Katherine Carlyle

by Rupert Thomson

/

  On the morning of October 9 I have breakfast in my room, then I sit at the desk in a white toweling bathrobe and write two letters to my father, both on hotel stationery. In the first letter, which is only a few lines long, I tell him I’m in Berlin, and that I need to talk to him. Could he meet me at midday on the seventeenth in Café Einstein on Kürfürstenstrasse? I know my request might seem unreasonable and that it might disrupt his schedule but then again how often do I make demands on him? He is my father, after all. I hope he can make it, I tell him. It’s important to me. I sign the letter — With love, your daughter, Kit — then I seal the envelope and address it to the apartment on Via Giulia.

  The second letter, which is more complex, runs to three sheets of writing paper and will be delivered by hand. I’m not sure how to address the envelope. In the end I settle for DAVID CARLYLE. I take the short letter down to the lobby and ask the woman on reception if she can post it for me. No problem, she says. It will go today. First-class. Her eyes are dark brown and depthless, like those of a shop mannequin, and seem at odds with her clipped efficient sentences.

  “How’s Klaus?”

  I turn to see Horst Breitner standing at my elbow in a camel coat and a large orange scarf. Horst Breitner, from the Konzerthaus.

  “What are you doing here?” I say.

  “Breakfast with a client.” His smile is condescending and only lasts a second. “You were living with Klaus, I think. Is he well?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t seen him in a while.”

  “So it’s over?”

  I consider him for a moment. His slicked-back hair, his damp eyes. His lavish clothes. Then I turn back to the woman on reception and ask her to put the postage on my bill.

  Horst places his card on the counter in front of me. “A drink, perhaps — when you are free …” Pulling on a pair of fawn leather gloves, he leaves through the revolving doors.

  As I watch him go I wonder if it matters that I’ve been spotted in the lobby of the InterContinental. I examine all the angles and decide it doesn’t make the slightest difference.

  On the way back to my room I drop Horst’s card in the silver rubbish bin next to the lift.

  /

  After spending an hour in the hotel’s business center I set off for Berlin Hauptbahnhof, where I am hoping to buy a ticket for that evening. In the back of the taxi I take out the longer of the two letters I wrote to my father and read it through again.

  Hotel InterContinental

  Berlin

  October 9

  Dear Dad,

  Thanks so much for turning up. Actually, that’s a weird way to begin, since I really have no idea whether you turned up or not. But I have to assume you’re sitting in the Einstein with my letter in your hand, otherwise there’s no point writing. It’s what I’m imagining and I hope I’m right. By the way, please order anything you like. I left some money with the waitress. She’ll take care of the bill.

  You’ll have noticed by now that I’m not there. It’s not because I’m late. It’s because I’m not coming. I’m not even in Berlin any more. I left days ago.

  I imagine you looking up after reading those last two paragraphs and rubbing the back of your neck like you always do when you’re annoyed. I don’t blame you for being annoyed. Please don’t think it’s a wasted trip, though. There are things I need you to hear, and this is the only way I could get your attention.

  When I was growing up, you spent a lot of time away from home, and though I missed you I got used to it. Normal’s whatever happens — when you’re a child, anyway. And you have to live for yourself — we all do — or you risk losing sight of who you are. Isn’t it also true you avoided me, though? Or was that only later?

  After Mum died, you certainly went missing. You left me with relatives, the parents of my friends, au pairs. They were nice enough, but they weren’t you. And even when you were there, you weren’t there. I know you were grieving, but still. You seemed to find it hard to be at home. Was that because it reminded you of her? Or was it because I reminded you of her? Maybe you blamed me for the whole thing. Because in a sense I was responsible. If she hadn’t had a child, she would still be alive. There’d still be the two of you. I know we never really talked about her death, but sometimes I imagine us having an argument and that’s what you always say. Why her? Why not you? Because if you’d had to choose between us I know you wouldn’t have chosen me.

