’m sure he’s forgotten, Lena says. He would not have come if he was holding a grudge.

  Julia’s laugh holds a hint of capitulation.

  It’s in his power to forget, not mine.

  It’s so long ago, Julia.

  I should have spoken to him about it, Julia says. Cleared the air. Now I wonder, should I call him, explain to him that I had nothing against him? I liked him. He was my friend. Maybe I fancied him. I just thought boys didn’t feel anything. The way he turned around sometimes and smiled at me without saying a word, as if he wanted more. Maybe it was some weird kind of love we had for each other, with no other way of showing it but through this painful messaging. He’s happily married now with three children, so he told me. His name came up in the paper just the other day, she says. Some trial in which he is defending a man on charges of attempting to set fire to a hostel. That’s what lawyers do. This sounds crazy, I know, but I keep thinking he may have been so desensitized by that experience at school that it brought him to this point where he can defend the indefensible.

  Julia, you’re thinking too much, Lena says.

  I know, Julia says. It’s the way I was brought up, feeling responsible for things by association.

  Let it go.

  If I hadn’t subjected him to that daily torture, Julia says, he might have done something kinder with his life, like medicine. Maybe he would have become an artist, a writer, done something creative. Maybe that’s why he came to the gallery, because he loves art and he hates being a lawyer defending people who burn other people.

  Lena offers to make more coffee.

  Julia’s son Matt walks into the kitchen wearing earphones.

  He has the presence of a ghost, not quite in this world. It must be Saturday if he’s not at school. Julia speaks about him in the third person – wait till you see, she says to Lena, he will grab some cereal and not even bother with a bowl, hand to mouth. He’s a vegan, she says, self-proclaimed. I had to bulk him up with protein last summer because his teeth had gone grey. He was with this theatre group in the country and they forgot to eat, just weed and love.

  What about saying good morning to Lena? Julia says.

  Matt lifts one of the earphones to say hello.

  Lena smiles – hi, Matt.

  For one moment he’s back in real time, then he replaces the earphone and disappears again.

  The sound of hammering has come right into the room at this point. The art books have all begun to take it personally. They would happily drag one of those workmen into a studio and silence him in art. Photos taken of artists in their studios often make them look like murderers, their overalls splattered with paint. We are relieved when Julia crosses the floor in her bare feet to close the balcony door.

  You can’t help looking back, Lena says.

  No choice, I suppose.

  I’m no better, Lena says. I still find myself getting worried about my father. He’s been dead a couple of years now, but I can’t help wishing I could undo some of the stuff I did. The trouble I caused him. I was sent to live in Ireland with my mother after they got divorced. I hated it. Couldn’t wait to get back to Philadelphia. I thought my father was punishing my mother by foisting me on her. I thought he wanted me out of the way so he could start a life with his new girlfriend. And guess what? I got my revenge on them by taking up drugs. They were everywhere. First thing I came across. Skibbereen is the drug capital of Europe, she says.

  I went on this binge of self-destruction.

  After he brought me home and got me straightened out, Lena says, I wouldn’t let him see his new partner. I refused to let her in the door. The scale of resistance was unreal. I couldn’t stand him paying attention to anyone else. Even the sight of a woman’s name in his address book made me mad. I tore them all out. I read their letters and cried. He was getting on very well with a woman from Madison named Grace. She was lovely. She would bring chocolates for me and I threw them on the floor, saying – what’s this, bribery?

  Honestly, they would have had a good life together, but I would not allow it. I got her number and called her one night. I think it was two in the morning. I told her she was ugly and fat and full of poison. She was making my father ill. He was dying because of her. I told her he was throwing up the whole night after she kissed him.

  Shit, Julia says.

  I was fighting for my life, Lena says.

  That’s rough.

  It’s unbelievable, Lena says, the power a child can have over a parent. I could smell the guilt. I could feel him thinking it was such a mistake to send me to Ireland. I could sense him being worried about doing the best for me, making up for lost time. I played his love against him. I held him to ransom. I chased away any possibility of a happy life. I insisted on being his only happiness.

  That’s the sacrifice, that’s what a parent does.

  You can’t go back and change things, Lena says.

  I’m sure you meant everything to him, Lena.

  Julia stands up and puts her cup into the sink. She puts her hand on Lena’s arm.

  Come on, Lena, she says. Let’s go and have a look at that studio.

  19

  The apartment remains silent all day. Other than the hammering coming from the building site nearby, there has been no sound until the key is heard in the door late afternoon. It’s Julia’s son, Matt. He walks into the living room and stands for a moment staring at the North Sea in one of the paintings as though it has spoken to him. He opens the door of the balcony to stand outside and look at the street below. The noise of hammering seems even more furious for having been kept out. When Matt comes back inside, he collapses on the floor by the wall. Before he goes down, he performs an inspired dance routine which includes leaping onto the sofa and sliding in triumph along the bare floorboards like a football player after scoring a goal. His collapse is graceful. Accompanied by a shout that might be heard by workers on the nearby scaffolding.

