How I Lose You

by Kate McNaughton

  ‘From Berlin.’

  ‘Oh really? Which part?’

  ‘From Marzahn.’

  ‘Is that East or West?’

  ‘East. Very East.’

  ‘My mother is from East Berlin too.’

  ‘Yes. Adam told me.’

  Ulrich took a sip from his beer. His hand rugged and thick-knuckled around the glass. Had that hand torn pieces of concrete from the Wall, swung a hammer against it, thrown a victorious fist into the air? She thought of Adam’s hands, so slight in comparison. Of Adam now, a thin, ghostly presence – Ulrich a mass of solid, warm flesh. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath of smoke-filled air, and was grateful that no one chose to interrupt the silence in her head.

  THE TRUTH IS, you are afraid of dying.

  Ever since it happened, you have been aware of the fragility of life, of the many angles from which its end can come, and you have feared for the wholeness of your body, you have feared that it might be your own death lurking in that shadow, in the squeal of an oncoming car or the twinge of pain in your chest.

  Every day, you fear death may come.

  It felt at first like this had to happen, since you couldn’t possibly live with this pain, this grief, and being incapable of living, surely you must die.

  But you realize now, this is not the same as wanting to die.

  You realize now that you have been selfish all along.

  The truth is, you do not want to follow Adam into death.

  You are not like one of those tragic medieval lovers, or like those elderly couples people speak so fondly of: she just wasted away after her husband passed, they went within months of each other, they simply couldn’t live without each other.

  You have so much life left inside you.

  You loved him, you did – but not enough to die. This is where your ways must part.

  So where does this leave love? Love, which bridges the gap between selves, but has not convinced you to plunge a dagger into your battered heart and thus stay true?

  ADAM IS ON the loo when the doorbell rings.

  ‘Hey Eve, doorbell, did you hear?!’

  Why Adam thinks she would hear him hollering and not the doorbell, Eva is not quite sure. Nor is she quite sure what it is he does in the bathroom exactly that keeps him there for so long. She has noticed that the amount of time he spends in there has gradually increased over the years, along exponential lines: inching slowly upwards while they were boyfriend and girlfriend, and, over the three years they have been married, positively skyrocketing. And she, the goofball, smiles fondly about it all – it’s amazing how being in love makes you see something endearing even in your partner’s oddest habits.

  She opens the door, collects a package from a sweaty DHL man, hollers at Adam as she walks down the corridor.

  ‘It’s a package for you from a – er – Ms Lena Bachmann.’

  ‘Oh great, thanks.’

  ‘Looks exciting. Nice and thick.’

  ‘Just boring medical stuff, I’m afraid. Woman I met at a conference last April.’

  ‘Shall I put it on your desk?’

  ‘Yeah, that would be great, thanks. Be out in a minute.’

  This is what married couples do: holler conversations through bathroom doors. It makes Eva feel safe and warm inside.

  When she puts the package down on his desk, how could she not notice that the list of attendees of the April conference is lying just there, with the names of the people Adam met carefully highlighted according to some sort of colour code? How could she not notice, without even needing to turn anything over, that the page she is looking at includes the names from A to C, and that there is no Lena Bachmann among those names?

  Though she thinks nothing of it, of course.

  SHE DECIDED TO walk it. There was no reason not to. It was bitterly cold, a real continental wintry cold which made you realize how far you were from the sea and its pacifying effect: how, in contrast, the water lapping at London’s toes shielded it from bitter Januaries. But Eva was equipped now with various pelts: fur boots, thick woollen jumper, leather coat, fur hat – in extreme weather conditions, it turned out that nature provided the best arsenal for survival. And, once you had found a way to encase your body heat, it was a glorious, sunny day; a day for walking, enjoying the light and the sense of aliveness you got from seeing your breath crystallize into icy clouds in front of you.

