In the four-seat configuration we each had a window, the third seat was empty, and in the fourth sat a Chinese man who spent the journey underlining passages in a Bible with red and green markers. At one point the train slipped into a tunnel and we crossed the inside of the giantess, history smoothed out into twenty minutes of subterranean darkness, a diplomatic handshake 150 feet underwater. The black outside the window was severed in two by the blur of the rail, and for a few moments I forgot our destination.
Once we emerged from the tunnel and into France the landscape went from barren to populated within minutes, as if an animator were feverishly working to fill in the space. The train zoomed past rows of wind turbines, threepronged ghosts slicing the air, and pylons that looked like metal cat’s cradle or some other thread-pulling game. Rows of dour apartment blocks, the next thing to jab the horizon, sprang into view as the rural landscape receded. Paris was coming into focus.
The poet from Ljubljana had sent Daniel detailed instructions on how to reach his flat from the Gare du Nord. After a brief ride on the RER we emerged at the Luxembourg Gardens and wheeled our suitcases noisily along the uneven streets, past busy cafés and dusk-filled corners until reaching rue Claude Bernard, then down its sloping pavement to number 49. The entrance was marked by large green doors so heavy they required two hands to push open and beyond these doors stood the bird-like concierge, who after confirming our identity handed us the keys and explained something to Daniel while pointing towards the courtyard. We crossed this courtyard, climbed a flight of stairs, then another.
The flat smelled of gunpowder and candyfloss, as if a clown had just departed. I let Daniel go in first, then stepped out from behind him and began to survey. At the centre of the room stood a bulbless lamp on a stand. Evening entered through a vertical tear in one of the curtains. A small chair faced into a corner. I imagined a semi-empty theatre months after its last performance, the props now obsolete, the final act played out long ago, the actors involved in other productions, their lines from the old play forgotten and replaced by newer, more relevant ones.
All around us lay the remnants of someone else’s life. Unwatered plants, decomposing flies on the sills, unwashed plates in the sink, crumpled linen in the hamper, clumps of dust and hair on nearly every surface. A corridor linked the rooms in railway-car configuration: bedroom, living room, kitchen, bedroom, bathroom. Like an estranged married couple I gravitated towards the larger bedroom and Daniel took the smaller one, presumably for guests. The living room faced the street, the other rooms, the interior courtyard. There were no photographs anywhere and during our entire stay I was to keep revising my image of the ill-fated couple, hard to gauge from the few items they left in the wardrobe, a dark plum woollen man’s suit and a black chiffon dress with oversized white cuffs. In the bathroom by the sink lay a brush full of long strands of greyish blonde hair.
Daniel instantly laid claim to the writing desk in the living room and moved it to face the window. Before unpacking his clothes he prepared his workplace. Books, papers, folders, a mug from the kitchen for his pens. Though nothing was said, it was understood I would never go near the area.
The fridge contained half a block of butter, a bottle of white wine and a jar of expired mayonnaise. We had a late dinner at an Italian across the street, an excellent place the poet from Ljubljana had recommended in a footnote. Along with our pizzas Daniel ordered a carafe of house red, and with every glass we clinked to two weeks away from our collections and routines, apart from his writing. The evening was buoyed by a lightness we’d rarely felt and we rounded it off by ordering two panna cottas and a second carafe.
We returned to the flat by ten, Daniel almost timid as he turned the key in the door, and after a slightly awkward goodnight in the living room that was different from all our goodnights in London, we said See you at breakfast and headed to our respective rooms.
Exhausted from the journey and slightly giddy from the wine, I slipped on a T-shirt and pyjama bottoms, washed in the bathroom once Daniel had had his turn, and brought a glass of water to my bedside. With the lamp off and the curtains firmly closed, a welcome darkness spilled over the room.
Yet almost immediately this darkness began to curdle into something viscous and heavy. As I lay in bed I began to speculate about the couple who’d slept in my spot for who knows how many years. I tried to imagine their faces, their bodies, their voices, whether they slept on their sides, stomachs or backs, whether intertwined or at separate ends of the bed, about whatever moments, fraught or transcendent, they’d lived out where I lay, what conversations, what passion or frustration. I began to worry I might inherit their dreams, that I’d find myself in ragged environments populated by ragged figures without knowing how to fend them off.
They’d certainly left behind a mood of unease, this couple, not necessarily imprinted on the mattress or pillows but rather on the stagnant air in the room, which lingered after I’d opened the windows. Even the set of sleep-courting images I had perfected in London over time — the paintings in the Gallery reduced to fuzzy squares and the night shifters, or night sifters, as we preferred to call them, who watched over them; Roland’s dentures in a glass by his bed, the submerged ruins of an ancient city; the moths on Jane’s strips, struggling for take-off — not even this brief sequence of images, which I’d run through whenever I had trouble falling asleep, worked to counter the others that night.
And how strange to imagine Daniel in the room down the corridor, asleep or awake, doing what, who knew, but it felt odd to be geographically close at this late hour with nothing but two doors between us. I began to regret having chosen the larger bedroom, fantasising now about a narrower bed, one with less history perhaps, and a room where the walls didn’t extend so far out.
My mind felt more and more like an occupied lift travelling up and down the shaft of a building, never stopping at any floor to release its passengers, just continui ng its purposeless journey until morning. To make matters worse, I became aware of a large television at the foot of the bed, its ominous square watching my every movement and non-movement. After half an hour of lying under its gaze I got up and wheeled it out into the corridor, where it remained for the rest of our stay. At around three I remembered Daniel’s stash of sleeping pills and his offer to help myself should the need arise, so I stumbled to the bathroom and after rummaging through his toiletries bag found the bottle and helped myself to two temazepams. Why two, I wasn’t sure, but ten milligrams hadn’t seemed like enough. I slept late into the following day, emerging from my room at noon to find Daniel at his desk.
And then there was the world that lay beyond rue Claude Bernard. Once through the heavy green doors, we slowly opened ourselves up to the city. Daniel searched for hints of its past, for images unloosed from the verses of his favourite poets, the small draughts and currents, he called them, that had survived the nineteenth century and still blew through the streets. From arrondissement to arrondissement, without map or destination, he would stop to take notes while I in the meantime began to assemble my own little mental collage, plucking things from outside and placing them together in my head. In a foreign city ordinary sights acquire new meaning: a hidden cornice becomes a mysterious sign, a jowly man leaning out of his window becomes a medieval grotesque, the black Labrador leading a blind man becomes a shadow cast forward.