“Why did you come so quickly?” she said, lifting her hips and pulling her black pantyhose up over her rump.
She described the second time they made love as “exponentially better”. He discovered over time that she was indeed a little bit frigid. She was articulate about sex, but not particularly sensual. She couldn’t have sex – even oral sex, which she preferred – without first taking some barbiturate or other. Otherwise, she wasn’t that interested.
The second time, in her sixth-floor studio in Sierichstraße, he was on fentanyl and she was on ecstasy. A sound woke him in the early hours. At first he thought it was Gus – he had had to lock his dog in the bathroom after Pericles became aggressive. Then he saw Bettina’s silhouette on the window ledge. The curtains were open. She was wearing his jacket, her long thin legs drawn up under it, and she was looking down at the Alster. Smoking a cigarette and weeping.
“Thank you.”
“For what?”
“You’ve freed me . . .”
He put his arm around her.
“From the social body.”
He had no idea what she was talking about. Tenderly he stroked her arm through his jacket. “What social body?”
“The public self.”
He guided her back to bed. Extinguished her cigarette. Held her to his chest. She was quiescent as he pulled off the jacket and extracted her arms. Before she would allow him to touch her she had to tell him something. “You don’t have to say anything.” Her words smelled of hand-rolled tobacco, a strand of which he had tasted in their first kiss. “I’ve never said this before. But I have to say it.” And declared herself.
He savoured the silence. Not yet feeling what he was about to say, but thinking, I will feel this. He lay beside her in the dark and said after a pause: “I love you too.” He could hear Gus whining.
In the dawn the sky was red, like a torch held up to a hand. When the sun peeped over the Alster and into the two front windows, he recognised the studio. The place where he had first met Sepp.
Lying on top of him, Bettina asked about his other relationships. He told her about Anita.
“Why did you break up?” she said, animated, and he wondered if this was her domain.
“It had run its course.”
“Oh, come on. Which one of you was unfaithful? Someone’s dumped or someone dumps.”
“We inflicted on each other our growing pains,” he said awkwardly.
“One can tell by a man’s chin whether he’s been unfaithful,” stroking the phrase like a dog she had just fed.
“What does my chin tell you?”
She laughed annoyingly and sat up, folding her arms on his chest. “Who was she?”
“Nobody.”
“An affair?”
“No, it wasn’t an affair. I was very young. I was impetuous. She wasn’t anyone important.”
“Don’t you dare say that about me one day.”
“I’ll never have to.” Then: “Hug me.” Then: “Please don’t let me let you go.”
Later that morning he bumped into Teo in Gänsemarkt. “How easy it seems. It is like falling.”
They went to exhibitions and to restaurants, where he paid, and to clothes shops in Gänsemarkt, where she paid. She wanted him to be wearing Thomas-I-Punkt. “Sweet, I’m so tired of seeing you in those sophomoric garments of yours that I’m going to take you to a proper store.”
She became his first serious companion since Anita. He could tell that her artist friends thought they were tremendously unsuited, but he felt happier than in a long while. She was twelve years older and much more experienced. It was the first time in his professional heart that he had been leaned on. That summer he shallowed himself in a procession of opening nights, champagne dinners, camera flashbulbs.
He had known her six weeks when a photograph appeared in a gossip column above the caption “Wedding bells for Artist Bettina Grau?” The text referred to Peter as a paediatrician, anticipating his appointment by two years.
“You look like you’re posing in a mortuary,” he said.
She quite liked that. “Then you know what that makes you, sweet?”
It was at the end of a warm day, bright but not radiant, when she asked him to marry her. He had taken her to dinner in a new Italian restaurant off Gänsemarkt. They were walking along the Alster to her studio when she said, “Do you want to get married?”
He was taken aback and in a strange way relieved. “Yes,” he said. Then, concerned that she hadn’t heard: “Yes.”
“But no children,” she said, stopping to untangle Pericles’s lead. “You can’t be a serious artist and have children.”
He, who specialised in children, felt ambushed. Even if he didn’t want children at the moment, it was an enormous thing to have to digest and dissolve. Not wishing to betray her, he swallowed his alarm. “Of course,” quickly looking at the lake, the sky inflamed as if stung by a bee. “Maybe the best paediatricians don’t either.”
They went upstairs, where they kissed. She touched his lips with the tips of her fingers and he smelled the dark nail varnish and felt her full breasts against his chest, the almost purplish nipples pressing through her shirt like Pericles’s nose.
“I want to come in your mouth,” she whispered.
No date was fixed for the wedding. She didn’t tell anyone else and nor did he. They had exchanged promise rings, but chose not to wear them.
What they had in common, he would come to realise, was the complicity of pathology. Bettina had an eczema on her hands, behind her knees, and a lot of different complaints he could walk her through. She quite frequently took ecstasy and sometimes cocaine. And under formal clothes liked to wear bras and panties in the neon colours of her dog leads.
For a while, Bettina’s outrageous behaviour amused Peter. He was keeping this artist tensely, slightly nervously happy, and it seemed not to matter that she didn’t seek to supply a commensurate need in him. He was adding to his life, he thought. There was no reason it couldn’t last. His chin on her blonde pubic hair, he told her: “I want to be able to talk and endure with you.”
