The bar was empty but for Glantz. He was sitting at his usual table, from which his plate from lunch, cup and glasses had been cleared; his notebook lay open in front of him. He had had to turn the page twice from the one onto which he had dribbled the day before so that today’s page would be pristine. He looked at the page obliquely. This afternoon, for whatever reason, due to the weather, perhaps, the way the season had drawn its veil over the sun, shrouding it, shrouding the day, only its ghost, drained and diffuse, reaching Glantz through the window behind him, or because of his state, having barely slept, because of the alcohol he had taken in, some unsuspected influence or ripple to his thinking, or other infinitesimal variation gone unnoticed in his attempts to strictly adhere to his usual routine, it, the page, would have appeared to hold no lustre nor bare portent; flat in the spectral light, the page was solid, a slab of stone onto which to carve a thought. Toolless, empty-headed, Glantz, with his good hand, caressed it.
Perhaps he was imaging the cool of stone, of marble, of headstone, the slight abrasion of a chiselled, weathered surface given only to his fingertips (which we here blindly follow), to their sensitivity to scratch, to texture, to the rough and planed smooth, theirs the only testament to the expression on the slab. They alone were party to its feel, to what it said, to its layered venerations, the touch of hands in greeting and departure, to that, perhaps, of lips, of the flowers and pebbles laid in proof of visitation. They alone could have discerned the traces of the words said there as the stone was laid, as it was positioned; they alone could read everything it would repeat when viewed at angles, obliquely, by those who gathered and mourned.
Glantz’s left hand was wrapped in gauze; he pulled the bandage down. The puncture wound would have looked so small once clean. He dug at it with a fingernail, picking off its gem of scab. He pinched his palm to seep a bud, dipped the picking finger in it, re-covered his wound with the bunched and soiled wrap, and began to press bloody prints onto the pages of his book.
The familiar electric chime sounded as Glantz entered the stationer’s. As usual, nobody was standing behind the counter. Glantz made no pretence of browsing. He had come for exactly the same notebook, same in size, style and colour, as the one he had thrown into the bin on his walk over from the bar.
He waited with his hands clasped behind his back; his pin had been reattached to the lapel of his mac.
Since arriving in the quarter, since before even coming back and moving in with his sister, Glantz had been going to Mme Antonia’s. Rather than closer, however, over the years, despite his fidelity, the owner had become less friendly and less attentive, no less than she had to her shop, it falling ever further into disrepair just like the neighbourhood around it. The stock in the windows was sun-bleached and warped, the shelves and displays inside dusty and unkempt. As with most of the businesses on that street, it was a mystery how they stayed afloat; one would rarely have encountered another customer should one have stepped into any of the shops. The bar Glantz frequented was the exception, but even there custom was on the decline. Were he to ask, say, Gloria, Gloria at the tobacconist’s, one of the more talkative of the remaining vendors, he would have heard how commerce all throughout the capital was “on its arse,” and that “it isn’t better in the provinces either of course.” “Scared people don’t spend,” was Gloria’s refrain, “aside from the economy being what it is. Even the smokers are packing it in.” That’s what Edwige reported back to Glantz, not that he showed any interest in neighbourhood goings on.
“There’s no young people, that’s the problem,” his sister would continue regardless, “been driven out, and you need young people to bring some life.” Glantz never responded with an opinion. On his rounds collecting rents and managing lets, he may have noted the age of the tenants, new and departing, but whether he cared is impossible to guess. Whether they paid what was due at the start of every month was about the only topic about which Glantz got exercised.
Glantz had properties all over the city, all over, that was, its shabbiest parts. His rooms were of the cheapest kind, bedsits, attics, studio flats. Some he owned but how many would be difficult to say; others he just managed, collecting the rents for their elderly landlords, cleaning things up when someone moved out, arranging repairs and renovations when such things were required. Rents were calculated by the week and paid in advance. The places didn’t cost much but not a payment was missed. No such thing as arrears when you rented from Glantz. Turnover was high, people came and went, and the places he managed rarely sat empty long.
“You pray on people,” his sister had once said, and had subsequently stopped asking Glantz about his job. Even if he had done it well, honestly and fairly, landlordism wasn’t a profession for which she had any respect. Which perhaps was why Glantz gave so little away when she came to him with questions about anything else. She had been willing to take him in, despite their differences, and that he, more or less, abided by the rules she set, was enough of a relationship for both. Simple proximity, as family, sufficed.
