Katherine Carlyle

by Rupert Thomson

  “Here they are,” he says.

  A man and a woman join us. We all shake hands. The woman looks about forty. She has short reddish hair, which may or may not be dyed, and very white, slightly greasy skin. Her full lips conceal small uneven teeth. Her name is Anna. The man — Oleg — is younger. He is wearing a designer black leather jacket with an open-necked white shirt, and his round head is covered with close-cropped hair of an indeterminate color, like bean sprouts or Tupperware. Anna chooses the seat opposite mine and studies the menu. Oleg brushes at the tablecloth with the backs of his fingers, even though it’s spotless, immaculate. No one speaks. It’s as if we’re about to play a game so esoteric that it doesn’t require any pieces.

  For the first half hour talk revolves around business. Delivery dates are mentioned — the fifteenth, the twenty-fourth. Place-names too. Kiev, Piraeus. Minsk. There’s a lengthy debate about Pavlo, and mention of somebody called Raul. Anna’s English is fluent, though heavily accented, and she tends to be the one who answers Cheadle’s questions. Sometimes they switch to Russian, and Cheadle’s understanding of the language surprises me. Oleg seems distracted throughout. He tilts his beer in its glass, and his vague, violent eyes keep drifting round the room.

  Eventually — and abruptly — the conversation stops, and a busy silence ensues, as if everybody at the table is thinking different but interconnected thoughts.

  “It’s Misty’s first time in Berlin,” Cheadle says at last. “She arrived two weeks ago.”

  I hear a faint click as Anna’s lips part on her teeth. It’s the stealthiest of smiles.

  “How do you like the city?” she asks.

  “I like it very much,” I say.

  Oleg is watching me, but nothing shows in his face. Neither curiosity nor interest. He doesn’t even convey indifference.

  “You like to travel?” Anna says.

  “I like new places.”

  I didn’t know it was possible for a conversation to be both mundane and tense, but that is how it feels. Though I requested the meeting, the Russians suddenly seem to have more invested in it than I do, and more to lose. Oleg is looking at my mouth rather than my eyes. He looks so intently that I imagine he can see my words emerging, one by one, like plastic ducks in a fairground rifle range. Cheadle gazes into his glass. He is smiling to himself. For some reason, I have the feeling he’s proud of me.

  “And when you leave Berlin,” Anna says, “you will go back to Rome?”

  “Oh no. No, I don’t think so.”

  She looks at me steadily, her voice quiet but insistent. “Where will you go?”

  “Somewhere else. I haven’t decided yet.”

  “Somewhere you have never been?”

  The question lacks rigor — the future I imagine is intensely foreign, and yet familiar as grass or water — but I try to answer truthfully. “I’m looking for a place where I’ll feel at home.”

  “You’re not at home in Italy?”

  “Not really.”

  “And in Berlin?”

  “No.”

  The conversation has arrived at a crucial point more quickly than I envisaged. If you’re speaking a language that isn’t your own, perhaps you become less subtle, more direct. Or it might be a Russian characteristic. Anna glances at Oleg, then back at me. Is it my imagination or did one corner of Oleg’s mouth curl upwards just a fraction?

  “You have money?” Anna asks.

  “Enough for now.”

  “And when it runs out?”

  “I’ll earn some more.”

  “What can you do,” Anna asks, “to earn money?”

  “I’m not sure. Something will turn up.”

  “Turn up?” For the first time Anna’s English lets her down.

  “Something will happen,” I say.

  Oleg mutters a few words in Russian.

  “You’re very confident,” Anna says, “for someone who is so young — or perhaps it’s because you’re young.”

  Cheadle lifts his head. “More drinks?”

  “Vodka,” Oleg says.

  “Also for me.” Anna smiles at Cheadle. Her front teeth are white, but the teeth farther back in her mouth are a dark rotten yellow.

  Cheadle orders two large vodkas, a sparkling water for me, and another whiskey for himself. When the waiter has gone I ask Anna where she’s from.

  “I live in Moscow,” she says, “but I was born in Cherepovets. It’s north of Moscow, about an hour by plane.”