  He appears to be lifeless.

  What has he taken? A small spillage of mashed gherkins and bread pulp has emerged from his mouth. His eyelids are not quite closed. His arms have an accidental layout. The positioning of his head against the skirting board gives his body a caved-in appearance. He seems neither deceased nor asleep, making his slow descent from that fantastic peak of lonely pleasure.

  He has been stealing from himself. He’s like that great junkie in literature – Faust. The pact with the devil. All that stolen knowledge to be repaid.

  Hold on, Matt. You have nothing to worry about. Everything will be fine, just hang in there.

  My author was addicted to alcohol. Joseph Roth drank himself to death. His life was hard and he had a lot of sorrows to drown, but he still managed to write a stack of books before he left this world. He sat at a table in a restaurant with a flask of wine or a double schnapps, what they called a ninety-per-center. It gave him artistic clarity. He kept listening to the conversations going on around him and managed to keep all that talk of politics out of his novels. He would not be in a position to provide much reassurance on addiction, but it might be worth hearing what he had to say about identity – I am a Frenchman from the East, a humanist, a rationalist with religion, a Catholic with a Jewish mind, a true revolutionary.

  Matt is African European. His father is from Nigeria and Julia is German. They met when she was on holidays and he agreed to conceive a baby without any further commitment to each other. She later managed to bring him to Germany and helped to set him up with a career in marketing. Matt grew up without his father, though he sees him from time to time and they occasionally go on holidays together. Last year they all went to Nigeria to meet his family.

  Perhaps Matt is not un
like Joseph Roth. He has the elsewhere inside him. A different here. A different back home which is often defined by his skin colour. Like Roth, he tries to shake off the construct of identity imposed on him from the outside. He is the true revolutionary at the forefront of a fluid world, free to travel back and forth between various places of origin, some real, some imagined.

  Julia has quite a number of books by African writers on her shelves. One of them was written by an African American author who was raised in Nigeria and emigrated to the US when he was around fifteen, same age as Matt is now. It’s called Every Day is for the Thief. In the book the author describes going back to visit his country of childhood as an adult. He writes with despair at the level of corruption and picks up the Yoruba proverb about the thief for his title. His journey home is written from the viewpoint of a man who has become used to living in New York and feels angry at having to pay a bribe for every small transaction. Everybody smiles and says – have you got something for me. The writer has outgrown his own people. He has taken on the values of his adoptive country and resents their thieving customs. While he managed to escape, they remain burdened by the history of their once colonized country, by the theft of the landscape on which their ancestors walked. The ground beneath their feet did not belong to them until they achieved independence in 1960, fifteen years after the end of the Second World War. The country had been plundered, some of its most precious works of art taken to museums in London and never returned. The people themselves were stolen to be sold as slaves. Theft was an inescapable part of the world order. Their relationship to property became distorted by that brutal history and the writer discovers, by going back after so many years in the USA, that a person can own something for one day, but that every day is for the thief.

  And what about those people who go and live in another part of the world. Are they not thieves too, stealing themselves from the place where they grew up? Each person leaving home takes some vital piece of information from the landscape that cannot be replaced by those who stay behind. By the time they go home again, everything has changed.

  It’s the paradox of the revenant. Going back to where you come from can give you the feeling of being cheated. It all looks so familiar and so different, the grass is lying to you. A person returning feels robbed.

  When Julia gets back, it’s dark. The light from the street shines across Matt’s body and it takes her a moment to notice that there is something wrong. She rushes over to find his eyes open. She feels for his pulse and calls his name a dozen times, trying to wake him up by holding his face in both hands. Telling him where he is and who he is and who his mother is. His breathing is that of a diver coming to the surface. She sits down on the floor with her back to the wall, cradling him in her arms and stroking his face.

  Matt, my boy, my baby Matt. Look at you.

  He opens his mouth, but he has no words to offer.

  She calls the rescue services. When the paramedics arrive, they check his pulse and take his blood pressure. His blood sugar levels have dropped. They ask him what he has taken and he tells them it was skunk, nothing heavier than that. They speak to his mother and tell her that, if she wants, they can take him in to accident and emergency for observation, but that would mean staying in hospital overnight. In a gently reassuring voice the paramedic, a young man not much older than Matt, says he will be fine if he gets some sugar. Every junkie will pass out now and then, they tell her. When they’re gone again, Julia goes into the kitchen and pours a glass of pomegranate juice. She comes back and makes him drink it all.

  Come on, Starman, she says.

