Care of Wooden Floors

I pointed at the wall. ‘What am I looking at, then?’ I said.

Before I could lower my arm or step back, the old woman grabbed my raised arm by the wrist and pulled it insistently towards the wall. I was stunned; a sick horror rose in me and I think I let loose a breath, a gasp of shock, but she still wore that determined grin. Her grip was like iron, and maybe I could have freed my arm, but not without a violent movement that was utterly beyond me. This woman was perhaps more than double my age yet I was completely unable to conceive of wresting free of this grip that terrified me. My muscles were heavy wads of wet toilet tissue. She pulled my hand forward so that the index finger, still extended, went into one of the holes in the stone. How many years of filth are in there? I wondered. And then my wrist was free – she left my hand with a finger pointing in this rough little hole. The hole was deep, maybe three inches or more – it almost swallowed my finger. It was too deep to have been made by some natural process of erosion, and there were many others like it.

‘Pan!’ the woman said, quite suddenly, a short, explosive syllable. ‘Pan! Pan!’ She was pantomiming firing a rifle. Maybe in other circumstances the sight would have been comical. But not now.

‘Pan!’

I saw now, and whipped out my finger as if it had been burned. These pockmarks were bullet holes. The side of the museum had been riddled with bullets. From what war or revolution? Who had been fighting whom? Was it even fighting? They could have just lined people up in this alley and shot them. Revolutionary justice. Counter-revolutionary justice.

The museum guide was still grinning at me. She could see that I now knew what I was looking at, I was sure. Maybe she thought that this was what tourists wanted to see, the real history. She clearly had me pegged as a foreigner – maybe she thought, or knew from experience, that Westerners were likely to be unenchanted by the displays inside the museum and instead had a ghoulish fascination with the story drilled into its stone, its guts, the real thing. I still did not know if these scars were recent or not. But it seemed to me that most of the history here was recent. I doubted that their television schedules were cluttered with I

the 1980s. Strikes and shortages, curfews and disappearances. The holes were a presence, not an absence. They awed and chilled me.

I ran my fingertips over a hole at chest level. Dug into solid stone at the bottom of that hole was a chunk of lead. What did it pass through before pitting the wall? The air, alive with shouts and commands and terrible noises; and skin, and muscle and sinew, and bone and blood? Had the blood been washed off, or was it now a component of the black filth that coated every inch of the wall? From blood to crud; vital motivating fluid one moment, dirt the next. Whose blood, though, if it was indeed there at all? Why spilled? What for? Fascist? Communist? Nationalist? Dissident? Loyalist? Monarchist? Collaborator? Resistance? Might this have been a freedom fighter’s corpuscles, or were these terrorist cells? Whoever had won would now decide that. Faceless idealists flitted in my imagination. Or no one, nothing – a bullet hurled through air ringing with forgotten slogans only to embed itself in this dead rock, which remembers it still. And the slogans echo to silence, and a man from an indifferent country sees the mark but not the maker, his time, his cause. All gone, and damage and trash is left behind.

The woman from the museum, that strange creature who brought me here, wrinkled her nose as if to indicate Ooh, isn’t this fun? and turned back towards the street, talking merrily to herself. I waited a couple of minutes until I was certain that there was no possibility of awkwardly re-encountering her around the corner, and then followed.

My stomach pinched and I realised with unwelcome timing that I was hungry. It was past lunchtime, the bulk of the afternoon was already gone, and my lower back ached from the walking. Doubly unwelcome was the realisation that I had a chore to run. I needed to buy groceries. Either I had to shop, or I had to eat out every night, and as I didn’t know how long I would be here, eating out could become expensive. But the notion of shopping for groceries while technically on holiday was repulsive to me.

There was a small supermarket on the way back to Oskar’s flat – I had seen it on my way out. But at some point in its history, a thunderingly incompetent acolyte of Baron Haussmann had had his way with this city. Its historic street pattern had been almost obliterated by an attempt to systematise it into a grid. This almost-grid had then been further complicated by a series of non-orthogonal avenues that stretched out from two focal points, the Market Square and the National Assembly. This carved the plan into dozens of flatirons, splinters and sawteeth. On the map, it looked a little like a sheet of reinforced glass that had two bullet holes punched in it, radiating fractures. On the ground, my path back to Oskar’s via the supermarket zig-zagged in an uneven W.

