I found a café with a humidifier that reached the street tables. I sat there, waiting for a waitress, but none came. I took out a notepad then and began to write. I wrote one version of a goodbye, but the veil of atomised spray fell on the pages and smudged them, the way tears would. And I thought, how strange, the circling nozzle attached to the wall below the sunshade is supplying all of the emotion. Surely some of it should come from me. So I tore out the page and wrote again. I shielded the fresh page with the tearful one and managed to write an unsmudged letter of goodbye.
It was almost dark by the time I was done. So for some reason I knew there would be no cello sounding out, doing its baroque thing around the cobbled streets. Something had to finish, I knew, and I had heard enough of it, for the time being at least. But everything else was much the same. The tiled arch in the fading light, the antique courtyard, the bullet-grey stone steps fanning upwards into the shadows. There was an outline behind the lace curtain of the apartment next to hers and I imagined the neighbour’s face with its dispassionate stare. I found the door unlocked when I pushed it and it swung slowly open. It had done so before to the accompaniment of the cello suites, so the little creak it made seemed plaintive and lonely.
I walked inside and it was all there again, the sofa beneath the window, without its cello for once, the curtains blowing softly from the blessed breeze outside, the half-open door to my right with the mattress visible on the floor. I half-expected to see her sleeping there, like the Rokeby Venus, face turned away from me. But there were only rumpled sheets visible, and there were no garments thrown about the floor. I folded the note, but the unwritten side of paper seemed to be crying out for a name. I didn’t know her name, so I addressed it simply to ‘dear’. It seemed as good a name as any for her, so when I had walked inside and whistled a tune and ascertained she was not in the bathroom either, I smoothed the sheets on the mattress, almost longingly, and left the note on top of them. I walked outside then and pulled the door behind me, careful not to let it make that final click. She might have forgotten her keys, I thought, and as I made my way down the stairs, it gradually began to build. A constriction in my chest, a sense of panic, a sudden sense of loss, as if someone or something had died. So this is how it feels, I thought, to lose somebody and know you won’t be able to see them again. What surprised me was the physicality of it, the muscular impact. I could hardly make it down those steps. And I thought everything the scientists tell us is wrong: there is a heart and a soul and it is stronger than this body of mine. And there was a sound now, echoing round the arch, and I realised it was coming from my phone.
It was a relief to hear the voice. Istvan’s, as if the real world could take precedence again. And as I walked down the cobbled street on to the boulevard, it all returned, the traffic, the evening heat, the hissing sprays of the humidifiers from the sidewalk cafés.
We have appointment, he said, tomorrow. Eleven thirty.
Where? I asked stupidly. I had to remind myself I had a business.
City morgue, he said. In the twelfth district. For you, me and your friend.
What friend? I asked stupidly, again.
Psychic friend, he said. Who sent us there.
I thanked him and cut off the call. But the moment I had done so, I suddenly missed his voice. Any voice. The feeling had returned, the constriction in my chest, as if a metal hand were closing on it, and the fingers were my ribs. Was that it? I wondered, the last goodbye? and I realised I had nowhere to go, nowhere I wanted to go. Home seemed impossible, for a while at least, and the only place of rest I could think of was that mattress, with my note waiting on the smooth bedsheets, but that seemed impossible too. So I did what all the lost ones do. I walked.
I don’t know how long I was walking, but I became aware, and it was an awareness that slowly crept up on me, of someone following. I wasn’t used to being followed, I had always been the follower. But I sensed, I couldn’t have heard, the slide of canvas sandals on the pavement behind me. I got the scent, then, of a fresh body in a summer dress, fresher than all the dank city air around me, and I knew she was behind me. I slowed, and felt her hand slip through my arm, in that quite unthinking way she had done it the first night we met.
The thing is, she said, it felt so different with you. With us. You were my twin.
I could feel the hand uncurling round my ribs, the constriction lifting, and I could breathe once more. So this is what it feels like, I thought, to find someone again.
Don’t talk, she said. I don’t want you to talk. I want you to hear what I have to say. You want to forget it all, I understand. You want to forget me, I understand that too. But the thing is, I met you in another life. There’s another world, where this never dies. And it has all happened before.
And it had, I knew that somehow. I was walking in another’s place.
With who? I asked. And stupidly, I thought of grammar. I should have said ‘with whom’.
You know who, she said. He lives on the other side. And you must take me there.
Why? I asked, stupidly again.
Because, she said, and her logic seemed impeccable, I cannot go there alone.
So we walked back down the boulevard of linden trees. There was a strange forbidden frisson to this, a sense of adult abandon. I was with her in public, among the night city crowds. They surged around like moths, past us and away; we were mosquitoes, flitting through them, never touching. We came to that shell of concrete rising out of the pavement and I led her down the steps that he had taken with the gentlest of touches on her elbow. She moved wherever I moved her, like an obedient pet. Down towards the platform, where all the day’s heat had gathered into a dark night cloud. We took the metro then and she sat on the wooden seat, laid her head back against the smudged glass and caught my gaze, in an amused, abstract way. There was a transaction here, a goodbye gift, but whether the gift was for her or him I didn’t allow myself to dwell on. I knew my capacity for jealousy and knew I had to keep it at bay. The train slowed then and we walked back up the steps and found ourselves on those rising, medieval cobbled streets and I almost didn’t recognise them at night. But I could see the shape of the castle in the gloom, a piece of moon dangling above it, and I let it guide me. Through those streets with the crushed windows and the sagging architraves. And I saw the sign then, down the thinnest of streets where the gutters of the roofs above almost touched each other. Musikinstrumente.
He runs a music shop, I said.
Of course, she said.
She walked down the street, like someone remembering.
There was a light glowing from the window. I came behind her, and saw the dim gloom of the music shop, the warm glow from the kitchen at the back. And I felt jealous again. Her stillness was unnerving, outside that window. It implied a world of feeling I would never know.
We should go, I said. And she shook her head.
Don’t do something foolish. And she shook her head again.
You want me to leave you here?
She nodded.
So I turned and left her there. The street was hers, if anyone’s. Definitely not mine.
As I rounded the corner, I heard the crack of splintering glass. Was she the stone-throwing type? I wondered. But I thought it best not to look back.