Levy - The Man Who Saw Everything

Also by Deborah Levy

Ophelia and the Great Idea

Beautiful Mutants

Swallowing Geography

The Unloved

Diary of a Steak

Billy & Girl

Pillow Talk in Europe and Other Places

Swimming Home

Black Vodka

Things I Dont Want to Know

Hot Milk

The Cost of Living

Contents

Poetic thought, unlike rootless orchids, did not grow in a greenhouse and did not faint when confronted with todays traumas.

Karel Teige,
The Shooting Gallery (1946)

To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed.

Susan Sontag, In Platos Cave,
from On Photography (1977)

Its like this, Saul Adler: when I was twenty-three I loved the way you touched me, but when the afternoon slipped in and you slipped out of me, you were already looking for someone else. No, its like this, Jennifer Moreau: I loved you every night and every day, but you were scared of my love and I was scared of my love, too. No, she said, I was scared of your envy, which was bigger than your love. Attention, Saul Adler. Attention! Look to the left and to the right, cross the road and get to the other side.

I was thinking about how Jennifer Moreau had told me I was never to describe her beauty, not to her, or to anyone else. When I asked her why I was silenced in this way, she said, Because you only have old words to describe me. This was on my mind when I stepped on to the zebra crossing with its black-and-white stripes at which all vehicles must stop to allow pedestrians to cross the road. A car was coming towards me but it did not stop. I had to jump backwards and fell on my hip, using my hands to protect myself from the fall. The car stalled and a man rolled down the window. He was in his sixties, silver hair, dark eyes, thin lips. He asked if I was okay. When I did not answer he stepped out of his car.

I apologize, he said. You walked on to the crossing and I slowed down, preparing to stop, but then you changed your mind and walked back to the kerb. His eyelids were quivering at the corners. And then without warning you lurched forward on to the crossing.

I smiled at his careful reconstruction of history, blatantly told in his favour. He furtively glanced at his car to check if it had been damaged. The wing mirror had shattered. His thin lips parted and he sighed sorrowfully, muttering something about how he had ordered the mirror from Milan.

I had been up all night writing a lecture on the psychology of male tyrants and Id made a start with the way Stalin flirted with women by flicking bread at them across the dinner table. My notes, about five sheets of paper, had fallen out of my leather sling bag and, embarrassingly, so had a packet of condoms. I started to pick them up. A small, flat, rectangular object was lying in the road. I noticed the driver was looking at my knuckles as I handed him the object, which felt warm and seemed to be vibrating in my palm. It was not mine so I assumed it was his. Blood dripped through my fingers. My palms were grazed and there was a cut on the knuckle of my left hand. I sucked it while he watched me, clearly distressed.

Do you need a lift somewhere?

Im okay.

He offered to take me to a pharmacy to clean up the wound, as he put it. When I shook my head, he reached out his hand and touched my hair, which was strangely comforting. He asked for my name.

Saul Adler. Look, its just a small graze. I have thin skin. I always bleed a lot, its nothing.

He was holding his left arm in a strange way, cradling it with his right arm. I picked up the condoms and shoved them into my jacket pocket. A wind was up. The leaves that had been swept into small piles under the trees were blowing across the road. The driver told me the traffic had been diverted because there was a demonstration that day in London, and hed wondered if Abbey Road was closed off. The detour was not signposted clearly. He did not understand why hed become confused, because he often came this way to watch the cricket at Lords, nearby. While he spoke, he gazed at the rectangular object in his hand.

The object was speaking. There was definitely a voice inside it, a mans voice, and he was saying something angry and insulting. We both pretended not to hear his words.

Fuck off I hate you dont come home

How old are you, Soorl? Can you tell me where you live?

I think the near collision had really scared the driver.

When I told him I was twenty-eight, he didnt believe me and asked for my age again. He was so posh he pronounced my name as if a pebble had been inserted between the roof of his mouth and his lower lip. His silver hair was slicked back with a product that made it shine.

I in turn asked for his name.

Wolfgang, he said very quickly, as if he did not want me to remember it.

Like Mozart, I said, and then, rather like a child showing his father where hed been hurt after falling off a swing, I pointed to the cut on my knuckle and kept repeating that I was okay. His concerned tone was starting to make me tearful. I wanted him to drive off and leave me alone. Perhaps the tears were to do with my fathers recent death, though my father was not as groomed or as gentle as shiny, silver-haired Wolfgang. To hasten his departure, I explained that my girlfriend was about to arrive any minute now, so he didnt have to hang around. In fact she was going to take a photograph of me stepping on to the zebra crossing in the style of the photograph on the Beatles album.

Which album is that, Soorl?

Its called Abbey Road . Everyone knows that. Where have you been, Wolfgang?

He laughed but he looked sad. Perhaps it was because of the insulting words that had been spoken from inside the vibrating object in his hand.

And how old is your girlfriend?

Twenty-three. Actually, Abbey Road was the last album the Beatles recorded together at the EMI studios, which are just over there. I pointed to a large white house on the other side of the road.

Of course, I know that, he said sadly. Its nearly as famous as Buckingham Palace. He walked back to his car, murmuring, Take care, Soorl. Youre lucky to have such a young girlfriend. By the way, what do you do?

His comments and questions were starting to irritate me also the way he sighed, as if he carried the weight of the world on the shoulders of his beige cashmere coat. I decided not to reveal that I was a historian and that my subject was communist Eastern Europe.

It was a relief to hear the animal growl of his engine revving as I stepped back on the pavement.

Considering it was he who had nearly run me over, perhaps it was he who should take care. I waved to him but he did not wave back. As for my young girlfriend, I was only five years older than Jennifer, so what was he going on about? And why did he want to know her age? Or what I do.

Never mind. I was looking at the notes in my hand (which was still bleeding), in which I had transcribed how Stalins father had been an alcoholic and was abusive to his family. Stalins mother had enrolled her son Joseph into a Greek orthodox priesthood school to protect him from his fathers rage after he had tried to strangle her. I could not easily read my own writing but I had underlined something about how Stalin would go on to punish people for their unconscious sins as well as their conscious sins such as thought crimes against the party.