Katherine Carlyle

by Rupert Thomson

  “No.”

  “It’s like a kiosk. You can buy coffee, or a hot dog, or —” He hesitates as the metal door behind him opens a fraction, then closes again. “Or pommes-frites.” He gives me directions. “Meet me there,” he says. “There are red umbrellas, with Coca-Cola logos on them. You’ll have the key to the locker, yes?”

  “Yes,” I say. “All right.”

  “Here’s something for you. You look hungry.” He passes me another, smaller package, wrapped in the same white paper.

  I drop the second package into the plastic bag.

  A woman in the same jacket, apron, and bow tie appears at the far end of the counter. She walks with her elbows lifted away from her sides as if she’s up to her waist in water.

  “Your change,” the man says in a loud voice, handing me some coins.

  As I travel back to the ground floor I realize that the man at the meat counter is living with an intensity and purpose that mirrors my own. Did he recognize those qualities in me, or did I simply show up at the right moment, when he wasn’t being monitored? And what exactly has he given me? Am I breaking the law? What if I’m stopped?

  No one stops me.

  Out on the pavement I keep walking, my body moving automatically, my mind quite empty, and I arrive at Zoologischer Garten a few minutes later without having consulted a map or even having paid much attention to where I was going. I find the lockers in a drafty corridor lined with yellow tiles. The locker doors are a grubby cream color with numbers stenciled along the top in black. Station announcements echo off the walls.

  I remove the smaller of the two packages, then place the bag in a locker and follow the instructions on the door. 1: Insert the correct money. 2: Turn the key. 3: Check the door is locked. I pay for the locker with the change the man at the meat counter gave me. At the time I thought what he was doing was for the benefit of that burly woman who may or may not have been his supervisor — he was simulating the last stage in a transaction that never actually took place — but now it occurs to me that he might also have been thinking ahead, handing me the coins I would need if I was to carry out the mission he was entrusting me with. Impressed by his ability to operate on two levels at once, I pocket the key and leave the station.

  On my way out I pass a photo booth, its curtain drawn aside. The light issuing from the interior is white but hazy — a science fiction glow. I sit on the seat and feed some coins into the slot. The flash goes off four times, then I wait outside. A strip of photographic paper drops into a silver metal cage. My eyes are shut in every picture. A smile smolders on my lips. I could be asleep and in the middle of a beautiful dream. I could be dead and happy to be dead.

  I walk east. The sun comes and goes. When I reach the Tiergarten, a path unspools in front of me. A gold statue of a winged woman stands on a high column, storm clouds massing behind her. A cyclist hisses past on wheels as thin as hoops. I find a bench and take out the package. Inside are two crusty rolls stuffed with smoked ham. I pick up a roll and take a bite. Food has never tasted better.

  /

  At five past five I’m standing by the kiosk in Witternbergplatz watching two teenage girls dip chips in mayonnaise when the man from the meat counter appears. He has changed into a black shirt, a black leather jacket, and a pair of jeans, but he has the same eager pasty look he had in the shop. He asks if I have the key.

  “You should eat,” I say, “or it’ll look suspicious.”

  “Suspicious?”

  “Like we’re doing a drug deal or something.”

  He stares at me. His throat is flushed as if he’s got a rash. “Right,” he says. “OK.”

  Stepping beneath the awning, he orders a Currywurst and lays a crumpled five-euro note on the counter.

  “Thanks for the ham rolls,” I say.

  “They were good?”

  “Very good.”

  He nods. “The meat’s high quality, I have to say.” He sounds so earnest that I can’t help smiling, but he doesn’t notice. A paper plate balanced on one hand, he spears a chunk of sausage with a white plastic fork and pokes it into his mouth. “Any problems?”

  “No. I put the bag in a locker, just like you asked me to.”

  “Thanks.” He licks curry sauce off his thumb, then looks away, towards Tauentzienstrasse.

  I remove the key from my pocket and feel its weight transfer from me to him a moment before I hand it over.

  “You already know my name,” I say. “What’s yours?”

  “Oswald Überkopf.” The look he gives me tells me he has been teased, or even bullied.