  And then there was Berlin, stretching out beneath her feet with its cobblestoned streets, its disjoints, its invisible stories. When Ulrich was with her, he would point them out to her, the layers of history: a Soviet block here, a Nazi building there, streets that had welcomed a debauched demi-monde since the 1920s, how you could still see the traces of all that had come before if you knew how to look. And when she was on her own, she would marvel at its fragmentary nature, how incohesive the whole place was, with turn-of-the-century apartment buildings interrupted by blocks of 1960s cement or brand-new glassy towers or simply nothing, and she would wonder where to look for the traces that concerned her, the traces of Adam, the traces of her mother.

  Well, she was doing it now.

  She was like the Man with a Movie Camera, an eye floating through space, recording everything that lay before it with equanimity. She went past a café called Babel, a huge expanse of drinking space, furnished with a haphazard but tasteful selection of 1970s East German furniture: PVC, plywood, lime greens and dirty beiges conjured up the spirit of a discarded regime. The people reclining on the harried sofas, however, were fully of their time, sporting asymmetrical haircuts, smartphones, and doctored H&M clothing. As she peered inside, like Tiny Tim looking in on the good cheer he will never know, a young man walked over to his boyfriend and planted a big kiss on his lips.

  Kastanienallee sloped downhill now, and the flurry of cafés gave way to residential buildings on the left, a straggly park on the right. She’d noticed, taking the U-Bahn here, that Pankow lay not much further up north, and Eva wondered if her mother had grown up in similar buildings, played in a similar park. This one looked sullen and uninviting, as though it had sprung on to the street by accident and now found itself obliged to stay there, constrained by some obscure bureaucratic regulation. She hardly needed to, but Eva checked the address she had found in Adam’s contacts list: Finsterstraße 45. Here was the street.

  She wished she had an excuse for getting lost, for delaying the moment when she would find herself face to face with the truth. She decided to walk as slowly as possible. Eva wondered why she couldn’t have more dignity, why she couldn’t walk upright with tears streaming down her face for all to see, instead of scuttling along, doubled over her grief as though it were a fragile load she had to shield from the elements. It was her lack of anger, that was why: it would be easier to stand tall in the face of some different kind of wrong – some betrayal. Perhaps that was the reason she wanted to meet Lena Bachmann – Lena. If she and Adam had had an affair, she might be able to feel angry with him. Angry that he had left her. Angry that he had moved so far away from her that she couldn’t even close her eyes and see his face any more, and yet the pain was still there, the grief, swelling and receding like waves, but never leaving her alone. Angry at Adam for this most complete desertion.

  Well, yes. But that was a bit unfair on him. Maybe she could get angry with Lena instead. She imagined her – a pretty, confident woman – opening her door to find herself confronted with this deranged English widow bringing news of the demise of her lover. She imagined breaking down, and Lena comforting her. She imagined Lena breaking down, telling her between heart-rending sobs that Adam was the only man she had ever loved, that her life was meaningless now with the knowledge that he was gone; and they would share their grief and memories of him, two rivals united by their common loss. She imagined Lena opening the door, and there being a five-year-old boy in the kitchen behind her, quietly doing his homework, the son of Adam. Or she would walk in and kill Lena Bachmann. Or Lena Bachmann wouldn’t be there
, her husband would, and he would be like a carbon copy of Adam, and Eva would walk in and make love to him.

  Number 100. She was getting closer. Finsterstraße was two long lines of blocks of flats, pale, impersonal. She came to one building that was shabbier than the rest, and noticed its dents and chips, how in places it looked as if an iron hand had ripped fistfuls out of the façade. Adam had told her about the bullet holes: how so many buildings still bore the mark of the street fighting that had raged through the city in the final throes of the Second World War. There hadn’t been as many as Eva had expected, several years of renovations having made a decent stab at erasing the past.

