How I Lose You

by Kate McNaughton

  Walking to the sliding doors of the Arrivals terminal awakened a familiar fantasy: on countless arrivals in airports the world over, she would imagine that there was someone waiting for her on the other side, some long-lost friend or dark handsome stranger. As the doors parted to let her through, she would scrutinize the faces in the waiting crowd, searching for a flicker of recognition, a friendly smile – and, advancing into the battery of flickers and smiles aimed all around her but not at her, closing in on hugs and kisses and yelps of joy and then walking clean past them, she would feel a delicious thrill of solitude. She would walk briskly away from the reunited lovers, the happy families, the polite business greetings, and revel in the sense of her own freedom.

  Once, a long time ago, she had shared this fantasy with Adam, and on a handful of occasions after that he had surprised her by standing there waiting for her on her return to London. The first time he had done it, she remembered, was when she had returned from the Congo. They had had terrible conversations throughout that trip, a string of near arguments intercut by crappy hotel internet connections, progressively aggravated by the exhaustion Eva was feeling as her journey drew to a close, and no doubt also by Adam feeling bored and alone in London, and worried about her, and also worried about – well, yes, that whole situation. It was only in recent weeks that it had occurred to Eva what those trips must have felt like to him. That the sense she would get of being uprooted, violently thrown into a different reality, the shock of readjustment that would accompany her return every time – that he must have experienced a mirror image of these feelings, that the dislocation could not have been one-sided. Why had they never talked about it? Eva would have the conversation with Adam in her head. She spent a lot of time in internal dialogue with Adam these days. It seemed the only thing to do, but also a travesty of his memory, since how could it be fair to turn Adam purely into a creation of her mind?

  When Eva had arrived at Heathrow that time, even more exhausted than the night before and still bristling from their last terse exchange, the unexpected sight of him waiting for her had made her angry, as though he had come purely to rob her of her freedom, to put his stamp on her; though she had also felt some relief that she would be driven home rather than having to fight her way back on the Tube.

  The next time he had done it, though, a couple of years later, she had had enough lonely returns to be caught completely off guard again, and this time she had been overjoyed to see him, having spent the whole flight back daydreaming about nestling into his arms. She remembered scanning the crowd, caught in a paradoxical space between her fantasy of finding a friendly face and her certainty that none would be there – and then, against all odds, meeting Adam’s eyes, seeing the delighted smile on his lips at having been a step ahead of her.

  Now, she strode through the exit at Berlin Schönefeld, and cast her eyes over the small huddle of welcomers. Her heart sank, leapt, stopped, shattered in her ribcage as she saw, there, behind the fat man in the flak jacket, Adam looking at her with his familiar smirk. By the time she had taken her next step, though, he was gone, leaving in his stead a youngish man with only the most passing of resemblances to him. These tricks of the light – of her eyes, of her mind – wearied Eva. They were like scenes from a second-rate Hollywood melodrama – and yet so real, so anguishing to experience. The world seemed a more protean place, now that she had a mind so desperately in need of a change to the laws of physics, so hungry for a resurrection. She understood those old myths so much better now: how Orpheus’s love for Eurydice could have been strong enough to overpower even Hades, how you could feel a love so deep it would be conceivable for it to overcome death itself. And so hers did, casting projections of his face on to the canvases of other people’s bodies wherever she went.

  In her anger, that first time that Adam had come to meet her at the airport, she had felt tempted to walk right past him, to turn her back on his attempt at a reconciliation. Now, turning her back on this Adam who wasn’t Adam, she felt guilty that his expectant ghost would be left hanging behind her, as dismayed and hurt as the live Adam would have been if she had walked past him all those years ago. Like Orpheus, she could feel the weight of her loved one walking behind her; like him, she wanted, with a strength of want that could have toppled mountains or turned cities to dust, to turn round and set eyes on her beloved brought back from the dead. But Eva was wiser than Orpheus, knew that the only way to keep Adam behind her was to point her eyes straight ahead. So that was what she did, and she wondered whether anyone here could see the evanescent figure that was trailing her.