  “And your friend?”

  ‘He’s from farther north — from Arkhangel’sk. Or you would say Archangel.”

  A sweet shaft of anticipation cuts through me, and I stare at the tablecloth in an attempt to disguise what I’m feeling. I can’t allow myself to think Cherepovets or Arkhangel’sk. I think glass instead. I think plate and spoon. Even so, I sense Anna’s interest growing, as if I’m a safe to which she now, quite unexpectedly, has the combination.

  “I’d like to visit the north.” I turn to Cheadle. “Do you think your friends could help with that?”

  “The north?” He makes a face. “What do you want to go there for?”

  “I’d like to see it.”

  “It can be dangerous,” Anna says.

  “Also in Moscow,” Oleg says, addressing no one in particular, “it can be dangerous.”

  “And it’s cold,” Anna says. “Extremely cold.”

  “Yes,” I say in a low voice, almost a whisper. “Do you think it can be arranged?”

  “Do you have a visa?” Anna asks.

  “No.”

  “It’s not so easy to get a visa,” she says. “You need a letter of invitation or support. You need to book hotels in advance. You need” — and she turns to Cheadle — “what do you call it, the list of destinations?”

  Cheadle smothers a yawn. “Itinerary.”

  “Yes,” she says. “You must tell the authorities where you are going, and when.”

  I look down into my glass.

  “Maybe we could help,” Anna says after a few moments.

  “Really?”

  Anna glances at Oleg again. “Yes. We have a contact. At the embassy.”

  The drinks arrive, and I excuse myself.

  Alone in the Ladies I look at myself in the mirror. Suddenly I’m so excited that my arms are in the air above my head and I’m dancing — crazy dancing, like I’m at a rave. It occurs to me — too late — that I might be caught on a security camera. I stop what I’m doing and begin to wash my hands.

  When I return to the table, the bill is already paid. Anna tells me she needs my passport. I hesitate. She can’t get me a visa, she says patiently, if she doesn’t have my passport. I reach into my bag and hand it over. She will also need a scan of my credit card, front and back. She’ll be in touch, she says. Through Cheadle.

  Out on the street Oleg hails a taxi, and the two Russians climb in. I wait until the car has turned the corner, then I thank Cheadle for the dinner and kiss him on the cheek.

  “I don’t think you should go,” he says.

  “That’s what you’re supposed to say,” I tell him. “That’s what everybody says.”

  He’s shaking his head.

  “I mean, I can’t stay here.” I look up Schlüterstrasse, towards Savignyplatz, then swing round and look the other way. The Ku’damm with its clogged traffic, its splashy neon. “This isn’t what I had in mind, not even remotely.”

  “What’s wrong with it?”

  “You don’t understand. You never will.” I open my arms wide and spin slowly on the pavement, my face on a level with the murky sky. “This is only the beginning.”

  “Maybe,” Cheadle says, “just maybe, you’re the one who doesn’t understand.”

  /

  It’s two days later, and I’m drinking beer and vodka with Oswald in his two-room apartment in Neukölln. He lives alone, with his dog Josef. We’re sitting in the kitchen, which is a bright, sickly green, like the algae on canals. The heating has broken down, and
we have kept our coats on. Our breath shows as we talk.

  Oswald faces me across the table, his left hand flat on the zinc surface, his fingers spread, as if he’s about to do that trick where you pick up a knife and stab the gaps as fast as you can. He has drunk more than I have and his eyes look fierce, bleached.

  I ask to see his tattoo. He pushes his sleeve back to the elbow. Running up the inside of his forearm in Gothic script are the words Religion ist eine Lüge. Religion is a lie.

  “Umstritten,” I say. Controversial.

  He pushes the sleeve down. “I’m going to tell you something — something no one knows.”

  I steady myself. We have reached a certain point in the night. He’s going to try and impress me or confide in me and then I’m supposed to sleep with him. I’ve no intention of sleeping with him, though. If I imagine him naked, his body looks raw and urgent, like an animal that has just been skinned. I shudder, then feel guilty.