What would he have shared with her anyway from the shrinking circuits of his repetitive life? Would he have told her that he had noticed the congregation of the parish thinning, the congregation aging, gradually disappearing? That people didn’t like the new priest? She had made it clear often enough that she had no truck with his church going. Better for them both to keep their mouths shut so as not to provoke a fruitless dispute. And he was hardly going to ask her to explain the classes she taught or her research, the things she got up to when she went out. Besides, as long as she was happy to provide the care she did, what reason would Glantz have to risk a change and jeopardize the life into which he had settled?
Mme Antonia peered out from behind the tatty curtain that separated the shop from her apartment. A petite and myopic woman with thick-lensed glasses, she, like many others in the city, appeared as light as dry bones and to be winnowing out; her shapeless housecoat hung from her clavicles.
“Yes?”
“A notebook,” said Glantz.
“Already with the notebooks that fat Mr Glantz,” she said to someone over her shoulder. Slowly she made her way between the boxes and packing cases that cluttered the space behind the counter, and through which a narrow run could be discerned. She stooped to lift a torn open box from the floor by its flaps, and dropped it onto the glass countertop, almost completely disappearing behind it. Glantz made no move to help her. Reaching over her head, Mme Antonia then yanked a book through the ripped hole, tugging at it violently as it resisted. She was breathless when she finally succeeded, tossing the notebook derisively onto the counter.
“Just one again, I suppose? You know you could just take the lot of them and save us all the bother later on.”
Glantz shook his head as he peeled a note from his stack of bills, folded it and put it back into his pocket. He placed the money on the counter on the opposite side of the box to the notebook. Mme Antonia’s hand reached blindly around to grab it. Glantz, awaiting change, did not pick up his new notebook.
“Your hand is bleeding there.” Glantz would have heard Mme Antonia’s voice emerge from when she stood, obscured. He looked at his hand; a spot of blood was spreading from the centre of his bandage. He stuffed his hand into his pocket.
“Wait there,” she said, and Glantz would have heard Mme Antonia start to shuffle back down her run, catching sight of her only as she disappeared back through the curtain from behind which she had appeared. He may have heard her mumbling, but there was no way he would have caught a word of what she said. A man’s voice from the back room was more distinct: he asked her what was going on and got no answer in return. A child started crying.
As Glantz waited patiently, the curtain was drawn back. A burly man, far younger looking than Mme Antonia, stood in the doorway wearing a vest, wiry greying hair across his chest and shoulders, a baby in his arms. The pattern of hair that remained on his head formed a perfect balding tonsure. Glantz, in all his visits, would have never seen the man before. Too young, surely, to be her husband, one would have to assume he was Mme Antonia’s son. There was aggressive distrust in the way he looked at Glantz. The baby, then, must have been her grandchild, but neither it, nor the man in whose arms it was held, looked the least bit like the stationer. Neither did the baby look at all like the man with its pale complexion, blue eyes and head of blonde and curly hair. It squirmed, sat on his hip, clamped to his side, and in response the man held it clamped tighter. He grabbed the child’s arm and held it down, his free hand holding the curtain open.
Glantz would not have been afraid to return the man’s look; he stood, as ever, impassive and unmoving. The baby in his arms began to mewl. Had Glantz ever heard a child crying there before? He seemed to flinch as the sounds the child made grew louder, eyelids blinking and eyes darting, a flush starting to bloom.
Outside a bus rumbled past, its windows catching the light of the sinking early evening sun, to send a blaze of its reflection across the shop. As its intense, golden hue sank obliquely over the man’s features he didn’t wince or try to shield his eyes; he didn’t react at all. The child, however, fell suddenly quiet. It stopped squirming, the man letting go of its arm, and followed the movement of the light, drawn within its drift until the glare was extinguished, shop left grey in its redoubled gloom. The child turned back towards the man, raised a hand and placed it gently on his unshaven cheek. The man looked down at the child and smiled. The baby, laughing and gurgling, patted his face and pulled at his jowls. Glantz held his breath.
The curtain fell back into place; outside in the street, the last light of the sunset fell away. Glantz shuddered, as though waking up. He looked around. He was alone now in the monochrome shadows of the shop, among it boxes and its dust, its countless, unleafed, virgin pages. He coughed and cleared his throat. Removing his glasses, he wiped at the corner of his eye with the cuff of his coat sleeve. There was no sound from the apartment at the back of the shop. Glantz cleaned his glasses on the hem of his mac and replaced them.
