‘Hello, children,’ says an old voice in German, and Bridget jumps. The mannequin has started to talk, blinking its eyes and stretching. ‘I didn’t notice you standing there. My name is Charles Robert Darwin. When I was young I liked to collect beetles. You might already have seen some of the beetles displayed here today.’
Children swarm towards the Darwin corner, pushing in front of one another, jostling at the silken ropes. Bridget extricates herself, hurrying away from the awoken mannequin, but she can still hear its voice following her, listing various insect delights.
At the back of the room several people are making their way through a doorway hung with strips of cloth. It reminds Bridget of the ribboned curtain Etta used to have on the kitchen door in their old house, to keep flies out. When the door was left open in summer, the bright plastic ribbons would sometimes rise and fall in the breeze like party decorations, or, other times, like streamers cast towards departing ships.
Bridget follows an elderly couple through the doorway; the man holds the strips back for her like a tramper holding back a resilient fern. Bush etiquette, Gene calls it. Bridget smiles at the man. One of the strips escapes his hand and brushes her cheek as they move through, and Bridget realises the fabric is very soft, like the skin of a peach, not plastic at all. Beyond the first curtain is a second one, which the man also holds back. Bridget feels as if she’s in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, navigating her way through layers of hanging coats to Narnia, but when she has passed through a third curtain of ribbons it’s not an endless winter she finds herself in, but summer. The air is heavy and still and warm, and she is surrounded by trees and tropical flowers. There’s even a small pond, dotted with water lilies. A path arcs through the green, and here and there along its edges are tree stumps patterned with sliced fruit. Someone has taken a lot of care in laying out the slices, ensuring there is a combination of colours and shapes, different on every stump, like stills from a turned kaleidoscope. There are banana flowers with apple-wedge leaves, fanned orange segments, discs of kiwifruit circled by grapes, fingers of mango and pineapple. Generous offerings, for such a winter. In front of Bridget, the elderly couple pauses. The man points towards one of the tree stumps, and the woman nods, smiles, bends to look. A luminous blue butterfly settles on it and feeds on a strawberry. And then a red butterfly joins it, and a velvety black one lands on the man’s pointing finger. And Bridget realises that the enclosure is filled with butterflies; that they are on the flowers and the trees and the fruit, and fluttering all around her as she walks through this small, manufactured summer.
She’s left her jacket at the coat check, but she’s still far too hot in all her wrappings. She wishes she could stop and rest by the lily pond, take off some of her layers, maybe cool her feet in the water. But already she’s at the end of the path, where there is another doorway leading out, and the elderly man is once more holding back the curtain for her, having ushered his wife back into winter, so there is nothing Bridget can do but follow.
‘You should have come. They had a butterfly house.’
‘You’re a sick person, Bridget.’
‘I went through it three times.’
Gülten sighs. ‘You need to do some real sightseeing. You haven’t even been along Unter den Linden yet, have you?’
‘No.’
‘Prenzlauerberg?’
‘Ah, no.’
Alexanderplatz? Potsdamer Platz?’
In the Former East – although it is still in the east – the sky is dark with cranes. Everything is being renovated; it’s costing billions. Some of Berlin’s most beautiful buildings ended up in the East, and were never maintained. A cathedral which was bombed during the war stood open to the sky for fifty years. Birds have damaged the interior.
All the old apartment blocks are having their asbestos removed. It is carcinogenic. And cheap, and fireproof, that’s why they used it. The Wall had asbestos in it, says Gülten. Before it was demolished and disposed of, people chipped chunks off it as souvenirs. They keep these safely tucked away, in cotton wool.
Bridget has a friend, she writes. She has the room next to Bridget’s in the hostel, and her name is Gülten. She is Turkish, but she grew up in Berlin.