  In fact, I’m not even sure you wanted me in the first place. Maybe I was her idea. Her dream. As Rome was. And when she got ill you were proved right, and that made you angry. I can imagine you shouting at her. You should have listened to me! If only you’d listened! Yes, you wanted her, not me. But she wanted me. So when I lost her, I lost everything. Is that unfair? If so, I’m sorry. It’s how I feel, that’s all. It’s how I’ve always felt. Some things you always thought were solid turn out to be made of fucking tissue paper and rubber bands. It’s not until you touch them that you find out. Not until they fall apart in your hands.

  I’m not coming home, Dad. I’m going in the opposite direction, returning to something I’m used to. Something that makes sense to me. I don’t expect you to understand that.

  I’m not even sure you’re reading this.

  Are you reading this?

  Your daughter,

  Kit

  I don’t much care for the letter. It seems confrontational, and the “fucking” is overly dramatic, but I don’t have time to make any alterations. It will have to do. At the last minute I decide to enclose one of the passport photos Oswald gave me. I study the picture before I slip it inside the envelope. My face is joyful, and also fierce, my chin tilted in a suggestion of defiance, which seems in keeping with what I have written. Oswald looks unwholesome, as always, but the exhilaration is visible in both of us. We’re giving off a kind of glow, and I’m reminded of the morning I spent in Pavlo’s gallery. The light that illuminates an icon is an inner light, he told me. In an icon there are no shadows.

  When the taxi stops at a set of traffic lights I scribble on the back of the photo: Me and my friend Oswald, on the night we saw the spaceship. A bit enigmatic, perhaps, given the tone of the letter, but I’m feeling lighthearted, mischievous. Will my father keep the picture? Will he treasure it?

  Or will it end up in the hands of the police?

  /

  I have only been sitting in the Einstein for a couple of minutes when the waitress with the chestnut hair stops at my table.

  “Still here, then,” she says. “How are you?”

  My encounter with Raul left me with bruises on my neck, my upper arm, and my wrist, but since I’m wearing a sweater and a scarf nothing shows.

  “Fine, thanks,” I say. “You?”

  Her eyes narrow. “I’m surviving.”

  Half an hour later, when I have finished my coffee, I call her over and ask whether we can speak in private. There’s a subtle alteration in her face, as if it’s a computer screen and someone turned the brightness up. She has a word with the woman at the cash till, then motions to me. As I follow her outside she says she only has five minutes.

  At the top of the steps that lead down to the street she turns to look at me. I wonder what she thinks I’m going to say. Ever since I first saw her I have found her intriguing. She’s aloof but also provocative; I’m fairly certain she’s bisexual. Freckles are sprinkled across her nose like grains of demerara.

  I ask if she’s working on the seventeenth.

  “The seventeenth …” She looks past me, thinking. “Yes,” she says eventually. “Yes, I am.”

  “Would you do me a favor?”

  Her eyes, which are the color of autumn, a blend of yellow, brown, and gold, widen a fraction.

  “It’s not difficult,” I say.

  On October 17, I tell her, at midday, a man will walk into the Einstein. He will be looking for me but I won’t be there. I produce the letter.

  “I’d like you to give him this.”

&nb
sp; She looks at the envelope and reads my father’s name out loud. She has trouble with “Carlyle.” I correct her pronunciation.

  “It’s very important that he receives the letter,” I tell her. “It couldn’t be more important.”

  “What does he look like?”

  I think of my father as I last saw him, on TV, in the window of that shop in Mitte. He’s in his early fifties, I tell her. Tall, with dark-brown hair and dark eyes. He’s English.

  “He sounds attractive,” she says. “Is he your lover?”

  “He’s my father.”

  “Oh.” She’s about to apologize but then she sees me laughing. She starts laughing too.

  I give her fifty euros. I want her to pay for anything my father orders, I tell her. If there’s any change she should keep it.

  “And if he doesn’t appear?” she says.