  “Jesus wasn’t really Jesus.” He sits back, pleased with himself.

  “You know something?” I say. “That would make a good tattoo. You could put it on your other arm.”

  “I’m serious.” Without taking his eyes off me, he adjusts his position on his chair, staying within the frame of my gaze but moving inside it, as though testing its limits.

  I finish my vodka. “Who was he then?”

  “You remember the Slaughter of the Innocents, right?” Oswald leans forwards. “Everyone thinks Jesus escaped — but he didn’t. He got put to death, along with all the rest. He died.”

  “So who did all the miracles?”

  “That’s what I’m saying. That’s the thing no one knows.”

  “Except you.”

  My words have a sarcastic edge, but he doesn’t waver, or even seem to notice. “Except me,” he says, as if it’s true, and obvious, and can’t be disproved.

  I finally ask the question he has been longing for me to ask. “If Jesus wasn’t really Jesus, who was he?”

  “Herod’s baby.” He nods slowly, agreeing with himself, a habit of his that still annoys me, then he reaches for his cigarette papers and his Ziploc bag of grass. “Herod had Jesus killed and had his own son placed in the manger and Joseph and Mary were sworn to secrecy, under pain of death, and then the Wise Men came with all their gifts — ‘the Wise Men.’ ” He lets out a derisive snort.

  “Joseph and Mary fled into Egypt,” he goes on, “pretending they had got away with the Messiah, but actually —”

  What Oswald is telling me is giving me a glassy feeling, and I’m worried I might black out on his sticky lino floor. I wish he would shut up, but he’s on a roll with his Jesus-wasn’t-Jesus theory. I light one of his cigarettes, hoping it might straighten me out.

  “— everything people believe in,” he’s saying, “everything that comforts them when they feel alone, or when they’re in trouble, or when they’re dying, it’s all a fabrication, all a lie —”

  The cigarette is making me feel even dizzier.

  “Let’s go for a walk,” I say.

  Josef hears the word and jumps to his feet, eyes eager, tail whacking the fridge door.

  Outside, on the pavement, the night smells of ash and salt. The sky looks brown. We hurry across Karl-Marx-Allee, which is wide and bleak, like some urban prairie. There are almost no cars. I wonder what Cheadle’s up to. He’s still determined to adopt me but I keep postponing it. I have discarded one father. Why would I want another?

  When I was sixteen I got top grades in all my GCSEs, and shortly after the results came through, my father and I flew to London. One night he took me to a restaurant in South Kensington to celebrate. I wore an elegant black dress and pinned my hair up. I was trying to look sophisticated — I wanted him to be proud of me — but the evening proved awkward from the outset. When the waiter took my coat he gave me a sly look, and I knew he thought I was my father’s mistress. I couldn’t believe my father hadn’t noticed. He was a journalist, after all. An observer. It would have been so easy to clarify the situation — My daughter just did brilliantly in her exams — but he didn’t, and my discomfort led me to broach a subject that had always been taboo — for us, at least.

  We had nearly finished our starters when I told him that something was bothering me. It had been bothering me for a long time, I said. As long as I could remember. My father chewed slowly, watching me. What I felt, in general terms, I said, was an absence of something, a sense of deprivation. A loneliness. But I had never been able to put it into words. How could I have done? I was too young — only a child. And then my mother died, and the feeling of having been neglected or forgotten became harder to make out, even harder to bring up. My mother’s death was so immediate, so shocking. So recent. My mother’s death had buried it. I looked at my father across the table, hoping he would understand, but we had never talked about the difficult things — there was no history, no precedent — and nothing was coming back. He just seemed puzzled, and slightly apprehensive.

  “I’m not describing it very well,” I said.

  My father told me to try again.

  “OK.” I took a breath and decided to go straight to the heart of it. “When I was an embryo, why wasn’t I injected into my mother right away?”

  The waiter, who had been hovering nearby, refilled our water glasses and then withdrew.

  “I’m not sure injected is the right word,” I said, “but you know what I mean.”

  My father leaned forwards, over the table. “Kit, for heaven’s sake. We’re in a restaurant.”

