He was present when I descended the steps, waiting in the shadow of the arch. I could have walked across the courtyard to the smaller exit, but I was tired, or I was curious, or just annoyed at being observed. So I continued, through the splash of late-afternoon sunlight, to the tiled wall against which he stood, and there was no cello playing, which I thought was odd. as I passed him he spoke again.
Hey, he said. Or was it how, or you? It was a greeting, whatever he said, designed to arrest one, neither friendly nor unfriendly, just curt. I stopped of course and turned once more and realised I remembered nothing of his face. The clothes I had remembered, the suit, with dampened patches round the armpits now in the summer heat, but I knew nothing of the face and wondered had it been because my eyes avoided it.
But there it was now, in the shadow, against the ceramic wall, dark, almost Levantine, slightly pockmarked round the cheeks and with a broad, full mouth. And I felt a pang of jealousy until I realised how absurd the feeling was.
You. It was you, he said, not hey this time. So the hey must have come first.
This was the love-object, yet another one. And I found myself wondering did he favour cufflinks.
Yes, I said.
No music today.
Not now. It seems to have stopped.
How can it just stop?
It comes and goes, I said, and tried to move on my way.
Please, he said. Tell me. What you do up there.
And there was panic in his voice, or something like desperation. I realised, with a dull sense of surprise, that he might be jealous too.
Nothing, I said.
Nothing?
I talk, I suppose.
Just talk?
And when I don’t talk, I listen.
Talk about what?
It would be impolite, I told him, to share that with you.
I don’t know, he said. Impolite.
It’s an English term, I told him.
Perhaps you are being . . . foolish.
I am sure of it, I said. And I must go now. If you’ll excuse me.
And he did. He stepped aside, and let me pass. I walked through the arch, on to the blissfully shaded street, and found a corner shop and ducked inside. I bought some gum from the proprietress, and saw his dark hair move past the window, then I walked back out. And I did what I was trained to do: I followed him, and kept half a length of street between us.
He made it through the cobbled streets to the wider boulevard and walked in the shade of the trees that flanked the traffic lane. I stayed on the pavement. I kept one eye on his dark suit as it appeared and disappeared behind the gleaming windows of the fitfully moving traffic.
Following. I could write a book on it. I probably am. It is one of the basic pleasures of the trade, like the feel of wood to a carpenter or of engine oil to a mechanic; it has its rhythms, its own moods, its basic quotidian duties and its sudden surprises. There’s a kind of Zen peace to it, it works best in a city, of course, along crowded boulevards like this one, where the parallax of passing bodies, lampposts, trees and traffic provide not only a cover but a kind of intermittent beat, an interrupted rhythm to the follower’s eye. There are the city sounds, of course, the blaring horns, the click clack of passing heels, the murmured conversations between businessmen, friends and lovers with who knows what endearments, emotional, financial, collegial. World after world passes the follower by and he – or she – has one ear out for those snatches of contingent lives, with one eye always on the subject – generally beyond hearing. You fall into an observant lull, the kind of peace a child has when it plays in a lonely sandpit; you forget yourself, your name, your anxieties and cares, you immerse yourself entirely in that other, that thing that is not you, that walks these city streets with a purpose, a destiny, a home, a family, a lover, all of which it may be your duty to discover.
So he was walking, through the aisle of linden trees, until he came to what seemed like a shell made of concrete rising out of the pavement, and he took a series of steps downward and vanished from sight. I sidestepped through the traffic and saw a metro entrance, the dark shape vanishing sideways, the hot-enginey wind blowing upwards into my face. Of course I followed, and found him on a platform with a random group of tourists in the grinding subway heat, as if all of the day’s humidity had gathered itself down here into one hot, fetid cloud. A train came, which he let pass, and then another, which he took. I jumped on the carriage behind, and could see the back of his head through the rear window, appearing and disappearing in the contrary motion of the carriages.
Why was I following? I had no idea. For the pure pleasure of it, I suppose. I was a follower. One of those who latches on to a life that seems more urgent than their own. It was habit, and I was curious. To know the story that had driven her to that bridge, to get some inkling into what she called the love-thing. To see did he wear cufflinks too.
And the train swayed and slowed and I saw him grab the handrail and saw the frayed cuff of his shirt and knew that he didn’t. Not that it mattered anyway. But the shirt was poor and maybe he was too. What did a cellist earn in an opera orchestra in this backward place? I had no idea.
The train shuddered, coming to some destination, and I felt a sudden, irrational surge of panic that the station would be my own. I had never taken the train home; the car was a necessity, what with schools and music lessons. What if I followed him up a set of steps, down a winding street and saw him enter a faux-wooden Tyrolean structure that was my own? What if Sarah was home and embraced him with a familiar hug, a kiss, brought him through that heavy door for an hour or two of questionable pleasure? It was absurd, I knew, but out of the lulled daydreams of the follower’s mind, all sorts of strange fancies emerge. Most of them are useless, but the follower entertains them because one in a thousand might turn out to be true. And the train came to a halt at an unfamiliar station, and I saw him elbow his way to the carrriage door and walk with a distracted air down a suburban platform towards another set of steps. And of course I followed.
We emerged into the hot, dying day. On a steeply rising cobbled street, almost medieval, with façades on either side that seemed to lean towards each other, as if their gutters and gables wanted to touch. And maybe one day they would. There was three hundred years of leaning in these structures, the tiny windows crushed out of shape by the weight of brick above them, and the roofs had lost all semblance of anything like a straight line. The sun was setting and there was an amber glow to the light that remained. A tiny sliver of its reddened ball was all that was left of it behind the dark silhouetted mass of a castle rising above those layers of irregular rooftop. And he walked down this street without a thought, as if it was his own.
His shoes echoed on the cobbled surface. An older woman with a headscarf passed him and nodded in some kind of recognition. So people lived on these medieval streets, they were more than picture-perfect postcards; they were home, at least to him.
He turned left now, down a narrower street, though one wouldn’t have thought it possible. But there it was, a dark ribbon of cobbles among single-storey houses, and he took a key from his pocket and opened a door and walked inside one of them.
I stood on the corner for a breath or two. I heard the woman walk back the way we had come. I watched the sun vanish completely behind the dark shape of the castle. And I heard another sound then, a rhythmic creaking, and realised it came from the door above the house. It was a small wooden sign, and it was angling backwards and forwards. There was no breeze, so it must have been the motion of the door as he entered that caused it to move. I walked towards it, slowly, after what seemed like a decent enough interval. There was faded handwritten lettering on the wooden sign. It spelled, in faux-medieval Germanic letters: Musikinstrumente.
Why the German, I had no idea. But it was a sign, and it advertised a shop, a tiny one, which I had to observe through the small, almost crushed windows. I could see musical shapes, inside, of a cello, a viola, a violin. I could see shelves stacked with sheet music for sale. And I could see him making his way past a counter, through this elongated room into another room inside. And in there I could see a woman and a child seated at a kitchen table.
He had a wife, of course. He ran a music shop to supplement his income from the orchestra. And he had a child, and hadn’t wanted another.