Or why not the East River — then I could watch it happening from my window.
The phone rang at a quarter past one in the morning. It was from the police station in 10th Street in Greenwich Village. Somebody called Sergeant Krapotsky.
He asked if he was talking to Mrs Holinek, and I confirmed that he was. What was it all about?
Was I perhaps married to a certain Martin Holinek? Sergeant Krapotsky wanted to know.
I confirmed that as well
‘Very good,’ said Krapotsky. ‘We have your husband locked up in a cell at the police station here. Could you perhaps be so kind as to come and collect him?’
‘What has he done?’ I asked.
‘I’m sure you’d rather not know that,’ said Krapotsky. ‘But if you were to come and fetch him we could draw a veil over the whole business.’
‘Is he drunk?’ I asked.
‘Is the earth round?’ said Krapotsky. ‘Is there water in the sea?’
‘I understand,’ I said. ‘But I’m afraid the fact is that I’m ill and would have great difficulty in travelling from one end of the town to the other. We’re flying back home to Sweden tomorrow, so you’ll be rid of him in any case.’
‘I know that,’ said Krapotsky. ‘He says he has to catch a plane early tomorrow morning. That’s why I want to get him out of here.’
‘Has he said anything else?’
‘He says he’s been trying to follow in the footsteps of Dylan Thomas, and it was going very well. I don’t know if that makes any sense to you, but those were the exact words he said before he fell asleep. The footsteps of Dylan Thomas — I’ve no idea what that means.’
‘I think I understand,’ I said. ‘But the fact is that our flight doesn’t leave until tomorrow afternoon. Couldn’t you let him sleep it off in his cell, and I’ll pick him up in our taxi on the way to Newark?’
‘Just a minute,’ said Sergeant Krapotsky. ‘I need to consult my boss.’
The telephone was silent for about half a minute. I looked out over the skyline of south Manhattan — you can’t avoid being impressed by it. Then the sergeant spoke again.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘My boss says that’s okay. What time will you be calling in?’
‘At about two o’clock, is that all right?’ I asked.
‘That would be absolutely fine,’ said Krapotsky. ‘Make sure you have his passport with you, assuming you have it, and tell them I’ve told you to collect him then. The address is 112 West 10th Street, but I won’t be on duty then. Thank you for your cooperation.’
‘Thank you for your help,’ I said and hung up.
‘I don’t want to talk about this. Not ever, not with anybody.’
That was the first thing — and generally speaking the only thing — that Martin said during the taxi ride to New Jersey the following afternoon. I could see that he was on the point of bursting into tears and had the impression that if I hadn’t had my sensitive stomach to think about I ought to have taken hold of his hand and said that I had forgiven him, irrespective of what there was to forgive him for. But I didn’t. He was still wearing the suit from Fifth Avenue, but it was hard to tell that it was only two days old. It looked more like twenty years old, and it also concluded its short life in a rubbish basket at the airport. Later I found a receipt indicating that it had cost 1,800 dollars, which was roughly the same as the price of the hotel room. But I took it for granted that this was also a part of our agreement: that we shouldn’t keep going on and on about the whole affair.
But the remarkable thing, the reason why I keep recalling those four days in New York, is the sudden feeling of tenderness that overcame me with regard to Martin. When I collected him from that police station in Greenwich Village, when we sat in silence on the back seat of the taxi, looking out through our respective windows, when he was in the toilet at the airport, changing his clothes. I ought to have been absolutely furious with him, even if it’s not for me to require people to live up to great heights; but the feelings that actually filled me were the precise opposite. True enough, this hung-over wretch was a fifty-year-old literature professor; but he was also a little boy who had gone astray, and if I hadn’t still been plagued with the after-effects of my stomach upset, I might well have told him so. That I really did feel sympathy for him. That there was something there reminiscent of what is called love — during those brief hours of our long marriage.
Perhaps it might have made him feel happy if I’d said something.
Perhaps it might have changed something.
Anyway, I told Christa about it a few days later, of course I did. Not that feeling of tenderness, just the rest of it. I remember her laughing, but I noticed that she did so because the situation demanded it, and I suspected she had been through similar experiences in her own life.
‘I expect you know the difference between a fifteen-year-old and a fifty-year-old man?’ she asked rhetorically in order to maintain the arms-length tone of the conversation. ‘Forty kilos and enough money to put their daft dreams into practice.’
I have sometimes felt that life is in fact about as half-baked as that summary suggests. And that we really shouldn’t go on and on about things.
I myself celebrated my fiftieth birthday a few years later. I travelled to Venice without Martin — that was a present I had asked for, and the family duly obliged. When my daughter asked why I wanted to go there on my own, I told her I’d had a secret lover in Venice for many years, and that shut her up.
I could see that she wasn’t a hundred per cent sure that I was joking.
I could also see that she hoped I wasn’t joking. That made me sad, extremely sad.
But I didn’t go there alone in fact. Christa was with me for four of the five days I spent in that magic city, and I’ve already mentioned that business of ashes in the canal.
But that feeling of tenderness in New York: where did it come from? Where did it go to?
31
Rain is pelting against the bedroom window, and dawn is the colour of old meat. Castor is fast asleep down by my feet; I wish it were possible to teach a dog how to light a fire, so that I could for once get up without almost freezing to death. We have fallen asleep and then woken up for forty nights in Darne Lodge by this time, and I no longer wonder where I am when I open my eyes in the morning.
I live here with my dog. In a remote, stone-built cottage that was once built for a wayward son who needed a roof over his head. He enjoyed it so much that he eventually hanged himself. I lie in bed for a while, wondering exactly where. There are substantial roof beams both here in the bedroom and out there in the living room: perhaps he hung up there, swinging back and forth, from a beam directly over his bed? In which case the bed must have been located somewhere different from where it is now, which is not impossible. The room is quite large in fact, at least thirty square metres. It is the ridiculously low ceiling that makes it feel smaller: it strikes me that he must have used quite a short length of rope, otherwise his feet would have been touching the floor.
On the other hand, I think eventually. . on the other hand I’ve read about people hanging themselves from door handles and radiators. Nothing is impossible for a chap with an inventive turn of mind. And the fact that no more than two people have hanged themselves in this house in over two hundred years is a circumstance one ought to regard as something positive. Bearing in mind the moor. Bearing in mind the rain, the mists and the darkness.
I get up. Light a fire, sit down at the table and note down today’s weather details in my diary. Tuesday the eleventh of December. Six degrees at a quarter to nine in the morning. A strong wind from the south-west and rain looking as if it’s never going to stop falling.