His colleagues at the basement recording studio in the city shortened his name to Greg. They don’t remember him being all that reclusive. He had a quiet sense of humour and could make people laugh without changing his expression. He made a name for himself writing clever jingles for radio ads. He had a lot of trouble with his teeth and used to swallow painkillers with his coffee. In the pale basement where no daylight ever penetrated, where the air was full of smoke and static, people lived on biscuits and takeaway food. Noxious curries that were left lying around on the floor by the mixing desk to be found by the late-night cleaners.
One of his molars had been giving him trouble for years on the road. He said he could well understand why cowboys in the American West used to have all their teeth removed before they went out to work on the ranches. And possibly why they sang sad songs to the longhorn cattle all night to stop them from stampeding. A rotten tooth was like the enemy within.
He sat in agony one day, holding his jaw, and finally decided to go to a dentist. One of his colleagues recommended an old dentist in the suburb by the name of Eckstein. He had regular appointments from there on, stopping off on his way home. The dentist took on a reconstruction job, sorting him out after years of neglect. His gums were in a terrible state, red and inflamed with periodontal disease.
‘Your two front teeth are already as long as your legs,’ Eckstein said.
The dental practice was on the main shopping street, above a TV and hi-fi shop. The door was green. An old, dusty green that people no longer use, except on garden sheds. The buzzer automatically let Gregor in each time and he walked up the stairs with the green carpet and the scent of disinfectant in his nostrils. Every time he arrived up the stairs, Eckstein would come out and usher him into the waiting room, saying his assistant was off ill. He would sit down on the leather sofa and stare around the green walls, listening to the sound of the water drill working in the room next door. On the walls, a number of strange art objects, giant shells and molluscs made of wool and wax and other substances that turned out to have been produced by the dentist’s daughter.
After a number of visits, Gregor began to suspect that the dentist had no other patients. The waiting room was always empty. He never heard any other voices. He had the feeling that Eckstein was only pretending to run a busy practice, keeping him waiting, making all the usual drilling sounds, telling some phantom patient to chew on the other side for a day before finally coming to show Gregor into the surgery.
Eckstein did all the talking, while Gregor stared out through the blinds at the upper windows of the house across the street which had no glass in them and where the pigeons were flying in and out, nesting in the upper rooms. Gregor’s mouth wide open, forced to be silent, while the dentist told him how he came to Ireland from Poland before the Nazis came to power in Germany. Some of his family had made it to America but his grandparents and most of his cousins were killed in the camps. When he was finished, Eckstein spent a lot of time clearing up his equipment, still talking, saying he would love to go to America to visit all his Jewish relatives, but he could never take the time off. Eventually he would say: ‘That’s it for today,’ but they would keep on talking for a while longer, because there was no other patient waiting. With a swollen cheek, drooling from the corner of his mouth, Gregor told his own story.
Gregor asked what the treatment would cost, roughly, so he could prepare himself.
‘Don’t worry,’ Eckstein said. ‘The bill is never as bad as the toothache.’
Eckstein fitted a crown and when the treatment came to an end, Gregor felt like the last man ever to sit in that chair.
Some weeks later, the trouble started again with the ache coming back in the same tooth. Every time he got out of bed and stood on his feet. A constant throbbing as he walked along the pavements. Vibrating like a tuning fork every time he played the trumpet. Gregor felt he had gone to an incompetent dentist who had done a bad job. He had paid and would have to go back to get it put right.
‘You cannot have pain there,’ Eckstein said. ‘There is no nerve left in that tooth, Gregor. You cannot be experiencing pain in a tooth that is dead.’
He tapped at the crown, dabbed it with a swab of ether, compared it to other healthy teeth which instantly sent an icy chill shooting into the roof of his mouth.
‘It’s only a stump,’ he kept saying.
‘I’m not making this up,’ Gregor said. ‘It’s killing me.’
‘Tell me exactly where the pain is,’ Eckstein asked.
Gregor pointed at the crown.
‘This is impossible,’ Eckstein repeated. ‘It is physically impossible for you to have pain there. Unless it’s a phantom pain, like an amputated leg.’
There was nothing Eckstein could do. Gregor left again, but the pain returned. He was back to swallowing painkillers. He went back, telling the dentist that the pain had shot up into his eye. Eckstein carried out more investigations, even going so far as to remove the crown and replacing it.
‘I can take it out if you like,’ Eckstein said finally. ‘If it’s giving you that much trouble. Maybe I can put in a bridge instead.’
Gregor began to suspect that Eckstein had done all this deliberately in order to keep his practice going. He couldn’t bear to have any more work done. He decided to try and live with it. Pinched his cheek sometimes to distract from the pain. And finally, when it got so bad that he could no longer endure it, he went back one more time to get it extracted for good.
Around the same time, the news was out that the Berlin Wall had come down. In the TV shop downstairs from the dentist, Gregor saw the pictures of people standing on top of the Wall duplicated twenty times across the various screens. Again and again the same images of people driving through the barriers, embracing, drinking champagne, while bewildered border guards stood by. The first section of the colourful Wall being removed by crane, reminding him of his own imminent extraction. He put his finger on the buzzer and walked up the stairs along the green carpet. This time he was not asked to go into the waiting room and the door of the surgery had been left open. Eckstein was sitting in his own dentist’s chair, reading the newspaper.