  “You had me frozen and then you left me in the hospital —” My voice was trembling, despite my efforts to control it. “You left me there for eight years.”

  My father put down his fork. His face had stiffened. It was obvious he had never expected — or even imagined — anything like this. Also obvious was his fear that I might make a spectacle of myself, and ruin the evening.

  A kind of fury surged through me, scalding and bitter. “Why did you make me wait?” And then, before he could answer, “I know why. It’s because you thought I’d be a monster, didn’t you. And maybe that’s exactly what I am — to you.”

  “This is ridiculous,” he said.

  “You abandoned me …” But all the force had gone out of me, and I sounded sulky, a typical teenager, a spoiled child.

  “Stop it.”

  “I wish my mother was the one who was alive and you were dead. At least I could talk to her —”

  I began to cry.

  “Is everything all right?” Our waiter had returned and was standing at my father’s elbow, one hand cradling the other.

  “Everything’s fine,” my father said, looking blankly into the middle distance. “Thank you.”

  For the rest of the evening — and the visit — we did our best to avoid each other. I was horrified by what I’d said. I didn’t wish him dead. Of course I didn’t. At the time, though, I felt he hadn’t taken me seriously. He had driven me to it. I’d had to say something. To make matters worse, I had embarrassed him in one of his favorite restaurants, something he wouldn’t find it easy to forgive. Address one grievance and you create another. It seemed I couldn’t win.

  Oswald calls out to me. “This way.”

  We cross a bridge. Off to one side and far below are warehouses and lorry parks. A canal glistens like a seam of coal.

  “Oswald,” I say suddenly, “I’m not going to sleep with you.”

  He doesn’t respond.

  When I glance at him, his eyes are lowered, and he has a frown on his face, as if he is trying to solve a problem that involves his shoes. Josef trots along beside him, looking worried.

  I repeat the words twenty minutes later, when we’re slouched in a booth in the corner of a dimly lit bar.

  “I wasn’t thinking about that.” He reaches for his beer, then puts it back on the table without drinking. “I mean, to be honest, I’ve probably thought about it,” he says after a while, “but I could never do it. I wouldn’t
be able to. You’re too sort of — I don’t know — exotic.”

  I laugh. “Exotic? You can talk, with a name like Oswald. I didn’t think anyone called Oswald still existed. I thought they all died out about a century ago — or maybe longer.”

  He watches me with distance in his eyes, as if I’m a shimmering figure on the horizon, approaching slowly, and he’s curious to see who I turn out to be.

  “When will you go back to Italy?” he asks.

  “That’s not on the agenda.”

  “Maybe your agenda needs updating.”

  “It’s being updated right now. I’m just waiting for certain documents to come through.”

  “More negotiations?”

  “That’s one way of putting it.”

  “Do you need money?” He studies me for a moment. “No, probably not.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  He doesn’t answer.

  I think of his kitchen — the queasy green walls, the broken central heating. “You haven’t got any money anyway.”

  “Someone’s looking after you. Someone’s paying.”

  Since I told him I’m not going to sleep with him he seems to have become stronger. More of a man.

  “I’ve got a free place to stay,” I say, “if that’s what you’re driving at.”

  “Are you —” He checks himself.

  “Am I what?”

  “Nothing. It doesn’t matter.”

  “You’re jealous.”

  He gives me a look.

  “You can’t have me,” I say, “so you want me gone.”

  “There could be some truth in that.” He smiles wistfully down into his drink. “But it wasn’t what I was about to say.”

  Later, on Britzerdamm, a white stretch limo glides past, tires trickling on the tarmac. A window opens. A pale hand waves. I’m reminded of the night I last saw Massimo, the boys with their Roma scarves and their loud mouths. Sometimes, when I think of where I am, I shiver, and I’m not sure if it’s terror or delight.

  “I’m going home,” Oswald says.

  It will take me an hour to get back to Cheadle’s apartment, and dawn isn’t far away. “Oswald, can I sleep at your place?” I pause. “Just sleep, I mean.”