  This was a concrete façade, so the holes were deeper, like flesh wounds. The front door to the building was open; Eva went in, and saw that the walls in the inner courtyard were also riddled with pockmarks. They rose up in elegant arcs towards the windows above, like flower stalks. Eva tried to imagine the scene: the Russian soldiers down here, gunning at every opening, the Germans taking potshots at them from their higher vantage points. They would be boys, fervent and Aryan, dying splendidly for a revolting idea they would never grow old enough to understand. Afterwards, as the walls stood smoking from the shock of the bullets, the Russians who had survived would go up into the flats and rape the women. Eva listened carefully to the silence of this residential street, trying to find the echo of all this violence; she heard a bicycle creak past outside the building, and a baby crying in one of the flats. Wrong place, wrong time – those people were here sixty-five years too early. You draw your lot in life, and then that’s it.

  She stepped out on to Finsterstraße again. She felt ready for Lena now, whatever her story might be. She walked away from the bullet holes, past newer façades that no longer remembered the screams of the dying. When she came to number 45, where the building should have stood, there was a little wasteland: a few heaps of rubble and some dry bushes attempting to grow in between them. Numbers 43 and 47 stood firmly around it, as though they had both had a limb shorn off but were trying to put a brave face on the whole affair. In a corner of the patch of land, behind the rusty wire that fenced it off from the street, a single daffodil blew mournfully in the wind.

  ‘A CROWD FLOWED over London Bridge, so many …’

  ‘I had not thought death had undone so many.

  Why are you quoting The Waste Land at me, Carmen?’

  ‘I can’t discuss that right now.’

  ‘…’

  ‘…’

  ‘Oh, here, I brought you this, too.’

  ‘I don’t like it.’

  ‘What are you talking about? You’ve always loved this stuff.’

  ‘That’s a lie.’

  ‘It’s Fruit and Nut. It’s your favourite.’

  ‘You’re talking to me like I’ve got Alzheimer’s.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘…’

  ‘…’

  ‘Jerusalem Athens Alexandria’

  ‘…’

  ‘Vienna London’

  ‘You’ve lost me, Carmen.’

  ‘Unreal.’

  ‘…’

  ‘You know London.’

  ‘Yes, I do. I also know Jerusalem, Athens and Vienna. I’ve never been to Alexandria though.’

  ‘You’re talking to me like I’m mad.’

  ‘Well …’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘You are kind of mad. I mean, it’ll get better – but right now you’re quite mad.’

  ‘How do you know it will get better?’

  ‘That’s what the doctors say.’

  ‘So we can’t be sure.’

  ‘You’ve got to get better, Carmen – you can’t just leave us to soldier on without you.’

  ‘You’ll manage.’

  ‘We won’t.’

  ‘People do.’

  ‘…’

  ‘I feel like my brain is trapped inside my skull.’

  ‘I think that’s where it’s meant to be.’

  ‘Unreal.’

  ‘…’

  ‘…’

  ‘Carm – can I ask you a question?’

  ‘Of course you can.’

  ‘Does the name Lena Bachmann mean anything to you?’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Lena Bachmann? Adam might have mentioned her. Ring any bells?’

  ‘I don’t think so. Why?’

  ‘I don’t know – no reason.’

  ‘There’s no such thing as no reason.’

  ‘…’

  ‘I mean, my memory is not very reliable at the moment. I’ll probably have forgotten this conversation by tomorrow.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  ‘Is that why you’ve asked me?’

  ‘Ha! I hadn’t thought about it, but maybe.’

  ‘You have a shifty look about you, Eva.’

  ‘So do you.’

  ‘…’

  ‘…’

  ‘It’s such – an effort, isn’t it?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Life – it’s so tiring.’

  ‘Don’t talk like that, Carm.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because you scare me.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because …’

  ‘You’re afraid to tell me.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I don’t like Fruit and Nut. Never have, never will.’

  ‘That’s not true.’

  ‘What’s not true?’

  ‘That you don’t like Fruit and Nut. You’ve always bought a bar before you go on any train journey, for as long as I can remember.’

