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 retinue of grievances and bugbears, and he was inevitably the most courteous in settling them. But his clipped, frosty demeanour, the formality of the notes and the pathological neatness of his room put people on the defensive. The others engaged in volcanic screaming matches that were forgotten within hours. They screamed shithead and bitch at each other and went to the pub together that evening. Oskar never lost his temper, never blew up. He was regularly angry, but his anger was as controlled and modulated and systematic as the music he would later write. Similarly, he never erupted into riotous geniality or helpless laughter. I only ever saw him drunk – properly drunk, that is, different-person drunk – on three occasions.
Q: What does Oskar drink?
A: Neat vodka.
Neat. Ha ha. He liked neat vodka at less than zero degrees centigrade – its high alcohol content means that it does not freeze. He bought a bottle, the best the off-licence had to offer, for himself and guests, and had no other place to store it than the freezer compartment of the communal fridge. This was a big purchase for a student, and the bottle monopolised the minuscule compartment, reduced to a letterbox by a thick sleeve of permafrost. The girlfriend of one of our neighbours failed to appreciate that vodka has to be stored at below-zero temperatures, and transferred the bottle to the main fridge when trying to find a berth for half a tub of chocolate ice cream.
Moved from its small and little-used nook and placed in the view of half a dozen thirsty, thirsty students, the bottle fared as you might expect. Most of it disappeared within three nights. Oskar discovered this on the fourth, when he had company. He took this badly, and having established the owner of the ice cream (‘Not even someone on this staircase!’) restored the vodka to its rightful place – with a note attached, saying Please do NOT put this out of the freezer.
This dispute somehow sparked off an impishness in the others. It became their mission to remove the bottle, drink some of its contents, and leave the depleted vessel in an unusual place. At this point, Oskar and I became friends: he recruited me to help look for the bottle. I was a nonentity to the others – not unpopular, just uninteresting, only there to make up the numbers at parties. My peripheral status made me an asset to Oskar: he knew I was not among the conspirators, and enlisted me to help search for the vodka.
So we searched together. The first time it turned up in the toilet cistern. The second time it was eventually discovered tied to a light fitting in the hallway. The third time we couldn’t find it for weeks. We had given it up for lost when Oskar found it. Somehow it had been duct-taped to the underside of his desk. The tiresome repetition of the theft did not enrage Oskar – if anything, he seemed to become calmer every time it happened. A few days after the bottle was returned to the fridge for the fourth time, Oskar knocked on my door and calmly informed me that it had disappeared again. Usually on these occasions he looked grim and disappointed – I often felt that he thought he could actually change the attitude of our peers with his little notes and chilly equanimity, an idea that was patently ridiculous, as I regularly told him – but this day he bore a small smile. I asked him if he wanted help recovering it.
‘No,’ he said. ‘It is mostly urine.’
He raised a supermarket bag; inside was a bottle of Absolut and a bag of supermarket ice. That night was the first time I saw him properly drunk.
Only Oskar could have been certain of producing absolutely clear urine.
Neat urine.
There was, among the various coffee specialties and special teas, a jar of Maxwell House. The kettle throbbed and phlegmed. Milk was in the fridge door. Brown sugar in a bowl on the table. Mugs were on the shelf above the beverage-makings. A spirit of efficiency ruled in the kitchen. It was easy to remember the efficiency and economy of Oskar’s music, and easy to imagine the exasperation and frustration of his wife, with her Californian outlook and kitchen that was primarily used as a platform from which endless boxes of take-out cuisine could be eaten. Look into these steel surfaces for as long as you want, you could never make out the blood-orange, blood-transfusion blaze of the Los Angeles dawn. Europe’s skies are older than America’s; Europe’s clouds start over there and by the time they reach here they are tired and ragged from their journey.
Boiling water over granules, a tilt of milk, and I stared into the result. Pale clouds lived and died by an unknowable rhythm under the surface, storms pulsating, growing and shrinking in the atmosphere of a gas giant, updraughts and sudden sinks pulling in a convective pattern. A spoon obliterates the system.
Billows of steam and condensation rose from the mug as it cooled on the side and I began to look for the cat food. Again, this was a short search; the cat food was in the larder-style utility room, along with a martial display of tinned foods and sacks of dried goods.
On the floor next to two water bowls and two spotlessly polished dishes was a pallet large enough for sixteen cans of diced mystery animal remains in a rich sauce of whatever, with the shrink wrap broken at one corner and fourteen cans remaining. Each can bore, next to the incomprehensible Slav-ese (probably containing the words ‘juicy’, ‘stronger teeth’ and ‘at least some % meat’), a picture of a feline with eyes that twinkled like taxidermists’ glass and a tongue that, captured in illustration, would now forever explore that same corner of its smiling mouth. Cat rendered as brain-dead consumer, trapped in lockstep with thirteen clones, licking tongues raised to the right in a bank of Heils, eyes fixed without focus on an endless future of more of this delicious food every day. Next to this band of brothers was a sack of the miniature biscuits that gave this gloop some texture. And a slip of paper, neatly folded on one of the surgically clean dishes, that I had not noticed at first; bleached paper on bleached china.
INSTRUCTIONS FOR FEEDING CATS, I read.
Half a can of food in each dish in the morning and the same in the early evening. Each time with a handful of their crunchy
