Katherine Carlyle

by Rupert Thomson

  I replay the Berlin scenario. When my father reads my second letter, the letter Lydia hands him, he is bound to be concerned, but he takes Lydia back to his hotel and they make love. He falls asleep. An hour later, he jerks awake. Of course. Why didn’t I think of it before? While Lydia showers, he puts in a series of calls to fellow journalists. Using his contacts — his influence — he makes a televised appeal that goes out nationwide. This is a version of my father I have rarely seen before. For once, he isn’t an authority. He’s just an ordinary man, helpless and weak. Still, I don’t doubt he will bring a certain flair to the role. His voice will falter at exactly the right moment; he might break down, or even cry, which is what a parent who has lost a child is supposed to do. My daughter, Katherine Carlyle, is missing … She’s all I’ve got … Kit, if you’re listening, please come home … Most important of all, they will show a photograph of me, though hopefully it won’t be the one in my passport. Taken when I was fifteen, I have dark rings under my eyes and hollow cheeks. When Massimo first saw it he laughed and said I looked like a junkie.

  Cheadle will miss the broadcast — he doesn’t own a television; TV’s for losers — but Klaus Frings, who has three, one in the kitchen, one in the living room, and one in the master bedroom, sees my picture and almost chokes on his profiteroles. Still coughing, he calls the number given at the end of the appeal.

  My father appears at the door of his apartment later that same evening. Klaus offers him a drink, which he declines.

  “She lived here for about ten days,” Klaus says. “She often sat where you are sitting now.”

  “When was this?”

  “September.”

  My father surveys the apartment — the coffee-table books, the soft furnishings, the art. At last his gaze comes to rest on the big unlikely German.

  “I don’t understand,” he says. “How do you know my daughter?”

  Klaus looks past him, at the mysterious gray painting. “I also don’t understand.”

  He describes how he first saw me, at the café-konditorei round the corner, on a foggy Tuesday morning. He says he suspects me of having followed him.

  “Followed you? Why would she do that?”

  “I have no idea.”

  Klaus relays the explanation I gave him. It sounds even less plausible the second time around.

  Impatient, my father asks for an account of the time I spent in the apartment. Klaus describes our evenings together — how we drank good wine and talked, and how he sometimes took me to restaurants. He doesn’t know what I used to do during the day, while he was out at work. I was deliberately vague. Elusive.

  “She was like a lodger, then,” my father says.

  The idea that Klaus and I might have slept together doesn’t occur to my father, but Klaus, who is still tortured by the memory of his impotence, squirms on his chair.

  “Yes,” he says miserably. “I suppose.”

  “And when she left, where did she go?”

  “I don’t know. She didn’t tell me.” Klaus gets up and walks to the window. “She said she’d met someone.”

  My father holds up the photo of me and Oswald. “Was it him?” “I don’t know,” Klaus says. “Who’s that?”

  “His name’s Oswald.”

  “It’s not a name she mentioned —” Something occurs to Klaus and he stares at the floor, one hand wrapped around the lower half of his face. He remembers me talking about the man I was going to stay with. He’s older — more like an uncle …

  My father notices. “What is it?”

  Klaus’s thoughts move back in time, back to the night in the Gendarmenmarkt when, heart still aching from the muted finale of Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique, he walked out of the concert hall. He looked for me in the main bar, and then in the smaller bar. He looked in the lobby. I was nowhere to be seen. Just as he was beginning to despair, he spotted me outside, at the foot of the steps, deep in conversation with a middle-aged man. In the taxi on the way back to Walter-Benjamin-Platz I showed him the card the man had given me. I mentioned the man’s name as well. Something foreign. Complicated. What, though? And then it comes to him: “Cheadle!”

  “Is that a last name?” my father says.

  Klaus nods. “Yes. I think.”

  “Cheadle. You’re sure?”

  “Absolutely.”

