BY THE TIME MOBIUS was awake, it had all been decided. He had been dreaming of crawling on his hands and knees through spiders’ webs in the darkness, and was grateful when Carl tore away the curtain and let in the morning sun. Mobius clambered from his bed to replace the curtain rod on its hoist, only to find himself exposed to the party in the garden below. Monika was there with Hannelore and Gustav, sitting quietly on a garden bench drinking coffee.
Mobius replaced the curtain and sat on his bed. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t convince Carl to stop packing his things into the canvas duffle-bag that was his only souvenir of the war. There wasn’t much to pack, but enough to guarantee a losing battle with Carl gathering the small mounds of shoes and still damp socks, his vest and jacket, and woollen trousers, and plunging them into the bag. The boy was excited, clearly acting under orders. Mobius didn’t even have time to object when Carl took up the duffle-bag, swept away the battered suit that was airing on a hatstand, and thudded out into the hall and down the stairs. ‘What am I to wear, Carl? You’ve left me nothing!’ But Carl merely roared and continued on his way.
‘There is only one way to find out,’ was the first thing Monika said to him when he was dressed and downstairs. She allowed a candid smile to break through her determination. She had reached a decision and wasn’t going to stand for any refusal. Mobius was well aware that he must quietly continue the performance of the willing hostage, as expected. That this was in accordance with his passive tendencies had, of course, been taken into account.
Monika was dressed in a sleeveless cashmere blouse and matching grey woollen trousers, and, beside her, Mobius’s shabby suit and disgraceful boots seemed more than ever a disguise that might betray her. He buttoned up his waistcoat and clasped his hands at his belt. He accepted an amused wink from Gustav and a tender, brow brushing and cheek pinching from Hannelore. She was wildly pleased, which made it even harder for Monika to maintain her calm. Only Carl misunderstood and burst into tears, trying to get Gustav to block the door and, when that failed, blocked it himself. His determined face didn’t commune well with his trembling lips and flooding eyes – he was clearly about to scream. Mobius rushed to embrace him, only just managing to keep the scream at bay. It emerged instead as a rook’s exhausted groan. Carl appeared happy enough with the compromise, and took up Mobius’s bag and mashed it into as small a parcel as possible, then ran out the door.
‘I’m sorry about that, but when I build myself up to something I like to get it over quickly.’ Monika placed her hand squarely in his lap, then withdrew it to start Rocinante, then replaced it, then removed it to change gears.
‘Not at all. It feels like a...’
‘An elopement? A . . . kidnap?’
‘Both of those things...An adventure.’
Monika smiled. ‘It will certainly be that.’
The car pulled away from the house and lurched over a railway sleeper in the grass by the ditch. ‘Oh dear. Never mind.’
Rocinante struggled against her weight until she found the thin macadamised line that hadn’t been eaten by the years. Once Rocinante was in her stride, Monika replaced her hand in Mobius’s lap, but withdrew it again to hit the horn, which sounded like a Chinese gong. ‘For good luck,’ she said, and hit it again to frighten some boys raking at a puppy under a tree.
The unpainted, cement-grey house stood out from its prim and brightly coloured neighbours. With a forecourt brushed over with lime, and a potholed driveway that led to a precarious shed seemingly afloat on a drifting hedge, Monika’s single concession to her neighbours’ obvious love of gardening appeared to be a dusty grapevine roped onto a bowed frame. A rooster strutted up to greet the car, puffing out its chest and staring malevolently. ‘The tyrant. I don’t know what to do about him. He attacks me when I’m at my washing.’
‘He looks hungry.’
‘Yes, I suppose he does.’
Monika climbed from the car and scuffed her muddy heels on the running board.
‘Hannelore’s gardening is a good example of what I mean. An excuse for adults to play in the mud.’
‘Who lives next door?’
‘The petitioner; you’ll meet her soon enough, if she isn’t watching you already.’
Mobius looked over at the lace curtains closest to them and was sure he saw them tremble. The immaculate stone cottage rose above garden beds afire with every colour. Tight reins of the greenest grass held the flowerbeds and rows of espaliered trees and sculpted shrubs together.
‘If they could talk, they’d scream,’ he said, indicating the apple trees closest to the boundary, strapped and staked and pruned almost to the ground. Each tree was, however, laden with fruit.
‘Yes, that would account for their taste, so far as I am told.’
Quite happy to take sides against the invisible petitioner, Mobius laughed as he took up his duffle-bag, and threw it cheerfully over his shoulder. Almost as though Monika had read his mind, she added casually – ‘The petitioner was once a very dear friend.’
‘Until?’
