My friend Stephen (let us call him Stephen) is an unsentimental sort of man. In his thirties, he has a sharper mind than his job as a middle-ranking civil servant really demands, but he has more or less settled down. Stylish (and one for the girls) in his twenties, he keeps his neat good looks and slight, alluring stammer, but seems content now in a steady relationship with a good woman in comfortable lodgings he’s able to afford, a long way from the centre of London. His intellect, though, still roves. He has an edge, a critical, sceptical outlook; and has avoided that benign, mellow fuzziness that can settle on people as they grow older. Though Stephen has maybe had to lower his sights a bit, he stays interested in things. He keeps his bite. That’s why I like him.
We had lunch the other day — we hadn’t seen each other in ages — and I caught up with his news. He’s bought a flat. In Berlin. ‘Why?’ I asked, surprised: ‘you don’t speak German; you don’t plan to live or work in Germany…’
No, he said, ‘but I read an article in the Mail’s Money pages, about buying flats abroad to let out as an investment. It had become obvious to me that on my civil servant’s salary I was never — I mean never, never in my life — going to be able to afford a place of my own in London. Never. So I took the Mail’s advice, found an agency that arranges these things, and did it all, at distance, through them.
‘They found me an unmodernised flat in what appeared to be a roughish Berlin neighbourhood — nothing special, but I could afford it — going very cheap because it had a sitting tenant in his late sixties, a Russian immigrant, with a life-tenancy, paying a controlled rent. He might live to 80; he might die sooner; and in the meantime I’d get a modest income. So we went ahead. It went through like clockwork.’
It seems Stephen hardly even inspected the place properly, though he took a quick look. He did arrange to meet his tenant, but snow interrupted travel plans and the meeting never happened. Rent kept coming in and, as Stephen had never been interested in the property as a place to live, that’s how things stayed: just an investment, in another country where they didn’t even speak English.
‘Then I got a call. My tenant had died in hospital. So now I had vacant possession. I agreed with the agency that I’d fly over and sort things out, go through the flat, make sure all the ends had been properly tied up with my deceased tenant, t’s crossed, i’s dotted, possessions packed up and despatched to next-of-kin… that sort of thing.’
And this is where things turned strange. Nobody knew the old man. It seems he had been married but his wife had died in the 1980s. No relatives could be found, nor even friends. Statutory advertisements were placed as the law requires, but nobody came forward, nor ever has since. The state had dealt with the body. There was no estate. It was now up to Stephen to deal with the household possessions, all valueless. Nobody else, literally nobody, had an interest in this.
‘I walked into the flat. It wasn’t too badly kept, but there was a terrible smell of cigarette smoke. When I touched the walls the yellow-brown came off onto my fingertips. It was like being inside the lung of chain-smoker.
‘But the funny thing was that were no cigarettes, no packets, no ash. Instead, lots of little bowls of mints where ashtrays might have been, as though a nicotine addict had been trying desperately to keep off the fags. Someone thought he had drunk every evening at a nearby bar — but when I went there they didn’t really know him: just an old man, they said, with a Russian accent, who sat alone with a beer and smoked until smoking was banned: no trouble to anybody.
‘I began to feel a bit curious about him.’ Going through drawers and cupboards, Stephen found in a wardrobe a sort of shrine to the old man’s wife: pictures, cards, letters, and lots of photographs of cats. It seems she had been a cat-lover, but that after her death he had given up the cat — perhaps, in John Betjeman’s words ‘For these, and all the other things/ Were part of you and me’. So he’d sat alone with his photographs of her and the cats, and smoked, for more than 20 years.
‘And then in a drawer I found them: the X-rays. Transparencies of his lungs, with huge dark patches on them. He’d been taken off finally to hospital, and never come back.’
Stephen, as I say, is an unsentimental chap, who no more believes in an afterlife than I do, so what he said next was striking. ‘And it’s funny. I’ve become, not obsessed with this man, but taken up with his life in a strange way.
‘You see, it has occurred to me this man lives now, only through me, who never even knew him. I’m the only person on earth, the only human mind, that has a record and picture of his life… almost like I’m the sole guardian of his memory. Like you’ve found somebody’s story in a bin. I’m a random person, with no connection… it’s been given to me by chance to know all there is that is now known about him — his only link from the dead.
‘I feel — hard to know how to put this — a sort of responsibility. What should I do with the photographs, the cat pictures, the X-rays, the cards from his wife? Destroy them, obviously, but… well, then I’ve destroyed everything… except my own memory. And that, too, will die. Then what will there be? Nothing.’
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