In the Shadow of Sadd

PAUL

Lars Kjaedegaard


Paul decided not to shave. They had slept late – a little too late – and he was already stressed. Victoria had been the first to shower. He had only dunked his head under the shower to rinse the fatigue out of his system. He didn’t think much of the humid atmosphere – it was raining outside, and after their showers, the air inside the apartment seemed as wet and sticky as the air outside. One could dissolve in all that water.

Victoria was making coffee, but he could judge by her body language that it would be a quick cup, not a relaxed, drawn-out breakfast.

He had to go. He had to get to work. But in reality the bustle wasn’t rooted in him – it was Victoria’s hectic manner rubbing off on him.

As soon as he was gone, she would go about her own work on the telephone. For a brief moment he saw himself and Victoria from above, like ants in the great labyrinth of the City.

Why, he thought? What are we doing? Why are we so busy?

He could hear from outside that the neighborhood was already coming to life. The streets of Hispaniola resonated with the sibilant sound of cars driving through the streets, mostly vans and trucks, bringing goods and supplies to the area’s shops, bars and restaurants. He thought about all the people who went about their routines every day in the run-down neighborhood. Sometimes, when he felt particularly hard-pressed and overburdened, the meaninglessness of it all would well up in him, and there was no other cure for that sinking feeling than to get moving.

***

His cup of coffee stood on the table in the living room. A bright spot in the day. Victoria made good coffee, even when she was in a hurry. He buttoned his shirt while he sat down and lifted his cup.

Victoria wasn’t any more impatient than usual. She sat across from him with her own cup, busily trying to unsnarl the telephone cord. He’d seen her do this many times, and he couldn’t imagine how the telephone cord always managed to get so twisted -- it was completely knotted. He watched her thin, pale-white fingers untwist the cord to her headset. The tool of her trade.

Victoria worked on the phone. She rarely used it for anything else. Her life depended on that phone. Commissions. Sales. It was important to her, and he imagined how she morphed into her business alter ego when she called her clients and convinced them to buy something, join something, subscribe to something. He didn’t know the details of it, as Victoria didn’t work when he was in the apartment. That was a rule – not his idea – but a rule she had written in stone that he had to respect. Her work sometimes seemed more important to her than he was.

He could see her white, moist skin under her unbuttoned, thick denim shirt, which hung loosely from her shoulders. When you work on the phone, it didn’t much matter how you looked. She said so often.

Paul thought she looked good. He could see the cleavage between her heavy, firm breasts. He felt a ripple of lust, and recalled how he had cupped her breasts when lying behind her during the night.

But Victoria and her breasts had to get to work, so Paul drank his coffee at a brisk pace, so she wouldn’t be irritated.

He got ready and gave her a kiss. She answered his kiss with burdened love, already partly engaged in her work. Paul put on his thin raincoat, went out onto the landing and smacked the door shut behind him.

***

The morning air was chilly and cold in the darkness of the stairway. He glanced at the neighbor’s door and reminded himself that he had to feed Jimmy Sadd’s fish. It would have to wait, and besides, he’d fed them late yesterday afternoon.

Paul walked down the stairs. The smell of coffee and wet dog hung in the air. The brown linoleum, once pristine, was now dry and cracked. He could hear the front door being opened below him. The hiss of the streets reached up to him. A new day. A new day like all the other new days.

His grandmother had taught him to always treat a new day as though it were the first day of his life, and to live it as though it were his last. He thought about her often, her furrowed face and her words of wisdom. He didn’t really know why it had stuck in his brain for so long – Grandma’s words sounded like words of wisdom, but Paul had never been able to see how they were relevant to his own life.

***

He went out onto the street, where the mix of noise and pouring rain formed a sort of foggy inferno. Paul started to walk, staying close to the building. He pulled the hood of his sweatshirt over his head.

The street was like a dead-straight rocky ravine, man-made cliffs on both sides, hollowed-out mountainsides where people resided. The sour-green cross over the pharmacy blinked away farther ahead. He took notice of the blinking cross every morning. There were various points of light that naturally attracted his attention on the way to the pet store. The advertisement featuring the little man with the round hat pouring red, blinking drops of Dubonnet into a glass. The man smiled up on the wall.

Then there was the yellow ad over the travel agency, a turmeric, shining band with a red sun in curved neon. The rays blinked while the rain poured down, and the drops shot up from the sidewalk. Now and then he would linger at the travel agency and contemplate the pictures in the windows – large color posters of brown people romping around the sand with beach balls. He had to stand very still and concentrate violently to block out the stink of engine exhaust, the splashing of the rain, and the rest of Hispaniola’s many sounds.

