Hotel andromeda, p.1
Hotel Andromeda, page 1
GABRIEL JOSIPOVICI
Hotel Andromeda
A Novel
For Tamar
What if these stones
Fall into the sea? What if someone builds
A stone monument at the sea’s edge?
Yannis Ritsos
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Conversation at the Top of the House
And in the Basement
An Unexpected Phone Call
The Arrival of the Man from Grozny
A Walk Along the Towpath
Nom de Plume or Nom de Guerre?
Hotel Andromeda
Thanks to the Russians
A Foul Mood
The Hands of Orlac
It Seems That They Mourn in Silence
I’m the Lady
I Don’t Know How to Go On
Nothing to Do Except Die
Round and Round
Short for Michaela
GC 44
Not Even the Tiniest Chink
A Tall Stack of Danish
No Problem
From Another Lady
Houdini
Now
Body in Boot
Soon Enough
That Was Then
I Saw Fanny Cerrito
I Know You Are There
Custos Messium
Note
About the Author
Also by Gabriel Josipovici
Copyright
Conversation at the Top of the House
She likes to come up here, to the bright flat at the top of the house, and to sit with the old lady in her large kitchen, with its window open to the sky.
The old lady says:
– I’ve only got cubes.
She is standing on a chair and rummaging about on the top shelf of the cupboard.
Helena says:
– That’s fine. I like cubes.
– Good, the old lady says. Because it’s all I’ve got.
She climbs down, clutching a blue cardboard box.
Helena says:
– I prefer cubes, actually.
– Cubes keep better, the old lady says. The granulated stuff tends to coagulate after a while, so it’s silly to get it since you’re the only person I know who takes sugar and you don’t come to see me that often.
– Don’t say that, Helena says.
– It’s the truth, isn’t it? the old lady says.
– It most certainly isn’t, Helena says. I come all the time. In fact I have to stop myself coming up here for fear of becoming a bore.
– There’s no danger of that, the old lady says.
– Isn’t there?
– None at all. And what’s more, you know it.
– I don’t, Helena says. But I do know that you’re much too polite to say if I bore you.
– That shows how little you know me, the old lady says. If you knew me better you’d know that I always speak my mind.
– You always say that, Helena says, but I doubt if you really do. Not when you think it would hurt someone.
– I value my privacy just as much as anyone else, the old lady says. You don’t have to worry. I’ll tell you when I don’t want to see you. Go on, she says, nodding towards the box, help yourself.
Helena eases a cube out of the box and lets it slide into her cup of tea. They both watch as it slowly disintegrates and merges with the brown liquid.
The old lady says:
– In Russia, before the Revolution, my mother told me, there was one cube of sugar for the whole family. It hung over the table, attached to the lamp cord by a piece of string, and anyone who wanted to sweeten their tea pulled it towards them and had a suck.
– I wouldn’t like to have been the youngest, Helena says.
– You wouldn’t have minded, the old lady says. Not if you’d not known anything else.
– That’s true, Helena says.
– Talking of Russia, the old lady says, have you heard from your sister?
– No, Helena says. You know she never writes.
The old lady takes a cigarette from the packet on the table in front of her and puts it in her mouth. She lights it and inhales deeply, then lets the smoke trickle out through her nostrils. She puts the lighter down beside the open packet.
Helena says:
– You know very well she doesn’t.
– She could email you, the old lady says.
– Email? Helena says. You must be joking, Ruth.
– Why? the old lady says. She must use email for her work.
– I doubt it, Helena says. I doubt if anyone has email there except the government. They barely have telephones.
She stirs her tea and takes a sip.
– And you don’t write? the old lady asks.
– Not any more, Helena says.
– You don’t want to know what she’s up to?
– Of course I do, Helena says. But I told you. What’s the point? She never answers my letters. Perhaps she never gets them. I don’t know. But I can’t keep writing into the silence.
The old lady presses the stub of her cigarette into the ashtray.
Helena says:
– When I was coming up the stairs just now I had the impression someone was looking at me.
She looks down at her cup. She says:
– I sometimes dream that I’m writing to her. And when I’m waking up or sitting in the bus I often find I’m composing a letter to her in my head. Telling her about my work. Trying to explain. But even in my dreams she never replies.
The old lady helps herself to another cup of tea. – For you? she asks.
Helena shakes her head. She says:
– As far as she’s concerned I don’t exist.
– That’s what you think, the old lady says.
– Yes, Helena says. That’s what I think.
– But you could be wrong, the old lady says.
– I could. But I know her well enough to think I’m right.
– Well, the old lady says. It’s possible.
Helena says:
– As far as she’s concerned I’m just a boring old art historian in boring old London.
She stirs the sugar at the bottom of her cup.