  After dinner I return to my room and switch the TV on. I select a Russian news channel — no Norwegian channels are available — and watch a soldier reporting from the scene of a flood. I walk to the window. A snow-covered hillside, sheer as a wall, and half a dozen lagged pipes. That sense of isolation again. Oddly familiar. Comforting. What surprises me, in retrospect, is my efficiency, my focus, as if I have been following a particularly clear and comprehensive set of instructions.

  Cheadle!

  When my father asks where Cheadle lives, Klaus can’t help. All he can do is give my father a physical description. Would that be enough to go on? Were my father to wait outside the Konzerthaus every evening, would Cheadle eventually appear? In fact, what was Cheadle doing there in the first place? The more I think about it, the more out of character it seems. But he wasn’t easy to know, or to predict. He didn’t like to talk about himself — I don’t do the past, he told me once, when I questioned him about his life — though I did manage to find out that his parents were Austrian Jews who had fled the country shortly before the Anschluss, settling first in Milwaukee, then in Madison, Wisconsin, and that he had developed a passion for icons from a Russian émigré he had met in San Francisco in his late teens, a man who, as he said teasingly, had taught him “pretty much everything.” If I were to ask Cheadle why he was in the Gendarmenmarkt that evening, his answer would almost certainly be mischievous or flippant — I was looking for you, baby — but there would be a reason, and it would be unguessable. I imagine my father standing on the steps of the Konzerthaus, coat buttoned to the neck against the chill, on the off chance that the American might once again pass by …

  Is there anything else he could do?

  Hold on.

  Everyone who lives in Germany is required to register with the police, especially if they come from outside the EU. Then again, Cheadle prides himself on being a renegade, and is unlikely to have paid much attention to the law. Knowing him, he will have engineered a degree of invisibility — as far as the authorities are concerned, at least. More fundamental still, there’s the matter of his identity. I have kept his card — it’s glued into my notebook — and I study it from time to time. Is J. Halderman Cheadle his real name? I wonder. I never saw his passport, only a bank statement that I suspect is fake. But if anyone can trace Cheadle my father can.

  I reimagine the showdown. This time it’s Cheadle who is summoned, Cheadle who is put under pressure. What kind of venue would my father choose? An embassy, perhaps — or even a police station. Somewhere that would serve to underline the gravity of the situation.

  A windowless room. Bright lights. The table and the two chairs are screwed to the floor. In this encounter Cheadle is less enigmatic, more aggressive. He isn’t accustomed to forfeiting control. The door opens and my father walks in.

  Cheadle toys with an unlit cigar. “You don’t look half as good in real life.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “You look better on TV.”

  My father smiles, then takes a seat.

  “You must be — what do they call it? — telegenic.” Cheadle makes it sound like something you could catch.

  My father leans forwards. “Tell me about my daughter.”

  Within seconds of turning off the lights and the TV I sink into the deepest sleep, my dreams overlapping, incomplete, and when I wake, nine hours later, only fragments of an oddly luxurious state of anxiety remain — not enough time, too much luggage, a plane to catch … I lie on my side in bed, the darkness absolute. There’s a distant, dull, tumbling sound that reminds me of a cement mixer. When I think about where I am, on that steep slippery curve near the top of the g
lobe, I experience a few moments of vertigo. Things are precarious, and I feel I might slide sideways or backwards, like someone clinging to a roof rack in a car chase. I doze for another hour. I’m tired, of course, but perhaps my body has realized I have reached my final destination and has decided to relax. Though I have met new people and visited new places, those aspects of the journey never had much relevance. What has interested me right from the beginning — what has preoccupied me above all — is the prospect of arrival.

  /

  When I walk into the bar at nine o’clock, an hour after the appointed breakfast time, a dark-haired woman I have never seen before steps out from behind the counter. She seems angry or exasperated, as if my appearance constitutes an infringement of some kind. Her face is round and white as a dinner plate, and the spaces below her eyebrows are swollen and slightly moist, like hard-boiled eggs without their shells. She tells me breakfast is finished.