He saw himself and Victoria in one of the white houses in the little Greek hillside town on the poster. A still morning, a morning in Paradise. Then he caught his own reflection in the tinted glass of the window, a thin, shabby-looking person with a hood. A worker on his way to work. He felt like a child looking into a confectioner’s window with glazed eyes. He proceeded down the line of stores. Now and then he saw a fierce splash up ahead where a gutter high above him was overflowing, and he hopped a bit to one side to avoid getting wet. He was already too wet for his own liking. There was no end to the rain, he thought – Hispaniola was a sunny, Caribbean place by association only.

***

He finally made it to AnimalCity. He opened the door to the large pet store and prepared himself for the hot, acrid smell of feed, animals and excrement that hit him every morning, and that he couldn’t imagine anyone ever getting used to.

The large red, blue and green parrot Walther regarded him from his cage inside the door.

“Good morning, Walther,” said Paul.

Walther didn’t answer. Lansky claimed that Walther could speak, but Paul had never gotten a word out of the old parrot. Still, he believed Lansky. Walther looked like a parrot that could speak, but simply chose not to, for whatever reasons. What would a bird have to say after spending decades in a dilapidated cage whose metal framework was peeling and brown with rust? If Walther did have something to say, it likely wouldn’t be anything particularly cheerful. Paul looked at the parrot’s powerful claws, which were wrapped around the debarked perch that bore the heavy bird’s weight. He thought that Walther had to be old – much older than himself. Lansky enjoyed talking about animals that could outlive humans, as if he were making a point, but Paul had never understood what the point could be. It appeared to be a source of everlasting joy and fascination for his boss that animals such as tortoises and parrots could grow very old. Another of his themes was the oldest animals on the planet: the shark, the crocodile. Relics, he called them. Lansky claimed that these animals had survived all these years unchanged because ‘Jehovah’ had gotten it right when he designed them. That point Paul understood. If one desired that one’s own kind should live a long time here on Earth, it would be wise to belong to a species that was long of tooth, small of brain, and overflowing with killer instinct. Lansky found this amusing as well. Paul wasn’t sure, and as a rule he lost interest when Lansky embarked on a detailed lecture on how sharks and crocodiles lived by a different time frame and were only waiting for humans to die off before they took over the world. Lansky claimed that man’s days were numbered, and that nature – including the sharks and crocodiles – would extinguish every last trace of homo sapiens within the next few thousand years. When Lansky was of such a mind, Paul would occasionally comment that the entire planet was just a temporary phenomenon, and that the sun would explode in five billion years. Lansky would reply, with a shifty grin, “It’s no big deal, I’ll be retired by then.”

***

Lansky sat behind his computer, a fat man in a yellow shirt. A man that could have been a caricature of a pet store owner in a run-down area. A man who could be played by Bob Hoskins – at once sympathetic and unbearable, obstinate, energetic, impatient and intolerant.

“Good morning, Lansky,” said Paul.

“You know why most customers don’t buy anything?” asked Lansky, without bothering to greet Paul.

“No, why?”

Lansky was known for his animal riddles.

“They just come to see the man,” he laughed, gesturing to himself.

Paul smiled politely. “You know why nobody would ever laugh at that joke, Lansky?” he asked.

Lansky smiled cheerfully, always ready for another joke. “No, why?”

“Because it’s just too petty,” said Paul.

Lansky thought for a moment before he began to laugh. “Der Humor-

Meister!” he laughed. “You should be a comedian.”

“I am a comedian,” said Paul, only half-kidding. Lansky didn’t understand that you had to be a comedian to work at AnimalCity, the place where rich and poor from all over the City came to buy pets of every sort. Specializing in the exotic, nothing too small, nothing too big, nothing too poisonous or reptilian, nothing too unreal or evil-smelling. Yes, a removed sense of humor was a necessity when cleaning out the cages under the fluorescent lighting of the vast store. Sometimes Paul viewed the shop as a necessary place, a supplier of sensation and smell, sharp claws and warm fur. The more expansive, wild and run-down the wet streets outside became, the more necessary it seemed to be for the locals to have a place where they could acquire pets that reminded them of the natural world far from the City, which for most was but an abstract concept. What was a koala bear doing in a rich woman’s apartment, high above the wet park, alone and munching away in his elaborate eucalyptus terrarium, far away from his Australian brothers? It was nature, but at the same time, it had nothing to do with nature at all. The animals were residents, prisoners of circumstance, and any troubled human who took a deep look into Walther the parrot’s eyes would see a resigned suffering every bit as intense as his own.