– You’re not boring, the old lady says. And I’ve personally never found London boring.
– To her I am and it is, Helena says.
– Perhaps to her, the old lady says. But not to me.
– You’re sweet, Helena says.
– I’m not sweet, the old lady says. It’s just a fact. Anyway, you’re you. Not this and not that. Just you. Nobody else.
– That’s what I keep telling myself, Helena says. But at times it’s difficult to believe.
– For you what you do is important, the old lady says. That’s all that matters.
– Is it? Helena says.
– Of course, the old lady says.
– I’m not so sure, Helena says. If it’s of no importance to anyone else then surely I’m kidding myself when I think it’s important?
– Why kidding? the old lady says. You may be right and everyone else wrong and one of these days they’ll wake up to the fact.
– And if everyone else is right?
– It’s still important if it’s important to you.
– That’s hard to hold on to, Helena says.
– Of course, the old lady says, in the great scheme of things it’s not important. But then nothing is.
– So?
– But there’s something between the great scheme of things and pure self-indulgence, isn’t there? the old lady asks.
Helena says:
– I know what you mean, but it’s hard to keep believing. I mean I believe when I’m at my desk working. I really do. I know it’s important to get it right and if it’s important to get it right then that means there’s a right and a wrong and it’s outside myself. Call it truth. Or something. But the rest of the time, away from my desk…
– That’s true of everyone, the old lady says.
– Not of Alice, Helena says. She’s never doubted for an instant that what she’s doing is important. And she’s right. It is.
– That’s what you think, the old lady says. Perhaps she thinks the same of you.
– Oh no, Helena says. She’s always known exactly what she wanted to do. And then she’s gone and done it.
– If that’s true, the old lady says, then she’s very lucky.
– But why are some people lucky? Helena says, pouring herself another cup of tea.
– If we knew that we wouldn’t call it luck, would we? the old lady says. On the other hand perhaps we imagine they never had any doubts because that suits us. Like George, my nephew. He seemed to know from the start that he wanted to be a concert pianist and that’s what he became. He lives for his piano and he lives for his performances. He doesn’t have a family and he doesn’t have any hobbies. When he isn’t practising he’s reading detective stories. It relaxes him, he says, after hours at the piano. And the hours more he’s going to put in before he goes to bed. But I sometimes wonder whether he doesn’t ask himself why he’s done what he’s done, since he’s never reached the pinnacle of his profession.
– He’s done pretty well, Helena says. He’s always on the radio.
– Pretty well, the old lady says. But he’s never reached the top. Where you find the Barenboims and the Schiffs. What I mean is that if he hadn’t existed it would not have made much difference to
– There aren’t any ranks in Alice’s line of work, Helena says.
– That’s true, the old lady says.
Helena swallows down the last of her tea and pushes the cup away from her as the curtains suddenly billow in the breeze.
The old lady gets up to shut the window.
– Gerald keeps urging me to find a ground floor flat, she says. I tell him climbing the stairs is what keeps me fit. And I wouldn’t give this up for anything.
– I can’t imagine you anywhere else, Helena says.
– I’m on top of the world, the old lady says. Let me enjoy it while I can.
And in the Basement
She holds the postcard photo out to him. – What would you say he was thinking? she asks.
He examines it in silence.
He looks up at her. He says:
– Nothing.
– Nothing?
– He’s just feeling the sun on his face, he says.
– But what’s going through his mind?
– Nothing, he says. I just told you: Nothing.
– All right, she says. What’s he feeling in the pit of his stomach then?
He leans over the photo again.
A time.
He hands it to her across the table. He says:
– I don’t know.
She says:
– It’s the end of his life. He’s seventy-one, seventy-two. He’s lost the two people who were central to his life, his crippled brother and his philistine and domineering mother. He’s an old man sitting in his back garden. His yard, as he would have said. Sitting not on a bench but on a kitchen chair. The chair that was always there in the yard. Under the quince tree.
She looks at him. He shrugs.
– Well? she says.
– I told you.
– Nothing?
– Uhuh.
– Nobody’s that empty, she says.
– Who said empty?
– You did.
– I said nothing was going through his mind. That’s different.
She waits.
He looks down at the table.
– Go on, she says.
– He’s just an old man sitting on a chair under a quince tree in his yard in the sun, he says.
– And?
– What more do you want?
– I don’t know, she says.
– Can’t you be satisfied with that?
– Is he happy, do you think?
– It’s not a question I’d ask, he says.
– But I’m asking it. Is he happy?
– Wittgenstein was a pretty tormented man, he says. The very English Bertrand Russell couldn’t make out this angst-ridden Austrian Jew. But as he was dying Wittgenstein is supposed to have said: ‘Please tell them I’ve had a wonderful life.’