The supermarket occupied the ground floor of one of the spearhead-shaped blocks, a wedge like the prow of a ship. A heavy antique iron clock was cantilevered out from the sharp point of the block, above the store’s front entrance, layers of cellulite-lump black paint and hefty Roman numerals speaking of another age. And now it surmounted a buzzing mass of strip-lighting and ready meals. It was a purgatory of sticky linoleum and radium-blue insectocutors. I bought what I needed and left as swiftly as possible.

As I uncomfortably backed my way through the resisting front door of Oskar’s building, I heard a disconcerting noise. At first I thought the door was creaking, but that was not the source. It was a sort of creak, though, but also more than that. It was the sound of the blade of a spade being dragged along a pavement, only changing in pitch, rising as it went. There was then a fraction of a beat of bright silence, a bit of rustling, and a savage metallic slam. It was the sound of a mechanical giant with a lame foot, limping towards some malign goal. The twin sounds repeated, rusted yowl and mantrap slam. They were coming from upstairs.

On the landing between the ground and first floors was a woman, hair tied back in the ubiquitous headscarf, her age an irrelevant point somewhere between forty-five and seventy. A life of poor diet and hard work had turned her into a huge callus, and her nose was pushed up in a way that inescapably reminded me of the squashed face of a bat. She was dumping rubbish-filled plastic bags into a metal-doored hatch in the wall of the landing, a rubbish chute with an age-degraded but still powerful spring on its opening. The effort needed to pull it down was clearly considerable, and it snapped shut with swift viciousness. Creak, slam. Hearing me climb the stairs, she turned and confronted me, demanding something I did not understand.

I took an instant dislike to this new person in my life, blocking my way. After the troubling interlude in the alley, I did not care for further crone encounters. Also … I look like nothing myself, and try not to judge on appearances. But this woman’s physical ugliness seemed in my snapshot opinion to be matched by an ugliness of nature. Hair tied back under the ubiquitous headscarf, that nose of the order chiroptera, and the unforgiving gleam of the eyes behind it … and she was fat, not the pillowy fat of overindulgence, fat like an armadillo. The bags of groceries I carried should have indicated that I was not some sort of burglar or rapist, but I felt like an intruder nevertheless. I put them down on the stone floor – the two bottles of red wine I had bought clinked and drew her disapproving attention – and pointed upstairs, pulling Oskar’s keys from my pocket with my other hand.

‘Oskar, upstairs,’ I said, more than once, as I dangled the keys like a hypnotist. She stared at them with what seemed like scepticism, then slightly grudging acceptance. Then, pointing upstairs with an expectant look on her face, she said a word that I (obviously) did not understand. I adopted a quizzical look and pointed upstairs. She repeated the word, nodding the while. Then she said it a third time, this time adding a questions mark. Baffled, I smiled and repeated the word as best I could. She smiled and looked intensely satisfied. Smiling and nodding like a Japanese businessman, I fled upstairs.

At least modernity had taken firm hold in Oskar’s apartment. The kitchen gleamed like a surgical instrument. The cats lay entangled and becalmed on the sofa – I shooed them off and sighed, then brushed at the hairs they had shed with my hand. It was obvious why they liked the sofa; direct sunlight warmed the black leather beautifully. They were hungry, and they orbited me, carefully making practised shows of being pitiable. I looked down at them, prowling around between the sofa and the coffee table, and my eye was drawn to the small blush on the floor my wine glass had left. The light was different now, and there was no escaping the mark – it was certainly there, undeniable, and I could not imagine that Oskar would not see it. I was an expert at deluding myself out of responsibilities, but this was beyond my powers. Oskar would see it, I was convinced. It was a blemish on my record, and made less than twenty-four hours into my custodianship of his home. Once, Oskar had astonished me at a dinner party by holding forth on my shortcomings with an exceptional eye for detail. My girlfriend at the time had been less than impressed, and I believed that the evening had contributed to the breakdown of that relationship. Oskar’s girlfriend back then was the woman who later became his wife, a relationship that a dozen Californian lawyers were at this moment dismantling for what I imagined was a considerable profit.

That mark … I went to the sink and wetted a sponge with a scrubbing patch on top, then dripped a drop of washing-up liquid onto it. Then, I attacked the mark with the ferocity of a wronged man. It was maddening, truly, to have a floor that could not stand the slightest flaw. A floor was made to be trodden on! It was where things inevitably fell. I scrubbed and scrubbed. That dinner party had been an odd evening. One of the reasons I liked Oskar was his truth-telling instinct, his directness about the failings of others, often without concern for social niceties such as their feelings. Really, it was only a surprise that he didn’t apply his frightening insight and uncompromising honesty to me earlier. But then I thought of his open contempt for my housekeeping abilities at university. And he later apologised, made a point of apologising, to me in person; in fact, that dinner party had been the beginning of a chain of consequences that had led to Oskar asking me to look after his flat.