Paul changed into his green shop coat and hung his moist sweatshirt to dry on the large radiator in Lansky’s stuffy office. Then he went about feeding the residents of AnimalCity.

***

He admittedly had an ambivalent relationship to the animals, which he divided into two groups: sympathetic and unsympathetic. The sympathetic animals included dogs, cats, raccoons – most of the animals with fur. Lansky had once acquired a lion cub, Altin, that was incredibly adorable with his slightly slanted, sleepy eyes and enormous paws. It was impossible not to love Altin. It was almost impossible to keep your fingers away from his overgrown coat. Many felt compelled to pet the little lion as though it were a dog. Paul was better at this than Lansky, who was too jittery. Altin always smelled wonderfully of forest floor and baby, but even Paul had occasionally been close to having his skin flayed when Altin suddenly bared his teeth, narrowed his eyes, hissed and lashed out at him like lightning with an overgrown paw.

The cute animals brought out the compassion in him. Why were they here? Paul could not understand why the customers’ obvious affection for these furry creatures didn’t extend to an understanding that they would be better off in their natural environment. And so he would be almost guilt-ridden when feeding a sad-looking raccoon or fruit bat.

The unsympathetic animals included reptiles, insects and certain birds – the dumb animals, the cold-blooded devils that didn’t even know where they were. Here the problem was inverted. Who would want to buy a charmless animal? What was the point? He knew that a lot of people in the big residential blocks and the villas on the periphery of the City had thousands and thousands of baby alligators, snakes, scorpions and the like. Some had snakes that they fed with live mice. It was a peculiar practice, he thought, and he wondered occasionally whether he was simply missing the gene that made it possible to care about a boa, and find it appealing to hold up a mouse by the tail and slowly lower it toward a snake’s distended jaws and flickering tongue.

On this day he was working mechanically, deliberately. There was enough to see to – Lansky was not particularly industrious or organized. But that was fine with Paul, it just made the time pass more quickly. Often he didn’t even see the light of day as walked between the rows of cages, terrariums and cases, needing his watch to judge the time of day.

It was dark when he took off his shop coat and changed back into his sweatshirt and raincoat. He said goodbye to Lansky and started home. Now the thousands of lights glimmered on the asphalt and the wet panes of glass. It could make him dizzy, looking down the street at the reflections of light, which created the effect that the cars were floating in the wet nothingness, linked to inverted copies of themselves that hung nearby.

***

He reached the building and resolutely walked in through a once-elegant, high-ceilinged vestibule. There was a small glass cage that had been home to the porter – it was now home to a stack of cardboard boxes, and the panes of glass were covered with dust. He took the stairs, inhaling the viscous machinery smell from the elevator’s oiled cables. He never used the elevator. It worked, but it creaked as it rose menacingly up through the stairwell, more sluggishly than a person could climb the stairs.

Once on the landing he fished out the key, not to Victoria’s little apartment with the misty windows, run-down furniture and the sticky, twisted telephone cords, but to Jimmy Sadd’s apartment on the other side of the landing. He let himself in.

Paul always felt enveloped by the stillness when he stepped into Jimmy Sadd’s deserted apartment. Sadd had replaced the old windows with new, triple-glazed plastic windows, muting the incessant hissing sound from the streets. He turned on the light in the foyer and went into the living room. It was hard for him to imagine that he was in the same building as Victoria’s miserable apartment. Everything was orderly, calm and clean here. The kitchen and bathroom were in new, modern, steel and rose-pink colored marble. The living room was large, sparsely furnished and elegant. Even the flooring was different from Victoria’s worn-out, varnished planking – here there was mahogany parquet. A zebra-skin rug dominated the area. Everything was in its proper place; the DVDs were lined up in neat rows on the tall, stainless-steel dresser on the left, an aquarium on the opposite wall. The windows were at the end of the long room. Even in the middle of the night, the brilliance of the street lights made any artificial lighting superfluous. A lamp over the aquarium illuminated the large, glittering tank. The bubbles from the pump ascended through the water in an unbroken column until they breached the surface. He gazed at the exotic fish while he sprinkled fish food over the surface of the water.

That was his job, and even though he had never met Jimmy Sadd, Bruno Hanson, Sadd’s driver, paid him a considerable sum to feed the fish.

He didn’t spend much time thinking about Jimmy Sadd. He was a wealthy man, there was no doubt about that, but generally speaking, very wealthy men were few and far between in a neighborhood like Hispaniola. The area had once been the home of the City’s Spanish-speaking population, and was dotted with Spanish cafeterias and bodegas with names like ‘El Torro’ and ‘Dindurra,’ where Spanish waiters in white shirts and black vests manned the coffee machines with a sort of shabby elegance. But the Spanish had, for the most part, moved on to other neighborhoods like El Molino, and the residents of Hispaniola were now mostly Eastern Europeans and Arabs. Everything was in a state of decay, and it was no small riddle for a man like Jimmy Sadd to have an interest in this apartment, especially considering the significant sum of money he had invested to have the place renovated.