‘Have you seen this?’ Eckstein said.
‘You mean the Wall?’
‘Yes,’ Eckstein said, slapping the paper. ‘You must go. You should be there, right now.’
‘It’s hard to believe all right,’ Gregor said.
‘If I were you, I’d be over there like a light. I’d go myself but for the practice here. Can’t let my patients down.’
He pointed at the pictures. He didn’t get up and Gregor never sat down in the chair again. They never talked about the tooth and it was never extracted.
‘You have to go home,’ Eckstein said. ‘You’ve got to be there to see this thing happening.’
The first Mara heard of Gregor’s return was a call from the nursing home in Nuremberg. Mara phoned to see how Gregor’s mother was getting on and was told by the nurse that Gregor was there with her.
At that point, she could no longer tell the difference between him and Daniel. She was very frail and her mind was going. She didn’t speak any more, only looked up to see who was in the room. They were all present when she died. Gregor, Mara and Daniel. A rainy night in autumn. Rain that stopped and left the chestnut trees outside the hospital stained in streaks of liquorice black. A strange reunion, sitting around the bed, watching her last moments, holding hands, all four of them in a circle, free-falling like parachutists and finally letting her go. They stayed on after she was gone, sitting without a word while Mara cried. They embraced each other in that great emptiness with the long, final breath still lingering like an inaudible whisper in the room.
Thirty-two
Coming back is the hardest thing. After such a long time away, the moment of return seems awkward, mistimed, only half fulfilled. It’s not easy to step back into the physical world, to feel the substance of life rather than the dream of life, to match up the touch world w
ith the inner world. The returning partner has become a ghost, a shape in the imagination, a desire, a longing waiting to be converted into reality.
When Gregor’s father returned from Russian captivity after the war, he was unable to feel anything. He had learned to suppress his dreams in order to survive the extreme hardship of the prison camp. He had watched other men succumb to the heights of longing and turned himself into an expert at wanting less, a denier of desire, a brilliant underestimater, sustained only by what mattered most, the thought of his wife and son waiting for him.
After his release, when he found his wife in Nuremberg and finally walked in the door, it felt like a fake. The embrace seemed unreal. It was too much to believe and he was unable to enter into his own luck, could not understand how he was still alive while millions of others had died. He hardly noticed his surroundings: the table, the two chairs, the stove and the bed at the opposite end of the single-room apartment. There was no sink and the water had to be carried from the bathroom on the landing. And although these alone were luxuries beyond his imagination, he could only see what had been lost and what needed to be improved. She seemed in shock as much as she was in happiness, cried repeatedly and tried to smile, thanked God for bringing him back and said he looked very gaunt. He remained in a kind of waiting room, like a deep-sea diver spending mandatory time below the surface to decompress before being permitted to rise up.
Gregor stared at him constantly. He knew how lucky he was to have a father, to be crushed in his arms with misjudged force. He was excited to see this man shaving and sitting down at the table, eating bread slowly, chewing with a blank expression. He listened to him coughing, watched him lighting up a cigarette, examined hands, ears, nostrils, taking everything into his belonging with such eagerness that his mother had to tell him to stop, to give his father some time. He saw him taking off his shoes to rub his feet. Saw his big shadow cast against the wall of the room by the lamp on the table. Watched him getting into bed with his mother, taking his own place beside her, while he lay on a cushion on the floor, fully awake. In the middle of the night he got up and stood by the bed for a long time, listening to him breathing, his face only inches away from his own, until his father jumped awake with fright and told him to go back to sleep.
His father told them of his capture, how his leg was caught in a wire fence when he heard the wheels of a tank coming up like the sound of bells ringing right behind him, how he would have gone under those steel straps if he had not ripped himself away at the last moment, tearing into his calf. In a cloud of diesel fumes he received a blow to the chin that broke his jaw. But he was glad of being alive, almost glad of the pain, too, because it meant the war was over at last. His stories of endurance confirmed life, but they almost meant more to him than being alive itself, as though the living sometimes envied the dead. He would always remain more war veteran than father, more soldier than lover.
It was difficult to accept any warmth. It took weeks before she could hold his hand and stroke it. He felt the comfort of her presence in the bed beside him, but he had become so trained on deprivation that he could not surrender to the intimacy of her body or take possession of what he wanted most. They seemed to fear each other and threw themselves into their work instead, substituting material pleasures for the honesty of love. Between them lay the nightmare of war, the bombing, the horrors of the front which he had experienced. He woke up with those intruder memories every night. He felt only defeat, shame, the cramped, airless awareness of being wrong.
They were restored by the ordinary things. By shopping. By walking through furniture shops and car showrooms. By cake every Sunday. They stayed up late at night listening to live boxing on the American Army radio stations. They loved going out to the forests. The innocence of nature. The optimism of children. Gregor at the table doing his homework, writing with his head bent over the exercise book.
How could she tell him that this was not his own son? How could she destroy that fragile story of survival by telling him the truth?
