Into the Flames, Down to Our Shoes, Vienna - by John Saul
ISLAND | issue 159
London, Davos, Trieste. It hardly matters where we have our affair. Whatever the latitude, the longitude, our clothes get shed and by the morning light we’re crowing. Amid the grey hotel fittings, we know without looking: passion, desire, have left a chaos of clothing, packets, wrappers, pillows. In the dimness of whatever is the season, the surrounding dishevelment is as startling as any burglary, especially if motes drift in the air like in films, as they do sometimes. This time is no different. We seem to have ransacked the room for its only real valuable, the bed. This is all your fault, says Inge glancing around, although – once I’d stopped looking into her eyes, and losing track, track of what I can hardly say – in some brown air past her shoulder I made out her earphones, their wires taking a peculiar interest in the coffee machine, a Nespresso, then along from there came bits and pieces of hers piled on the armchair, behind which were the awkwardly drawn curtains (they just wouldn’t pull across). I didn’t dare look at floor level, which Inge would likely sum up in the words: What the hell. Tidying up we do later if at all. At the last hotel with its prints of giraffes (the hotel emblem), Inge left every towel and cushion turned upside down, the giraffes gawping towards the doorway for help, looking ridiculous with their hooves stuck in the air.
Alençon may be much the same as Stromboli or Devizes but we do take some interest in the hotels. There’s no upsetting, let alone trashing the very places we might like to return to another day, night – as many days and nights as can be arranged. All that might get ripped are our clothes and there we just pretend (jerking hands and making fripp sounds), that is, we would probably like to do some ripping but as a rule we don’t (it could make for complications back home). So we do have our conservative sides, our regularities, our patterns Inge says – such as who takes their shower when, or which side of the bed to take. These might enter our small talk but there’s the other side to us – as I might point out to Inge, even as she pins me to the mattress, there seemed no pattern to our love-making. El estupido, she’ll say back – or in another scenario, she moves on me, there are ripples, I can’t speak. Within this square of bed we are so in tune.
“Within this square of bed we are so in tune.”
So ask where we are now and it’s not Copenhagen, not Granada; where I am is not so much the place but thinking about our habits, the way we are. After dealing with the usual things – open windows versus closed, who takes which chair (today there’s only one), the necessity of drawing the curtains, we regularly rate a place – not on its décor or by some obscure marker but on the cleanliness of the in-house phone, the freshness of the air, if bottled water is left out for guests. If dressed in time we weigh the dubious merits of hotel breakfast versus taking our chances on the outside (the fine bakery, the waffle café, this time the Moroccan coffee shop Inge noticed down the street).
We lie back, heads on pillows. Should I get up, try coffee, best not – I’m in the habit of setting the Nespresso at destruct (all its parts expect this). Eyes closed, I attempt a trick of the mind on the curtains, which had failed me so on arrival. I am overlaying them with other, better curtains, so I can close my eyes and pretend they’re falling properly. Somewhere there were floor-length windows with a regal drapery, where was that, Venice, it couldn’t have been that little place in tiny Haarlem, or could it. But the trick isn’t working, when we are up I’ll fix them, I’ll go checking the grouting round the shower – follow all the familiar furrows, fiddling with the air conditioning dials and doubtless buggering up the coffee machine. (As for the other stock feature, we long ago gave up trying to cheat the mini bar.) If any of this seems bizarre it hardly compares to Inge, who will not only be counting the soap bars, the shampoo vials and towels, she can go crawling on her knees, scratching away with the end of an old nail file, inspecting all over for stray hairs (a dramatic scene at reception once ensued; the desk downstairs won’t know how lucky they’ve been).