  “Oswald? You don’t hear that too often.”

  The wind whips his hair across his eyes. He tips his plate and fork into the bin, then reaches up with both hands. As he scrapes his hair back behind his ears, the sleeves of his leather jacket ride up, revealing a tattooed inscription on the inside of his left forearm. The letters have a Gothic look, but I don’t see them for long enough to decipher them.

  The sun has dropped below the level of the rooftops and the square is plunged in chilly shadow. A shiver of familiarity goes through me. A sense of eternity, and the abyss. Tomorrow, at the café on Giesebrechtstrasse, I will sit near Klaus Frings again, and this time I will talk to him.

  “Are you free tomorrow night?” Oswald is eyeing me, head cocked, thumbs stuck in the belt hooks of his jeans.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I’m involved in some negotiations at the moment.”

  “I thought you were a tourist —”

  “And anyway, I can’t constantly be doing you favors.”

  “It’s not a favor.” He scuffs the ground with the side of his shoe. “I’d like to show you something. I think you might be interested.”

  I ask for his number. The fact that I don’t have a mobile surprises him — everyone has mobiles — but I choose not to explain. He scribbles his contact details on a piece of paper. I’ll call, I tell him, though I don’t say when.

  As I turn away he says my name. I glance over my shoulder. With his flushed neck and his wrinkled black shirt he looks scorched, as if he just escaped from a burning building.

  “You haven’t asked me what was in the bag,” he says.

  “That’s true,” I say. “I haven’t.”

  “Aren’t you curious?”

  Other people’s mysteries — I’ve got no time for them. I’ve got too many of my own.

  “It’s your business, isn’t it?” I say.

  Then I walk on.

  /

  When I approach my hotel an hour later, a white car with a green stripe down the side is parked out the front. POLIZEI, it says. Police. My mouth is dry and I pause beneath a tree. Surely it can’t be me they’re looking for. Not so soon. I take a breath and push through the glass door. In reception two officers are questioning the woman who runs the place. She hands my key over and I move on down the corridor. A silence expands behind me and I sense the policemen watching me but they don’t call out for me to stop.

  Back in my room I turn the TV on. My German isn’t bad — with Oswald I remembered the word for negotiations — but I need to become more fluent. On the news they discuss Angela Merkel’s chances of winning a third term in office. Later, there are bulletins about preparations for the Oktoberfest and about pollution in rivers. I think of all the e-mails, tweets, and text messages piling up inside my phone, or circling in the infinite expanses of the Web, unable to reach their destination, like planes kept in a holding pattern above an airport. My father likes to talk about traveling in the seventies and eighties, and how you would lose all contact with those you left behind. You might write postcards, he says, or letters, but you never used the phone, not unless it was a real emergency. When you were gone, you were really gone. It’s different for you, he says. You were born into a world where people communicate nonstop. It’s not a choice. It’s a habit — a necessity. Like breathing.

  At eleven o’clock I switch the TV off. Outside, a heavy rain is coming down.
I leave my room again. When I pass reception I ask the woman what the police wanted. They were looking for illegal immigrants, she says.

  On the pavement I look up into the sky. The rain turns copper-colored as it drops through the light of a streetlamp. I open my umbrella. People are queueing on the other side of the road, and I can hear the thud of a bass line, fast and muffled, dull. The purple building seems to shake.

  “Hey.”

  A scrawny man peers into my face, his eyes hard and shiny, like ball bearings, a crooked fence of teeth. I move away, towards the railway bridge. He shouts after me, words I don’t understand. The bass notes fade. A train screeches in the dark.

