How I Lose You

by Kate McNaughton

  ‘And did he tell you whether he ever found anyone?’

  ‘No. We only ever talked about it that one time, when he was thinking about looking into it. Actually, I think I asked him, years later, whether he’d ever had any luck, but he just said it hadn’t come to anything, and that he’d changed his mind about it being such a good idea anyway.’

  ‘…’

  ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘No, I just – I found … some notes he’d made. Nothing very substantial, but I was wondering whether he’d talked to you guys about it.’

  She had been trying, repeatedly, to call Thorsten Stein, but he never answered. It was driving her crazy, and yet she couldn’t tell her friends about it – the story still felt like something private to her and Adam, something she had to decipher before opening up to the world. Their last adventure together.

  They started walking again. On a decrepit billboard, rising out of the May Day mulch, was a glossy poster for a new luxury apartment block.

  ‘See, this is what I mean – there’s stuff like this being built on every street corner.’

  Henry was wrestling himself out of Adam’s coat, sweat beading on his ruddy face.

  ‘Blimey, it really has got boiling all of a sudden.’

  ‘I wonder what it’s like, for people who’ve lived here their whole lives – having their city be so radically transformed.’

  ‘The ones I’ve spoken to don’t seem that perturbed by it, weirdly. It’s as though the Berlin they lived in as kids, say, is just a different place from the Berlin they live in now.’

  ‘Like time is the space that divides you from it.’

  ‘Time, politics. History.’

  ‘And they don’t feel the need to go back to that time, ever? That place?’

  ‘I suppose only in the way we all do – we all have moments when we wish we could go back to when we were kids, don’t we? Staying at our grandparents’ or something. Or wishing we were back at university. And you get this pang that it’s not possible, but you just have to accept it.’

  ‘Yes. Wanting to turn the clocks back.’

  Carmen’s face has sharper angles, even compared to how it was when Eva left London – but apparently she hasn’t been having too hard a time, all things considered. It’s just they’re all losing their puppy fat – even Henry, whose bulk has solidified into something more dense and streamlined – more substantial, somehow. Already, they are different from the people Adam knew – they are starting to outgrow him. Eva winces at the unfairness of it.

  ‘I’m glad you guys are here.’

  ‘I’m glad we’re here.’

  ‘Yeah, me too.’

  Somehow, they had started slowly circling the watchtower again. On its far side, the slightly elevated surface of a steel door was barely perceptible underneath thick layers of graffiti, like a wound half healed under mottled skin.

  ‘So, Eve – do you think you’re going to stay here, then?’

  Eva looks at her friends – the years they have known each other, the life they have shared, its peaks and troughs. Adam still alive in their minds.

  ‘You make it sound as though you think that’s what I’m planning on doing?’

  ‘I don’t know – you seem … You seem well. I mean, maybe it’s just that time has passed …’

  ‘No, it’s … Well, yes. Time has passed. But it’s more – I feel I have things to do here. With all this family stuff. I want to come home, though. I’ve been thinking – I don’t know, maybe I could pitch Bill some sort of series about East Berlin. Or just do it for myself. I was thinking I could come back to London but still spend a lot of time here – sort of commute.’

  ‘The Adam Lorvener system, in short.’

  ‘A fitting tribute, no?’

  ‘He’d certainly be excited that you’re trying to find out about all this after all.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’ll be good to have you back, anyway.’

  ‘It certainly will.’

  ‘Thanks, guys – it’ll be good to be back.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Henry’s phone again. It was in the pocket of Adam’s coat, which he had draped over his arm, so it took him a while to wrestle it out into the open air. He walked away from them.

  ‘Do you think Henry’s OK?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Well, you know, with losing his job and everything …’

  ‘Oh, he’s fine. I think in a way he welcomes it – it gives him an excuse to do something more interesting. I think it’s been hard for Georgie, though.’

  ‘Not the life she’d imagined.’

  ‘No. But then which of us has the life they’d imagined?’

  Carmen smiled ruefully.