  ‘Maybe I was deceiving myself.’

  ‘What if you’re deceiving yourself now?’

  ‘Good question.’

  ‘You wouldn’t be Carmen if you didn’t like Fruit and Nut. It’s one of your most distinctive features.’

  ‘Maybe I’m not me, then.’

  ‘Yes you are. You are most definitely you.’

  ‘How do you know, though? How do you know who I am?’

  ‘I don’t know, I just – do.’

  ‘How do you know who you are?’

  ‘Er …’

  ‘…’

  ‘…’

  ‘Eva?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘How does anyone ever know anything?’

  ‘Good question.’

  EVA WALKED ON to the end of Finsterstraße and tried to get her bearings. None of the street names she could see meant anything to her, but then, above some rooftops, she spotted the tip of the Fernsehturm. Alexanderplatz. One place she knew, at least, in this city full of unknown people, unknown streets. She couldn’t believe her mother hadn’t told her more about her home. How much of our lives we keep to ourselves; how secret our pasts. Would her mother have stood here and seen familiar buildings? Would Adam have hopped confidently on to a tram without needing to check where he was going? It was an attractive proposition: to think that she was inside their mental images. But although she hadn’t been here very long, she understood already that it couldn’t possibly be true: Berlin was changing too fast, with its building sites on every street corner, its general air of upheaval. What could be left of the city Adam had first discovered twenty years ago? What could be left of the city her mother had been exiled from over thirty years ago? Words, names, which meant nothing to her, and to them would have conjured up places they would no longer recognize. Why had she come here?

  For Lena Bachmann, partly. And she realized that what she felt now, walking away from the hole between two buildings that should have been her rival’s home, what she felt now was relief. She had tried to find Lena Bachmann, and failed. She would need to look harder, of course, but for now, she had been granted a stay of execution.

  For now, she didn’t need to know.

  So she might as well ignore her.

  Eva turned on to a street that looked like it led towards Alexanderplatz. The light was going now, going fast, and the street was eerily empty. She jumped when a man came round a
corner in front of her, shoulders hunched against the cold. She felt her heart rate shoot up.

  She wondered how she could have become so fearful. Or perhaps she wondered how she had managed to be so fearless in the past. She had wandered alone through blacked-out African cities, listened to rockets being fired outside her hotel window, always trusting that the world would send her back to Adam in one piece, always dismissing his concerns for her. And now, now that she had come home to where half her family was from, a home that happened to be one of the safest and most affluent cities in the world, she was afraid of walking down a poorly lit street for ten minutes. Perhaps she had needed Adam to worry about her so she could feel brave.

  This route had been a poor choice: it was lined on one side by the high, forbidding arches of the S-Bahn, and on the other by some kind of commercial park, all low, square buildings and neon brand names fizzing in the rain. Had Adam ever seen this side of Berlin: its cheap, miserable, in-between zones, not devastated enough to be cool wastelands, performing some kind of obscure function in keeping the more attractive parts of the city afloat? Could her mother imagine that this, too, was the face of her childhood home? How isolated we are by the limits of our experience – by the tiny, incidental meanings that attach to tiny, incidental things and together form what we call our lives. She could have been walking in Adam’s footsteps exactly, and still come no closer to seeing Berlin with his eyes. If you were to take a map and trace her itinerary along these streets, and then add to it all of the routes that Adam had taken during his time here, and then all of the ways her mother had been as a girl – still those three sets of lines would never intersect, the three cities never merge into one, separated not just by time, but also by the thin layers of skin that divide one body from another.

  Eva lost all fear as she walked past the drab buildings of the commercial site: they were too mundane to be anything other than the backdrop to a slightly miserable, lonely walk home. Soon she would be back at the flat, and Ulrich would make her one of his amazing hot chocolates. No grandiose horrors could happen here. Horrors never happened where a Hollywood script would have you expect them: they hid in your bed, and were barely distinguishable from everyday events because they were so real.