Care of Wooden Floors. Will Wiles
that covered one wall of the room drew my eye. Bookshelves are a devil to keep clean – dust gathers on top of the books with surprising rapidity, and it is difficult and tiresome to thoroughly clean those areas. I strolled over to get a closer look. I also wanted to find a guidebook that would help me navigate this city, something better than the inadequate volume I had brought with me. I doubted I would find one, because I had nothing similar about London back at my flat. But perhaps.
Like the rest of the flat, Oskar’s books were beautiful and carefully arranged. They were organised first by category, and then by size. At least four languages were present, with German and French accompanying English and Oskar’s mother tongue. There was a large number of paving-slab-sized glossy, expensive books of art and photography and ‘design classics’. The art emphasised the ‘modern’ and the difficult -ists, constructivists, vorticists, futurists; Diane Arbus and Nan Goldin; and a blast of warmth and light from volumes on Warhol and Lichtenstein, the sort of art that did not make me so uncomfortable. There was architecture, of course, again characteristically modern: Le Corbusier and Mies, Richard Neutra and Herzog & de Meuron. The Neutra, like the Lichtenstein, suggested a Californian hand here. Did Oskar’s wife have any input when it came to the content of the bookshelves? I doubted it. The mixing of the bookshelves in a relationship is a gesture of vast, almost foolhardy, mutual trust, and Oskar wasn’t able to live on the same continent as his wife, let alone jumble up the contents of his library with hers. Just thinking of the idea made me picture him wincing. But there did not seem to be even a shelf for her – none of the books I imagined she’d read, auction catalogues and law journals, blockbusters for those interminable flights across the world, West-Coast self-help, yard after yard of management ‘bibles’ by ‘gurus’ – business secrets, the main habits of monied socio-paths, the utterings of successful salesmen and speculators. But not an inch of them was to be seen. Her mind had not established the tiniest beach-head in Oskar’s mental world. Who cheesed her move? The rest of the bookshelf was filled with the typical and the expected. Shelf after shelf of the books I associated with Oskar. There were a variety of novels and histories, broadly twentieth-century classics: Koestler, Camus, Salinger, Solzhenitsyn. History, cultural history, books about World War II and the Nazis and the Soviet Union, Schindler’s Ark, modern politics with an emphasis on America, Russia and Germany, stacks of books about music, biographies of composers and musicians. Not a hint of dust, anywhere, so another ‘win’ for Oskar there. But already it was settling all around me.
One book caught my attention – a big book about Oskar’s orchestra, the Philharmonic, in German. It seemed to be a history written in celebration of a very recent anniversary – 150 years of something. I thumbed it open, planning on looking up Oskar’s name in the index, and found that a leaflet was slipped into it – a programme for the present concert season. Oskar’s photograph smiled out from the page. I grinned at the vanity of it – bookmarking the page with his own photo on it. He was standing beside another man, taller than Oskar, with receding ultra-pale hair revealing a bullet-shaped head. They were wearing the highly formal evening wear that infests classical music, and Oskar’s companion was carrying a violin. It was a good photo – a warm smile from Oskar, a pleasure enhanced by its relative rarity. Oskar applied the same rules to interior design and facial expressions: less is more. A smile was a superfluous decorative extravagance; a grin was rococo excess.
There was something written on the concert programme, in Oskar’s hand:
Maybe Useful?
‘Maybe useful’? Why would he write that on a programme for his own orchestra? No one would know the schedule of performances better than he. Or was the note, and the programme, meant for me? If the programme was intended for me, then tucking it into a book like this was an unusual move – especially this book, this page. Unless he knew I would look in this book – but that was unlikely. Or maybe he thought that looking in this book meant that I was interested in the orchestra and therefore might attend a concert? The photograph of Oskar smiled at me. That smile now seemed teasing. Perhaps the leaflet had been meant for someone else (the wife?), or Oskar was in the habit of leaving notes to himself.
Taking out the programme, I closed the book and put it back on the shelf. Odd, odd. Inside, three performances were marked, their dates underlined, with an asterisk next to them in the margin. The season had started three weeks ago, I saw, but the highlighted concerts were all in the next two weeks, as if they were intended for me, suggestions of performances I might enjoy while I was in town, or ones that Oskar particularly wanted me to hear, for some musical reason that was beyond me. The soonest marked concert was two days away.
In a sudden thrill, the entire oddness of the situation, my situation, struck home; Oskar’s home. Here, his flat, was the aggregation of his entire life; his collected works. And the collected works of Oskar that surrounded me not only displayed the mainstream of his personality, his ordered, taxonomic brain; they also displayed the interstices in that plane of self, the gaps, the discarded bus tickets, the quirks and wrinkles.
Flush with this weird sense of omniscience, I felt a growing need for domesticity, for a small obeisance to the household gods. I wanted to make myself a cup of coffee in order to test the kitchen. Also, I didn’t know what time the cats had last been fed. Oskar probably fed them before he left this morning – he had certainly let them back into the flat – but that may have been quite early. They might by now be hungry, and I thought that feeding them would give me a bit of good PR. Aha, they would think, this is a man who knows how to use the tin opener.
But coffee first. The person in this relationship needed sustenance before the animals. Besides, a quick poke through the cupboards would also establish if there was anything tasty-looking for supper, and there was the horrible possibility that Oskar only stocked coffee beans that needed to be ground and percolated and all that tedious rubbish. It was the sort of thing he was capable of, and there was a coffee-maker-percolator thing on the work surface, its gleaming chrome winking impossibility at me. Those twisty detachable wrench-handle-cup parts pointed accusingly.
Thinking along the lines of the ergonomics of the kitchen, I tried the cupboard immediately above the treacherous mercury-shine gadget. The payload – a waft of dried beans and leaves, pressure-packed, freeze-dried, connoisseur-approved, corporation-imported caffeine for a dozen delivery methods – was hit instantly, but also released with that relieving aroma was a slip of paper that, sucked out of the cupboard by the air-pressure difference created when I opened the door, flipped, looped and swayed down to the worktop.
It read, again in Oskar’s cramped black hand:
Please help yourself to all tea and coffee, but if it should run out please replace.
I stared at the note, just the tiniest strip cut from a pad, for a little while. It was thoughtful. It also felt unnecessary, perhaps; it was pedantic. Did he fear I would strip the flat of the materials for making hot drinks, leaving him thirsty and bereft on his return? Why did he feel another note was needed? The concert programme was still on that table, next to Oskar’s instructions, which had seemed to me to be very comprehensive. But then, this was his flat, he above all had very specific ways of going about the business of existing. The sense of Oskar’s very recent departure from the flat was a static charge in the air. Here was a man with very clear views on what should happen in his home. He had always been particular.
Perhaps it was appropriate that a composer should make notes. At university, Oskar had littered the staircase we shared with slips of paper, instructions, proscriptions, statements of intent, reminders, invitations and rebukes. In the first week of the first term, a little note appeared on the back of the door of the shared toilet: Please use the air freshener. O. On top of the cistern was a brand-new bottle of air freshener: pine. None of the other toilets had air freshener, but this was the one that Oskar used. He had bought it himself. As it was pinned to the back of the door, I was able to inspect this note at my leisure on scores of occasions. The O was hypnotic – a perfect circle, with no obvious beginning or end.
That was just the start of the notes. The emphasis was generally on the NOT. Please do NOT make so much noise after 1 a.m. Please do NOT leave dirty plates in the sink. On our staircase, eight people shared a kitchen. It was the scene and subject of endless disputes. Oskar was far from the only resident with a