  ‘You’re OK, though, Carmen – right?’

  ‘I’m managing.’

  ‘You’ll be OK.’

  ‘…’

  Eva looks at her friend, and thinks: there is so much I don’t know about you. What is it actually like, to have your own mind betray you? I don’t know what you’re really thinking, most of the time – I used to think I did, but I was wrong.

  ‘Do you wonder, sometimes, what it would have been like if you and Henry had ended up together?’

  ‘What? No!’

  ‘…’

  ‘Honestly, Eva …’

  ‘I just think he’d be happier with you. And maybe you’d be happier with him.’

  ‘What, you mean I wouldn’t have gone mental?’

  ‘…’

  ‘That was always going to happen, Eva.’

  ‘…’

  ‘Better for Henry to be lumbered with a prissy posh girl than with a psycho, don’t you think?’

  ‘…’

  ‘Besides. We don’t know what goes on between them, behind closed doors. Georgie may seem dreadful to us, but do we really know her well enough to judge that? Henry must have chosen her for some reason.’

  ‘Hm.’

  ‘I think you and Adam just liked the idea of the four of us being able to double-date.’

  ‘Ha! Maybe you’re right.’

  Henry was walking back towards them.

  ‘It’s Georgie. She’s on her way.’

  ‘Right, let’s head back then – you’ve kind of seen all there is to see here anyway.’

  They walked away, and crossed back over the scar of the Wall, leaving the mournful eye of the Wachturm to watch over them, Adam’s coat swinging heavily from Henry’s arm as the sun continued its warm rise.

  DEATH IS THE only certainty, the great divider, the ultimate boundary of the self.

  That you can die, and I not die.

  That I can die, and you not die.

  You wonder what this thing is, love, that hurls itself against this boundary like a sparrow flying at a pane of glass, not understanding its transparency, mistaking it for non-existence, wings flapping frantically in an attempt to gain the necessary momentum to burst through, hurtling at it again and again until glass cracks skull.

  The dead hide behind their panes of glass, with their secrets, their closed books. What do they know about themselves that you do not know? What do they know about you that you do not know?

  You fly into the glass again, it cannot be, it cannot be there, your thin, thin bones spread your feathers once more and you slice through the air, head down, determined this time that you will break through to the other side.

  EVA LOOKS THROUGH the window of the S-Bahn as the landscape flutters between Plattenbau, shopping centres and the quiet façades of older residential streets. She still hasn’t managed to get an answer from Thorsten Stein’s phone number, but with Carmen and Henry now returned to London, there is nothing to stop her from simply going to the address Lena gave her.

  They’ve had time to sink in now, the absurdities she has found out.

  They thought she, Hanna, was dead. She, Eva, thought that they were dead, and they, her grandparents, thought that their daughter, her mother, was dead. Why did ever
yone think everyone else had died?

  And how could Eva’s mother have brought herself, with her fratricidal retelling of the family story, to rob Eva of an uncle? How could she have deprived Eva of her true name?

  She gets out at Wollankstraße, and just after passing underneath the dark arch of the railtracks on her way out, crosses over the line of the Wall, the familiar double thread of bricks in the ground. Bloody hell. The bloody thing is everywhere. Stop it, she wants to scream, disappear, I do not need to be reminded of the carving up of this city, I do not want to see yet again the hurt it caused, the hurt it caused my family, and what is going on, why has my mother not told me the truth, why did Adam not tell me the truth?

  Did Adam walk down this street? Did he step over this line of bricks on his way to see my uncle, as though they were nothing more than marks in the ground?

  She presses the buzzer next to the name ‘Stein’, then when a crackly voice asks her who she is, is not sure how to explain, and stammers. She hears the sound of a door opening inside, steps coming towards her.

  ‘Ja?’

  The door swings open, and the man pushing it recoils when he sees her, gasps, as though she is a ghost.

  ‘Und Sie sind?’

  ‘Ich – um. Ich heiße Eva. Ich … Sind Sie Thorsten Stein?’