  She took the slip of paper with Ulrich’s address on it out of her pocket and glanced at Adam’s handwriting, drawing comfort from the familiar scrawl. Then, before she knew it, she was out of the terminal. Cool, German air rushed into her lungs, and she fancied it still bore the scent of the Siberian pines it was born in before rushing over the Urals and the Central European Plain. She looked up at the dull grey sky and the tired grass beyond the car park: so this is the heart of Europe.

  She paused, not knowing where to go from here. She felt on the threshold of something, as though each step she took might either send her plummeting off a rock face, or lead her into the splendour of a hidden valley. She had never before felt so completely alone. She had always travelled with other people before she started working, and on her numerous trips as a journalist had always had Adam and the foreign news desk within a text’s or a phone call’s reach. How much she had shared with Adam – how many small, quotidian details, about being on a train or in a café or across from a man who looked like the fat, Afghan version of Henry – how many texts and emails and insignificant chatter, the stuff of life. Now she had to make those comments to him in her mind, like a madwoman.

  A yellow sign saying ‘S-Bahn’ pointed her along a grim strip of asphalt, which small handfuls of people were trudging up and down. They were all young, many in couples or groups of friends, or alone but with an air of excitement and confidence in their own good fortune. Eva followed them along, aware of the loud rattle of her four-wheel suitcase in the midst of all these backpackers.

  The walk led to the S-Bahn station, a drab clutter of newsagents and wurst stalls in a tunnel underneath the rail tracks. Eva floundered as she tried to work out which platform to go to, until she noticed that one of them said the train would go via Alexanderplatz, the only name she recognized and which she knew was in the centre of town. She walked up to the platform, and was struck once again by the ease with which she navigated this place that was at once so foreign and so familiar. Where other tourists were squinting at the incomprehensible timetables and ticket machines, she breezily studied her options, finally selecting a monthly travel ticket: after all, she was here indefinitely, wasn’t she?

  She boarded the train, a boxy, plasticky thing with plenty of room for bikes and hardly any passengers – so unlike the cramped London Tube. It set off, whizzing alongside a road through a flat landscape of houses and barren fields. This is the heart of Europe: this dreary plain, these faceless suburbs, these semi-industrial complexes. This is Prussia, those feathered warriors. This is East Germany, that grey utopia.

  At a station called Betriebsbahnhof Schöneweide, an enormous dog stepped on to the train, followed by a man who was presumably its owner. The dog looked like an Alsatian, but was about the size of a Great Dane. Its massive head wore a meek expression, two kindly eyes looking out over a muzzle that could easily chew your arm off. The man had a similar air: grizzled, handsome, a twinkle in his eye. They sat down in the square of seats next to Eva’s, the man with his nose in a book, the dog on its haunches and sniffing the air with relaxed curiosity.

  Then the train hit the city. After Treptower Park, it soared over the Spree, revealing a majestic vista of industrial riverside buildings, a white statue of two wrestling stick men with their feet in the water, and, in the distance, the futuristic shape of the Fernsehturm. River vistas were Eva’s favourite in all the cities she
visited: they all had similar perspectives, a certain grandiose sweep, and yet they were all so unique to the place they were in, a quintessence of it. Nowhere was the perfection of Paris more evident than when you drove along the berges of the Seine; nowhere did the City of London boast its opulence more proudly than seen from one of the bridges straddling the Thames. Berlin looked huge and eclectic glimpsed during this brief crossing: a jumble of high rises, wastelands, giant neon adverts and artworks. Then the train dived back into the city: grey buildings, graffiti, patches of land where nothing was.

  Just before Ostkreuz, the train paused in an urban void. Grey cement façades, a slip road rising slightly alongside the railway: it was like a place you had always expected but never known, familiar in its strangeness. It might have been what you’d be met with if you sat on a Tube train till Stanmore, Walthamstow, Cockfosters: the bare necessities of a city – walls, roofs, transport routes, and a lifeline connecting it to the pulsating centre. But here she was almost at the centre already, just three stops away from Alexanderplatz. As though Berlin were just an assemblage of liminal spaces, concentric circles of excentricities.

