By Elodie A. Roy.
Housemates
When I think of Sally, I think of the dilapidated house we shared on Arthur’s Hill. The two men rented the attic rooms. Sally and I lived on the first floor. The ginger cat was at home everywhere. Sally worked part-time as an art teacher. I was still a student. We spent entire days together in that house. I liked observing Sally. She had something placid, quaintly beatific to her features, something more ancient than her twenty-five years: an air of grave amusement softly haunting her round, still-childish face. She wore shawls and big, extraordinary dresses. Like a gypsy. When my mother visited, she said: This girl has a very old soul.
When I think of Sally, I see her in the dark basement kitchen where we cooked together. I see the two of us: standing there, interminably peeling carrots and potatoes. Sally spoke about difficult things plainly, as if they were easy. One day she’d be telling me about the collage films of Jeff Keen and the dense mystery of Maya Deren’s life. The next day she would be speaking about her heavy period, how she removed bloodstains from the sheets with the juice of a lemon. She showed me how to rinse my hair with sage and rosemary to make it fuller. I liked her simple magic: the small rituals she’d created to get through the day, through her life as a woman. I knew she told me her secrets because I was a woman too, or soon to become one. Without knowing much about her—precisely because I knew so little—I revered her. Sometimes I left tiny trinkets on her untidy desk. A bracelet made of shells. In the autumn, shiny conkers. Maybe I loved her. Maybe I was only looking for someone to love, someone kind and patient who would absorb the excess of life I could feel beginning to swell within me. At the time I didn’t know that this excess was life itself. It never returned in quite the same urgent way. At nineteen I felt and wanted so much—all the time.
The two men who lived upstairs appeared at dinner punctually and always together. One of them wrote, the other played violin. I thought they looked alike: pale and bearded and worn-out from too much time spent indoors, absorbed in their improbable work. They seemed to live on eggs, toast, black tea. They had lived in that house much longer than we had. The cat belonged to the man who wrote. We spent relatively little time with these reclusive housemates, but I could see they liked Sally. Whenever the four of us gathered in the kitchen, they’d try to make her laugh. They liked her because she was a beautiful woman as well as a talented painter, while I was only a student, remote and shy, without a face of my own. My long hair perpetually fell in my eyes. I had nothing to show the world. I didn’t want to be seen. But I wanted very much to see. I wanted to disappear in the act of seeing.
With the men, Sally was different from the way she was with me. She became suddenly flirtatious. She offered them the surface of herself: her pale, easily blushing skin, the rustling sound of her dresses. She was on the edge of who she was. But the surface also was her. It became her. Her biggest weakness was that she liked to please. And so her timeless soul was tinged with a hint of vanity, of irrepressible self-love.
One summer we had a party. The whole street came to our house. We pushed the battered Chesterfield couch against the wall and danced in the living-room. Somebody had brought the first Talking Heads record. In the silence between two songs a grey-haired painter told Sally she had a face like a Botticelli. She let him kiss her. I remember his ugliness, his ghostly, already sunken features. The man stayed the night. Sally’s room was next to mine. I remember her laughter—so high—on the other side of the wall. His voice: low, caressing. I was heartbroken. When I came downstairs the following day I saw her mopping the floor, erasing the traces of the night, and I started to cry. She told me not to be silly. She said I would understand one day. We dragged the sofa back to the centre of the living room. It was sunny outside. We pretended nothing had happened.
It was around that time that we discovered the house was infested with fleas. The cat had brought them in. They lived in the carpet. That summer we were forever scratching our legs. At night we lit candles and placed them in the middle of saucers filled with water. The fleas jumped to their deaths, attracted by the light. We found them in the morning, floating on the water—dozens of tiny black dots. It was a dangerous way of killing fleas—Sally’s way. But we slept soundly as the candles were burning, as if protected by a charm.
We eventually got rid of the fleas. I graduated and Sally fell in love with a Greek biologist called Socrates. He came to the house almost every night. Within a few months Sally left with him. The last time I heard from her she lived on a Greek island. She was painting. And to this day I still don’t understand her, who she was or what she meant. When I think of Sally, I wonder whether I loved her, or the house we lived in, or the idea of her living in the house, trying to keep me safe.