Once my elbow and shoulder began to ache, I stopped scrubbing at the floor. I rinsed the sponge, squeezed it thoroughly, and wiped away the suds. Was the blemish still there? The floor was wet – it was hard to tell. Besides, I was beginning to feel that this blemish was like a flash-shadow left after a photograph has been taken, a blob imprinted on the back of my eyes and nowhere else. I thought of Edgar Allan Poe’s story ‘The Tell-tale Heart’, in which a murderer is driven mad by the imagined audible beating of the heart of his victim, concealed under the floorboards of his room. But I was no murderer, I thought, and it would take a lot more than a tiny mark on the floor to drive me insane.

DAY THREE

I was lying in Oskar’s bed, not even slightly awake, when I realised that my surroundings had performed an unhappy transfiguration in the night. The bed now seemed to be of unlimited size. At first I feared that I had shrunk, but that theory did not stand up to close examination. The white duvet was as thick as it had been when I went to sleep, all the stitching and weave of the cotton was the correct scale, but the mattress and its coverings no longer had a visible end in any direction. Everywhere I looked, it stretched out to an invisible vanishing point, a white cotton horizon against a plaster-white sky. Sky, or ceiling? It was impossible to tell, and the answer did not seem to be important. Beneath me, I imagined a fathomless underworld of dusty springs. Above was the irrelevant nothing.

Slow panic. To crawl or walk out onto that trackless desert of duvet, or over the treacherous footings of boggy pillow-down, would mean losing my way, succumbing to snow blindness, and ultimately (in the boxer shorts and T-shirt I slept in) death from exposure. To worm my way under the duvet at first seemed a better plan; not so exposed to cold, at the very least. But a duvet that size must weigh thousands, millions, of tonnes, I feared, whatever its tog count. To crawl too far underneath it would be death – I would suffocate in the dark before the first mile was up.

It really was unfortunate. My immediate surroundings, in their proper place in the world and at sensible proportions, could not be more comfortable – I was simply in a bed. But as this bed had grown to encompass the whole world, it had become a deathtrap as alien and unforgiving as an Arctic waste or Asiatic desert. Any place, I realised, no matter how temporarily comfortable or inviting, is only rendered habitable by the promise of other places beyond it.

For want of anything else to do, I turned over. The horizon, a greyness that was really only a fresh, distant, horizontal quality of whiteness, swung into view. A tiny pang of seasickness came and went. Seasickness without the hint of an ocean; not so much as a drop of water. How long could one survive without water? Not that I could measure time – I did not believe that this ash-white dome above me varied its appearance according to night and day. I would have to conserve and ‘recycle’ my own fluids, I thought. The idea of drinking my own urine did not appeal. And I had no way of … decanting it. Would I be reduced to using a cupped hand, or somehow … aiming? The mechanics of the whole operation were not at all pleasing. Afterwards, I would have to move to a new place on the frontier, no doubt about it. I was not going to lie in the damp patch. Certain death in a prosaic wilderness was one thing, lounging around in my own waste was quite another. Fortunately, and this was the one bright spot that I could see: there was no shortage of identical spots to move to.

Incredible – I could not have been in this new situation for more than ten minutes, and already I was figuring out the practicalities of pissing all over myself. And right on cue, the question of fluids arose, and a mild complaint issued from the fleshy lower part of my abdomen. It was unmistakable, and it would only become more urgent. And there was something else wrong. A darkness was advancing in the distance beyond my feet. Maybe I had been wrong about the days and nights here, and this was dusk. But it was not dusk or gathering bad weather. It was spreading below the horizon, just a storm-like far darkness at first, but more resembling an incoming tide as it advanced. Storm-like, yes; it was the bruised blue colour of spilled red wine, a purple, thunderhead hue. It was Homer’s wine-dark sea, seeping into the white cotton of the acres of duvet, darkening as it grew deeper. At first, it seemed to be a growing lake that was approaching my feet, but then, in a dreamy instant, I realised that it was to my left and right as well, cutting off escape. I did not want to look behind me. It was no growing lake, I was a shrinking island.