  At the station, a young woman got on, and sat down opposite the man with the dog. The dog, by this point, had lain down behind his master’s seat, just by the entrance doors to the carriage, so that each new traveller was greeted by a nodding Cerberus. Now, though, as the train pulled out and rattled between rows of square windows and tiny balconies, it rose with a languid huff and turned its huge body towards the girl. She looked like a student, early twenties probably, casually pretty, her attention plunged into a book which was removing her far, far away from this train, this day, this particular set of contingencies in the time–space continuum. The dog stood contemplating her with interest, then started inching towards her. It was like watching a car crash in slow motion, as the formidable beast closed in gently on this rose petal. Only when it nuzzled its way into her lap did the girl lift her eyes from her book and register her admirer. He looked up at her with sad brown eyes. Outside the window, the buildings shooting by were gradually gaining colour and character – perhaps this city did have a centre after all. The girl, after a few moments of shock at having such a behemoth put its head between her legs, smiled kindly and patted it. The morning sun cast a golden light on orange, yellow, glowing warm buildings.

  The dog’s owner, who had been following the whole scene out of the corner of his eye, clicked his tongue, and the beast promptly retreated to lie at his heels. He smiled charmingly at the girl. The train was pulling out of Warschauer Straße now, hurtling through a no-man’s-land beneath the rest of the city. Scores of other railway tracks stretched out to the left of it, while on the right Eva caught sight of a lonely football cage, its wire meshing absurdly or artistically dotted with green plastic buckets. Over on the other side of the river, a giant prefabricated purple box sat surrounded by tractors and piles of mud, sporting a neon sign that seemed to have no one to flash at but her. The grizzly man had started chatting to the pretty girl. Eva envied them the ease of the meeting, the warmth of the smiles, their artifice-less good looks. The older man was probably a bit of a rogue, a charmer who had done this a thousand times before and was only really capable of returning the fidelity of his dog. The girl was probably young and innocent enough to have her heart broken. But oh to be that young and innocent, to have your heart broken by a rakish older man!

  Eva’s eyes met those of the dog, gazing up at her with the mournful compassion of the mutually excluded. But though she would gladly have run her hand over its soft, silky crown, the animal stayed put, welded now to the patch of floor by its master’s feet.

  She turned again to the city flashing by outside her window: it was tower blocks in the best Soviet style now, huge buildings that looked as though they had been fashioned out of cardboard. Adam had told her about them, how there was an avenue here that could have been Moscow, and how he loved to cycle along it. She imagined him now, zipping alongside her train on a ghost bicycle, the wind in his hair. She wondered if her mother had cycled along it too, as a girl, on a more old-fashioned bike, when the buildings were being put up, perhaps. The tower blocks ran dully in front of her eyes. If Communism had won the battle, would the stuccoed façades of Chelsea have seemed as mistaken in their delusions of grandeur as these drab buildings did now? If her mother hadn’t left East Germany, would these cold tower blocks have looked like home to Eva?

  But, already, these remnants of a glorious workers’ past were being replaced by enormous holes in the ground and semi-constructed buildings, the triumphs of capitalism gradually taking over Alexanderplatz. Adam had told her about this, too. Where East German families would once have sauntered over a vast expanse of concrete of a Sunday afternoon, the gut of a future shopping mall was exposed for all to see, all concrete girders and steel rods reaching for the sky, soon to welcome those same families – a little older now, frazzled around the edges, world-weary after so many regime changes – into a warm, stultifying circus of special offers and elevator music. Eva tried to imagine where the giant bust of Lenin that once adorned the square would have stood; but there was no room left for him now, amid the shops and the advertising panels.