Hunger
A visitor had brought us violet candies from the south of France. The small tin box was left on the kitchen table. Every now and then Karol took out one of the fragrant, flower-shaped sweets; he’d suck it for a little while before removing it from his mouth and placing it, with ceremony, back onto the table. A few minutes later he would gravely put the half-eaten sweet into his mouth again, suck it a while longer, and then take it out. I was repelled and fascinated by Karol’s way of eating. It took him hours to consume a single tiny candy.
My flatmate’s odd eating rituals extended to other foodstuffs, too. When I offered him a cookie (for he had a sweet tooth) he’d eat a tiny bit and almost immediately return it to the saucer. A long time—a few hours, a whole day—could elapse before he’d touch it again. He made things last. His relationship to food was unlike anything I had ever witnessed. In the most unexpected moments—for instance, when we sat together on the rickety bus to central Liverpool—he would produce soft, juicy pears or boiled eggs from his sempiternal rucksack, proceeding to consume them slowly by my side. The idea of sharing never seemed to cross his mind, though I think I wouldn’t have liked eating his food anyway.
I knew that Karol was orphaned and I sometimes imagined that his way of eating was a trace of the deprived child he had been: a vestigial remnant of hunger, ungenerosity, messiness. Yet there was never any suggestion of greed in his manners. Karol ate in an agonisingly slow way, without a trace of appetite or impatience.
He spent an inordinate amount of time discussing restaurants, solemnly comparing their merits. One night, as we were walking past a brightly lit, sophisticated place on the High Street, he put his forehead against the window and began to describe it excitedly, almost savouring it in advance. ‘But I’m not suggesting you and I eat there,’ he added abruptly. We were good friends. Initially I supposed it was poverty, rather than pride or shyness, that prevented him from taking me out. He never invited me anywhere and, as I later realised, discouraged any real closeness or intimacy. Our friendship was of the functional type. So, when he made a little bit of money from temping at a primary school, he visited restaurants and cafés on his own. It was one of his small and rather infrequent pleasures. A single outing provided him with stories to regale others for months. Our disenchanted flatmate didn’t care for his culinary reminiscences, but I listened to him intently.
Although I was only moderately keen to hear about England’s pizza renaissance (as he termed it, without irony) and harboured many doubts about the virtues of English cuisine, Karol’s conversation kept me enraptured. How did this argumentative and susceptible man so unwittingly give me joy? We were friends on tacit, uncertain terms. Sometimes he’d let me watch him while he ate. In rare moments of altruism, he questioned me about my family and volunteered stories from his motherless youth. When he tired of discussing fashionable eateries, he’d seamlessly launch into literary critique (Kafka’s diaries and Middlemarch were among his favourite texts) and he had nothing but praise for English public libraries. Perhaps it was his voice, or his unusual phrasing, or his vague, hypnotic stutter that drew me to him. Perhaps it was the fact that we were both foreigners, speaking good English with faint but ineradicable accents. We were both now in our mid-thirties, though we had come to Liverpool in our late teens. We’d both left our home countries behind, because we’d both had to do so. Perhaps our forced exiles bound us together, though Karol never appeared to give much thought or notice to our common predicament.
He was too deeply enveloped in his own life, in his small schemes to survive and make money, in his idle dreams of restaurants and in the books he read, to pay much attention to anyone else. Everything about him appeared to be free and unconcerned. He wasn’t interested in pleasing others, and because I was still trying so hard to conform—often failing spectacularly—I admired his detachment. Others were attracted to him too, so this great asocial made friends easily. Although he was largely unaware of his own originality, he would comment on mine. He’d laugh at my unconventional accent and try to correct my pronunciation, scolding me for making the same mistakes over and over again. ‘How long have you lived in this country?’ he’d ask with feigned severity. Once, with a patronising smile, he declared me ‘useless’—yet I treasured the smile, the tenderly disparaging tone, for in his repeated criticisms I could hear affection.
We lived together for nearly two years before Karol left for Hamburg, where he had some cousins. I retained a quiet admiration for him. In the months that followed his departure, I found myself absentmindedly wandering the city, stopping before restaurants’ windows with irrepressible pangs of desire. What tormented me wasn’t hunger so much as loneliness. I knew then that the desire for food was inseparable from the longing for love, and that I would never be able to satisfy either one of them.
