… I was the one in control. It was a logical solution to a problem, that was all. It’s not like I intend to do it again — it’s not healthy, for one thing. But alcohol is sometimes useful. If you’re patient… if you drink enough of it… then there is a sort of heaviness, a paralysis that creeps into your limbs so that your fingers go numb and you drop the wine glass with a splintering of broken glass… your head falls back, the chair tips over… and you end up lying there senseless on the floor for the rest of the night where you won’t be able to do any damage to anything… or anyone.
I was woken up at about 10 a.m., rather suddenly, by a lot of very cold water being thrown into my face. I jerked awake, blinking water from my eyes and coughing it out of my mouth. At once, pain started throbbing dully through me — through my head, my neck, my shoulders — my whole body — from the combination of having slept on the hard floor all night and the alcohol that was still coursing through my system. ‘Oh good,’ Stephomi said, some of the concern fading from his face as he looked down at me, ‘you’re not dead after all. Careful, you’ve been lying in broken glass all night.’
I glanced down and saw that he was right. There were jagged pieces of glass all over the floor from the bottle of wine that Stephomi had dropped and the wine glass that I had broken later. The spilt wine from the bottle had soaked into my clothes, staining my shirt and making me smell like an alcoholic tramp.
‘Luckily you don’t seem to have cut yourself too badly,’ Stephomi said, eyeing me critically. ‘Let me give you a hand up.’
I didn’t want to take his hand but standing up would have been difficult and — let’s face it — undignified otherwise, since there was nowhere on the floor I could put my hands without cutting into them. So I took his hand in silence and let him pull me to my feet.
‘What do you want now?’ I asked thickly, carefully brushing crushed glass from my clothes.
My throat felt like sandpaper, my tongue seemed to be stuck to the roof of my mouth, and the light beyond the windows hurt my eyes, forcing me to shield them with my hand. There is, after all, a downside to too much alcohol.
‘Oh, a great many things,’ Stephomi answered cheerfully. ‘But for today I’ll settle for not seeing you drink yourself to death. It’s lucky you weren’t sick or you might have choked on your own vomit, you know. You would’ve done better to drink with me last night.’
‘Oh, shut up! I know what you’re thinking but I was in control the whole time. I told you to get out. Why have you come back? What do you want?’
Stephomi sighed. ‘I phoned you a while ago and there was no answer,’ he said quietly. ‘I was afraid that something might have happened.’ I gazed at him for a moment, water dripping from the ends of my hair to the floor where he had drenched me. I had meant it last night when I’d told the scholar to get out of my apartment. I’d really wanted to hurt him. And I was still angry with him. Angry for the deception, angry for his spiteful refusal to help me, and angry for his stubborn silence. But yet… I was pleased to see him. Who knows what true loneliness is?
‘I thought about it last night, Gabriel,’ Stephomi said, still watching me warily, ‘and I think there are some things I might be able to tell you without breaking my promise. If you want to go and dry your hair and change your clothes, I’ll wait for you.’
‘No,’ I said at once. ‘Tell me now.’
‘All right,’ Stephomi replied, following me as I stalked through to the living room.
I sat down on the couch, trying to avoid getting any red wine stains on it, wishing my head were a little clearer. Stephomi dropped down onto the other chair.
‘For starters,’ he began, ‘the money that was in your apartment
… is it still here?’
I narrowed my eyes at him and forced myself not to glance at the cupboard in which I had hidden it.
‘All right, don’t tell me,’ Stephomi said hastily, seeing the look on my face. ‘All I was going to say is that it’s yours. You didn’t steal it or anything. I’m assuming that’s what you suspected? But rest assured the money belongs to you fair and square.’
‘And what did I do to get such an amount?’ I asked.
Stephomi grimaced apologetically. ‘All I can tell you is that the money is yours. You were a writer by profession.’
‘A writer?’ I thought back to the typed manuscript I had found in my desk. ‘A less than popular one?’ I asked, realising that if I had ever succeeded in publishing anything, my works would surely grace my own bookshelves.
Stephomi shrugged slightly. ‘Mozart himself was before his time, my friend. Look, I can’t really tell you very much. You can go on hating me if you want and scream at me to get out again, but I just want to emphasise first that… you didn’t do anything to deserve this.’
‘You said that I asked you not to tell me about my past,’ I said, staring at him. ‘Are you saying that I knew I was going to lose my memory? That I somehow did this to myself?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why? How?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said simply.
‘Where is everyone?’ I asked desperately. ‘Where are my family? Where do they think I’ve gone?’
Stephomi was looking uncomfortable now. ‘I really can’t say any more, Gabriel. Faith is part of friendship,’ he said softly, looking at me closely. ‘You asked me to trust you when I promised not to give you these answers, and I did even though I didn’t like it. I believe you must have had a good reason. Now I’m afraid you’re going to have to trust me when I say I can’t tell you any more. I know it doesn’t make sense, that you have nothing solid to put your trust in here, but that is the meaning of faith.’
I wanted to trust him. I didn’t want to be completely alone here for the rest of my life, spending my evenings counting and recounting the boxes of fish food in my cupboard that I still hadn’t been able to bring myself to throw away.
With a last uncertain, apologetic grin, Stephomi stood up to go, but paused in the doorway to the kitchen and turned back. ‘Please don’t push me away, Gabriel. Leave the past alone and build a new life now.’
I laughed miserably. ‘I want to believe you… but faith isn’t enough for me. How do I know that everything you’ve told me isn’t lies?’
Stephomi paused, considering my question. ‘What can I say? I’m afraid faith will just have to be enough for now because that’s all you’ve got. But what reason would I have to lie anyway? “ The liars and those who distort the truth must perish… and then there may be room for a freer, nobler kind of humanity again. ” To quote Captain Wilm Hosenfeld.’
The name was familiar to me but Stephomi was almost at the front door when horror made me leap to my feet as I suddenly remembered who the man was.
‘You quote a Nazi to support your cause?’ I asked, striding to the doorway to stare at Stephomi in disbelief.
Once again, Stephomi turned about to face me, a small smile on his face. ‘Ah, Gabriel, why do you assume that following Hitler and being a good and brave man must be mutually exclusive?’
‘Listen to yourself!’ I said, appalled. ‘Are you trying to be funny or something? Evil and Nazi are synonymous. To suggest anything else is… it’s blasphemy!’
‘Then, forgive me, by all means,’ Stephomi replied, tilting his head as he gazed at me. ‘But I assure you there was no sin intended. You expect too much from humanity sometimes, Gabriel. We can’t all be perfect, you know. Why don’t you ask Wladyslaw Szpilman about it?’
Stephomi’s initial words had been soothing. I had begun to feel comforted by what he was telling me. But he had ruined it with that quote at the door. To even suggest that a German officer of the Second World War was anything other than a scheming, plotting, greed- and sin-driven demon made me feel utterly sick. Stephomi had described him as a ‘good and brave man’… What on Earth could have moved him to speak such depraved words? Perhaps he didn’t know the full extent of what the Nazis had done? Perhaps he didn’t know about the families murdered in front of each another; the husbands and wives who had been forced to dig each other’s graves before being shot into them; the golden teeth and fillings that were ripped from Jewish mouths before their owners were shot like dogs; the families who had shuffled onto trains together, clutching the one suitcase they were allowed to take, full of their most precious possessions, hoping against hope that, somehow, everything would still be all right and Europe would not soak in its own blood — only to have their cases torn from their fingers before they were shipped off to slaughter houses like cattle… To suggest that anyone even remotely connected with such atrocities had nothing to feel shame for… to even suggest it… disgusts me beyond words.