Etta and Gene have met some of their new neighbours, who seem very nice. They have joined their street’s Neighbourhood Watch; you can’t be too careful these days. Some of their neighbours have had burglar alarms installed, but they seem to be nothing but trouble. Etta and Gene are getting quite cunning in their old age – instead of having a whole alarm system put in and having the thing going off all the time, they’ve just had an empty alarm box fitted to the outside of the house. As a deterrent. Much cheaper, too. Does Bridget think she’ll be having a white Christmas?
Gülten combs her eyelashes with a tiny brush, not blinking once. Bridget draws on some lipstick and studies her own reflection. So this is how she looks on the other side of the world. She likes the glint of silver at her throat (Gülten’s choker) and the scent of her hair (Gülten’s shampoo). You look great, Gülten tells her, the men won’t be able to stay away.
They are going drinking. They have discovered a bar with old aeroplane seats round the tables and fur on the walls. A CD of nature sounds plays in the toilets.
You order,’ says Gülten. ‘Do it in English. We might get free drinks.’
At the best clubs, she says, you can jump the whole queue if you speak English or know one of the DJs. Gülten is going to lose her virginity to a DJ. She’s not exactly sure which one yet.
‘That guy by the door,’ says Bridget. ‘He’s staring at you.’
‘At my tits you mean,’ says Gülten. ‘He’s Turkish. Turkish men treat women like dirt.’
The bartender pours two glasses of red wine for them. Then he offers them a joint. A transvestite in a slinky gown begins singing and sliding a balding feather boa across the tables. Bridget and Gülten sink into the furry walls. They leave an impression when they go.
Germans have the strangest ideas, Bridget writes to Christina. Whenever I say I’m a New Zealander the first thing they say is oh, I’ve heard you can’t go outside there in summer, otherwise you get skin cancer. And those are the ones who know a bit about New Zealand. The others think it’s in Australia.
Christina plans to come home to New Zealand soon, maybe for Christmas, with her Austrian boyfriend. Thorsten is a doctor too.
Christina’s letters are always more personal than Bridget expects. She tells her about a pregnant woman she was treating. Everything seemed to be going perfectly, then right before the birth she had to tell the woman and her partner that the baby was dead. Christina held her hand right through the delivery. She’s never having children, she says. All that pain for a dead baby.
Bridget finds an old medical textbook in an antique shop. She sends it to Christina for Christmas. Christina probably can’t remember much German from school, but maybe Thorsten can translate. It’s mostly pictures, anyway, labelled in spidery old text. There are whole bodies with lines all over them, like the animals in Etta’s old cookbooks showing cuts of meat. There are parts of bodies, too, in cross-section. Bridget can read the names of these; she learnt them early on. The eye; the hand; the brain; the heart.
Bridget and Gülten are on their way home from the bar. They keep tripping over. Gülten catches her toes on the curb and falls. She just lies on the road, laughing. Bridget lies down and laughs too. Gülten lapses into Turkish.
‘Hey,’ says Bridget, ‘I can’t speak Turkish.’
‘Was I speaking Turkish?’
‘I don’t know, I can’t speak it.’
Gülten laughs even harder. ‘Sorry,’ she says, and then she’s off in Turkish again.
‘I can’t understand you,’ says Bridget, but Gülten doesn’t seem to have heard, and Bridget suddenly cannot find the words to explain herself. All she seems able to remember are the most basic terms.
‘Drink,’ she says. ‘Book. Friend. Street.’
> But Gülten isn’t listening, so Bridget pulls her up off the road and they start walking again. Bridget talks back to her in English, just to have something to say. She tells her about the time she burst into the laundry to change out of her togs and found her father standing at the tub in his shooting clothes, his sleeves rolled up to the elbows. His arms were bloody, and he was holding a half-feathered bird by the neck. The laundry smelled of sweat, and rain on wool, and gun oil. Gülten doesn’t understand a word she says.
When they come to a Turkish takeaway, Gülten drags Bridget inside. She buys a Käsetasche and starts eating it, and it must have been low blood sugar or something, because she’s back to normal after a few bites.
‘My mother makes the best Käsetaschen,’ she says. Her chin glistens with oil.