At this moment of intensifying crisis, my bladder also wanted attention. What had been naught but a twinge from the early-warning system a few second ago had now, unfairly, escalated into a full-scale case for immediate action. I was facing imminent peril of an unknown nature on all sides, thanks to the Wine Stain from Beyond, and the need to go to the toilet. I had two top priorities, both of them evacuation. But there was also something strangely reassuring about this sudden desire to urinate. It was the most familiar thing about these circumstances. It was a factor that appeared to come from beyond this contrived terrain of duvet and mattress and threatening darknesses. It was real; I was certain of it. I really did need to go to the loo – it was something that I could measure empirically and had experienced before. I began to suspect, very strongly, that everything else might be a dream. And as if detecting my lack of confidence in it, my new reality all at once felt far less substantial.

The stain had advanced to within two feet of my two feet. And with that, consciousness fell hard around me like a cookie-cutter stamping out the rectangular shape of a king-size bed in the cotton savannah, and then lifted to reveal the walls of Oskar’s room beyond. Oskar’s room! I was sitting up, unexpectedly, and my heart started to beat like a rubber ball dropped on a hard surface from a great height. It was morning; there was sunlight and street-sound. I was awake. I needed to go to the toilet. Outside, beyond the French windows, I could hear the cats whingeing. The demanding little beasts would have to wait.

I pivoted on my rear, swinging my legs out from under the duvet (which, although it had resumed its conventional proportions, I felt it would be prudent to treat with some suspicion) and put my feet on the floor. This manoeuvre provoked a hollow bong from the mattress. Something in its echoes brought to mind whales calling in the ocean depths. The floor was rugless and cool; hours of bed warmth seeped from my feet into the boards. I stood, stretched, and trotted off to the lavatory, crossing as I did so a rhombus of sunlight. Its heat surprised me.

An inexplicable misery had overtaken me at some point in the night, and the promise of a day of brilliant sunshine seemed only to sharpen the sensation. Maybe the desolation of my nightmare had followed me out of sleep.

It felt most likely, however, that my low mood came from the following apprehension: I had nothing to do. Of course, this wasn’t strictly, technically true – there were various things to be ‘getting on with’; I needed to shower, the cats needed to be fed, I needed to be fed as well. But beyond these quotidian tasks, no activities were planned. This empty time – I had mentally categorised it as ‘relaxing’ or ‘pottering about’, both of which names imply some activity other than just standing stock-still or going back to bed – had been deliberately introduced into my rudimentary schedule in vast quantities, and I had eagerly anticipated it when thinking about my trip before setting off. This, I thought, would be the point at which my better self, the improving-book-reading, poem-writing self, would emerge; the time when I had removed from my path all the obstacles that I considered to be the source of my lack of creativity and self-improvement back in London. I had no work to do, I was not going to be interrupted, my surroundings were congenial and my mind was (mostly) at ease. My sensitive soul was no longer held down by heavy chains of duty and distraction – it would now (I had theorised) take wing. But I was gripped by a kind of dull horror. Even in perfect conditions, I couldn’t muster the perfect mood to be all that I wanted to be. I simply could not do it. If nothing was stopping me, then what was stopping me? Because I was certainly stopped. Something had me by the entrails.

Unfair friends of mine saw my ambitions as pretensions. They, I was sure, were wrong. Oskar had been worse than unfair – he had been savagely fair. I did not know what to think. ‘I want to be a writer’ sounded right to me, but with it came a kick in the guts from the you’re-telling-a-lie goblin. That was my ambition presented as a proud thoroughbred when in fact it was a spavined, half-blind mule. Certainly, riding it had not got me far. I had never even left the stables. For pity’s sake, I had roughly planned that I would be at least a proper journalist of some sort while attempting to write whatever it was I wanted to write, but I hadn’t even managed that! What did I do? I wrote council documentation. I explained your bin collection schedule. The shower, at least, managed to refresh me and slough off some of these fears.

Household rituals. I put out the cats’ food while the kettle was boiling for my coffee. What did they do during the night? Whatever it was, it gave them an appetite, and they chugged down their chunks of brown flesh with gusto. What did they do in the sleeping city … fuck and prowl, no doubt, glory in streets without trams and human feet. They were active, most active, in the dark and cold corners of the night and then sought out the brightest parts of the room in which to sleep. It was as though they stored up the energy that fell on them during the day and released it at night.