  He nods, slowly. He is a tall man, with the heavy density that age confers on those who were muscular in their youth.

  ‘Um. Er. I think – sorry. Ich glaube … Sie kennen meine Mutter? Vielleicht.’

  ‘Ja. Das glaube ich auch. So. You better come in.’

  Eva follows him in, through the dark hall of the building. She feels slightly irritated with Thorsten for having switched to English, irritated with herself for having fumbled words she is perfectly capable of speaking. But perhaps it is better this way. The world is feeling unsteady enough as it is – at least she has the solidity, the familiarity of English to hold on to.

  They walk up a short flight of stairs, into the mezzanine flat. Its entrance is filled with a riot of shoes, coats, a pushchair and various toys: a small football, a chunky plastic digger. A voice comes from the next door down the corridor.

  ‘Papa? Hey, was meinst du, wenn wir …’

  A young woman appears at the door, and stops short when she sees Eva. Eva stops short too. The woman is blonde to Eva’s brunette, but the curve of their eyebrows, the angle of their cheekbones, echo each other. They stare, as though they are recognizing something.

  Then the young woman turns to Thorsten.

  ‘Das hier ist Eva. Eva, this is my daughter, Johanna.’

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Hallo, Eva.’

  ‘Könntet ihr uns kurz alleine lassen? Wir müssen reden.’

  ‘Ja klar.’

  Johanna disappears back into the room briefly, then returns with a little boy and girl in tow. They totter out into the corridor, holding on to their mother’s hands, and stare at Eva with curiosity. Eva stares back, and thinks that they are something to her, cousins removed in some way.

  ‘So Eva, please, come and sit down.’

  Johanna bends down to pick up a small jacket from the floor. ‘Nice to meet you, Eva – maybe see you later?’

  ‘Er. Yes. Maybe.’

  They leave her to wrestle small arms into small coat sleeves – Thorsten closes the living-room door, gestures Eva to a sofa.

  ‘So. Eva. You really are Hanna’s daughter?’

  ‘I – er – well …’

  ‘You look just like her.’

  ‘…’

  ‘Did she ask you to come here?’

  ‘No, she – she doesn’t know I’m here. She doesn’t even know I’ve found you. I – She never told me about you. That she had a brother.’

  ‘So it is Adam who sent you?’

  ‘So you did meet Adam?’

  ‘Yes, he came here, maybe – I am not sure – some years ago. But you do not know this? It is not him who told you to come here?’

  ‘No, I – well. Not exactly. He …’

  ‘…’

  ‘He died, you see. And …’

  ‘…’

  ‘…’

  ‘I am very sorry.’

  ‘Yes, no – thank you. And so – well, he’d never told me anything. About – about you, about my mother. But – looking through his papers, I found out … It’s a long story, it doesn’t matter. I’m sorry to just turn up like this. I did try to call your phone but I couldn’t get through …’

  ‘Ah. Yes – the number has changed.’

  ‘…’

  ‘Here.’

  Thorsten hands Eva a tissue.

  ‘And – you’re my uncle. I never knew I had an uncle.’

  ‘I never knew I had a niece – well, until Adam came here. Actually, we thought Hanna had died, trying to cross the Ostsee to get to West Germany.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  ‘…’

  ‘So he’s the one who told you? That my mother was alive, after all?’

  Thorsten nods slowly. He does not say anything, and so Eva stays silent also.

  Her eyes wander around the room. There is a dark mahogany cabinet next to her that reminds her of the furniture on display in the Stasi Museum in Lichtenberg. Behind its glass panels sit plates and dishes of various sizes, the family porcelain, gifted at weddings and passed down through the generations for everybody to spoon their soup out of. And then she notices a familiar twist of ivy and violets on paper-thin bone china, and there it is, the rest of the tea set, there are tea cups and a pot as well, and she wonders what Adam thought when he saw them, the precious heirlooms, the siblings of the one he smashed.