  “Finished?” I say. “There’s nothing to eat?”

  “No, nothing. You’re too late.” She points at an electric kettle on a low table by the wall. I can make myself a cup of tea or coffee, she seems to be saying, but that’s all there is.

  Before returning to my room I arrange to have my evening meal at seven. I would like to crack a joke about not being late, but I lack the vocabulary and I suddenly remember Torgrim saying it was impossible to get a smile out of the woman who works in the hotel. This must be her.

  That day I make my first reconnaissance of the town, surviving on TUC biscuits and Toblerone bought from the bar. Though it’s eleven o’clock when I step outside, it feels more like dusk or twilight, except for in the east, beyond the mine, where the clouds are a garish chemical yellow, like the flames in a gas fire. I follow an unpaved track that runs parallel to the fjord, passing buildings with smashed windows, an olive-colored van on wheel blocks, and several sledges propped upright against a wall. It’s hard to tell where the settlement ends. There are no markers or boundaries. The place just peters out in a tangle of smokestacks, gantries, conveyor belts, and sheds, the ground littered with wooden pallets and bits of metal whose purpose is obscure, coal everywhere, blackening the snow. A woman in Longyearbyen told me polar bears outnumber people on Svalbard, and that I shouldn’t venture out of town on foot unless I was armed. In Longyearbyen there were signs warning of the presence of polar bears. There are no signs here.

  I turn back, moving past the hotel. The settlement occupies a narrow shelf of land between the fjord and a steep craggy ridge. Though the buildings mostly face the water, they seem randomly arranged, as if they were dropped from a great height and then allowed to remain where they landed. Some look traditional, with intricate white fretwork around the doors and windows, their clapboard exteriors painted in yellows, blues, and greens that have been bleached and ravaged by the weather, but there are also larger, more utilitarian blocks made of bleak gray-brown brick. Municipal buildings like the school, the canteen, and the museum are to be found on or around the square. The naive, almost visionary murals on many of the facades — explorers, castles, whales, longships, domes — stand out against the landscape, like wishful thinking or white lies. There are very few people about — just, sometimes, a woman hurrying along with a plastic bag or a man wearing an orange helmet with a light on the front.

  I walk down a path and across a football pitch, the goalposts rusting, netless, then I climb a slope to a road that is flanked by long low warehouses, many of them open-ended. One contains an enormous eerie heap of sawdust. Another is piled high with bags of cement. A third warehouse is filled with small green tiles, some of which have spilled onto the ground outside. There’s a faded red building with a row of cages attached to the exterior wall and a sign that says PIG HOUSE in English, and when I stop and listen I can hear the animals inside, snuffling and squealing. I’m about to knock on the door when a man appears, cradling a piglet in his arms. With his blue-gray complexion and his sunken cheeks he looks like an undertaker, or one of the undead, but I sense a gentleness in him.

  “Angliyski,” I say, pointing at myself.

  He points at the piglet. “Russki.”

  When I ask whether I can see the pig house he seems to caution me — I think he’s telling me the smell is bad, and that it will stick to my clothes — but then he shrugs and unlocks the door. Once inside, he leads me from pen to pen, introducing each of the pigs by name. Using a combination of words and sign language I ask if he slaughters them as well. Of course, he replies. That’s his job. Heated by banks of ancient radiators and lit by large dim bulbs, the atmosphere in the building is soupy, sickeningly sweet, and it’s a relief to step outside again. He makes a joke about how we both smell bad now, then he invites me into his house, where his wife offers me a glass of juice and some hard biscuits that taste like dust. My hunger is such that I’m thankful for anything.

  By the time I leave their house it is two in the afternoon, and the light has altered dramatically. Though the sun itself isn’t visible, it has risen high enough to illuminate the rugged land on the far side of the fjord. The top half of the mountains is a rich orange, the color of marmalade, and the lower slopes, which remain in shadow, are a muted, atmospheric mauve.