History
When I first met you in the late 1990s we used to visit the flea markets. You were my first friend in Berlin. You didn’t ask, as other people did, what I was doing there. The streets were full of ghosts. We spent whole Sundays sifting through masses of discarded objects in hope that one of them might declare in plain, unambiguous terms: I am what you are looking for. But we never found that total object of our dreams. Instead we found approximations—nearly the thing, never the thing itself. Porcelain cups. Worn pieces of fabric. Children’s books. Grey Erika typewriters. Amiga records. We thought we were touching history because, for a short while, we cradled in our hands something made long ago: a material witness of what used to be, a fetish. Yet the witness was mute. The witness didn’t care what it said, what it didn’t say. It was perfectly indifferent.
Last December you turned sixty. You don’t care about history anymore. You tell me that with years you have become less interested in ideas and concepts. You have become less able to decipher the past. You no longer believe it is here to be deciphered. You say: The past doesn’t need us. It does its own thing. You say you’ve stopped believing in ghosts. You and me, you add, were the real ghosts of this city. It was we who were forever haunting it, returning with quiet deliberation to the places where history used to be.
You also say: One day Berlin will cease to be special. It will survive, perhaps, as a faint scar—a barely visible trace. Only those who intimately suffered will notice or remember its presence, be able to indicate precisely the location of the wound. It will survive as a phantom pain. Other people—most of us—will never know that pain: where it is, where it was.
These days, every time I visit your flat in Wedding, I notice something else has gone. You explain to me that it’s an experiment: you’re trying to see whether you can part with objects, with items of furniture, with the mementoes of a whole lifetime. You’re only keeping the important books, a handful of letters, some photographs. I sit on the thin, faded rug in the middle of the living room. I’m glad you’ve kept it. When I was a child I spent hours sitting cross-legged on my grandparents’ rug. I had read the tale of the magic carpet. I wanted to fly away. I sit on your rug’s faded patterns—flowers and stylised stars—remembering my childhood. I hear the sound of water boiling on the gas stove. You’re making us coffee, in the rudimentary way your grandmother made it long ago in this part of Germany which is now Poland: by mixing the hot water with a bit of ground coffee directly in the cup. As the water cools the coffee falls down to the bottom of the cup. It’s a weak, muddy drink, more like a potion. You bring our cups over and sit beside me on the rug. I never told anyone about wanting to fly away, about my disappointment when the carpet wouldn’t move—about the summer afternoons I waited for something to happen. With you, I think, something of the dreamy suspension of childhood returns. There is no great hurry. What we do we always do slowly, moving with the sweetly staggering gestures of dreamers and sleepwalkers. When I first met you I thought: We have all the time in the world. We are luckier than most people.
As months go by, you become more drastic. You say that parting with objects is coming more easily now, that you need the space to live, to write. I cannot help smiling at your quiet decisiveness, your sudden mania for empty spaces. I call it your minimalist phase. I smile and yet it worries me. You are not much older than me and yet something in you—I see it clearly—is preparing for death. I tell you that you remind me of Peter Kien in Canetti’s Auto-da-Fé. Kien the scholar goes slowly insane, empties his entire flat. He destroys all his books in a bonfire. Canetti was Jewish and writing about fascism, about the lure of emptiness and the desire for total destruction. But you don’t like being compared to Kien because you resemble him in too many ways. You don’t like being reminded of the past, of the history you now refuse to be part of. As if you could extract yourself from the great mass of events. As if you could extricate the speck of your own existence from the monumental expanse of the past. And so you carry on emptying your flat and the more space you create, the more the rug stands out on the floorboards and the nearer we are, I think, to finally flying away.
Suddenly you want everything to be light and easy. You strive for complete detachment, dispossession. You say you want to live in the moment. Where do you begin? You begin by removing everything that weighs you down and ties you to the ground. I ask you about writing, about the binds that words create, about the roots they have—how deeply these roots go. You say you don’t want to write anymore: you’d like to unwrite, to efface every word one by one. I want to ask you: about the binds that love and friendship create between us. You say it is different. But I can see you’ve crossed a frontier and I cannot follow you.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Elodie A. Roy is a French-born writer living in Newcastle upon Tyne, England. Her short stories appear in The Stinging Fly, Flash Frog, New World Writing, Bending Genres, The Oxonian Review, and elsewhere. As a cultural theorist, she’s the author of two non-fiction academic books.