Coffee for me, my energy source. I was hungry as well, lazy hungry. Breakfast would have been the obvious way out, but it was past eleven already, and too close to lunch. I switched on the television, and again had to chase the cats off the sofa in order to watch. Why did Oskar banish them from a spot they clearly loved? It seemed arbitrary and cruel. CNN prattled its anytime monologue. Television news, especially rolling news, especially American rolling news, is criticised for its incessant preoccupation with novelty, crisis, overthrow and calamity, lives violently stopped and systems at bay, but to me it seems to be a mantra of imperturbable continuity, the reassuring (to some) humming of the great wheel continuing to turn. All these horrors, it says, all these revolutions and tumult, they do not matter, my children, they have not altered the hourly bulletins, the opening and closing of markets, the drumbeat of the global system. It goes on with the supreme, hermetic self-confidence of the medieval monastic orders. It sings the hours heedless of day or night, matins and compline, business report and planetary weather. No wonder it seemed so suited to the international, interstitial spaces, the airport lounges and hotel rooms. These places are called bland, but they are not. They are the default, the canvas, the underlay, the transmission test card. Everything else is a localised aberration.

It seemed so unfair to stop the cats from sitting on the sofa, and in my low mood I felt that I would appreciate the proximity of their warm little minds. I lifted the nearest one – the one whose tail bore a white tip, the only distinguishing feature I could discern so far – onto the sofa beside me. It circled once, and then jumped back off again, apparently just to be bloody-minded. Fine. Be like that, see if I care.

Damn – I did care. I had been snubbed by a lesser mammal. Nothing snubs quite like a cat. What evolutionary purpose did it serve, this inherent disdain, this artful blanking? International weather revealed, to my chagrin, that London was also sunny. I wanted it to be raining there, and sunny here, so that I could properly enjoy the Schadenfreude of the holiday-maker. But they would be sweating on the Tube, and when lunchtime came not an inch of grass in the central parks would be spared the imposition of a secretary’s pasty arse.

Time trundled on, trams rumbled by. No wonder they had served as muse to Oskar. They informed the air like the lowing of cattle, the same air of unthinking service of unknown needs. A tram is unaware of its timetable; even its driver, its guiding intelligence, is concerned only with his route. I decided that I would do at least one culturally improving thing today, if nothing else – I would find and listen to Variations on Tram Timetables, Oskar’s great success.

Noon passed. The day was broken, cracked down the middle like a paperback’s spine. I made a simple lunch, thick slices of Routemaster-red sausage, Land Rover-green cucumber, slices of cheese and bread, a sliced lunch conducted by a sharp, pointy little paring knife, a most surgical instrument from Oskar’s surgical kitchen. Consciously avoiding thinking about my actions and their implications, I pulled the cork out of the half-full bottle of wine on the kitchen table and poured myself a glass. A glass at just past midday, only an hour from rising, not a healthy thing. But this was a holiday, of sorts, not a time to be concerned with the formalities of everyday life. I would have to be careful, though, not to spill anything.

The stain was still there, of course, that damn little mark. It was so small and pale, nothing at all. I was now worried that my fierce cleaning yesterday had, if anything, made it more noticeable. The scrubber surface of the sponge had left tiny scratches in the thin polish of the floor – an oval matt patch, with that cursed little blemish at its centre. The message was clear – no more scrubbing at it. There was nothing more I could or should do about it. I had to put it from my mind, ignore it. There was no way Oskar would notice it.

What was I thinking? Of course he would notice it. I knew that he would. I chewed on a slice of sausage ruefully, and remembered the effort I had made to clean my flat before Oskar had come round to dinner that time. It had made little difference.

What did he want, after all? Even he could do nothing about the inevitable degradation of all things, the scuffs and scratches, the smuts and drips, the fingerprints and dust. Fingerprints are universal, the calling-card of humanity. I loved those forensics shows, the television police procedurals in which criminalists painstakingly reassemble human incident from smudges and residues, the blood drop and lipstick trace, the soiled tissue and shed thread. In those, the most evil criminals were always the ones who left the fewest clues. When a killer left no trace, not a hair, not so much as a single helix, you knew that you were dealing with a real bastard, a psychopath, calculating, emotionless, outside the human. An intellect vast and cool and unsympathetic. As for dust, that was more human than anything. It is primarily dead skin cells. We are walking dust factories. However futile it was, Oskar’s resistance to this inevitable grime was magnificent.

It was too early for wine. I sipped it with care. It clung to my lips, and to the sides of the glass. Winemakers call this the ‘legs’, and it’s a measure of the alcohol content of the wine – the ‘stickiness’ is caused by the spirit overcoming the liquid’s surface tension.