  I walk for an hour. The rain has driven most people indoors. At a T-junction near Potsdamerstrasse a woman leans against a wall, thigh-high patent-leather boots, gold handbag dangling from one shoulder. A car idles by the curb. I turn the corner. In the next street a balloon that says HAPPY BIRTHDAY is caught in the upper branches of a tree. When I think about how I came into the world, my body starts to throb. It’s like toothache, but all over. After eight years in a storage tank I was finally lifted into blinding daylight, a foretaste of the birth that was to come. They moved me from one thawing solution to another — T1, T2, T3, T4 — then put me in an incubator. I had been there before, of course. This was the place where I divided. Cleaved. But everything was different this time round. I was being prepared for implantation. I experienced a gradual loss of control, a delicious incontinence. I was unfurling, expanding. Taking shape. A sudden, hectic tumble into life. My cells were yellow — a healthy yellow — and the heat coursing through me triggered urgency and purpose. It wasn’t my decision to feel hopeful. Hope happened to me. And then the warm red darkness of my mother’s womb …

  Later that night, as I lie in bed with the lights off, I hear distant yelling.

  The scrawny man picking a fight.

  Police arresting immigrants.

  /

  When I enter the café on Giesebrechtstrasse the following morning, Klaus Frings is already there, sitting at the same table as before. I take the table next to him and order a double espresso. Klaus leafs through his paper, seemingly oblivious to everybody else. Though his overcoat and reading glasses look expensive, I don’t see him as a businessman. He could be an architect, I’m thinking, or the curator of a small museum. I’m so focused on him and speculating so intently that I’m surprised he doesn’t sense my presence, but his eyes don’t leave the page, not even when he reaches for his coffee.

  My espresso arrives. It’s time I made contact and I choose an obvious opening, the one least likely to arouse suspicion.

  “Could you pass the sugar?”

  He looks at me over the top of his glasses, his eyes wary, almost hostile, and I remember that this is a man who has recently been jilted. He might be feeling resentful towards women at the moment. He might have it in for all of us. Or perhaps it’s simply that he dislikes being interrupted.

  “The sugar?” I say again, more gently.

  “Of course.” He hands me the bowl.

  Thanking him, I select two brown sugar lumps, drop them into my coffee, and pass the bowl back to him. “I’m sorry,” I say. “My German’s hopeless.”

  “Not at all.” The angle of his head alters. “You were here yesterday.”

  I smile but say nothing.

  “What are you doing in Berlin?” He puts his paper down. “Are you a student?”

  “Not exactly.” I lower my eyes, looking at my coffee. I imagine the sugar lumps dissolving — a thin layer of crystals on the bottom, and the hot bitter darkness overhead. “No one knows I’m here. In Berlin, I mean.”

  “You’ve run away?”

  “I’m nineteen. Nearly twenty.”

  He looks past me, towards the door. “I didn’t mean —”

  “It doesn’t matter. I can’t really go into detail, though. Let’s just say that I’m experimenting with coincidence.”

  “Is that what this is — a coincidence?”

  I give him a quick look. Has the Englishwoman been on the phone to him? We ran into this girl the other day — at the cinema … But no, why would she mention me? Above all, why would she mention me to him? I didn’t even hint that I might be interested in her friend, Klaus Frings — and besides, it’s clear from his expression that he’s teasing me.

  “So where do you live when you’re not” — and he pauses — “experimenting?”

  “Rome.”

  “Ah. That explains the tan.” He appears to think for a moment, leaning back in his chair, one hand massaging the back of his neck. “Are you staying in the neighborhood?”

  “No.” I mention the hotel where I have spent the last two nights. He hasn’t heard of it, which is hardly a surprise. I tell him where it is. His frown returns.

  “That’s not a good area. At night it can be —” He doesn’t want to say it. The word dangerous.

  “It’s not so bad.”

  “How long do you plan to stay there?”

  “I’m not sure.” Once again I look down into my coffee cup.

  His gaze lingers on me — I can feel it, like heat — then he glances at his watch. “I must go.” He stands up. “Will you be here tomorrow?”

  “Probably.”

  He extends a hand. “Klaus Frings.”

  I know.

  “I’m Katherine Carlyle,” I tell him. “Most people call me Kit.”

  “Kit.” He nods, then turns away.

  Through the window I watch him run across the road. I don’t think it’s because he’s in a hurry. I think it’s because he knows I’m watching and he wants to look active, young.

