“In Lewiston there were just smelly paper mills.”
“But you didn’t grow up in Lewiston.”
“I never said that I did. In fact, I only know the place because, when I was at college, I ran cross-country against a college that happened to be in Lewiston.”
“A Manhattan long-distance runner who ends up living in Kreuzberg. Is that what’s known in English as ‘slumming it’?”
“Except I’m not that sort of Manhattan boy.”
“And you can tell me what sort of Manhattan boy you are later, as I am on deadline for a translation and have spent far too long on the phone with you.”
“Is that a complaint?”
“Just an observation.”
Then she gave me the address of a café called the Ankara.
“I presume you don’t mind exchanging Istanbul for Ankara?” she asked.
“Well, Istanbul to Ankara really is crossing over to the wrong side of the tracks.”
“Don’t forget to bring your passport then. Does eight o’clock tomorrow evening work?”
“Absolutely.”
“Enjoy your Dvorak tonight.”
She rang off. Of course I felt elated, especially as she had lost a little of the distance that characterized our brief earlier contacts, and I was intrigued and delighted to discover that she could be smart and ever-so-acerbic. Most of all, she had agreed to meet me for more than just a professional chat, and I found myself now thinking that the wait until tomorrow would be a damn long one. Impatience is such a curious emotion. We want the next day to arrive now in the hope that we will get what we are seeking, even though we privately know that there is no guarantee that things will ever turn out the way we desire. Impatience is about wanting validation long before you have any idea whether it will be granted. By showing your hand too quickly—by letting it be known you are already so smitten—you risk rejection. You have to demonstrate interest, but not zealotry. You have to exercise patience.
I had another small problem on my hands. When I suggested going to hear the Berlin Phil, I had no idea whether I would be able to score a pair of standing-room places for the concert—and now I felt obliged to somehow find a ticket for tonight, so if (and, more like, when) she asked me how was the concert, I could talk about it. Also: Kubelik conducting Dvorak was something of an event. So I immediately planned to leave the apartment at six, take the U-Bahn up to Potsdamer Platz, and hope to find somebody selling a spare ticket out front.
But during the course of the afternoon a loud, authoritarian knock came on the door. Opening it I found myself staring at the police officer who had interrogated me after the assault on Alaistair.
“May I come in?” he asked.
“Of course,” I said, opening the door fully. “Any news?”
He stepped inside.
“Your friend had a lucky escape. The medics managed to stop the bleeding just in time. He proved to be rather robust for a drug addict. He responded well to the transfusions. As one of the doctors at the hospital told me, he seemed to resist the temptation to surrender to death. He’s still in a serious condition, but he is expected to make a full recovery. Of course, he is now in the throes of withdrawal due to the absence of his ‘substance,’ but you wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”
“You and your colleagues tore the place up, in search of that substance. And what did you find?”
“This is no longer an interrogation, Herr Nesbitt. I just came by to return you your passport. I was able to interview Herr Fitzsimons-Ross this morning, and he not only exonerated you, he was also able to give me an address of the gentleman who assaulted him. It seems that they’d had ‘dealings’ with each other before, though not of such a violent nature. Your friend had the bad luck of running into him in some bar two nights ago. But, again, you’ve never been to this bar, or any place like that?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“Of course, of course. You are the innocent abroad. You know nothing, you see nothing. And fortunately for you, we found nothing.”
He reached into his jacket pocket and withdrew my American passport, along with that hefty notebook he had the last time.
“I need you to sign a document, confirming that the passport has been returned.”
I signed where requested.
“Can you now tell me at which hospital I can find my friend?”
He mentioned a hospital not far from the Zoologischer Garten. Trust Alaistair to end up in a hospital near the zoo.
“And he said he would appreciate a visit from you this evening.”
“Thank you for that.”
“I do hope and trust our paths will not cross professionally again.”
“I’m planning to stay out of trouble, sir.”
“Of course you are—being such a trouble-free person.”