  When the train doors opened at Alexanderplatz, the man and dog and the girl got off, with an offer of coffee proffered and accepted. Eva followed them: she needed to change trains here to go to Ulrich’s. She watched them disappear down an escalator, and felt a pang of jealousy: she had never gone off for coffee with a strange man like this – she and Adam had been so young when they got together. And now that she could, she didn’t want to. Had Adam seen pretty girls on the Berlin S-Bahn and wished he could have invited them for a coffee, wished that he hadn’t pledged his best years to her, Eva? Had he walked around Alexanderplatz thinking about her, or about something completely different – somebody completely different?

  She took the slip of paper with Ulrich’s address on it out of her pocket and stared at Adam’s handwriting, as though that was going to give her any answers. And she thought about the other slip of paper she had stowed away in her luggage, the other address, also found at the bottom of that cardboard box: Lena Bachmann, Finsterstraße 45. She made her way down into the belly of the U-Bahn station, and wondered what it was she was looking for here, exactly.

  THIS IS A memory that has no beginning. It starts in medias res, or rather does not start, or end, but hovers in her mind like a multitude of photographs strewn across a carpet, images side by side and on top of each other, fragments of time freed of the links of cause and effect.

  She sees her father ushering her into the living room, whispering a ‘Quiet, darling’ of uncommon gravity.

  She sees so many pictures on the TV screen. A young man with slick, jet-black hair, eyes gleaming under a battery of photographers’ flashes, smiles straight into the camera; he is so completely, perfectly happy that Eva feels she might burst with joy. She falls in love for the first time in her life; his bright, clever eyes, his long nose and cheekbones will remain with her for much of her adolescence.

  She sees the crowd around him, hundreds, thousands of people, as far as the eye can see, sitting with their feet dangling in mid-air over lurid graffiti, arms around each other, singing, grinning into the wind.

  She hears a litany of words that mean nothing to her then: Bornholmer Straße, Schabowski, Checkpoint Charlie, Gorbachev, Honecker, Kohl, Friedrichstraße, die Mauer, die Mauer.

  She sees a woman in a glowing department store thrust a handful of banknotes into a journalist’s face, talking enthusiastically as she gestures around her towards an escalator, a shoe shop, a promotional offer for Christmas tree decorations.

  She sees a pickaxe pounding at the Wall, which splinters with surprising ease, revealing dusty grey cement under the bright paint. Hands claw at it, frittering it away, and though she is only ten, Eva can see the avidity, the anger, the joy that these fingers express.

  She feels hungry, because it is past
her dinnertime, and no one seems to want to unglue themselves from the television to make something to eat.

  She sees a weary official blink up at a crowd of journalists and mumble a few words which set off a frenzy in the room, questions shouted over each other at this little stammering man.

  She sees a soldier with his rifle hanging limply by his side.

  She sees a crowd flood past a raised barrier.

  And next to her sits her mother, watching the television, silent and perfectly still, two streams of tears on her cheeks flowing as steadily as the thousands of people pouring through concrete gaps into the promise of West Berlin.

  STILL IN THE bleariness of half-sleep, Eva reaches out and runs her hand over the empty mattress beside her.

  She wonders first where Adam is, then where she is.

  On the other side of the wall, there is a mechanical sound, the clicks of plastic against plastic and whirrs which she eventually identifies as paper being pushed out of a printer, just as she identifies the room around her as being her bedroom in her parents’ house, remembers that this is where she is.

  Which does not answer the question of Adam’s whereabouts.

  She gets out of bed, slips on her dressing gown and goes out into the corridor. She says his name as she pushes open the door to her father’s study.

  ‘Ad …?’

  Sudden, shuffly noises. Adam, lit only by a desk lamp and a rim of light from the printer, is staring at her with widened eyes.

  ‘Ah. Hi.’

  ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘Ah, yes, fine – sorry, you just surprised me there, I thought I was the only person awake in the house.’

  The soft, blue glow of the printer is strangely alluring – Eva steps towards it like an absent-minded moth, makes to pick up the papers it has spooled out, but Adam grabs them first and holds them face down against his crotch, as though to protect his modesty.