– What’s that supposed to mean? she says.
– It means that most of us can’t ever really decide whether we’re happy or unhappy. Sometimes we think the one thing and sometimes the other. And there’s no-one to turn to for arbitration.
She leans over and lays another card-photo on the table in front of him.
– What’s this? he says, drawing it towards him.
– Look, she says.
– I’m looking, he says.
– Tell me what you see.
– It’s him again. In a room. Same photographer no doubt.
He turns the card over. – Hans Namuth, he says.
– Go on, she says.
He examines the photo again.
A time.
He says:
– Same period, probably the same shoot. He sits in a broken-down armchair in front of a window with a frilly curtain half drawn back and the most amazing wallpaper, like the interior of a woodland glen that hasn’t seen the light of the sun for years. He’s looking down, his eyes closed, his left hand on his knee and his right clenched round a book which he seems to be pressing into his huge bony forehead. Or perhaps he’s just meant to be leaning his head against it. It’s difficult to tell. Next to the window enclave is a narrow door with a No Smoking sign stuck on it, and, below that, a number of other pieces of paper, some of them whole sheets. A wall which starts barely beyond the door juts out towards us, holding him and us in the tiny space, made smaller by the fact that it’s entirely taken up with shelves bulging with files and loose sheets of paper, in front of which stand boxes also filled with papers and files, on one of which one can make out the words: ‘Records and Music’. But the predominant atmosphere is of a demented silence.
She says:
– Yes. The silence is pretty deafening.
– Can you make out the title of the book he’s holding? he asks.
– No, she says. I even tried with a magnifying glass, but it’s blurred.
He goes on looking at the photo.
She says:
– His brother’s died. His mother’s died. He’s all alone. But then he was always alone. His mother wanted him to be what he wasn’t and would never be, a social and financial success, someone who would help her keep up the ‘tone’ she was used to from her own upbringing, someone she could boast about to her friends. She couldn’t make him out. Why was he so lacking in ambition? Why couldn’t he earn a proper living? Why did he have to take those dead-end jobs, like working in a garden centre right there in Queens? Why did he have to spend so much time with those screwball Christian Scientists and poring over the works of Mary Baker Eddy? And yet, despite all this, famous artists like Willem de Kooning and Marcel Duchamp would ring up and ask how he was, and famous ballerinas like Tamara Toumanova and Zizi Jeanmaire, and film stars like Tony Curtis, would come round to the house to see him and buy his work. Tony Curtis called the other day, she would tell her friends. Tony Curtis? The Tony Curtis? Of course. Who else? He’s a great admirer of Joe’s work. His younger brother had had cerebral palsy since early childhood. He was never able to walk and spent his life in a wheelchair. He had difficulty speaking but was not in any way mentally retarded. He and Joseph were very close. Almost like identical twins. Each knew what the other was feeling, even when they were apart. Coming home from work Joseph would spend hours playing toy trains with Robert, two men in their thirties and forties playing toy trains. The three of them, the mother and two brothers, lived together all their lives, after their two sisters got married and moved out, and it drove Joseph mad. He worked at night on the kitchen table. If his mother found one of his boxes on the table when she came down in the morning she would throw it out into the yard. Kent you keep your stuff out of my kitchen? Looket the mess you’ve made! But he went on making those boxes. For himself. To give to the starlets he worshipped. To the shop assistants he hardly dared talk to. To the artists he venerated. Duchamp owned one. Man Ray another. My son who knows Willem de Kooning. Moira Shearer. Susan Sontag. And she kept throwing them into the yard. If he had forgotten one in the oven, where he would often put them to create the cracked and ageing quality he was after, she would scream at him until he put his hands over his ears. ‘She screamed at and scolded this fifty-year-old man as if he was seven years old,’ one visitor commented. ‘It was unbelievable.’
She stops.
He waits.
He gets up and goes to the bookshelf. He pulls down a book and brings it back to the table. He sits down, flicks through the book till he finds what he wants, then pushes it across the table to her.
She asks:
– What’s this?
He says:
– Read.
– ‘Old Man Asleep?’ she asks.
– Uhuh.
She reads. He sits opposite her and watches her.
– Yes, she says, when she has done, pushing the book back across the table to him.
He turns it round and reads for himself.
He says: – Sorry. The title fooled me.
She waits.
He turns the pages. – Ah, he says, here’s what I was looking for.
He pushes the book across the table to her again. He says:
– Read it aloud.
– Title and all?
He laughs. – Forget the title, he says.
She reads: –
Weaker and weaker, the sunlight falls
In the afternoon. The proud and the strong
Have departed.
Those that are left are the unaccomplished,
The finally human,
Natives of a dwindled sphere.
