and condensers, stuff like that.’
‘How do you know about old radios?’
‘My dad,’ she said. ‘He wanted a boy, so he taught me how to fish and shoot and change a fuse and hotwire a car.’
Niemand sat down. ‘I wish I’d met you earlier in my life,’ he said.
39
…HAMBURG…
They ran on the river path, saw the backs of the houses across the water, here and there a rowboat pulled onto the bank, fowls strutting and pecking, a man hanging washing. There were few runners, many people on bicycles. The sun came and went, gave no heat.
Anselm had not run with anyone since college, since his runs with his room-mate Sinclair Hollway, who went on to become a Wall Street legend for putting twenty-six million dollars on a nickel play. The unauthorised money lost, Sinclair was found dead in his house on Cape Cod a week later.
‘Anselms have been in Hamburg for a long time,’ she said.
He looked at her. Her hair was pulled back and she was wearing anti-glare glasses, the kind target shooters wore, yellow. She looked different.
‘What do you know about Anselms?’
‘I looked them up. I suppose you know all the family history.’
‘Some.’
‘Pioneers of the Hanseatic trade with America, it said.’
‘That’s quite possible. How old are you?’
The yellow eyes. ‘Thirty-seven next month. Why?’
‘No reason.’
‘You simply wanted to know?’
‘Yes. Simply wanted to know. Innocent inquiry. Or isn’t it?’
‘I have no opinion.’
‘No innocent inquiries. Is that it? Nothing is innocent.’
‘A question about age, that could certainly be innocent, yes.’
‘But you don’t think this is?’
‘I didn’t think you had any curiosity about me. This is really a conversational cul-de-sac. What kind of books do you enjoy? Do you read novels?’
‘I read novels.’
Once he had read two or three a week, on planes, while eating, waiting for something, someone, somewhere. He never went anywhere without at least two, usually three, buying five or six at a time and leaving them where he finished them. He had donated books to planes, airports, trains, railway stations, left them in parks and bars and hotels and coffee shops, government offices and embassies, taxis and buses and hire cars. Once he left a book in a brothel, the woman had seen it in his coat pocket, asked for it.
They ran. He looked down and saw how shabby his running shoes were, bits were peeling. No German would run in such shoes.
A family on bicycles was coming at them, two abreast. He dropped behind Alex. The plump mother said thank you, three children each said thank you, the father said another thank you.
Running behind her, he admired her backside. He also admired her action. No show to it, no big knee lift or arm action. She just ran, everything straight. When he went up to join her, they touched, just a brush of upper arms, a sibilant friction.
‘DeLillo,’ she said. ‘Do you like him?’
‘I read the earlier books, the Oswald book, that was the last one I read.’
‘You liked that?’
‘I don’t know. I must have, I finished it.’
‘You give up on books easily?’
‘Yes. It’s an American thing. Gratify me or be gone.’
‘You don’t want to live in America again?’
In the beginning, in the early days in the old house on the canal, he had sometimes thought about going back to America. But the idea disturbed him, made him weepy. Go back where? He had no home, the people he had loved were gone, father, mother gone, he was alone. Lucas was all he had, if he had Lucas, they could not even touch properly and Lucas lived in London, he was English now. Go home to the place he left to go to Beirut? To Kaskis’ tiny apartment on the hill? It would belong to Kaskis’ family since Beirut. And later he came to think that Hamburg suited the way he felt, his condition. He was of it and not of it. He belonged and he didn’t. The Germans had partial memory loss and so did he. They had chosen what pieces to forget, but then perhaps so had he.
‘America overwhelms me,’ he said. ‘There’s too much of too little. Why would you think I don’t have any curiosity about you?’
The yellow eyes looked at him, away. ‘I should not have said that. A silly thing to say. What else do you read?’
‘Mostly, I get drunk and go to sleep in front of the television with the cable news on.’
It was true. He sat with a book in his lap, a glass in his hand and on the television an endless loop of death, destruction, pain, fear, famine and misery. Often he came back and watched again when he woke far out on the wrong side of the night, wet with sweat from his dreams.
They ran.
‘I also listen to music while I’m getting drunk watching the news,’ he said. ‘A multi-media experience.’
They ran. Anselm’s knee was beginning to hurt, the pain that started as dull, like a memory of a pain, gradually turned to fire in the joint.
‘You’re not interested in the music I listen to?’ he said.
They ran. He thought that this would probably be the only run they would ever take together and he did not know how to prevent that from being so.
‘People like you probably listen to Wagner,’ she said. She did not turn her head.
‘Wagner?’
He had no idea what she meant, he had no view on Wagner, his father had hated Wagner, the Wagners as a whole. But he also disliked her tone, it send a current of annoyance through him and, for an instant, he wanted to bump her into the canal-it would be easy, hip and shoulder. Splash. There would be no coming back from that and it would be over. He would go home. Resume his life without shrinks. She could crawl home, wet, have her own post- traumatic stress.
‘People like me?’
She said nothing, didn’t look at him.
They ran and he kept looking at her. ‘What kind of person am I?’
She still didn’t look at him. ‘You’re an adrenalin addict,’ she said.
‘You like percussion. You’re a seeker after percussion.’
‘I was a hostage, that’s all you know about me. Where do you get all these other opinions from?’
‘Just intuition. Professional intuition. You say you were often scared but you never stopped looking for chances to be scared.’
Anselm heard bicycles coming up behind them. He fell back to let them pass, thin androgynous people in latex outfits, helmets, thin dark glasses. Alex slowed for him.
‘That’s not a terribly clever thing to say,’ he said. ‘That was my job. That was what I did. I didn’t go to these places on holiday.’
‘Did you take holidays?’
The sun went. His knee was getting worse, soon he would be showing it, favouring it, he would be pathetic. This was why you didn’t run with other people.