Ah, reception: the last staging post on our retreat from the outside world. These lamplit desks form the soft, inner frontier, the inner ring in a series of rings, like a target board, which begin with the harder, serious borders, the formalities, the public check-ins and the customs points, and end where we are now, at a bed somewhere. After we sign for the receptionist who directs us to our room, a plain Anna or quiet Veronica, or someone all grins, like that Yaroslav far from home – Siberia, he said, Uyarspasopreobrazhenskoye, smiling as if he knew what it was like to travel far and emerge at a place of freedom – we’ll most likely take the lift, the oft-confusing corridor, as ever putting the card in the slot at the door and having to put it in the other way, slower, faster, it’s like this every time, upside down, the left on the right, front at the back, until we tumble in, to a swift flopping down; an even swifter, snappier standing up. We try the various switches for lights, see if the bed is a single mattress or some stitching up of two. After darting between the bedroom and the bathroom each settles on an individual space, while neither suitcase might be opened. On this occasion I can’t remember if they were or weren’t, all I remember is Inge enthusing – Byzantium, tremble! she says – before we were undressing, negotiating whether to take everything off or leave on a top or what-not (a conversation without words that we circle around and when it’s least expected slip into, much as I slip into Inge herself, as if one or the other, the tops, shirts or blouses or Inge herself are the centre of everything). We kiss, we touch, we soon establish that little country of ours, enclosed by blinds or curtains: our cave, a self-declared republic, its capital the bed, the borders invisible and beyond them only darkness.
“We kiss, we touch, we soon establish that little country of ours, enclosed by blinds or curtains: our cave, a self-declared republic, its capital the bed, the borders invisible and beyond them only darkness.”
Inge swears we could run a column: How To Have An Affair. In the places we take to most the bedding trolleys arrive late, she’d say chattily, there are no knocks at the door and any sounds are faint, preferably soothing, like hairdryers (vacuuming: no, running water: no, breaking plates: distracting but okay), and the room is out of the way, maybe across some mildly fragrant courtyard. This doesn’t mean we seek out rustic baths and crumbling stonework, cypress trees and ancient wells. We can go modern too, as now – modern, even if it means putting up with astroturf outside the windows, where a gangly sculpture stands, claiming to be a gazelle leaping, while inside we have a blown-up shot of Naples, or that portrait of a nude madonna down the corridor, vaguely sacrilegious, a mask on a stick held up to her face. (And somewhere monks are chanting, Inge claims.)
But most deserving of a mention: the bliss. How many times has one of us come from rushing through some turnstile in the dark into the other’s arms, to be struck dumb in a taxi or be quieted by some thundering public transport system, until there is another coming together to answer questions at a bright reception desk, touching hands over the papers, forms and bank cards – wondering where we are amongst all the chandeliers, the leather sofas, the mirrors (so many mirrors), the hubbub from some bar.
Inge’s column will open with the words: Anywhere is fine. Where there’s a rail link, a quayside, a working runway, any one of these: a plan is suggested then hastily filled with details. As to the rest, who cares. Whatever are the circumstances, we will turn the greyest town into the purest delight. We’ve been at this a long, long time. We are in deep. Since the last meeting it’s been months. Winter is coming. We reunited across a crowded customs point, there was Inge, tousled already, crazy as ever, blushing so it overwhelmed her.
We’re so glad we divorced each other. We can now enjoy our affair.
“We’re so glad we divorced each other. We can now enjoy our affair.”
*
Past her bare shoulder those curtains look even more bent, crippled, ashamed to hang as they do. A suitcase is hampering the way they fall – even though we don’t seem to have bothered to unpack last night, when we fell for that east Siberian charm (best call it Uyar, madam, not that you’ll find it on a map, all the maps say Uyarspasopreobrazhenskoye does not exist) and allowed this international encounter to infuse the next few minutes (we didn’t even register the strangeness of the lift, the singing sounds piped in, was that monks singing?). And now? The morning light has grown, I’m waking, Inge speaks: You have your pyjama top still on. I look down to discover that I do. Pyjama? Did she give me this last night (always those dim recollections of the evening before)? It’s blue, a fine chequered pattern, a mosaic look. Is this mine? The buttons, I see now, are large. Try as I will they won’t undo.