She is not dieting any more, ever again. She started a diet a few months ago and ate nothing for twelve days. For the first four, she was hungry, and her mother cooked all sorts of special food to tempt her. All the family favourites. Gülten did not eat. By the fifth day, she wasn’t really hungry any more. Which was good, because she had other things to think about. She had blackouts if she stood up too fast, and sometimes she felt giddy for no reason at all. By the twelfth day, her old jeans fitted her again. Gülten was happy. Gülten’s mother cooked. Gülten collapsed at university and had to be carried out of the lecture theatre. When she came to she began to eat. And eat.
They sit on the sticky concrete outside the takeaway while Gülten finishes her Käsetasche. This is a bad neighbourhood, she says, we’re right in the middle of Kreuzberg, last month there were nine murders here in a week. Some schoolboys found a woman’s head on a park bench; an elderly man was robbed and pushed under a train; a baby was thrown out an eighth-storey window. There are a lot of Turkish men in this neighbourhood. If they speak to you or even look at you, you must ignore them. Do not answer back, or gesture. Do not assert yourself. In their minds, this is a sign of interest.
On the phone, Etta asks Bridget if she’s met anyone nice.
Yes, says Bridget, she’s met lots of nice people.
But no-one special?
No. Well. She’s getting on really well with that Turkish girl she wrote to them about. They go out together a lot.
Gene is on the other phone. He wants to know what the food is like.
It’s all right, says Bridget, if you like pork.
Etta says she’s heard the bread is excellent, hundreds of varieties.
Bridget says yes, there are, it’s very confusing.
Christina’s coming in a few days, says Gene. She’s bringing Thorsten with her. They’ll all ring Bridget on Christmas Day.
Bridget says she’ll look forward to that.
Etta thinks it’s nice that Bridget has made a friend, and that they live in the same hostel. That way Bridget doesn’t have to travel home by herself at night. She hopes she is being careful.
Oh yes, says Bridget, it’s really very safe, in fact she sometimes feels safer here than she does at home.
Gülten wishes she could stay in Berlin with Bridget for Christmas. Her family doesn’t celebrate it, they’re strict Muslims. In the holidays they go to stay with relatives in Istanbul, and Gülten hates it. She saw her father slaughter a lamb in the garden last year. If my mother knew what I get up to here, she says.
Gülten’s mother has had cancer ever since they came to Germany. Her stomach has been removed, mostly. She can’t eat much, and has lost a lot of weight. Gülten tries not to be jealous of this. Gülten’s mother cooks. She wants her daughter to move back to Turkey with them, where they have bought a beautiful new house in their old neighbourhood. She worries about her daughter living in Berlin alone; there have been a lot of attacks lately. She wants her to marry a nice Turkish boy.
No wonder I’m still a virgin, says Gülten. They make you so afraid of it.
When she reached puberty her mother removed all tempting objects from her room. Candles, deodorant bottles, tall vases, everything. Gülten is not allowed to use tampons.
Bridget’s duvet is leaking feathers. Every day she finds more strewn on the carpet, around her bed, under it, drifting like snow when she opens the door. They gleam in the dark; cold crescent moons. She knows they must be coming from somewhere. At night, when she pulls the covers around her, she can feel the spines of the feathers inside bend and snap like tiny bones. It is getting colder.
There have been bush fires, writes Christina. They are still burning in some parts. She knows Bridget must have seen about it on TV. Her apartment is not dangerously close to the flames. She has had a few burn victims to deal with; some of them have died. It is very hot because of the fires, as well as the usual Australian summer. She wears SPF45 the whole time. She misses Bridget.