After the officer left, I had to resist the temptation to track down Mehmet and tell him the splendid news that Alaistair had pulled through. Realizing that my evening out at the Berlin Phil was now not going to happen, I instead made my way up at six that night to the Zoologischer Garten. Then I walked the five minutes to a drab 1950s building, with the hospital sign, “Krankenhaus,” at the head of the driveway that led to the front entrance.
I was in luck. Evening visitor hours had just started. In the gift shop off the lobby I bought a box of chocolates to go with the assorted magazines and books I had gathered up from my rooms before leaving. The woman at the reception desk checked the Rolodex in front of her and—after I showed her the required ID—confirmed that Herr Fitzsimons-Ross was in Ward K, Block B, giving me directions on how to find it.
Ward K, Block B was a public ward on the fourth floor of the hospital. En route I passed a pair of exhausted, sallow-looking parents pushing a young emaciated boy—he couldn’t have been more than seven—in a wheelchair, his skin the color of faded parchment, his head bald from evident chemotherapy treatments. Then there was a hugely overweight man in his forties, standing in a hallway, his face pressed up against one of the institutional green walls, crying uncontrollably. Just beyond him was a woman, around thirty, hunched over a walking frame on wheels, trying to negotiate her way slowly down a corridor.
The writer in me wanted to take everything in, focusing my eyes on all the infirmity and despair and sadness around me, making mental notes, knowing I would, one day, use it all. But the other part of me—the man without the icicle in his heart—also had to lower his eyes at times (especially the sight of that child in the throes of cancer treatment) when it was just too damn hard to bear. When I finally reached Ward K, Block B, I kept my vision trained on the linoleum, only looking up occasionally to see if I was approaching Bed No. 232, which, as the reception clerk informed me, was the bed occupied by one Alaistair Fitzsimons-Ross.
“Don’t you know I hate fucking chocolate?”
His first words to me as I approached his bedside. He had shrunken in the days since the attack: his cheeks hollow, concave, his complexion beyond pale. There were two large intravenous blood bags hoisted above him, dripping slowly into his two arms. There were assorted monitors and screens surrounding him, metronomically registering the beep-beep of his heart. He looked so cadaverous. Yet, as always, his eyes shone bright.
“And I don’t want to read any fucking novels,” he said as I unpacked the reading material I brought him. “I hate novels. Imitations of life, written by wankers. Almost as bad as travel books.”
“I’m delighted to see you’re in the process of making a full recovery.”
“I think I might turn vampire after all this, given how I have been feeding on other people’s blood for days.”
“At least you’re alive.”
“And the police informed me that I owe my life to you, for which I will never forgive you.”
“The police say they know who the attacker is.”
“Correction: I know who the attacker is, as I was foolish enough to make his acquaintance previously. Mind you, as he didn’t stab me on the pr
evious occasion we spent the night together, I thought it was safe to hook up with him for another little dalliance. The problem is, Horst paints.”
“I wondered.”
“What do you mean, you wondered?”
I paused for a moment, knowing that there was no way around what I had to tell him and that it was best to get it out and done with.
“The man who attacked you also attacked the three canvases you were working on.”
Alaistair’s lips tightened and he shut his eyes. I felt terrible for him.
“How bad is the damage?”
“Very bad.”
“Define ‘very bad.’”
“Irreparable.”
He shut his eyes tighter, his head sinking deeper into the pillow. We fell silent. I could hear him working hard at muffling a sob.
“I’m so sorry,” I finally said.
“Why the fuck should you be sorry?” he asked, suddenly angry. “You’re not the talentless little shit who did this to me.”
He fell silent again.
“You should have let me die.”
Another silence.
“Thank you,” he said.
“For what?”
“For letting me know now. Had you waited until I was on the mend I would have despised you.”
“I saw Mehmet the other day.”
“Did you tell him?”
“He came by the apartment and saw what happened.”
“Oh Christ. Did you tell him the circumstances?”