Business interests, perhaps?

Sadd’s henchman, Bruno, was the man who hired and fired Sadd’s people here in the City, and he certainly looked the part. He was big, bald, muscular, and clearly well qualified for any job that required an intimidating presence. The sight of the gorilla-like Bruno getting out of his white Chevy van was something of a caricature, and led Paul to imagine his boss, Jimmy Sadd, as a little, dark and shriveled man. A slight, well-dressed man with a piercing gaze.

***

Paul always fed Jimmy Sadd’s fish on the way home from work. Victoria would frown on him coming home early and interrupting her work. Besides, it gave him time to meditate on the world, spending half an hour in the surreal apartment so close to Victoria’s place.

Perhaps Victoria had met Jimmy Sadd.

It was Victoria who had one day said, “Mister Sadd, the neighbor on the other side of the landing ... He needs someone to take care of his fish.”

Now that he had looked after the fish for some time, it would seem gratuitous, should he ask Victoria what kind of man Jimmy Sadd was. Victoria had a propensity for suspicious behavior. He could imagine her wanting to know why he had asked. Had anyone said something about Jimmy Sadd? Victoria wasn’t the type to accept a response such as, “I was just curious.” She would always believe that there was something else behind it.

He went over to the bookcase with the DVDs as he philosophized. At one time it would have been books, not DVDs. His dad back home read books, and he used to say, “You can judge a man by the books he reads – and by the books he doesn’t read.”

That must go for DVDs too.

He let his gaze glide over the spines of the glossy boxes. The Godfather. He let out a chuckle. Of course. How typical, and almost ridiculous, that the first film he saw on Jimmy Sadd’s bookcase was The Godfather. There were other films that told a different story: The Sound of Music. South Pacific. Rio Grande. The collected works of Laurel & Hardy. Buena Vista Social Club. Wings of Desire – he’d seen that one himself. Fitzcarraldo by Werner Herzog. There was no doubt that, whatever kind of man Jimmy Sadd might be, he had an eclectic appreciation when it came to movies.

Or maybe, thought Paul as he let a finger glide over the row of DVDs, maybe the collection was just as coincidental as book collections often are in the homes of the wealthy? Maybe they were compiled to show that here lived a man with a diverse appreciation of quality films. He had a hard time believing that Jimmy Sadd occasionally sat here all alone and watched Laurel & Hardy. But who was he to say?

***

He considered how unfair it really was that he lived with Victoria in what was nothing more than a standard slum apartment – a run-down and dilapidated place hardly worth keeping up – while this apartment remained empty most of the time.

He pictured himself and Victoria living here, how their lives would be different without the slums rubbing off on them, relieving them of the desire to take a shower in the shower cabin in the bedroom, where the calcium deposits formed yellow-brownish ant trails along the edges.

They could live a decent life in here. It was a dream, of course, a fantasy, but he allowed himself to explore it further. He saw himself on the black leather sofa, listening to the sound of the water splashing against the floor of the luxurious shower in the rose-pink marble bathroom. He saw Victoria come into the living room, naked, wet, with a towel coiled around her bleached hair, making her narrow figure and large breasts seem even more boyish. He could feel he was becoming aroused, and had no problem imagining himself and Victoria on the wealthy Jimmy Sadd’s zebra-skin rug, where sex would be a lot different than it was on her frayed mattress on the floor next to the shower cabin, while the mouse desperately sprinted in place on the running wheel in its cage. He saw himself lying on his back, on the smooth rug, while Victoria’s breasts swung back and forth above him, sometimes touching his chest.

Wealth was sexy, there was no doubt about that.

He sighed. Wealth was sexy – and so what?

He was not rich, he worked at AnimalCity, a low-ranking employee. Victoria was not a rich, confident woman, but a hardworking saleswoman who worked by phone, who always smoked too many cigarettes and never rested in the present. Her thoughts were always directed at whatever lay ahead, something she had to do, and sex with her – exciting though it was – always reflected her restlessness. One day recently, when a lack of funds had kept them at home, he’d taken her from behind while she leaned over the table in their little living room and smoked a cigarette.

Their sex was desperate, almost tough.

It wasn’t fair.

Why didn’t they have a chance? Why did wealth and security belong only to others? Others who had big, bald men like Jimmy Sadd’s driver Bruno to take care of everything for them?

***