Lucy, I think, but get no further than that, dazzled by sudden sunlight
across the lake.
I stand looking out at the lake, warming my hands on a cup of coffee.
Too soon the sunlight disappears again, the city darkens. It is a
bleak, sombre day, colder than it should be. The water heaves under the
weight of the wind, the ferries rock and shudder at their moorings. The
tops of green-spired, green-roofed buildings disappear into low clouds
pushing in from the sea.
I shiver and pull my coat around me and think of Lucy in her bush hat
and sandals in the heat of central Africa.
I set off again, surprised, suddenly contented. Walking the streets of
Hamburg, I am alone and at ease. Obscurity favours me, and the dark
pleasures of anonymity. Here I can live for today with no yesterday or
tomorrow, no past or future to trouble me, no misplaced hope waiting to
deceive me.
A woman passes by, wrapped in a coat. Lucy, I think again, but it is
only the shape of her face.
I walk on, along streets not yet familiar to me, across busy roads,
through to the Elbe that is heavy and grey with the grey shapes of
ships appearing out of the mist. I find a way between the warehouses
and along the banks of canals past bars and barges and ducks and
moorhens, and back up again towards the city centre. Standing beside me
at a crossing where the lights seem unwilling to change, an old man
smiles, shaking his head, sensing I am new here and still trying to
make it out. Too many cars, he says as finally we cross and cut back
down to the canal. I had better get used to it, he adds: a city full of
cars and water. And darkness, I start to say to him, but already he has
left me.
Beneath the colonnades by the Jungfernstieg that frame the view of the
city and the Binnen Alster – the smaller of the two lakes
that seem to
me to form its heart – someone has left a llama tethered to a
cycle
rack. A child points and laughs; a miniature dog barks, its hair
standing on end. A cyclist, noticing nothing, locks his bike to the
rack and scurries into a shop. The llama leans across and licks the
warm saddle with its large, lascivious tongue. The child touches the
wetness where the llama’s tongue has been and puts his finger
in his
mouth, savouring the taste. I smile and walk on.
Once before, I lived a life that was as strange as this, in London, in
a house with a garden and a view of the setting sun. I walked to the
park and drank tea and watched people play tennis and children laugh
and fight and fall over and cut their knees. On hot summer days I sat
on the grass with a newspaper or a book and read and thought and let
ideas and images form: fragments of poems waiting to be written.
Sometimes in the early evening languorous couples made love beneath the
trees. Sometimes seagulls spreading their wings on the grass were
struck by golf balls.
Sometimes, though not often, I thought of Lucy.
And now the summer has gone and London with it and I am alone in
Hamburg, starting my life again as if none of it ever happened, wanting
to believe I can put the past behind me.
What am I left with? A cold autumn evening, the smell of freshly brewed
coffee, a warm hotel room with a view over the Gänsemarkt.
Little
enough to complain about.
I stand by the window, looking out. The wind has dropped. The square
for once is empty of cars, the traffic blocked by a lorry. The cobbles
glisten from earlier rain. A man waves to a woman walking with a pram.
A cyclist weaves around the line of cars and past the lorry. Pigeons
perch on the top of Lessing’s statue, bobbing their heads,
spreading
their wings. Somewhere a child laughs.
I wait, doing nothing, feeling everything. A moment of solitary luxury.
I think of an old story, that in the Gänsemarkt the homeless
who looted
the city after the Great Fire sat dividing the spoils, untouched,
untroubled, as if the power of the rich had turned out to be illusory
after all. Not so many generations ago. A story told by an old man in
the bakery opposite as I sat perched on a high stool like the pigeons
on Lessing’s statue and drank cappuccino and ate a long
sausage with
mustard, for the rich, sharp smell of it more than the taste. A story,
a memory, a piece of folk history passed down from father to son,
through plagues, floods, revolutions, wars, massacres and the
destruction and rebuilding of a city more ruined than could ever have
been imagined. Now, it seems, while the rich are as rich as ever, the
homeless are children who have run away from home, sailors whose ships
have sailed without them, and old men with wandering minds who sit on
pavements rattling plastic cups at passers-by. Others, in dark corners
by the canals at the back of the shops, stick needles into their arms
and no longer know whether they are rich or poor as they press their
faces up against opaque windows, staring unseeing into their own glazed
eyes.
I turn to speak to Lucy, to talk of nothing, only as a way of reaching
out to her again, of finding myself gathered in by her slow, drifting
gaze that seems to fill the room when we have spent the day together,
the curtains closed, the door locked and forbidding entry, our
nakedness all that we have left in common, all that we still desire to
share.
It is already too late. Lucy has gone. The wistful smile that twists
the corner of my mouth comes only from a memory of pleasure, not from a
sense of loss or regret.
The moment passes.
Lucy. The syllables are soft, melodic, seductive, a promise of pleasure
that was always an illusion, of fulfilment that was always out of
reach. Lucy, whom I loved, among others.
Images remain: her long, narrow toes, a childhood scar beneath her
knee, her nose broken in a fall and never put back together again. A
fall or a struggle? I ask her. A fight with a jealous lover? Lucy looks
at me scornfully. She will not explain. She is no longer a child, she
says. She is a woman, responsible for herself and what happens to her.
Men can do what they like, but not to her.
Where is Lucy now? In Africa, it seems, putting back together the
victims of war, making them whole again. Sometimes it is not possible,
she says; there are too many bits missing: legs and arms and sides of
faces. Where is it this time: Angola or Rwanda or the Congo? Somalia or
Mozambique? I no longer know. I know only that her face is darkened by
the sun, the skin drawn tight by the suffering of others, and that her
hand, when free of the scalpel, shakes. Her eyes stare past me. At
what? I wonder. There is no longer poetry in her looks or in the hard
words that fall sharp-edged and bruising from thin, tightened lips,
like rocks dislodged on a mountainside, laying waste all in their path.
And yet we were made for each other, Lucy and I, come what may. We
survive, we endure, despite our own actions and the efforts of others.
When we come together again, often without warning after months when we
have not exchanged a word of love, sorrow or joy, it is with a
savagery, a brutality out of which we emerge – both of us
– satisfied
for the moment, if not fulfilled.
We part without mention of love or loyalty, knowing it is too late. The
world awaits us separately, with all that it has to offer.
So I will not admit to missing Lucy, during the long months we are
apart. Life is too short and too sweet, beckoning to me like the lotus
flower, for which there is no tomorrow.