All That Man Is Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by David Szalay

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Part 1

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Part 2

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Part 3

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Part 4

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Part 5

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Part 6

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Part 7

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Part 8

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Part 9

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Nine men. Each of them at a different stage of life, each of them away from home, and each of them striving – in the suburbs of Prague, beside a Belgian motorway, in a cheap Cypriot hotel – to understand just what it means to be alive, here and now.

  Tracing an arc from the spring of youth to the winter of old age, All That Man Is brings these separate lives together to show us men as they are – ludicrous and inarticulate, shocking and despicable; vital, pitiable, hilarious, and full of heartfelt longing. And as the years chase them down, the stakes become bewilderingly high in this piercing portrayal of twenty-first-century manhood.

  About the Author

  David Szalay is the author of three previous novels: Spring, The Innocent and London and the South-East, for which he was awarded the Betty Trask and Geoffrey Faber Memorial prizes. Raised in London, he has lived in Canada and Belgium, and is now based in Budapest. In 2013 he was named as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists.

  ALSO BY DAVID SZALAY

  London and the South-East

  The Innocent

  Spring

  To every thing there is a season,

  and a time to every purpose under the heaven.

  1

  Seventeen, I fell in love …

  1

  Berlin-Hauptbahnhof.

  It is where the trains from Poland get in and the two young Englishmen are newly arrived from Kraków. They look terrible, these two teenagers, exhausted by the ordeal of the train, and thin and filthy from ten days of Inter Railing. One of them, Simon, stares listlessly at nothing. He is a handsome boy, high-cheekboned, with a solemn, inexpressive, nervous face. The station pub is noisy and smoky at seven in the morning, and he is listening, with disapproval, to the men at the next table – one of them American, it seems, the other German and older, who says, smiling, ‘You only lost four hundred thousand soldiers. We lost six million.’

  The American says something which is lost in the din.

  ‘The Russians lost twelve million – we killed six million.’

  Simon lights a Polish cigarette, sees the word ‘Spiegelei’ on a laminated menu, the money on the table, waiting for the waiter to take it – euros, nice-looking, modern-looking money. He likes the fonts the designers have used, plain, unornamented.

  ‘A million died just in Leningrad. A million!’

  People are drinking beer.

  Outside, drizzle is starting to dampen the grey environs of the station.

  There was an altercation with the waiter – whether it would be possible to have two cups with a single Kaffeekänchen. It was not possible. They had to share one, Simon and his friend, who is now at the payphone – their mobiles don’t work here – half-hidden under its smoked plastic hood, trying to speak to Otto.

  The waiter, in his stained scarlet waistcoat, had been insolent with them, Simon thought. Obsequious to others, though – Simon’s wary eyes follow him as he moves around, moves through the smoke and noise – to men in suits with newspapers, like that one, looking up with a sudden tight smile, looking at his watch as the waiter unloads the tray.

  A voice starts to spew information about trains. A hard-edged voice penetrating from somewhere outside where the wind invades the spaces of the station. The voice is like a tap of sound – turned on, turned off.

  Simon is familiar now with the facile snatch of tune that precedes each irruption of this voice

  of this voice, and its echo.

  And the facile snatch of tune, when it sounds, has started to seem like an extension of his exhaustion, like something inside him, something subjective.

  The waiter literally bows to the suited man.

  The life of the station plunges and swirls like a dirty stream. People. People moving through the station like a dirty stream.

  And that question again –

  What am I doing here?

  He sees his friend Ferdinand hang up the payphone.

  They have been trying to speak to Otto for days – he is someone Ferdinand met in London a few weeks ago, a young German who said, probably drunk, probably without expecting it ever to happen, that if he was ever in Berlin he was welcome to stay.

  Ferdinand returns to the table with a worried expression.

  ‘Still no answer,’ he says.

  Simon, smoking, says nothing. He secretly hopes that Otto will never answer. He has never been keen on the idea of staying with him. He did not meet him in London, and what he has heard about him he does not like.

  He says, ‘What are we going to do then?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ his friend says. ‘Just go to the flat?’ He has Otto’s address – Otto is expecting them at some point this April, that much was arranged from London, sketchily, with messages on Facebook.

  They travel two stops on the S-Bahn, and spend a long time looking for the flat, and when eventually they find it – unexpectedly, it is in a dirty little side street – there is no one there except a green-uniformed policeman. He waits on a landing where the stairs turn, one flight down from the door of the flat, in the murky light of a window.

  Unsure why the policeman is there

  Has Otto been murdered?

  they hesitate.

  ‘Tag,’ the man says. From his voice it is obvious: no one has been murdered.

  They say they are looking for Otto, and the policeman, who evidently knows who Otto is, tells them he is not there. No one is there, he says.

  They wait.