‘Her husband died, her children ran away, and I was somehow to blame.’
‘And on the other side?’
‘Frau Jensen. Whose husband has not died and whose children have not run away, more’s the pity for her.’
After a moment of hesitation at the front door, Monika pushed on inside. Two rooms and a staircase branched off a long central corridor that led towards what he presumed was the kitchen. A distant warmth radiated from the room and he could hear the choking of an overfilled stove, and whistling in the pipes above them. The empty corridor had been scoured clean. The walls were still damp from washing and the floorboards betrayed swathes of newly dried dust.
Mobius followed Monika as she strode past the empty rooms. Without even looking, he could smell that the rooms were never used, were newly exposed to fresh air, and that the stale must hadn’t given any ground overnight.
‘I practically live in this room. Come, it’s warmer.’
Mobius put his bag on the kitchen table, where it seemed rather too obvious and so put it at his feet. He felt, and looked, like a billeted old soldier. Monika watched him and took a deep breath. She closed her eyes and took an even deeper breath. Mobius waited for the pronouncement she had put off at the front door.
‘Dear Paul, no, that won’t do. May I call you Mobius? I noticed that Gustav...’
‘That’s Gustav’s sense of humour. It’s what my colleagues have always called me, as though I don’t have any other names. Call me either Mobius or Paul, but, I warn you, if you call me dear Paul, you’ll sound like my mother.’
‘That wouldn’t be a very good start – on top of everything else, I mean.’
‘You were going to say?’
‘Yes, I was.’ Monika came a step closer, square-on, and sighed. ‘I understand that your awkwardness is a kind of etiquette... and it is quite charming in its own way. Oh, I’m so nervous, imagine if we hadn’t, the other day...’
‘Yes.’
‘And, that my own lack of etiquette is a kind of awkwardness. However, I want us to be –’
‘I understand.’
It was Mobius who removed the final step between them, taking Monika’s head in his hands and kissing her quietly on her forehead, her nose, her mouth. She remained stiff in his embrace until he released his pressure, and she placed her head upon his shoulder.
‘Dear man. It’s just that, as I imagine you can appreciate, I’ve been so resigned to my lot, this empty house, Rocinante, my friends, my routines, the rooster ...’
She chuckled and squeezed his ribs.
‘That pimp, without a harem.’
‘Yes, that’s him, precisely.’
Monika looked at him strangely. There was a glaze of affection in her eyes, but also something else, something that surprised him.
‘Now, what would you like to do?’
‘I would like to take a bath.’
She grinned slyly and shrugged. ‘I rather hoped you were going to say that. Something in the Berlin air,’ she sang. ‘You must have brought that something with you!’
With curtains tied back and windows open, Monika’s bedroom on the second floor caught the full afternoon sun. She was thoroughly asleep, her face pale with dreams, her eyelids flickering. Mobius lay next to her, one leg slung over the quilt and taking the sun on his flank, back and shoulders. Mobius got the distinct impression that she was a regular daytime sleeper, simply because of the routine that Monika had followed prefatory to sleep. As he had lain there, she had descended the stairs and fed the furnace, locked the front and back doors, opened the kitchen and bedroom windows, then returned naked to her bed, all the while practically asleep. In fact, she even seemed surprised to find him on her return. She kissed him gently on the cheek, and then, with the determination of an explorer, dragged herself onto her side of the bed, and yet like a tide soon regained the central area.
The brightness of the room was accentuated by the canary-yellow walls, painted the same colour as the only other room Monika inhabited: the kitchen. The colour was designed to ward off gloom, something she had admitted when she referred to her ‘dark moods’, after Mobius had remarked upon the lack of pictures hung in the rooms and, indeed, throughout the whole house. ‘A wall should speak for itself’ had been her reply, and there was nothing Mobius could say to that.
He ran a finger down her forearm and rested it in the crook of her palm. This woman who was a piano teacher but kept no music in the house, this woman who painted her walls yellow but slept throughout the day, this woman whose diet consisted, as far as he could tell, of biscuits, cigarettes and cognac, lay beside him and slept soundly, wheezing out an E note from somewhere deep in her chest.
The voices of the afternoon arose from the land and entered the window on the warm breeze: the sounds of chopping wood, a lowing steer from the farmland nearby, pigeons scratching on the roof and the tinny snore of a backyard water pump. He even thought he heard children singing, then the clear sounds of a marching drum. He returned to the things within the room: the sauna-yellow walls that contrasted everything, the old wooden dresser, drawers open and weeping a shirt, the wardrobe stuffed with primary-coloured dresses and suit jackets, whose door was unhinged and stood alongside, whose shelves were aslant beneath a crammed weight of scarves and hats, gloves and capes, and the shoes parked beneath the window’s edge, in strict formation, but nevertheless a little splayed, a little unlaced, a little dusty.