  By the time I leave the café it’s after nine. I move through the city with no destination, no agenda, following whichever street takes my fancy. Unlike Rome, Berlin doesn’t seem to have any hills. The sky, though cloudy, feels immense. At midday I catch a bus going west and spend the afternoon walking in the Grünewald. As I circle the Teufelssee, a small lake hemmed in by pines and birches, a woman appears on the path ahead of me. She’s wearing a one-piece bathing suit. Her feet are bare. She puts a hand out to steady herself, steps down into the lake, and then stands still. The water cuts her off at the knees. Her bathing suit and the water are both black, which makes her white limbs look detached, dismembered. At last she bends down and pushes forwards, her freestyle neat and confident, almost hydraulic. The lake peels back behind her, and suddenly my head is empty but for a single thrilling intuition. The world will part before me. I’m on a smooth sweet path to everything that matters.

  /

  Towards the end of the afternoon, on Heerstrasse, I hail a taxi and ask the driver to take me to Café Einstein. We labor east, through heavy traffic. Mist hides the tops of buildings and blurs the brightly lit shop windows.

  I passed the Einstein on my first morning, noting the name on the liver-colored canopies above each window, and the inside of the café is just as ornate as the exterior. The rooms have high molded ceilings and dark wood paneling, and the décor is old-world, all pale custard, clotted cream, and eau-de-nil. The waitresses wear starched white aprons that reach down to their ankles at the front, and the coffee is served in cups whose rounded rims are encircled with a band of gold. Sitting at a marble-topped table I look sideways. Infinite versions of myself curve off into the still green depths of a mirror.

  I remember the time my father took me to a restaurant in Chinatown. This was during the winter when our house in Tufnell Park was up for sale. I would have been eight or nine. My father ordered Peking duck and chicken noodles. Afterwards, he bought me a gold cat with a paw that moved up and down in the air. He told me it would bring good fortune and I pretended to believe him, though I knew he had no time for lucky charms and wasn’t even remotely superstitious. I can still see the cat’s gold paw glinting and the red lanterns with their tasseled fringes swaying above the street. I can still remember the feeling of my hand in his. On our way home, as we stood on the lower
deck of the bus, a man got on, his eyes so dark around the edges they looked burnt. He pointed a long trembling finger at us and said, You’re terminated. I looked at my father and we both began to laugh. Later, my father told me he thought the man was ill — he had got on at a bus stop outside a hospital — but it became our catchphrase. Until my mother heard it, that is. She had already been diagnosed with cancer by then, and she didn’t see the funny side. Turn around three times and spit. Both of you.

  The waitress who takes my order has tawny hair that is pinned up in a chignon. Her features look chiseled but when she smiles her face lights up and softens. Strapped to her hip is a chunky leather wallet that bounces like a holstered pistol as she strides about. When she returns with my coffee I feel the urge to speak to her, though I can’t think of anything that isn’t superficial or mundane.

  “I really like this place,” I say.

  “It’s a strange place,” she says. “It has a history.” She tells me the villa was once the home of Goebbels’s mistress, a silent movie star, and also an illegal gambling den for SS officers.

  I glance around but nothing of the past remains. “Despite all that, there’s something — I don’t know — relaxing about it.”

  “Not if you work here.” The waitress smiles with her eyes. “Is this your first time?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you see the garden?”

  “No, not yet.”

  “It’s at the back. It’s very nice to sit out there, especially in the summer.”

  “I don’t think I’ll be here then.”

  “That’s a shame.” She looks at me, her eyes seeming to narrow a little, as before. “Maybe you should come back — when the weather’s warmer.”

  “I’d like to,” I say, “but it’s not so easy.”

  “Oh.” Glancing down, she smooths her apron over her hips. “Well, anyway. Enjoy your stay.”

  /

  “I’ve been thinking,” Klaus says as he approaches my table.

  It’s my fourth day in Berlin. The tree outside the café quivers in the wind, and a man hurries past, one hand pressed to the crown of his hat. Klaus is wearing a different overcoat, charcoal gray with black trim on the pockets and the collar, but his briefcase is the same, and judging by its ancient polished look I would guess it’s a family heirloom, since he doesn’t seem the type to go to flea markets. I ask him if he would like to join me.