Slipping the new notebook into his pocket, without waiting any longer for his change, or for whatever it was the shopkeeper had gone to get, Glantz turned and left the shop. He would have heard the chime of the electric bell as the door swung shut behind him.
Not one shop’s length further down the road, Glantz jumped as someone touched his elbow.
“Excuse me, is your name Mr Glantz?”
Glantz stopped dead. For a moment, he did not look around. The voice belonged to a young man; too young for it to intimidate Glantz, though shocked he would have definitely been. It didn’t belong to the man he had seen in the shop. What’s more, he had said “excuse me” and not, directly, “Mr Glantz”, the way an officer might. The uncertainty of his intonation, the hanging of the question, might have offered succour too. Had too long now passed though to state succinct denial?
Glantz placed one foot very slowly in front of the other, still not looking back.
“It is Mr Glantz. Isn’t it?”
Whoever it was had let go of his arm. The man must have been waiting for him. That meant he had been tracking Glantz, tracking him before he had gone into the stationer’s. For how long, Glantz must have wondered, was I being followed?
He started to walk again, each step so slowly taken as to be almost indistinguishable from the way the hidden sun and failing evening light shaded its setting down and across him, shadows lengthening along the street. “Never run,” was something people said. “Don’t give them the chance to say you tried to run, that you were trying to evade arrest.”
First one foot then the next.
“I know you from the bar, Mr Glantz. It is you, I know. I’ve seen you there.”
Glantz walked on, walking now at almost his normal place. Whoever it was hadn’t reached out again, hadn’t seemed to take a further step after him. Nor had the person raised his voice; he had let Glantz go.
“I just want to talk to you, sir, Mr Glantz, about what happened at the bar the other afternoon. That’s all.”
Glantz continued walking. Let the boy, he had the voice of a boy, he might have thought, stand there in the street and draw attention to himself. Others there, now, no doubt, would be starting to stop and would be looking; they would be wondering who it was making all the fuss. Let that shut him up, the boy. It was as though Glantz could sense the young man’s confidence dissolving; his stride lengthened, and the pace of his steps quickened up. He had no choice but to keep walking on, as though there was no way the man talking could have meant him. If he didn’t continue like nothing had happened, he might again become the focus of unwanted attention. Someone, undoubtedly, had started watching. He had to keep moving; he had to walk on.
Glantz walked straight, crossing the street which, had he turned down it, would have taken him home. He walked on past the tobacconist’s and further, until he reached the bar. He crossed the road again, just beyond where the suicide had been hit by the bus. He couldn’t have known if he was being followed; he hadn’t once slowed nor turned to look. He passed the church and kept on going.
Glantz walked until he reached the river. The night’s fresh hungers bloomed beyond the murk of the evening traffic and the bilious yellow of the streetlights, its craving revealed only in the split seam of the river as it snaked through the city, bisecting it, opening it out to bleed wide swathes of rich and inky darkness. Glantz, however, for the moment, kept his eyes on the pavement. He had still not yet, since being accosted, dared look back to see if he was being followed.
Rather than cross the river, Glantz turned on reaching the quays and followed the road along its banks. There was a loop he could walk which would deliver him home, and a point in his now slow and shuffling flight at which whether he had shaken his pursuer or not would become irrelevant. If they weren’t to arrest him or attack him there, along the river where the city was at its darkest, there was little he had to fear in heading back towards his sister’s. Besides, if it had been the police, and they knew who he was, they would have also long known where to find him and would already be there, awaiting his return.
There was nothing for Glantz to do but walk; he advanced as inexorably as the night.
And as he did, if you had seen him pass, there on the quayside away from the lights, you might have thought he grew in stature, that his shoulders dropped and broadened, that his stride extended, that, despite how he was moving, stillness had settled on him, grace, as though, you might have though, enveloped by the darkness, the smell of the river, its mud and effluent, he was weightless, gliding through the murk along the banks, head lolling, listing slowly to the left and to the right, lights in the far distance catching his lenses, reflecting off his glasses, to give his eyes, pale, lucent and unblinking, a morbid allure as they emerged from the shadows; how, borne on the rhythm of his movement, his gait, his gently swinging arms, waves went through him, a silken furl, and you may have noticed, also, how silently he moved, how the world beyond the two of you , you and Glantz, would seem to have fallen quiet, that you couldn’t hear his breath or the sound of his steps, that the lapping black water that he trailed had hushed.