  “Amazing,” I say out loud, even though I’m quite alone.

  At the far end of town I come across a building with the words GREEN HOUSE on the side. The door has been left ajar. I look both ways, then step inside and find myself beneath a huge slanting roof of glass panes, many of them broken or missing altogether. The round columns that support the roof have been painted silver white, with horizontal flecks and streaks of black. This nostalgia for birches, which I first noticed in the mural, seems especially poignant in this town, not just because of its extreme isolation, but because it’s a place that has no trees at all. The greenhouse looks to have been abandoned for some time, the raised area where vegetables once grew now covered with spongy moss and rust-colored grass on which a ragged dummy sprawls, half scarecrow, half voodoo doll, its blank stuffed bag of a face topped with a trilby. Sitting on a chair I sketch the interior — the trailing, desiccated plants, the pipes tangling on the far wall, the fall of gray light through the smashed glass panes. I draw until my feet go numb. When I leave the building, the sun has withdrawn from the mountains, and the air is so cold that it seems to creak and snap like an old man cracking his knuckles. I hurry back to my hotel room where I run a bath. The water that gushes from the tap is brown and slightly sticky. I lie there for half an hour, my body only hinted at.

  That evening I appear in the bar on the stroke of seven. The dark-haired woman remains expressionless, her face Kabuki-like, though I sense an air of grim satisfaction, as if she thinks she might have taught me a lesson. I don’t see her as vindictive or malicious, only impatient with those who fail to abide by what is, for her, completely normal practice. She might also resent foreigners, since we have enough money to come and go as we please.

  I eat dinner in silence, as before. It’s so quiet that I can hear the blood circling round my body — or perhaps it’s the fizzle of the lights behind their plastic panels. Afterwards I make a cup of instant coffee and go up to my room, where I watch a Russian film in which men gallop about on horses shooting each other.

  /

  At breakfast on my third morning a man of about thirty-five is sitting at a table just inside the door, bent over a bowl of dry cereal that looks like puffed wheat. The moment I sit down he looks across at me and asks me, in English, where I’m from. I’m Misty, I tell him. From England. His name is Anatoly, he says, and he comes from Moscow. He works as a doctor in the hospital, which is the red-and-white building opposite the hotel. His contract terminates at the end of the month. When I remark on his meager breakfast, he tells me his stomach troubles him. The pain keeps him awake at night. I ask if he’s on medication. He indicates the mug next to his bowl. Tea, he says. His eyes are red-rimmed and haunted, like a figure in a painting by Munch, and his posture is stooped, his shoulder
blades poking through a thin striped sweater.

  As I eat, he tells me that the town’s drinking water is taken from what he calls “the lake.” Many local people have problems with their stomachs. Also with their teeth and bones. He recommends that I buy water, and points at the bottle on my table, imported from Germany. He will be glad to leave Ugolgrad, he says. The place isn’t good for him.

  Since I never expected to meet anyone who could speak English I view Anatoly’s presence as a stroke of luck, a kind of blessing, and I have so many questions suddenly that I can hardly choose between them. The other places I have visited only engaged my interest obliquely, but it’s important I learn everything I can about Ugolgrad, since I am already thinking of it as home. I start by asking about the miners. Most come from Ukraine, Anatoly tells me. They earn six thousand rubles a month — which is more than he earns, he adds ruefully. They eat in the canteen, using a card issued by the mining company. They buy groceries there too. No money ever changes hands. When I probe him about safety in the mine, he tells me there are many accidents. The ground is — and he holds one hand above the other, then moves them both backwards and forwards.

  “Unstable?” I say.

  “Yes. Two months ago, death. Four months ago, death.”

  He spoons more cereal into his mouth. The individual pieces are so light that the simple act of lifting them through the air dislodges some of them, and they spill onto the floor. It doesn’t seem to occur to him to pick them up.

  I ask if he could show me round the hospital.