The cognac and the sun in his eyes had given him a headache. He withdrew his hand and rubbed his neck, high beneath his skull. His feet tingled in response, as though his sluggish blood was returning. Blood returned, too, to that place still damp from their lovemaking. She had been exhausted and, although tender, it had been over quickly, she taking his hands off her breasts and belly, drawing him onto her, looking him squarely in the eyes. Although they were as eager as they had been at the castle, there was none of the same humour and even less of the sport; it was an easy subsidence and swell, on the edge of sleep, a communication of the eyes as much as the undercurrent that gripped them. ‘What would that waiter think if he saw us now,’ Mobius had wanted to say, but had stopped himself, and, in any case, Monika had closed his lips with her own. They rocked back and forth, becoming slower rather than faster, until, with a barely perceptible movement, he had run aground, and she had smiled, closed her eyes and launched off into sleep.
Mobius had just shut his eyes when there was a scrabbling on the tiles beneath the window. It sounded as though someone might have tossed a stone onto the roof, but moments later the rooster appeared, standing astride the window frame, ridiculously bowlegged and puffy, shoulders jerking and comb aroused. The rooster glared maliciously, rapidly opening and closing its beak, threatening to crow, but then, just as suddenly, slipped and fell, clattering back over the roof and squawking to the ground.
Even this little performance didn’t awaken Monika. Mobius dressed quietly, shutting the door behind him.
He sat on the running board of the car and smoked a cigarette, one of Monika’s. In his bare feet and vest, his trousers rolled above his ankles, he felt as though he belonged to the car and the dusty drive, and the warm sunshine in particular. He couldn’t remember the last time the sun had touched him on his naked arms. He consciously relaxed his shoulders and let go of his stomach. He drowsed and slumped, just like an old dog. He flicked away his cigarette and closed his eyes.
‘Good afternoon, Herr...?’
Mobius opened his eyes and looked around, but couldn’t locate the voice that was intimate yet hidden.
‘I’m right here.’
And so she was, a little old lady on her hands and knees, crouched beside the nearest apple tree. She was no more than a few metres away and the cigarette he had tossed burned in the mulch by her gloved hands. She gathered up some mulch and buried it.
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t see you there.’
‘Leaf parasites it is. This time of year.’
She stood up, as much as she could, which wasn’t a great deal. Her bent spine showed clearly through the thin material of her checked shirt. She winced as she rocked on her hips and stretched her legs. Even with her thin grey hair and watery brown eyes, Mobius could tell she had once been a beautiful woman.
‘Would you like some apples, Herr...?
‘Mobius. Well, I –’
‘Please help yourself. I’m afraid if I get down again, I mightn’t . . .’
‘Yes, of course.’
Mobius pulled at an apple that looked ripe but whose stem wouldn’t break. He twisted and pulled harder until the tiny tree shook.
‘Are you from the city then?’
‘You can tell...’ answered Mobius, still working at the apple.
‘It’s your answers to my questions. We’re right here, in the middle of what you probably refer to as nowhere, no-one is around, and yet you don’t really want to talk.’
‘Thank you for the apple –’
‘See what I mean? Are you visiting Frau Phelps?’
There was no guile in her voice as she passed him several more apples. ‘I can go on asking you questions, or you could tell me for yourself.’
Mobius threw up his hands. This gesture seemed to please the old woman, who was barely taller than his waist, and she collected more apples and dropped them into his vest, out of which she’d made a basket with his hands. As Mobius talked, they collected rapidly, he telling her whatever he thought she might want to hear, and she replying with apples.
She listened politely until he was finished.
He looked across at her then, wondering how many more apples he could carry, and saw pass over her face a grimace, or was it a moment of fear?
Mobius turned to follow her gaze and saw Monika standing at the window behind them, her face hidden but her belly and slack breasts in full sunlight, thighs astride and revealing her nakedness, her thick black V, which she scratched, before turning into the darkness.
The old woman smirked. ‘Better get back, Herr Dr Mobius. Talking out of school, I’m afraid.’
‘I’m sure you exaggerate, Frau...?’
But the old woman cackled and squeezed his hands, and to his horror took advantage by reaching beneath his outstretched vest and stroking his naked belly. She laughed even more at his response, which was to grunt in alarm. ‘I can smell her on you.’ Then she wandered off into her garden, having already forgotten about him.