In August, a fortnight after their engagement, she introduced a new fragrance at the Ascan Krone gallery in Isestraße. She handed around home-made perfume bottles and dared her stylish guests to spray themselves. The response was exclamatory. It was the new green-tea fragrance, but better than green-tea. A mixture of bergamot and peach kernel. She was lauded in Tagesspiegel as the new Annick Goutal. Then it was revealed: the fragrance consisted largely of chilled dog urine. Even Gus had pissed in the bottles. The debate was taken up in Berlin by Lettre Internationale. That autumn Bettina was hailed as the new Damien Hirst.
She never slept a night in Peter’s apartment. She talked of couples who kept separate establishments as a model. Once he finished his time as a locum maybe they would move in together. Meanwhile, he spent the weekdays in Eppendorf and the weekends in her studio, twelve minutes by bicycle, where she cleared a desk for him, an angle-topped davenport at which he liked to sit and watch her sculpt in the gallery above. She still fascinated him. He wanted to be near her, even though he knew she was a fantasist. While she, even though she was contemptuous of his bourgeois aesthetics, had grown covetous of his tough admiration.
Six months passed like this and then as the days lengthened it all went wrong.
When lovers first meet they expose their tenderest nerves to the shock of an intimate breath. But as they get to know each other there is a tightening of armour.
What he remembered most about the summer of their unwinding was not the situation in East Germany – the rigged elections in May, the Monday prayer demonstrations – but the sculpture Bettina was working on in her gallery: a railed-off area reached by a green spiral staircase and where she never allowed him to trespass.
The sculpture became her excuse. Her alibi. She was always having to see someone about it. Work on it. Haunt the medical supply stores and hospital dustbins for the esoteric material
s that she insisted were needed for its creation.
She didn’t say so then, but the sculpture was of Peter. Years later he would be coming down a corridor in a Berlin hospital when he would gasp for breath. Less at the sight of the statue than its title: Saint Peter.
The demands of his residency made him unpredictable in his routine. At first he blamed the tightening between them on UKE’s Department of Paediatrics and a work schedule that physically and mentally drained him.
“You of all people should understand,” he told her on one occasion, arriving late at an opening. “You’re the daughter of a medical man.” He got into her brown Mercedes-Benz two-seater and she drove very fast to Blankenese and they watched the ships disappear into the night until all they could see were the flashes of phosphorescence in the churned water. They had dinner in a restaurant beside the Elbe where a couple recognised her and she drank too much and talked too much. With difficulty he persuaded Bettina to calm down. He paid the bill and supported his fiancée on her high heels up the steep steps to where she had parked her car and she became less hysterical and tiresome.
But it was obvious that she had never been involved with someone she couldn’t control or whose schedule couldn’t be readjusted. She began to retaliate.
In the spring, to celebrate their emergence from four months of fur wraps and legs reflected in puddles and wind that groped like a hand under his coat and flipped Gus’s ears inside out, he planned a holiday.
“Listen, why don’t we go camping in Helgoland?” By now, the beginning of April, the leaves were back in the trees.
“All right,” said Bettina.
Then, at the last moment, she cancelled. The sculpture. She had promised it for an exhibition. It still wasn’t finished.
“Look, I’m sorry about the opening,” he said.
“Don’t be ridiculous. Medicine calls you – and ‘the business’ calls me.”
He absorbed this, but it happened again.
“Where were you?” he would ask. Not once, but once or twice a month. “I waited an hour.” He knew it wasn’t unreasonable to ask. He knew he wasn’t as tedious as he sounded. Sometimes it was two or three hours before she turned up with Pericles at the end of a blazing lead.
“Oh, I had to see a dealer from Berlin.” Or an agent. Or a journalist.
She had claimed that she wanted to marry Peter, but he couldn’t ignore the possibility that he was discardable. Little by little, with each act of carelessness the fact of their engagement subsided into an embarrassment not to be mentioned until it grew clear to him that marriage was out of the question and yet to discuss it risked bringing down the card-house.
And in this stew he met someone.
“It’s not me you’re fucking,” she said one morning, looking daggers at Peter as if he were her uncle. From somewhere under the bed he heard a slurping. “It’s someone else. Who?”
One Sunday in early January he had been working in her studio when he switched on the radio and experienced a strong déjà vu. It was a cold winter’s day and he was hungover and something about the cast of light outside her window made him shiver. Here am I, he thought, sitting at another desk. And was reminded of his desk at school. Of the cubicle where he had stood in this very room. That he was not in control of his life. Still behind the curtain. Evading himself.
On the radio Bach was playing. Bettina was saying, “I’m sorry, sweet, I have to work tonight. I have to get this thing finished,” when he recalled a cantata that he had heard in the Thomaskirche at the age of twenty-three.
He bought five CDs of Bach cantatas and spent the evening in Eppendorf listening to them with Gus. None contained the music he was after.
The idea of tracking it down devoured him, and when Teo sent free tickets to the Musikhalle where a friend was performing in a Bach string quartet he went along.
Teo searched over his shoulder. “Bettina?”
