Anxious People(31)
* * *
Zara still carries the letter around with her in her handbag, every day. She’s only been down to the bridge once, the week after he climbed onto the railing, she saw a girl climb up onto the same railing, and a boy who rescued her. Zara didn’t even move, she just stood hidden in the darkness, shaking. She was still standing there when the ambulance arrived and took the girl to the hospital. The boy vanished. Zara walked out onto the bridge and found the girl’s wallet and ID card with her name on it. Nadia.
Zara has spent ten years following Nadia’s life and education and the start of her career in secret, from a distance, because she’s never dared approach her. She has spent ten years looking at the bridge, also from a distance, from the balconies of apartments that are for sale. For the same reason. Because she’s afraid that if she goes down to the bridge again, maybe someone else will jump, and if she seeks out Nadia and discovers the truth about herself, perhaps it will be Zara who does it. Because Zara is human enough to want to hear what the difference is between that man and Nadia, even though she realizes that she doesn’t really want to know. That she bears the guilt. That she’s the bad person. Maybe everyone says they’d like to know that about themselves, but no one does really. So Zara still hasn’t opened the envelope.
* * *
The whole thing is a complicated, unlikely story. Perhaps that’s because what we think stories are about often isn’t what they’re about at all. This, for instance, might not actually be the story of a bank robbery, or an apartment viewing, or a hostage drama. Perhaps it isn’t even a story about idiots.
* * *
Perhaps this is a story about a bridge.
28
The truth? The truth is that that damn real estate agent was a damn poor real estate agent, and the apartment viewing was a disaster right from the start. If the prospective buyers couldn’t agree about anything else, they could at least agree on that, because nothing unites a group of strangers more effectively than the opportunity to come together and sigh at a hopeless case.
The advertisement, or whatever you want to call it, was a poorly spelled disaster, with pictures so blurred that the photographer seemed to believe that a “panoramic shot” was something you achieved by throwing your camera across the room. “The HOUSE TRICKS Estate Agency! HOW’S TRICKS?” it said above the date, and who on earth would get it into their head to hold an apartment viewing the day before New Year’s Eve? There were scented candles in the bathroom, and a bowl of limes on the coffee table, a brave effort by someone who seemed to have heard about apartment viewings but had never actually been to one, but the closet was stuffed with clothes, and there was a pair of slippers in the bathroom that looked like they belonged to someone who had spent the past fifty years shuffling around without ever lifting their feet. The bookcase was packed, and not even color-coordinated, and there were even more books piled up on the windowsills and the kitchen table. The fridge was covered with yellowing drawings produced by the owner’s grandchildren. Zara had been to enough viewings by this point to be able to spot an amateur: a viewing should make it look as if no one lives in the apartment, because otherwise only a serial killer would want to move in. A viewing should make it look as if anyone could potentially live there. People don’t want to buy a picture, they want to buy a frame. They can handle books in a bookcase, but not on the kitchen table. Perhaps Zara could have gone up to the real estate agent and pointed that out, if only the real estate agent hadn’t been a human being, and if only Zara hadn’t hated human beings. Especially when they spoke.
Instead Zara did a circuit of the apartment, trying to look interested, the way she had seen people who actually wanted to buy apartments look. That was quite a challenge for her, seeing as only someone on drugs who collected fingernail clippings could possibly be interested in living in this particular apartment. So when no one was looking in her direction, Zara went out onto the balcony, stood by the railing, and stared off toward the bridge until she started to shake uncontrollably. The same reaction as always, time after time for the past ten years. The letter she had never opened lay in her handbag. She had learned to cry almost without tears now, for practical reasons.
The balcony door was ajar and she could hear voices, not just in her head but from inside the apartment. Two married couples were wandering about, trying to ignore all the rather ugly furniture and instead visualize their own really ugly furniture in its place. The older couple had been married for a long time, but the younger couple seemed to have only gotten married recently. You can always tell by the way people who love each other argue: the longer they’ve been together, the fewer words they need to start a fight.
* * *
The older couple were called Anna-Lena and Roger. They’d been retired for a few years now, but clearly not long enough for them to have gotten used to it. They were always stressing about something, but without having anything they truly needed to hurry for. Anna-Lena was a woman with strong feelings, and Roger a man with strong opinions, and if you’ve ever wondered who writes all those too detailed, one-out-of-five-star reviews of household gadgets (or theater plays, or tape dispensers, or small glass ornaments) on the Internet, it’s Anna-Lena and Roger. Sometimes, of course, they hadn’t even tried out the gadgets in question, but they weren’t the sort of people to let that stop them from writing a scathing review. If you had to try things out and read things and find out the truth about things, then you’d never have time to have an opinion about anything. Anna-Lena was wearing a top in a color usually only seen on parquet floors, Roger was in jeans and a checkered shirt that had received a sulfurous one-out-of-five-stars review online because it “had shrunk several inches!” not long after Roger’s bathroom scale had received the damning judgment that it was “calibrated wrong!” Anna-Lena tugged at one of the curtains and said: “Green curtains? Who on earth has green curtains? Honestly, the things people do these days. But maybe they’re color-blind. Or Irish.” She didn’t say this to anyone in particular, she had just fallen into the habit of thinking out loud, seeing as that seemed appropriate for a woman who had gotten used to the fact that no one listened to her anyway.