There were damp sandbags in every doorway, there were municipal workers with unnaturally wide brushes pushing small tsunamis of brown water in front of them. There were whirlpools around every drain, but the traffic was flowing once more. I had dried the battery on my phone and called Frank, and told him he was indeed right, we should sit down and have a proper talk. So we met in a café and talked, me in my dampened suit, he in a kind of camouflage outfit, with military boots and a black ski mask tucked into the shoulder-band. He had changed, I mentioned, briefly, by way of a greeting. Everyone has changed, he said. You have seen the news? I had, I told him, and assumed he wasn’t talking about the water. No, he said, and adjusted the cuffs on his well-pressed khaki shirt and I saw that he was still wearing cufflinks. So we should talk, he said, and we began.
We talked about everything but the matter in question, about the riots, the rains, until eventually, when the coffee was cold, he asked me, in the way of men who are used to dealing with the world, to come to the point.
I have to stop blaming her, I told him. Much of the fault was mine. When fissures like this erupt between couples, both parties have issues to deal with and must take their share of the blame. Do I detect a whiff of the therapeutic couch? he asked me, smiling. There’s no couch involved, I told him, and it’s not like that, not like the cliché at all, it’s more a conversation with oneself, but sadly, the kind of conversation one cannot have with oneself, only through another. So the other is the conduit, he said. Yes, I agreed, to the kinds of realisations one should make on one’s own, but rarely can. Are we talking forgiveness here? he asked. Yes, we are, I said, but I also know how little there is to forgive. The difficulty, I told him, is forgiving oneself.
But.
But, he said. There would have to be a but.
Yes. But. I would ask you for a favour. I need a gift returned.
To a woman? he asked.
Yes, to a woman.
So I can allow myself the satisfaction of being right, he said. There was a girl.
There was a girl.
And you would like me to deal with her.
Yes.
As a – what is the Latin? Quid pro pro.
Something like that.
Tell her what? That your marriage goes on? You can’t see her again?
All of that.
Give her a shoulder to cry on? Because . . .
Because you’re that kind of man.
That women like to spill their hearts out to.
Sometimes more than their hearts.
We can’t help who we are.
No. And give her this.
I wound the bracelet of black pearls round my fingers. They reflected the café we sat in, the stained-glass windows, the curved ceiling, in their dark uneven way.
It will mean a lot to her?
Yes, I said. And to me.
We crossed the bridge then. The river was swollen like a fat worm that had fed too much on a bloated corpse. The humidity had come back wholesale and I was sweating in my already damp suit. He seemed immaculate, though, walking beside me and talked about tides of history that were coming this way, how the neutered, degendered flowers of the west could never thrive in that hard ancient Slavic soil. Were these new opinions, I asked him, or did he always think that way, trying to imagine Sarah listening to such bilge, but no, he told me, much like my therapeutic experience, it was a matter of uncovering a layer of thought he always knew was there. There are times, he told me, where one has to think straight.
Nail one’s colours to the mast.
I offered him the cliché for nothing.
Yes, he said. Otherwise the future won’t be black or white, will be a . . .
He was searching for a word.
A rainbow, I offered again.
No, he said. A mess. A pastel mess.
We made our way then through the cobbled streets I hadn’t seen for a while, and I was sad to see that most of the cobbles had been lost, ruptured, torn out of their sittings by the floods. They were being piled in untidy pyramids now by municipal workers. But I heard it then, the sound I hadn’t heard for a while, and he must have heard it too, because he asked me, did she play the cello?
She did, I said, and we could see the tiled arch now, the miraculous sound coming from above or inside it.
Can you hear that? I asked him.
Of course, he said. Bach. The second suite, in D minor.
I was mildly surprised at his erudition.
We know our music here.
We walked inside the arch. And he was right. Of course, they knew their music.
The courtyard was a mess of sandbags and sad grey pools that reflected the grey sky above. But the melody soared above it, which time or tide could never mess with.
And you want me to give her this?
The black pearls were in his hand. And I realised, for the first time, that they weren’t black at all. They were a delicate dove-grey.
Just follow the sound, I told him. Up those steps. And be nice to her.
What else would I be? he murmured. And I did wonder what else, as he walked up the fan of dark concrete steps and was soon out of sight.