Maybe there is no such thing as returning. It’s impossible to go back to what was before, like undoing war, like repairing history. After the Berlin Wall came down, after the euphoria of instant love in the streets, it became clear for the first time how far both parts of the same country had drifted apart in the intervening years. The people in the East seemed more eager and more in love with new things, less cynical, less cool. They had their own ways of being frugal and stocking food, their own idea of bargains, their own kind of intelligence and their own damage. They spoke the same language but with different meaning.
When Thorsten first met Katia in Berlin amid the celebrations, they knew instantly without having to say very much that he was from the East and she was from the West. It was part of the attraction that when they spoke to each other in German, they still had to translate some of the expressions. There were different words for so many things, different concepts, different superlatives. As they fell in love and got married, they created a new family language of their own. Their work forced them to spend time apart. Long before they moved to the farm, Thorsten spent a year as an intern in Bremen while Katia continued teaching in her home town of Köln, so he often had to commute home in his spare time to see her and the baby Johannes. Life moved on in large sections of time and he could hardly catch up before he had to leave again.
When Juli recently had to go to Istanbul for a funeral, she was away for two days and it seemed to Daniel like an eternity. After a few hours it felt to him as though he might never see her again. Walking through the streets of a different city with thousands of other people around her, she seemed to belong to those who laid eyes on her at that very moment. That same evening he discovered he could not remember her face. He tried to visualise her smiling at him, but his imagination lacked the ability to recreate the features which had become so familiar. He could remember all kinds of vivid parts of her. The kinetic texture of her skin as she slid into her jeans, the imprint of her nipple in the palm of his hand, the curve of her neck, but not her face.
Perhaps the face is too much of a disguise. Something which is constantly in motion, a story unfinished, a mask, a representation full of incoherence and guessing, more in the realm of fiction than fact.
When Gregor returned to Berlin after his long time abroad, there was a familiar tension in the architecture, in the sound of the underground doors closing, in the echo of street names. The city was still full of excitement and confusion after the Wall had come down. He felt like a tourist and an inhabitant at the same time. Everything reminded him of Mara. He could see her face, like a portrait accompanying him around the streets. For years he had not had any dreams at night. He wondered if all that brain activity had stopped or if he had got out of the habit and suppressed them. Back in Berlin he found himself waking up once more with an overflow of illogical imagery in his head. Whole movies full of strange, half-material, time-travelling realities. He saw Mara vividly in his thoughts, in every crowd, on every platform. Merely walking down certain streets brought back random images of great intimacy, highlights re-enacted with great precision in his memory. Insane, unrepeatable moments which seemed more real now than when they actually occurred. He recalled standing in the doorway of a bookshop with her one night on the way home from a concert, a hasty, insurgent act. He even found himself going back to see if the bookshop still existed, to see where they had stood once in a different time and where he had almost left his trumpet behind. It was enough to push him beyond the boundaries of memory, back into the physical world. Never before had he felt so much alive in the present, with his feet on the ground, living in the real world of touch and taste. Her presence was everywhere. He could clearly recall the rounded shape of her lower lip and the sound of her breath beside his ear. He could recall inhaling the scent of her hair and the height of her head and the unique angle in which he had to lean down towards her face.
She had almost become too real. When they began to meet aga
in, there was an awkward distance between them, as though memory could never catch up with reality. Painful reunions in which things would have to be said first and explained, apologies made before that gap could be closed. There was a duty to make up for lost time and to convert themselves back into living beings. After such a long time, he had to put the absence behind them before they could exist in the same place on earth, breathing the same air.
His solitude had become an obstacle. He was afraid of her forgiveness, afraid of her loyalty.
‘I’ve left it very late,’ he said to her on one of those occasions when he invited her to go for a walk with him. There were things he had to say to her which were difficult to say while she stared into his eyes across the table of some café, so it was better to walk with both of them looking ahead in the same direction at the path in the forest.
‘I don’t really deserve your company,’ he said.
‘We’re here now, aren’t we?’
He had expressed his regret before in letters. But these words needed to fall between them, out loud, in her presence.
‘I’m sorry that I ruined everything for you,’ he said.
‘You made it up to your mother,’ she said. ‘That’s important to me. You and Daniel are talking, that’s what matters most.’
What really mattered was that he had come back, that they were walking side by side, that his physical presence was also a confirmation of her life.
‘I still believe you,’ she said to him with a great surge of emotion. ‘I have always believed your story, Gregor. I never doubted it. Even though I never found the proof, I still believe that you’re Jewish and that you were an orphan.’
He was shocked by that declaration. It was her way of saying that she still loved him, but instead it sounded as though she loved an effigy, a story, a version of Gregor that had existed in the imagination long ago. He could not get himself to say anything, and maybe he had gone beyond caring about those things. Her devotion to his story seemed to distance them, preventing them from being together without judgement, without that ancient duty to establish an identity, to explain, to say who you are. It was as if life was always merely some kind of confirmation of status rather than just a flow of air and words and time and careless love between people. Perhaps she had become more of an obstacle in the meantime, keeping them apart with her obsession with the past.
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