Surface tension – not a bad description of my fears for the floor, and Oskar’s other perfect planes. His other plane of existence. What was he doing right now? Approaching 3 a.m. in California – he would be still asleep in a hotel room, in that city of hotel rooms and freeways. My mental image of Los Angeles was a sun-baked tangle of asphalt clichés. LA was the nest of his wife, his soon-to-be-ex wife, Laura. I had met her only that once, when she came to dinner, and I had taken an instant dislike to her. She worked for a large American firm of auctioneers, and made extravagant amounts of money overseeing the transfer of fine art masterpieces between members of the super-rich. A perfectly legitimate line of business, but my muddy leftism caused me to regard it as somehow discreditable. She drank spirits, Oskar said (neat vodka, perhaps), and I had the strong impression that she did not think very highly of me, that my dislike of her was reciprocated. But my impression of her was fair, of course, and hers of me was a monstrous error based on snobbery.

A discreditable profession, exhibit A: she had described herself as an ‘oil trader’ when we met. Commodities, I assumed, but it was her idea of a joke. Not an icebreaker – it was a ploy to put me off balance and seize the initiative. The art of conversation according to Sun Tzu.

It didn’t help that this exchange took place just inside the front door of my flat, an area that reeked of chemicals from the bleach onslaught I had deployed in the bathroom. The bathroom was next to the front door, as is strangely common in small London flats carved out of Victorian terraces. Welcome to my home – it may smell like a gassed trench, but that’s preferable to it smelling like a latrine. When I consider the placement of that loo, outhouses at the bottom of the garden start looking like a smart move.

Oskar’s toilet did not smell of chemicals or latrines. His bathroom smelled slightly of soap, but mostly it smelled of water. Not the marshy, damp smell that sometimes builds up in bathrooms. Water, the smell of a pristine glacial stream splashing onto rocks, the smell of ice. What is one actually smelling when one smells that smell? Ozone or ions or something. Perhaps if I paid more attention to shampoo adverts I would know.

I ran water over the plate and the paring knife and left them in the sink. Then I drained my glass, hovered over the taps, and turned back to the kitchen table. Again without allowing my actions much thought (another glass? And not yet 1 p.m.?), I took the wine bottle and thumbed the cork out of its neck. With my glass recharged, and my spirits recharged by its contents, I decided to take another look at Oskar’s study as a prelude to maybe doing something constructive, something worthwhile. It drew me because it was so perfect an environment for work.

It was as I had left it, of course; it was almost exactly as Oskar had left it. There was a subtle, near-imperceptible change in the air in here, the smell of paper, of newspaper clippings slowly turning brown (the printing press autumn), the smell of dust. I could hardly see any dust, but it had left its infinitesimal aroma, a ghostly trace in the air. Those motes in their lazy but restless diurnal migration of convection. A dust diaspora, banished from the surfaces. But Oskar had been away, now, for two days – it was settling. The finest sprinkling could be seen on the lid of the baby grand piano. The cleaner would be coming soon to move it along again. Cleaning products often have violent names – Oust, Raid, Purge. One could easily be called Pogrom.

I set my glass down on the blotter on the desk and drew my finger across the top of the piano. It trailed a path in the traces of dust. Next, I attempted to write my name amid the particles, but there were too few to make it out clearly, and I wiped it away. It’s a strange instinct, to want to sign one’s name in misty windows, wet concrete, snow. It is like animals marking their territory, particularly in the case of men inscribing snow. But I do not think it is a possessive, exclusive act: ‘This is mine, keep out.’ When we were a young species, the world must have seemed so unlimited and trackless, and to leave traces of oneself must have been to reach out, wanting to connect with others, strangers who would always remain strangers. To make one’s mark then was an expression of how deeply we longed to see the signs of others.

Idly, I struck a piano key (I do not know which one – it was near the middle) and listened to the note ring in the air. On the far side of the door, the television was still on, near-inaudible, a soft rhythm of speech and jingle, and there was the street, cars (not so many), trams (regular) and feet.

The trams dislodged a thought in my mind. I looked over the shelves of CDs, with their serious, wordy classical spines, and found a small section of works produced by the local Philharmonic. Oskar must have had some role to play in many of these recordings and, sure enough, there were some copies of Variations on Tram Timetables. Lou Reed was still in the CD player; I evicted him and opened the case containing Oskar’s Meisterwerk.