He had tried to manage Monika but she was inconsolable. Seeking to allay her suspicions, he had said the worst thing possible: that the old woman – what was her name? – had seemed like a nice woman.
‘She didn’t tell you her name? What did you tell her? I want to know!’
Monika was in such a state that she’d tipped out all of the apples into the garbage. Darkness was falling as the old house awakened, creaking like an old boat, negotiating in its timbers the rapidly approaching cool. Then she had taken him by the hand, and led him upstairs.
It was the look in Monika’s eyes that made him finally understand. She was astride him and grinding her hips. The sensation of her rough hair on his belly was both abrasive and pleasant. Her grip on him was relentless, she sawed across his thighs without for a moment relaxing the great smooth pressure that felt like rungs on a ladder, the sensation of both washboard and wringer. This cost her a great deal of effort and her jaw was tightly clenched. Her eyes, however, bored into his own, until it became finally clear that what mattered to her most of all was not his love but his loyalty.
Monika was laughing at herself now, seated at the kitchen table downing glass after glass of brandy while Mobius tried to keep pace. He was desperate, in fact, to keep pace. From next door, on the other side, came the sound of a wailing child above the unmistakable sounds of a beating. A skirmishing row appeared at the margins of the child’s wailing, the hoarse shouting and bitter escalations of a man and woman at close quarters, spreading wildly from room to room until the child was silent and the fight spilt outside. The chill evening air appeared to aid in the combustion and soon the shouting was a single sound, cyclonic and incomprehensible, rousing the neighbourhood dogs and even the rooster, whose bugling introduced the wet sounds of slaps and punches, then sobs and pleading, a slamming door and a resumption of the child’s cries. The rooster entered through the open back door and strutted before them, proud and enraged, overcoming itself in their presence, clipping its spurs on the wooden floor before hobbling down the hall like an old nightwatchman returning to his bed.
‘Their children despise me,’ said Monika, who was immaculately calm. Mobius, on the other hand, was rattled, his heart was thumping and his numb fingers were beginning to shake: the usual indices of violence.
‘Do they?’ he replied, ironing out his voice. ‘Whatever for?’
‘I’m told they compose songs about me, that they have even performed in class. The wicked old lady next door.’
‘Don’t you return their toys over the fence?’
‘Footballs, dead cats, whatever is at hand...’
‘A perfect neighbour.’
Monika was silent while she filled their glasses. ‘I joke about it, but I want you to know what you’re getting into...’
‘I’m sure it’s not that bad.’
He smiled reassuringly, but they were moving towards difficult territory. There were so many things that he hadn’t yet shared with Monika, and wasn’t ready to either.
‘I told you my Pieter was a chronic socialist; well, this hardly mattered when he was an artist and I was an actress, of course. But during the war...’
‘I see.’
‘His paintings and my roles have been forgotten, but not this fact, unfortunately. It even seems to be getting worse, since the election. Like I said, there are some with long memories . . .’
‘Go on.’
‘When he was killed... There were things said, in public, a bit of a scandal. You can’t imagine what it was like here – the town was run by crazy old men and hysterical mothers, all mad with worry and grief. I wasn’t the only one to raise my voice, but...I was a teacher. It was a small school. Parents got wind...I was a defeatist, a traitor and whatnot...’
‘Like you said, you weren’t the only one.’
‘But I’m the only one left. You know the script – Jews and socialists lost us the war. Well, Pieter was both... And I was his wife, a teacher... vulnerable minds and all that.’
‘You could always move away, you know.’
‘I’m not going to give them the satisfaction. And I have my friends.’
‘Quite right. Although you just said you were the only one left...’
‘I wasn’t always friends with Hannelore, for example. She once thought I was a traitor, too. But I can understand why she might have thought that, and she can understand why I said what I said. You see?’
‘If only it were that simple.’
Monika reared up immediately, scoffing. ‘You don’t agree with me? I’ll cut your head off!’
Instead, she put aside the bottle and leant into him, her chair drawn up to his own, rubbing her hands over his thighs. A sparkle of mischief remained in her eyes and her voice was sweet and low.
‘It’s about this time I usually...’
Monika curled her body onto his lap, her eyes glinting out of the shadows beneath the table. Mobius stroked her hair and removed a lock from her forehead. Her scalp was hot and damp, but her forehead was as cold as the night air that swept through the door. He embraced the hardness of her head, turning her as much as he dared so that now he was able to kiss her breasts, then her neck, then finally her mouth, drawing in her breath, replacing it with his own. With their lips joined, he murmured, ‘I doubt they’ll be expecting us.’
‘Oh, I’m sure they’ll be expecting us. But let’s disappoint them, shall we, at least for a while?”