  They wait for over an hour, Ferdinand making a few trips to a payphone in the street to try people who might know where Otto is, while Simon sits on the tiled floor in the huge space of the downstairs hall, and tries to make progress with The Ambassadors, a dog-eared Penguin Classics edition that lives in one of the zip-up side pockets of his backpack. His tired eyes find these words –

  Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to. It doesn’t so much matter what you do in particular so long as you have your life. If you haven’t had that what have you had? I’m too old—too old at any rate for what I see. What one loses one loses; make no mistake about that. Still, we have the illusion of freedom; therefore don’t, l
ike me to-day, be without the memory of that illusion. I was either, at the right time, too stupid or too intelligent to have it, and now I’m a case of reaction against the mistake. Do what you like so long as you don’t make it. For it was a mistake. Live, live!

  He takes a pen from the same pocket of his pack where the novel was and with it makes a vertical line next to those words. Next to the vertical line, in the margin, he writes, MAIN THEME.

  Ferdinand returns, damp with playful rain, from the street.

  ‘What should we do?’ he asks.

  The S-Bahn again.

  The rain has stopped. From the windows of the train they see things. A memorial stretch of the Wall, thick with psychedelic graffiti. They don’t remember that world. They are too young. Sunlight out there on the empty land, shining through the spaces where the Wall used to be. Sunlight. Through the windows of the S-Bahn train, through their lace of impurities, it touches Simon’s shrinking eyes.

  What am I doing here?

  What am I doing here?

  The train whacks over points.

  What am I

  The train slows

  doing here?

  into a station, open to the air – Warschauer Straße. Windy platforms, a waste land all around.

  A waste land.

  April is the …

  They are in love with Eliot, with his melodious pessimism. They are in awe of Joyce. He is what they want to be, a monument like him. These are the writers whose works made them friends. And Shakespeare’s tragedies. And L’Étranger. And the plight of Vladimir and Estragon, which they like to think of as their own. Waiting for Otto.

  Warschauer Straße. Trains move among the lusty weeds. Spring showers strafe the peeling hoardings, the overpasses spilling the sound of unseen traffic.

  In Kreuzberg they sit down exhaustedly to lunch.

  Kreuzberg is a disappointment. It was supposed to be the hipster district, the Alternativ quarter. Ferdinand, in particular, is disappointed. Simon puts food into his shapely mouth. He had not expected anything from Kreuzberg. He had no interest in it, and finds his friend naïve – though he does not say so – for thinking it would be interesting.

  There is some discussion, as they eat, of how much more expensive everything is than in Poland (they did Warsaw, Kraków, Auschwitz) though the higher prices are justified, is their feeling, by the superior quality of everything in Berlin. The food, for instance. They eat hungrily.

  Somehow they start talking about people at school. They are in their final year, are taking their A levels this summer, hoping to start at Oxford in the autumn. (Which is why Simon is ploughing joylessly through the works of Henry James, on the lookout for material pertaining to the ‘International Theme’.)

  So they talk about various people – what twats they are, mostly – and then Ferdinand mentions Karen Fielding.

  He has no idea, throwing the name out like some mundane object, that his friend frequently dreams about Karen Fielding – dreams in which they might speak, or exchange looks, or in which their hands might momentarily touch, and from which he wakes, still seeming to feel the touch of her hand, to a single moment of overwhelming joy. He transcribes these dreams to his diary, very earnestly, along with pages and pages on what they might mean, and on the nature of the dreaming process itself.

  In the waking world, he and Karen Fielding have hardly spoken to each other, and she is unaware of how he feels – unless she has noticed the way his eyes follow her as she moves with her tray around the dining hall, or tramps back from lacrosse in her muddy kit. Practically the only thing he knows about her is that her family live in Didcot – he overheard her telling someone else – and from that moment the word ‘Didcot’ started to live in his mind with a special, mysterious promise. Like her name, it seems almost too potent to put down in writing, but in a youth hostel in Warsaw, one evening, while Ferdinand was showering, he wrote, and it made his heart quicken: It seems pointless to travel Europe when the only where I want to be is humble, suburban, English

  His pen hovered.

  Then he did it, he wrote the word.

  Didcot.

  Her name, more potent still, he has never summoned the nerve to form.

  Now, when Ferdinand says it Simon just nods and pours more sugar into his coffee.

  He longs to talk about her.

  He would like nothing more than to spend the whole afternoon talking about her, or just hearing her name spoken aloud again and again, those four syllables that seem to hold within them everything worth living for in the whole world. Instead, he starts to talk, not for the first time, about the impossibility of achieving any sort of satisfaction as a tourist.

  Ferdinand lowers his eyes and, stirring his coffee, listens while his friend holds forth ill-temperedly on this subject.

  What was the tourist trying to do? See things? See more of life? Life is everywhere – you don’t need to traipse around Europe looking for it …

  the only where I want to be

  Withdrawing from even the pretence of listening, Ferdinand starts to write a postcard. The picture: Kraków Cathedral, black and jagged. The postcard is to a girl in England with whom he is involved in a vague flirtation, who he quite likes sometimes – who he thinks, anyway, he ought to keep in play. He smiles and feels the bristle of his strong chin as he writes, We’re both growing beards – it sounds pleasingly manly. When he has finished, he reads out what he has written for his friend’s approval. Then he stands up to look for the loo.