  She gets him on his feet and leads him straight into the bathroom. Once he is sitting on the floor of the shower with a warm flood of tropical rain coming down on his head, she goes to clean things up. A fictional scent of pine fills the air. She closes the balcony door to keep out the late-night traffic tearing along the cobbles on the street below and allows the room to recover. She gets him out of the shower onto his feet again and dries him off with a large white bath towel. She reaches up with furious love to dry his hair, leaving it in standing stacks, then she rubs his back. She kneels to dry off his long legs and then steps back to examine him.

  Matt, look at you. Any woman, she says. Any woman or man on this planet would be crazy about you.

  And here, she says, knocking with her knuckle on the top of his skull, what you have in here is infinitely more beautiful than your body.

  She wipes her face to make sure he can’t tell she has been crying.

  Remember all the magic tricks you did for me, she says. And what about your drawings.

  His art showed such promise. He has an improvised art trolley with trays designed to hold vegetables now filled with paints and brushes. She wants him to find a story for his longing. Now she is forced to check her credit card history and ransack his bedroom to find his secrets.

  You know what, Julia says. We’ll get you straightened out. We’ll go swimming. Let’s go to the pool tomorrow morning. Then we’ll go up to Hamburg. You need to go and live with your other mother, it will be good for you to be around Irena for a while, going for lots of walks in the forest with her dog. You love that dog, don’t you?

  20

  Lena arrives back late. Julia is still up – she can’t sleep. Sitting in the kitchen, holding an all-night vigil, checking every now and again to see how Matt is doing. Lena keeps her company and they drink camomile tea in buckets while Julia talks about her son, how she will have to bring him up to Hamburg, a new school, a new start. His other mother is a doctor and will get him into some kind of drug rehabilitation programme.

  Lena tells Julia that she went to meet Armin.

  I wanted to give him something, Lena says. A small gift, just to thank him for returning my book. A lot of people would not have bothered even picking it up, or maybe would have brought it to some antiquarian bookseller and sold it. I’m sure it’s worth a few euros, though it’s missing a page.

  What did you give him?

  It was hard to decide, Lena says. A gift voucher would have been too much like something your aunt would give you. I found a lovely brown scarf with a houndstooth pattern, but that’s more like a birthday present, she says. I’m going to keep that for Mike when he comes over. He’s planning a walking trip to Romania for us both. He’s been growing a beard, by the way, it’s quite impressive, makes him look rugged. Like a pioneer. He wants to go hunting, that’s his thing.

  Lena says she thought of giving Armin two tickets for a Nick Cave concert, but that might have implied going together. If he doesn’t have a partner, that is.

  In the end I went for the obvious – a book.

  That makes sense, Julia agrees.

  He brings me a book, so I bring him a book, right?

  What book?

  Took me ages to decide, Lena says. I can’t read them in German. The woman in the shop recommended a novel written by a Bosnian man who came to Germany to escape from the conflict in the former Yugoslavia.

  Ah yes, Julia says, good choice.

  After I gave it to him, Lena says, I had second thoughts. I felt a bit stupid. Like, hang on, what do you give a migrant, obvious: a book written by another migrant. With a couple thousand titles to choose from, nothing comes to mind, only a book that basically tells his own story. How dumb is that?

  No, Julia says, it’s an uplifting story.

  Like, here, Armin, have a good look at yourself.

  Believe me, Julia says, he’ll love it. There’s a great scene in the book about the writer’s grandfather accidentally stepping on his grandmother’s foot while they were dancing. It could have changed the course of history and the author might never have been born.

  Armin is a good reader, Lena says.

  It’s thoughtful of you to give it to him, Julia says. He’ll appreciate that.

  He doesn’t have a whole lot in the line of memor
ies, Lena says. There’s no home to remember back there in Chechnya. He doesn’t have much to say about Grozny, apart from the smell of diesel fumes. The engines of armoured vehicles spewing out dirty black smoke. And gunfire. He used to play with empty shells. He can remember queues for food aid. He can remember the curfew where nobody was allowed onto the streets and a group of mothers stayed up all night in the house talking and talking, sometimes all laughing together, until there was an explosion heard in the distance and one of the women said – that’s one that missed us.

  He lost his parents in that war, Lena says. He still carries injuries from the explosion at the market. He’s got some shrapnel fragments in his body. He has a sister who lost her leg in that bombing. There’s a piece of newsreel footage of them both in a hospital, he told me, though he’s never seen it himself. They were brought to Germany by an aunt when they were young, with the help of traffickers.

  He had nothing much to say about that journey either, Lena says, apart from being on the train for hours. It took days, to him and his sister it seemed like months.

  He’s working with a group of city planners. Goes around measuring, you know, those tripods you sometimes see on the street, don’t ask me what they’re for.

  It was mostly his adoptive German family we talked about. That’s a happy story for him to tell. He and his sister grew up in a large family that was full of chaos. A huge apartment in Frankfurt where they could wave at each other through the windows across the courtyard. It was a great place to play hide-and-seek, he told me. Rooms off rooms off rooms – you could get lost. They used to cycle around on bikes.