  ‘I – my mother always told me that she was an only child. And that her parents had died very soon after she left East Germany, in prison, both of them …’

  ‘Yes, Adam told me. This is … well. A quite fanciful story, let us say.’

  ‘But – why would she make something like that up?’

  ‘For this, you should ask her – I cannot answer in her place. This is what I told Adam, also. But I can tell you, of course, what happened here. I do not know exactly how Hanna told you the story?’

  ‘She said that your parents were betrayed – that they were meant to be helping a journalist from the West, who was barred from entering East Germany, to come to the GDR incognito. And that someone had tipped the Stasi off about it so that as soon as he arrived, they were all arrested.’

  ‘Yes. This is all true.’

  ‘And then, she said, she was worried that things could get dangerous for her too, because she’d been writing these samizdats that were distributed throughout the church groups, and so she had to escape. And soon after that, her parents died in prison – her mother from a heart attack, and then her father committed suicide when he found out.’

  A half-smile has budded on Thorsten’s lips, dances over them like a shadow. The crinkle at the corner of his eyes suggests he is struggling not to let it grow, unfold into mirth.

  ‘Actually, I wrote those samizdats.’

  ‘Yes, I found out recently.’

  ‘I’m sorry. For you, of course, this is difficult – this story, it must have been hard to hear. But I find it funny to hear that Hanna pretended to have written my articles. She was very opposed to them, back then.’

  ‘…’

  ‘But yes, I must explain to you. Though first I have to say this: you must understand, these were complicated times. For people like us, our family, people who were opposed to the regime or were connected to the resistance movement – it made your life difficult. Not always in a very dramatic way – of course, some people were put in prison, some were killed, even – but your life could also be made difficult in small ways. People would find they couldn’t get a job, or they would come home and discover they had no – how you say, in the kitchen, Geschirrtücher …’

  ‘Tea towels?’

  ‘Maybe? Tea towels? To dry plates and things, yes? So, someone would come home and find s
uddenly all the tea towels have vanished from the kitchen. And so you would know: the Stasi were here. They are watching me. We were not suffering like Russians in the Gulags, but it was a strange time. You often could not know who to trust. And I must say for Hanna, also, she believed in the GDR. In the Socialist project. It was maybe a way of rebelling against the family – In a family of dissidents, the only possible rebellion is to be for the regime, oder? But she believed in it for good reasons. She wanted a just world. And we knew about suffering, even if we were born after the war ended: this city was in ruins, everyone we knew had family who had been displaced or killed. In school, we were taught that Socialism was the way to avoid this happening again, and she believed it.’

  ‘But – then why did she leave?’

  Thorsten looks away from Eva, ponders, ponders. She feels like a child, not understanding, waiting for the grown-up to make sense of information that she isn’t old enough to grasp yet. She looks at him, and thinks, my uncle. I should have memories of being bounced on those knees as a child, a gallopy-gallopy-gallopy-gallopy into a ditch!

  ‘I was the one who was supposed to leave. The plan, over the Ostsee – it was arranged for me. But when my parents were taken away, I decided not to go. I would not have been able to help them from outside the GDR, and of course then we did not know if they would be released soon or not. But the plan was arranged, and then Hanna said she will go instead. It surprised me, because as I said, she loved the GDR, she believed in it being the way to build a better society. But she suffered from her family connections: she could not get a place at university, she was being punished as a way to try and get my parents and me to stop our political activities. And so, I thought this was why she decided to leave: because in the West at least she would be able to study.’

  Again, the faraway gaze: Thorsten remembering things that little Eva is not privy to.

  ‘You say you “thought” this was why she left, though?’

  ‘After the Wende, we – me, my parents – decided to look at our Akten – the files the Stasi kept on us. And there we realized that she had been the one who told them about the journalist. Where they were going to meet him, what their plan was for him to travel around the country without being noticed. It was the first time my parents were involved in something so obviously illegal – up until then, they had mainly just been running discussion groups at the church. And it was Hanna who told the Stasi. It was because of her that my parents were arrested.’