She took Thorsten home with her at Christmas to meet the parents, as Bridget was no doubt informed. Christina is glad Etta and Gene shifted to their townhouse when they did. If they’d left it any longer they would have been too old to move. The new place is reasonably spacious inside – they’ve even got a room for Christina and a room for Bridget – but there’s only a strip of garden. Which is good. Gene was finding it difficult maintaining the old one. Actually he didn’t seem quite himself. He made an embarrassing scene at the table one night, throwing salt around the place and stuff, and then afterwards he insisted on showing Thorsten his German pistol. God, can you imagine. I’ve got something you might be interested in, Thorsten, he says. And Mum just freezes, you know how nervy she’s always been about having it in the house. So he makes a big thing about getting it down from the roof, and claps Thorsten on the shoulder and says he knows he can trust him not to mention anything about it. And then he unlocks the box, and unwraps the thing and holds it like it’s the hand of John the Baptist or something. And poor old Mum stands there squirming and finally manages to ask if anybody would like a Milo, but Dad just starts telling Thorsten about how his best friend’s father took the pistol from a dead German in the war, and how when the friend had children his wife didn’t want it in the house any more so he gave it to Dad. Mum mutters that they had children too, and Thorsten doesn’t know what to say, so he says well they turned out all right didn’t they? And then next door’s alarm goes off, and one across the street, and one somewhere else down the road. Really weird. So that breaks the moment, thank God, and Dad says they sound just like a whole gaggle of crows screeching don’t they, horrible birds, crows. And Thorsten actually corrects him! He says I think you mean a murder of crows, Mr Stilton, we learnt generic terms in English class, strange what you remember isn’t it?
Actually, though, the letter continues, their father has been having some chest pains. Christina doesn’t want Bridget to worry, but she didn’t think he looked well at all. She did listen to his heart, though, and it was fine.
In fact, Bridget has not heard about the bushfires in Australia. She has not heard about the earthquake in Los Angeles, either, or the toxic spill in the North Sea. She has avoided disaster. She has been very busy. There are so many museums, exhibitions, churches, concerts, bars. She tries to write as often as she can. There was a big parade when the American troops left Berlin, which she missed. She can’t be everywhere at once.
The bartender at the bar with the furry walls knows Bridget and Gülten by name now. He gives them free drinks tonight. Gülten thinks he’s gorgeous. So does Bridget, but she seems to forget all her German in that place.
Ask him out, she says, but Gülten says no, he’d get the wrong idea, and anyway he’s not a DJ.
They get home at nine in the morning. Neither bothers to take off her makeup. Bridget has just got into bed when her phone rings.
Etta is fine; she hopes she’s not ringing too early but she thought Bridget would be off to lectures soon.
Yes, soon, says Bridget.
There is a bad time lag on the line, which makes it sound like Etta is pausing before she speaks.
‘Actually,’ Etta says, ‘I was ringing about your Dad.’
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It’s six in the evening when Bridget wakes up. She feels as if her whole body has been poisoned. She’s not sure if her mother really rang or not. But there’s a note by the phone, scribbled in her writing: Biopsy. Asbestos. Two weeks. Lufthansa?
It is in her writing, but it’s in German.
Gülten bounds into her room and flings open the curtains. ‘I’ve made breakfast,’ she announces. ‘Turkish style. Cucumber and cheese and tomato and lettuce on rolls. You’ll need some vitamins for the party’ She throws Bridget’s duvet off. ‘You look like shit,’ she says.
Bridget and Gülten have been invited to a private party at the furry bar, invitation only. The bartender asked them to come. This is our big chance says Gülten, all the club crowd will be there, we might be able to get our names on the permanent guest lists.
She is hoping there will be lots of DJs to meet. Bridget will have to speak English.
She grabs a top out of Bridget’s wardrobe. Can I borrow this, she says, thanks.
It’s already dark when they set off, and it’s starting to snow. Bridget stops to put on her hat. She heard about a man who went cycling without a hat on and one of his ears dropped off.
There are even more cranes against the sky. The whole city is a construction site. It’s hard to tell if some places are being renovated or demolished. It’s costing billions, says Gülten, but it’s a great chance to make your fortune if you’re enterprising enough. She’s heard that one guy plunders old bits of concrete from the apartment blocks in the East, breaks them into chips and sells them as pieces of the Wall. They’re the same material. Nobody can tell the difference.
In a Fishbone Church Page 17