All That I Am Read Online Free PDF

I’ll not eat.
    ‘I’ll bring you a sandwich first.’
    ‘No need.’
    ‘The usual?’ Clara has a way of ignoring me that is tender, not brusque. She is a ringmaster in a room with a tired old lion. She needs no chair or whip, the tone of voice will do.
    ‘Thank you.’
    ‘Capers?’
    ‘Please.’ I smile up at her. ‘And thank you, Clara.’

RUTH
    I take the milk out of the fridge and sniff it. It’s okay. I boil the kettle and take care to pour the water into the cup, not the tin of International Roast. Last week, in a minuscule moment of steaming absent-mindedness, I ended up with an overflowing coffee tin. I wedge a packet of Scotch Finger biscuits under my armpit and take the cup down the hall to the front room. Most old people, I am convinced, live on Scotch Finger biscuits.
    When I sit back down in front of Toller I spray crumbs everywhere–it’s the Big Bang of biscuits! There are more crumbs than there ever was biscuit, and the thing will remain forever inexplicable. Bev is coming later on to clean. Of course she is cross when the place is not already clean. Long ago I decided to treat her huffing and puffing, her toxic, airborne reproaches as a game, as something that bonded us. She can sneer at my slovenliness (but I gave up the cigarillos!) while I feign gratitude for her ministrations. By this ritual we silently acknowledge that her virtue is superior to mine, though I, by happenstance and in no way that speaks to my merit, am superior in money.
    So Toller had been in a sanatorium. I find it hard to think of such a firebrand mute. Dora never mentioned it–maybe she didn’t know much about it. Though she did tell me other things about his war, things he would not speak about publicly. He’d volunteered, she said, because he’d wanted to ‘prove with his life’ his love of Germany. His physical courage had frightened those around him. Once, when a soldier lay wounded in no man’s land, Toller ran out to pull him in but was forced back into the trench by a hail of artillery fire. For three days and nights the boy called them by name, at first loud and desperate, and then weaker and sadder. By the time he died Toller’s enthusiasm for the war had curdled into a suicidal recklessness in the protection of his men. Dora said he felt responsible for the mess they were in, as if it were, somehow, all his fault.
    Dearest Toller. Why is it famous people are so much shorter in real life? The first time Dora brought him to my studio in Berlin–I was at Nollendorf Platz, so that makes it 1926 or ’7–I opened the door and looked down and saw only two huge-horned gramophones, a pair of legs under each. Dora’s voice came from behind one.
    ‘He bought six of them, would you believe. For friends. One for you.’
    ‘But we’ve never met!’ I was embarrassed as soon as the words left my mouth, as if I’d said them in front of royalty. But I was shocked at the extravagance.
    ‘Don’t be so literal, Ruthie,’ Dora’s voice said. ‘You going to let us in?’
    They put them down on a table. Toller turned to me, smiling. For an instant I was in the presence of a piece of fiction, someone come to life from the pages of the Munich Revolution, from a WANTED poster, from theatre playbills. And then he was just there: a youngish man in a rumpled silk shirt, with wild, grey-streaked hair streaming off his forehead, pumping my hand. He held my eyes with his.
    Toller had no small talk, no register for Bekannten –acquaintances. He would fix you with those dark eyes, for slightly too long. His only mode, with everyone, was intimacy. Women loved him for it. He bypassed all the agonising repartee, the uncertain negotiations of flirtation, and spoke as if he knew them, had already been inside them. Who wouldn’t give themselves, wholly and fully, to a man who might at any minute sacrifice himself to save the world?
    He was still smiling, holding my hand. ‘I’d be able to look you in the eye,’ he let go and