  Though I have addressed this possibility — obliquely in the short letter, more frankly in the longer one — I haven’t really wanted to envisage it. The idea that the letter might lie unopened until someone decides to dispose of it isn’t easy to bear, or even think about.

  “You get to keep the money,” I say.

  “And the letter?”

  I shrug.

  I thank her for helping me, then start down the steps. As I reach the pavement I turn and smile at her.

  “Will you be coming here again?” she calls out.

  “I’m afraid not.”

  She looks over my head, into the street. Her face, laid bare by the white light, loses its hardness and becomes much younger suddenly, like that of an anxious child. She runs down the steps and throws her arms round me. There’s a staggered feeling, something intense and yet displaced, the emotion and the situation not compatible exactly, but parallel somehow, equivalent. Tears lift through me but don’t quite reach my eyes.

  She stands back. “Well,” she says, “it was nice meeting you.”

  “What’s your name?” I ask.

  “Lydia.”

  “It suits you.”

  She thanks me with a quaint, almost theatrical dip of the head. “And you?”

  “I’m Kit.”

  She repeats my name.

  “It’s short for Katherine.” I check my watch. “I have to go.”

  “Goodbye, Kit.”

  “Goodbye.”

  /

  That evening I’m just settling into my seat when I see Oswald below me on the platform. He has Josef with him. Since he can’t possibly know I’m there I could easily hide from him but I decide there’s no need. I go to the door at the end of the carriage, slide the window down, and call his name. His head snaps round. Looking worried, he walks over.

  “I was wondering where you’d got to.” He registers the fact that I’m on a train. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m leaving.”

  He looks back along the platform, checking on my destination. “Moscow?”

  “I’m glad you’re here,” I tell him. “It means I can say goodbye. It was good to meet you, Oswald. We had a great time, didn’t we — though I’m sorry you lost your special piece of concrete.”

  “Oh, that.” He smiles. “Well.”

  “I feel it was my fault. If I hadn’t been shouting at you —”

  “No, no.” He looks at his shoes, then up at me again. “It was worth it.”

  “That man, he was so rude. I mean, we weren’t doing anything —”

  “That’s right. We weren’t.” A loud blast from the train echoes off the curved glass roof and Oswald’s features tighten. “Will you be coming back?”

  The sight of his upturned face, half inquisitive, half hopeful, is so poignant that I’m deceived into thinking I know him much better than I do, and that we’ve been friends for years, and in that moment I come close to loving him.

  “No,” I say gently. “I don’t think so.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  He looks back along the platform again, partly because he wants to see if the train is about to leave and partly to use up some time. There are only seconds left, and as with all goodbyes there is the pressure to do or say something moving, something unforgettable. Perhaps, also, it’s in his nature to squander what is precious to him, and then regret it later.

  “Can we keep in touch?” he says. “Can I call you?”

  “Best not.”

  He nods. It’s the answer he expected.

  “In fact, here,” I say, “take my phone.” I hold out the BlackBerry Cheadle gave me.

  Oswald laughs, then shakes his head. “You can’t just give me your phone.”

  “I don’t need it anymore.”

  “You don’t need it?”

  “No.”

  His hand lifts into the air, then falters.

  “Take it,” I say. “It’s probably stolen anyway.”

  He reaches out and takes the BlackBerry, then he stares at it as if he has never seen one before.

  “Maybe I’ll send you a postcard,” I say.

  He looks at Josef who is sniffing at a puddle. I don’t think he believes me.

  “How come you’re here?” I ask him. “I mean, it’s late.”

  “I like stations.” He pulls Josef away from the wet patch. “Josef seems to like them too.”

  “Gleich und gleich gesellt sich gern,” I say. Birds of a feather. It’s wittier in English but he still smiles. I lean out of the window. Farther up the platform a green light is showing.

  “I never told you about the parcel,” Oswald says.

  The train jerks, then checks.

  “It wasn’t anything important,” he goes on, the words tumbling out. “It was just an excuse to talk to you. We’re not allowed to talk to customers, you see — not unless we’re serving them.”

