Were Rabih and Kirsten able to read about themselves as characters in a novel, they might—if the author had even a little talent—experience a brief but helpful burst of pity at their not at all unworthy plight, and thereby perhaps learn to dissolve some of the tension that arises on those evenings when, once the children are in bed, the apparently demoralizing and yet in truth deeply grand and significant topic of the ironing comes up.
Adultery
Love Rat
Rabih is invited to Berlin to give a talk about public space at a conference on urban regeneration. He changes planes in London and flips through a succession of magazines over Germany. Prussia lies flat and vast below, under a light dusting of November snow.
The event is taking place east of the city, in a conference center with an adjoining hotel. His room, on the twentieth floor, is clinically austere and white, with views of a canal and rows of allotments. At night, which comes early, he can see a power station and a procession of pylons striding into the distance in the direction of the Polish border.
At the welcome-drinks party in the ballroom, he knows no one and pretends to be waiting for a colleague. Once back in his room, he calls home. The children have just had their baths. “I like it when you’re away,” says Esther. “Mummy’s letting us watch a film and have a pizza.” Rabih watches a single-engine plane circle high above the frozen fields beyond the hotel’s parking lot. As Esther talks, William can be heard singing in the background, making a show of how uninterested he is in any father who has had the bad taste to leave him behind. Their voices sound younger over the telephone; it would be eerie for them to know just how much he misses them.
He eats a club sandwich while looking at a news channel, through whose lenses a series of tragedies appear relentlessly uniform and unengaging.
At dawn the following day he practices his speech in front of the bathroom mirror. The real thing happens at eleven in the main hall. He makes his points with passion and a deep knowledge of his subject. It’s his life’s work to champion the virtues of well-designed shared spaces which can bring a community together. A number of people come up to congratulate him afterwards. At lunch he’s seated at a table with delegates from around the world. It’s been a while since he’s experienced an atmosphere this cosmopolitan. There’s a hostile conversation in progress about America. A Pakistani working in Qatar decries the impact of America’s zoning laws on turning circles; a Dutchman alleges an indifference on the part of the nation’s elites towards the common good; a Finnish delegate compares its citizens’ dependence on fossil fuels with an addict’s relationship to opium.
At the end of the table a woman is leaning her head to one side, sporting a wry, resigned smile.
“I know better than to try to defend my country when I’m overseas,” she interjects eventually. “Of course, I’m every bit as disappointed in America as the rest of you are, but I still have a deep sense of loyalty to it—just as I might with some crazy alcoholic aunt whom I’d stick up for if I heard strangers talking about her behind her back.”
Lauren lives in Los Angeles and works at UCLA, where she’s studying the effects of immigration in the San Bernardino Valley. She has shoulder-length brown hair and grey-green eyes and is thirty-one. Rabih tries not to look at her too directly. Hers is the sort of beauty that seems unhelpful to encounter in his present circumstances.
There’s an hour before the sessions start again, and he decides to take a walk outside in what passes for a garden. His flight home departs early the next morning, and there’ll be a new project waiting on his desk when he gets back to Edinburgh. Lauren’s dark tailored dress did nothing to draw attention to itself, and yet he remembers every detail of it. He thinks, too, of the stack of bangles on her left arm; he could just see a tattoo underneath them, on the inside of her wrist—an inadvertent, melancholy reminder of the generation gap between them.
In the late afternoon, in the corridor leading to the lifts, he’s looking at some brochures when she walks by. He smiles awkwardly, grieving already that he will never know her, that her deeper identity—symbolized by the purple canvas bag slung over her shoulder—will remain forever foreign to him, that he can write himself only a single life. But she announces that she’s feeling hungry and suggests that he join her for tea in a wood-paneled bar next to the business center on the first floor. She had breakfast there that morning, she adds. They sit on a long leather bench by the fireplace. There is a white orchid behind Lauren. He asks most of the questions and thereby learns bits and pieces: about her apartment in Venice Beach, a previous job at a university in Arizona, the family in Albuquerque, her love of David Lynch’s films, her involvement in community organizing, her Judaism and her hammed-up terror of German officials, which extends also to the stiff and thick-necked barman, a character rich in comedic possibilities, whom she nicknames Eichmann. Rabih’s attention wavers between the specifics of what she’s saying and what she represents. She is at once herself and all the people he has ever admired but learnt not to be curious about since his wedding day.
Her eyes crinkle with laughter as she glances up at the barman.
“ ‘You’ll never turn the vinegar to jam, Mein Herr!’” she sings under her breath, and Rabih’s own breath catches in wonder at her charm. He feels fifteen again and she is Alice Saure.
She flew into Frankfurt the day before and took the train here, she tells him; she finds European trains so good for thinking. Rabih realizes it must now be close to bathtime back at home. How simple it would be to explode his life simply by moving his hand ten centimeters to the left.
“Tell me about you,” she prompts. Well, he studied in London, then went up to Edinburgh; work keeps him busy, though he likes to travel when he can; yes, he does rather mind the gloomy weather, but perhaps it’s a useful discipline not to worry too much about the state of the skies. The editing comes with unexpected ease. “What did you do today, Daddy?” he hears his children inquiring. Daddy gave a talk in front of lots of people, then read his book for a while and had an early night so he can take the first plane home tomorrow to see his darling girl and special boy—who might as well not exist right now.
“I can’t face the delegates’ dinner,” she says at seven, after Eichmann returns to ask if they would like a cocktail now.
So they walk out of the bar together. His hands are trembling as he presses the button for the lift. He asks what floor she needs and stands opposite her in the see-through glass cubicle on its way up. A fog has settled over the landscape.
The forthrightness of the middle-aged seducer is rarely a matter of confidence or arrogance; it is instead a species of impatient despair born of a pitiful awareness of the ever-increasing proximity of death.
In its basic form, her room is nearly identical to his, but he is surprised by how different its atmosphere seems. A purple dress is hanging on one wall, and a catalogue from the Neues Museum has been set down by the television; there’s an open laptop on the desk, there are two postcards of a painting of Goethe near the mirror, and on the night table her phone is docked into the hotel stereo. She asks if he has heard of a certain singer and summons up her album with a few taps: the arrangement is spare, just a piano and some percussion in what sounds like a cavernous cathedral, and then a powerful female voice cuts in, clear and haunting, unusually deep and then suddenly high and fragile. “I especially love this part,” she says, and then closes her eyes for a moment. He remains standing next to the foot of the bed as the singer repeats the word always in rising octaves, like a cry that goes straight to his soul. He has kept clear of such music since the children were born. It serves no good purpose to be transported like this when the confines of his life demand resoluteness and impassivity.