“Sends her apologies.”
After the concert, Teo introduced him to a tall violinist, seven years his senior, with prominent eyes. Peter told her that he came from England, the land without music. “There are worse things,” she said. “Perhaps you were busy doing something else.” On the following evening he waited for her by the players’ exit.
Their first time in bed, he asked for her assistance. “I want to find this piece of music. A Bach cantata.” And started humming it, but not in such a way that she was able to identify the original.
It became a habit. Every time they made love, she had to play a different CD, to see if he would recognise the cantata. Her long face seemed to become more angular each time he shook his head until the moment arrived when she told him that the impossible had happened. The music of Bach had begun to depress her.
On their last night together, she put on a cantata composed by Bach in 1727 of which only this recording existed. She had bought it at considerable effort and expense from a collector in Wedding. She was convinced that this was the piece he was looking for. He shook his head.
In the morning she unhooked her duffel coat for the short walk to the rehearsal room. She did up the fake bone buttons and picked her violin case off the floor. Then she turned off the light and waited for him in the doorway. “I’m tired of this. Time to go. Now.”
He had been on his trip. Now he had to unpack his bags.
“There’s no-one,” he told Bettina. Which had the virtue, by then, of being true. But after his experience with the musician he had sobered up. He needed to be accountable. His final exams were in a few months and he was scared.
He got out of bed and walked over to the window and looked down at Sierichstraße. It was midday and the traffic was thinning, about to change direction.
“Peter?” said Bettina, chewing on the word as if her head were still in his groin. Pericles, hearing her tone, cocked his head. “Please answer me this. It’s all I want to know.” She took a pillbox from her pocket, her face hardening, her Omen jacket the colour of the car seat where Kirsten had spread her long and Lycra’d legs for him. “Why have you drifted away? You weren’t like that at the start, when I asked you back to my room for a whisky and you recited that poem about the Death of Arthur. I’d have followed you to the end of the earth. The last cliff. And then you became distracted. Why?”
She wanted to know. Genuinely.
“I don’t know,” he said, very tired. His chin pointing down to the street.
She arranged the pills for her attention-deficit syndrome and swallowed one. “Down, Pericles.” Then, because he stood at the window and stared at a girl in a samphire-green coat with a fur trim, “Are you sure you’d rather not be with someone else?”
“Yes.”
“Here, come with me.”
She put on her man’s paisley dressing gown and led the way up the spiral staircase.
At last the sculpture was ready. She needed his opinion.
He said nothing, not wishing to hurt her feelings. Initially, he had been amused by her work because of its novelty. On fentanyl he could play the role and provide a suitable reaction. Sober, he found to his dismay that he had nothing to say.
“It’s absolutely wonderful.”
She looked at him sharp-eyed. He had seen her give critics the same expression. “That is the most vacuous reaction I’ve ever heard. That’s just English rubbish.”
“Let me get you a coffee.”
But she was on to him. “‘It’s wonderful, it’s riveting.’ Come on, what do you really think?”
With great reluctance, his eyes settled on the naked figure sculpted from used bandages and already sold to a medical institution in Berlin for a substantial sum. “Listen, I can’t do art criticism to order. It’s hard enough to transplant a liver.”
“What did you say to me? ‘I want to be able to talk and endure with you.’”
“I can’t handle this now.”
“What does that mean? Will you be able to handle it tomorrow? I thought you’d signed on for a lifetime of handlin
g it.”
“Stop this, Bettina. I have to walk Gus.”
Her hand slipped into his pocket. But she wasn’t after his penis. “You’re not walking anywhere,” grabbing his key ring, “until you tell me what you really think of it.”
More than the traffic had changed. Suddenly, she was no longer confrontational. “I need to know, Peter,” in a surprising soft voice.
He told her and her eyes reddened. She smiled wanly as if crushed and then looked away to her sculpture. But it was a wound that passed. He saw before his eyes the blood dry, the clot form, the white skin unblemished. From the moment of impact to the healing, no more than a few seconds.
“Here,” giving back his keys.
“Let me make that coffee,” he said.
She accepted the cup and stared down at the Alster.
“You’re like my uncle,” she blurted suddenly, between hot sips, “who would weep tears of love and then hit me.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
HE WAS SOBER FOR another two weeks and then a 10-year-old girl died on him.
It was a sweltering afternoon in June. All day he was booked to see children in the clinic. “For Christ’s sake, you’re a medical student,” the registrar would say afterwards in his defence. “You were being pulled in twenty different directions. You were busy, busy. And you were interrupted. That’s why most people hate paeds. Ninety-nine per cent of the time it’s clear coasting. But that 1 per cent when they do get sick, it’s panic-button terror.”
In the lunch interval, he went to pour himself a cup of water and a woman bustled in with her daughter.
“She’s having difficulty swallowing,” said the mother, who wore a silver trouser suit with lavender cuffs and a matching lavender scarf. “I just brought her in because she’s prone to strep and I wanted to get a prescription now.”
The girl’s name was Hannelore. He sat her down. She had a pale round face and thin braids of dark hair hanging to her waist. There was a hesitancy about her when he looked into her throat. An anxious expression in her eyes.
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