I hold a pyjama sleeve to her cheek, close to her eyes, letting the blues contest each other. And? she says. Art is everywhere, I say. She digs fingers in my stomach. Dear hopelessly lost estupido, you are always spreading out and out, mentally. Stretching one leg towards the ceiling she produces the German word ausufern, which has to do with water spilling over, lapping beyond – aus – the shore – ufer, apparently I was always ausufer-ing, says Inge stretching the other leg. Besides, she goes on, if you look at the label you’ll see it’s quality, made to last, and before you make some estupido reply take note I’m not wearing anything, see, I’m not letting anything get in the way of my goal. I pull the collar round to see the label. Questions of whether to keep on clothes and which clothes, Inge says while reaching for her glass of water, must have been around as long as people, as long as people were doing it – so she describes, shuddering with pleasure: inside the caves and on the floor of those savannahs.
*
Listen, says Inge, the monks in the lift. The monks (the mirrors too, who can forget the mirrors) are due at most a footnote. From down the long corridor comes their melancholy echoing sound. The guidebook and the hotel prospectus had a great deal to say about the city tram system, the opening hours of the local Hermitage, all manner of details down to the mechanics of the old black-market penicillin racket (we had a mutual interest in the illicit, the criminal, we still talked about the street corner where Verlaine shot Rimbaud in the wrist) – but in the history of the hotel building no mention of any monastic goings-on, although that was surely the sound of monks going up and down in the lift, as if they were sat cross-legged on its roof. Inge, who believes in signs in dreams, says it’s a message, a commentary. Luggage not in blacks or greys alerts them, she says, they are like customs officers looking at everybody and their profiles. She closes her eyes, leaving me to continue her thoughts. True, our suitcases were in blacks and greys once, Inge, in our former state as wife and husband. In our new incarnation our cases, now at the forefront of our belongings, have adopted bright blues and greens, limes and oranges. To hell with the old paraphernalia, into the flames with them, that’s your approach these days, Inge, you just throw underwear upwards and anywhere, delight your shoes might never afterwards be found.
“To hell with the old paraphernalia, into the flames with them, that’s your approach these days, Inge, you just throw underwear upwards and anywhere, delight your shoes might never afterwards be found.”
Enough thinking on your behalf, you’re sidetracking me. I have my own trajectory, so as the chant sounds – the lift doors parting for someone – then turns faint again, I say I heard what you said, Inge, but I have to enter you and from the very next moan getting out words isn’t so simple, now that we’re making love, breaths are too short, who knows, at most one of us will soon utter a sudden cry of a word, maybe loud, making more talk twice as difficult. In these situations what counts is the tremble, Inge says, tries to say, but it comes out in a whisper: Byzantium, tremble!
The chants are subversive, Inge says, something underground – they fit, her argument goes. After all an affair was an underground undertaking, involving subterfuge, hence the appropriateness of those cisterns, remember, of Istanbul – pardon me: Byzantium, she says, choosing straddling me for the moment to say so, even as the monks on the roof of the lift pick up their songsheets to begin again. Strange, but we’re used to strangenesses. The details change with the place, but broadly this is how it goes: taking our cave out of storage we set it down anywhere, relying for final directions on a receptionist, in this case a young man from a town that isn’t to be found; we are camped around the corner from where a poet shoots another, or where a great pendulum swings, or we have a stiff gazelle grazing on astroturf and now this chant in the lift which needs shaking off, a shake of something, then another shake, like shaking the rain off the umbrella that belonged in yet another place, another time, the time we were in Brussels, Bruges, or was it in Madrid.
*
We stand before a mirror, a six-foot mirror with wide bevels and glinting blue, reflecting a hard, modern light. In this story of love, which I could entitle Happy with Inge, there have been so many mirrors. Mirrors, in Krakow, Dublin, where you will. Up at last, we’re standing inside the bevelled edges, inclining heads, comparing knees. What are we to make of this, us? With years on the move, we have no place to pitch a final tent. Why worry? is Inge’s attitude. If the breakfast time is already over, or the coffee made like in the 1950s, or it simply goes on raining, why worry? If a place lets us down in some small way, then we’ll say as we always do, as we part at the station platform, the airport, the taxi rank: goodbye London town, farewell sweet Geneva. Throw all we have into the flames, down to our shoes, Vienna. ▼
Image: Paula Campos
This story appeared in Island 159 in 2020. Order a print issue here.
If you liked this piece, please share it. And please consider donating or subscribing so that we can keep supporting writers and artists.