“I said that a thief broke into the place while you were asleep. You woke up. There was a struggle . . .”
“I’m sure he didn’t believe a word you said.”
“He’s currently helping me redecorate your apartment. In fact, it was Mehmet who organized all the paint stuff, the sanders, the . . .”
“Why the fuck are you repainting the place?”
“Because your blood is everywhere. But it will be all gone by the time you’re released. And by the way, I really am pleased you’re still with us.”
“I’m not. Those paintings . . . don’t you ever fucking call them canvases again . . . those paintings, they were good.”
“I know a writer who once lost an entire manuscript of a novel he’d been working on for over a year. A fire in his apartment in Manhattan. He’d fallen asleep in bed with a cigarette and was lucky to escape with his life. But his two copies—the original and the carbon—were burnt to a crisp. And what did he do?”
“Let me ask you something: in your spare time do you give those ghastly motivational speeches that your country so adores?”
“Sorry for trying to cheer you up.”
“Nothing will cheer me up now. I am beyond cheerless.”
“And you will start those paintings again, and they will be good. Maybe not as good as you will always think the destroyed ones were. But . . .”
“You’re far too fucking nice. How is Mehmet?”
“Very concerned about you. So concerned that he’s there every morning, painting away. Any idea when they might release you?”
“It’s not just the loss of blood that’s keeping me here. It’s my little ‘problem’ as well. They have me on the ‘substitute.’ The quack in charge of me has said that he won’t sign off on my release until he is certain I have been weaned off smack.”
“How’s it going with the methadone?”
“Considering that I have been in a fucking coma, no problems. But now I can already tell that the withdrawal, even with the methadone, is going to be monstrous. I have several close junkie friends who went down the substitute route. They all reported back the same thing: absolute hell.”
“Well, at least you will get off it now.”
“Stop sounding like I’ve been spending my entire adult life waiting for the moment when I could be near-fatally stabbed by a fourth-tier artiste in some sordid fuck bar so I could finally free myself of the dreaded drug which had so crippled my life. The fact is, I love smack.”
“But since they won’t let you out of here until they’re sure you’re off of it . . .”
“Mind you, I could try to check myself out of here once I have enough blood coursing back in my veins. As the quack and the investigating cop explained to me, the fact that I am Ein Ausländer—a bloody foreigner—presents all sorts of complications, in that it’s clear they have physiological proof I am a junkie. Which means they could legally throw me out of the country. But the Germans aren’t as rigid as the Brits or the French on such matters, though. Thank fuck, they didn’t search the apartment.”
“Who told you that?”
“I just surmised that, as it was a case of attempted murder—”
“You’re a junkie. They tore the place apart.”
“And did they find—?”
“No, I got it out the window and into the trash the next morning.”
“You threw it away?”
“What the hell was I supposed to do? Keep it warm until you came back? Say the cops had done a sweep and found your shit?”
“That was seven hundred deutsche marks of ‘shit.’”
“A small price for not getting busted and evicted from the Bundesrepublik.”
“We don’t live in the Bundesrepublik. We live in Berlin.”
“They’d still deport you. Now you can wean yourself off your addiction at their expense.”
“Stop sounding so fucking pragmatic. When are you next seeing Mehmet?”
“Eight a.m. tomorrow, when we sand your floor.”
“Will you ask him to visit me?”
“I’ll ask, but you know he can’t be seen with you.”
“He told you that?”
“Yes, he told me that.”
“Then can you come back tomorrow night and give me an update?”
“On what?”
“On everything outside this fucking lonely hospital.”
“Tomorrow night’s impossible.”
“Why is that?”
“Because I am otherwise engaged.”
“What’s her name?”
“I’ll tell you if it amounts to anything.”
“It will amount to something.”
“How can you be so damn sure?”
“Because you know it will.”
“The day after tomorrow then?”
“Of course.”
“And tell Mehmet he’s missed.”