  I remember the weight of the package. “So what was inside?”

  The train jerks again and starts to move.

  Oswald seems calmer suddenly. Even though the train’s pulling away from him, even though the distance between us is increasing, he takes his time.

  “Bones,” he calls out. “Bones for the dog.”

  A smile cracks his face wide open.

  He shouts something else but I can’t hear him above the hiss and screech of the departing train. The platform slides past, and his face becomes a pale dot. I watch until he’s hidden by a bend in the track, then I close the window and return to my seat. The train picks its way over the points like a drummer trying to find a rhythm. Bones for the dog. I’m smiling too.

  THREE

  We arrive in Warsaw just after three-thirty in the morning. I leave my compartment and walk along the platform. The low ceiling traps the scorched smell of trains. At a kiosk run by a woman with peroxide hair I buy a liter bottle of water. Cool and metallic, it has the same taste as the night.

  No sooner has the train pulled out of the station than I doze off, only to be woken at dawn by a guard from Belarus who checks my transit visa. Though I have fled Berlin, memories of the Croatian still haunt me. I regret having told him about my mother; it’s not something he should know. I try to shut him out but the images keep coming. He hurls a lamp across his room. He opens the fridge and swallows the miniatures one by one — gin, vodka, whiskey, rum. He reaches for the phone and dials. Who’s he calling? I feel a growing apprehension about what might happen when we cross the border into Russia. What if Cheadle’s friends have seen to it that my visa is rescinded? What if I’m turned back?

  Along with her will, my mother left a letter asking that her ashes be scattered in the Protestant Cemetery. We would often walk from Via Giulia. It was the Roman equivalent of going to the park. In the spring, when the daisies flowered, the grass was a dazzle of white. On summer afternoons the trees stood in deep pools of shade. We used to visit the famous people — Keats, Shelley, Goethe’s son — or watch stray cats eating pasta near the Pyramid of Cestius. My mother talked about the contrast between the peace inside the walls and the traffic jams and shouting just beyond. It was a cusp o
f a place, she said, removed from life yet still a part of it. Her wish made sense — it sounded like her — but my father told me that unauthorized scattering was forbidden, and also disrespectful. The urn containing my mother’s ashes could be “interred” in the cemetery wall, he said, but until that could be arranged it would be kept in a drawer in his bedroom.

  One weekend, while he was out of the country, I took the urn from his chest of drawers and tipped the ashes into a plastic bag. Coarse and granular, like gravel, there was more than I had imagined there would be. I left the apartment with the bag hidden under my dress. It was an August afternoon. Gray and pale-orange clouds with messily torn edges bumped about in the sky, and my body ran with sweat where the plastic pressed against it. The streets were hot and quiet, everyone at the beach.

  I had been worried the gatekeeper might search me, but when his eyes met mine he nodded and let me through. Inside the cemetery I wandered aimlessly, pausing at the place where Shelley’s heart is buried. Then I remembered how my mother and I would often settle beneath a certain cypress tree and snack on chocolate or figs. Once I had found the tree I dropped to my knees and trickled the ashes in a circle round the trunk. In daylight they looked obvious, a glaring white. Someone was bound to notice. I was just thinking I would have to cover them with blades of grass when the air shifted. Thunder banged overhead, loud as a dustbin lid. Seconds later, the rain came down. The ashes darkened and sank into the earth.

  My father lost his temper when he found out what I had done but my anger more than equaled his.

  “It’s what she wanted,” I shouted.

  “You broke the law —”

  “I don’t care. You think she was happy in a drawer?”

  I put my face close to the train window. Flat fields show through a mist of condensation. There are no primary colors anymore, only faded browns and greens, drained yellows, subtle shades of gray. No houses, no people. A kind of wilderness. Out in the corridor I slide a window open. The air smells of parsnips and stainless steel. I whisper the word Russia to myself, and a shiver travels up my spine.