  He is away for some time and sitting in the sun-filled restaurant Simon watches the smoke climb from the tip of his cigarette.

  It is the tiredness, maybe, that makes him feel like crying.

  What am I doing here?

  The feeling of loneliness is immense as a storm front. His friend, after ten days of travel, he finds irritating most of the time. He struggled to muster a smile when he read out that postcard, and showed him the little sketch he had done in green ink of a bearded man. And the way he had sprayed himself with his Joop! before putting his pack in the locker at the station. The way he had ostentatiously lifted his T-shirt to spray the Joop!, to show the world the whorl of hair on his chest … At that moment … And this is supposed to be his friend he is with. As immense as a storm front is the feeling of loneliness that overcomes him.

  As he watches the smoke climb from the tip of his cigarette.

  In the sun-filled restaurant.

  *

  In the evening, they present themselves at the flat again and find Otto’s sister there with two male friends in leathers, one small with a faceful of piercings – Lutz – the other much taller with a walrus moustache – Willi. Otto’s sister has no idea who Simon and Ferdinand are, but when they explain she suggests they make themselves at home and wait for Otto – he is sure to turn up eventually. She and her friends, she says, are just leaving.

  Left alone, Simon and Ferdinand do make themselves at home. The flat is surprisingly large and they wander through it taking minor liberties, helping themselves to some expensive-looking whisky, and opening drawers. In one drawer Simon finds an odd pack of cards. They must be tarot cards, he thinks. Idly, he turns one over – a picture of a hand holding some sort of stick. As der Stäbe, it says. Ace of Staves? A phallic symbol, obviously. Not exactly subtle. Whatever. Nonsense. He shuts the drawer.

  *

  It is about two o’clock in the morning when Otto storms in and finds them in their sleeping bags on the living-room floor.

  He switches on the light and screams.

  Then he notices Ferdinand, who has just lifted his head and is squinting up at him, and shouts, ‘Fuck, man, you made it!’

  ‘Otto …’

  ‘Fuck!’

  ‘I hope you don’t mind …’ Ferdinand starts.

  ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’ Otto screams at him.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind that we’re here …’

  ‘Do you think I mind?’ Otto shouts.

 
‘I don’t know …’

  ‘I was waiting for you.’ Someone else is standing there, at Otto’s shoulder, peering over it.

  ‘Listen, we tried to phone you …’

  ‘Yah?’

  ‘You weren’t here.’

  ‘I wasn’t here!’ Otto explains, still shouting.

  ‘And you weren’t answering your mobile …’

  ‘I lost it!’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Yeah, I lost it,’ Otto says, suddenly in a quiet, dismal voice. ‘I lost it.’

  Having sat down on one of the sofas, he starts to make a spliff, disappointing Simon who had hoped he would immediately turn off the light and leave.

  Otto is wearing a silly hat and his jacket sleeves stop well short of his wrists. His Adam’s apple goes up and down as he works on the spliff. It turns out that he and his friend have jobs all week serving drinks at an event somewhere outside Berlin. While he makes the spliff, Ferdinand thanks him again and again for letting them stay.

  ‘Listen, again, thank you so much,’ Ferdinand says, sitting up in his sleeping bag.

  ‘Hey, fuck, forget about it,’ Otto says, with lordly indifference, from the sofa, still wearing his hat.

  ‘What, er, what about the policeman?’ Ferdinand asks.

  Otto doesn’t seem to hear the question. ‘What?’

  ‘The policeman. You know.’ Ferdinand indicates the spliff that is taking shape in Otto’s lap.

  Otto is dismissive. ‘Oh, fuck that man!’ Then he adds, ‘He doesn’t care.’

  ‘What’s he doing there anyway?’

  ‘My father,’ Otto says. ‘It’s bullshit.’

  ‘Your father?’

  ‘Yeah, it sucks.’ Putting the finishing touches to the spliff, applying saliva with the tip of his little finger, Otto says, ‘He’s in the government. You know …’

  ‘In the government?’ Simon says suspiciously, speaking for the first time.

  Otto ignores him and sparks the spliff.

  Simon has taken an immediate dislike to Otto. He wishes Ferdinand would stop thanking him. For his part, he says almost nothing and when, after the first spliff has been smoked, Otto encourages him to make another, he takes the materials without a word. Otto keeps telling him to use more ‘shit’. He and Ferdinand are talking hysterically about people they know in London. Later, Otto says Simon should make another spliff, and again keeps pressing him to use more shit. They are all quite stoned. Someone has turned on the TV and found something possibly pornographic – some naked women in a wheatfield, it seems to be. Simon ignores it. The others are laughing at it. Otto’s friend, Simon suddenly notices, has left. Simon has no memory of him leaving. He has an unpleasant feeling that he imagined him, that no one else was ever there. The others are laughing at the women in the wheatfield, Otto staring eagerly at the screen, his eyes shining, his tongue half-out, transfixed.