I did pass on that message to Mehmet the next morning. The walls were all repainted, and we spent the four hours he had set aside to work here dealing with the messy business of sanding the floor of the studio. The wood dust was torrential, Mehmet pointing out that the parquet flooring was of the cheap variety and seriously brittle when attacked with a sander. Of course, when he arrived that morning I immediately informed him that Alaistair had pulled through—and, judging from the acerbity of his repartee last night at the hospital, had not been too mentally scathed by this attack. Mehmet took this information in with a modest nod of the head, then fell silent until he started telling me what we needed to do to get the floor stripped of blood. Halfway through this dusty job, we took a break for coffee—during which he suddenly asked me:
“You are telling me the truth about his condition? He really will live, yes?”
“It does look that way. And he did ask about you many times. Why don’t you just go to the Krankenhaus and visit him? I mean, it’s not like we live on the other side of The Wall and have every move we make monitored. Anyway, even on the wild chance that you did run into someone you knew there, big deal. You’re visiting a friend, nothing more.”
Mehmet simply shook his head and said, “It’s not as simple as that.”
We carried on working in silence until noon. Mehmet helped me sweep up all the sawdust, then washed his hands, straightened his tie, and said, “Tomorrow at eight.”
Once he was gone I glanced at my watch. Realizing that I still had the afternoon to kill before making my way to meet Petra at that Turkish café near her apa
rtment, I decided to do something that had been anathema to me since my last year in college: I was going to go for a run.
A true confession: at one time in my life I actually saw myself as a marathon man. Or, at least, a marathon man in training. I ran cross-country in school. My specialty was the 10K and I actually came in third once in an intercollegiate track meet. I also spent two years on my college’s running team until my love affair with cigarettes put an end to all that.
Jogging out onto Berlin’s hard, arduous concrete, I was struck immediately by how quickly the old training kicked in again. Setting off I heard again the voice of the taskmaster track coach at school in New York, an ex-Marine name Mr. Toole who always exhorted me:
“Four paces run, then four exhalations, then four paces, then four exhalations. And you never, never deviate from that rhythm. You forget the four-four rhythm, your breathing will go all over the place, and you will lose pace, velocity, staying power. You start doing something goofy like even occasionally holding your breath . . . and I’ve seen even experienced long-distance runners inadvertently make that mistake, because they simply forget the four-four pattern . . . and you will find yourself winded, flagging, lost. In running breathing is energy—and I am going to come down so damn hard on you, Nesbitt, if you forget that.”
But I never forgot that, and jogging through Kreuzberg I kept repeating the same mantra:
Four paces, four exhalations. Breathe back slowly through your nose. Four paces, four exhalations. And never, never, hold a breath longer than needed.
Youth is such a great gift and one which we never really see until years later, when we become aware of the body’s increasing lack of forgiveness for our excesses. As I hit the first kilometer mark, all I could think was: So I can smoke and run at the same time.
A city changes when you run through it. Distances that always seemed lengthy when walked are now surprisingly close, the jaunt from my front door to the U-Bahn station at Heinrich Heine Strasse no longer its usual ten-minute stroll. Then there’s the simple fact that you are rushing past everyone—and, as such, are dodging pedestrians and cars and, in this case, heading northward, using The Wall as a directional marker. But even though my route zigged in toward this barricade and then away down nearby streets, the fact was: The Wall now appeared to be an endless impediment. I could turn left, but simply could not jog to the right. When I followed its northward trajectory, it eventually dumped me out in front of the Brandenburg Tor and the ruin that still was the Reichstag. A left-hand turn and I was now running through the Tiergarten—that big public park through which Hitler’s mob marched when they torched the parliament, and which, prior to that infamous night, was best known during the exalted decadence of the Weimar Republic as a favored place in which to encounter prostitutes of both sexes. Now it was shadowed by the ghosts of an imperial and fascistic past, and by the biggest line of ideological demarcation constructed during this most terrible of centuries.
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