An Honest Man

by Ben Fergusson

  In West Berlin’s 480 square kilometres, bounded in concrete and barbed wire, the natural habitats we roamed amounted to a few small woods, some overgrown train tracks and a bog or two, a fact made clear to the other children when, in the wooded depths of the Reinhardswald, Maike asked the trek leader when we would reach the next toilet. From then on, we were ridiculed, even when Stefan corrected one of the guides, who mixed up a medlar with a crab apple. When the guide acquiesced, one of the Bavarians shouted, ‘He read it in a book. He read it in a book in the library,’ and the other children collapsed into laughter, as if they had imbibed all of their knowledge from the wilderness direct.

  Backed into a corner, we responded in the only way we could, becoming ostentatiously condescending. Petra led the charge, pretending not to understand the Southerners and making an overweight boy from Bochum cry when she told him he smelt of poverty. Lagging behind the others, we talked for a fortnight, shared our homesickness and agreed to meet up the first weekend back to collect owl pellets in Grunewald, the forest that fills Berlin’s western edge. I think we were all surprised when we all turned up.

  We joined the West Berlin Wildlife Trust, knowing it would be good for future university applications – we were right – and together began what for all of us would be a lifelong pursuit: counting and measuring creatures, plants and land formations. At the lakes, we counted snails, frogs, toads, diving beetles and reeds; we sat outside ruined buildings in the dusk pressing our click counters as silhouettes of bats beat out and later beat back in; we marked out sections of rare dry grass with meter sticks and counted butterfly eggs, as grasshoppers sprang to safety, like flicked rubber bands. We loved it; it made us feel useful and grown up. Though we never talked about our shared passion abstractly, it quickly became a given.

  Stefan, Maike and Petra were all a year older than me. I’d been sent to the British School run by the Army in Charlottenburg, taking A levels at eighteen while they were taking their Abitur at nineteen. Because my English mother worked as a psychologist and was married to my German father, we were one of the few British families that stayed in the city. Although they lived in different corners of Berlin, Stefan, Petra and Maike all came from Catholic families – a relative rarity in part-Protestant, mostly heathen Berlin – and so all attended the Catholic school in a Fifties building on Winterfeldtplatz. I had always been jealous of them, palling around together while I was stuck with another classroom of friendly British children whose approaches I rejected, embittered by years of desertions.

  The final straw was a boy called Jonathan, who had arrived at the British School when we were both eight and stayed for three years. He had buck teeth, laughed at my jokes and was very badly behaved. We rode around town on buses – free with our British IDs – shoplifting from distant corners of the city and breaking windows in abandoned buildings. Once we threw stones over the wall at Spandau Prison in the hope of hitting Rudolf Hess, then still clinging on to life, and were chased off by the prison guards.

  Jonathan’s mother was a Queen Alexandra Nurse and very patriotic, and in the few years we were friends I went with him to the Queen’s Birthday Parade at the Olympic Stadium. Once a month, his mother drove us through Checkpoint Charlie to East Berlin to buy Meissen pottery from Unter den Linden and Russian dolls from Natasha’s on Karl-Marx-Straße, then took us to a restaurant to eat cheap pink meat in breadcrumbs with tinned runner beans. Because my mum’s cooking was so bad, I was as delighted by these bland, salty meals as I was by the food Jonathan’s mum let us order from the FRIS book, a catalogue of goods kept in British military foodstores that military families were allowed to order at cut-rate prices. Like Christmas stockings, Jonathan’s mum laid out the steel FRIS box and by the afternoon it had been filled with luxuries that had eluded me until then: sliced white bread, digestive biscuits, orange squash.

  But after one Christmas holiday Jonathan didn’t come back to school. His parents had been posted to Sardinia and I was heartbroken. When Stefan and Beate came over for dinner that Friday Stefan told me about Wilde Kidz and I begged Mum to let me go. And the moment I’d formed a permanent group of German friends I clung onto them.

  I didn’t just idolise them because they were older than me. Stefan was socially engaged, Maike was clever, Petra was sharp-tongued and powerfully gave the impression that she didn’t give a fuck what anybody thought about her. I always felt like a pigeon that had found its way into an aviary of exotics. Stefan’s thin, hairless body and mop of curling locks made him look like an Italian, as did his thick black eyebrows that met in the middle; Petra had fine, sharp features and big breasts; Maike was statuesque, with long Bill Brandt legs and a nose as straight as a Greek sculpture’s.

  The walking, cycling, swimming and camping we did meant I was fit enough, I wasn’t too short or too tall. My hair though had been carrot-red as a child, and this had led to teasing at the British School. Nothing severe but, being half German, it added to my sense of otherness.

  My hair had darkened almost to brown, its redness only revealed in direct sunlight, in the freckles that covered my face and shoulders, the pale pink of my nipples and the russet hair on my legs and arms. Nevertheless, the vague sense that gingerness was akin to ugliness, that it moved me into the category of Kevin Cuddon, the boy with a purple birthmark on his face, and Nicola Dean, who had alopecia totalis and an NHS wig, meant that, in my circle of German friends, I felt grateful for their friendship and for Maike’s love.

  I opened a second Coke. Behind Stefan, an overweight couple were filling in a crossword, half-shaded by an orange-and-blue Fanta umbrella. The man’s miniature trunks and the woman’s bikini were the same shade of turquoise, the elastic cutting into skin the colour of coffee, wrinkled and shiny like used cling film.

  Behind them, I thought I saw the red swimming trunks of the man from the traffic lights, but the red cloth resolved into a white-spotted neckerchief tied Madonna-like around someone’s platinum-blonde hair.

  ‘Anyone want to watch a film at mine?’ Stefan said, tossing a Pez from a Garfield-headed dispenser into the air and catching it between his teeth.

  ‘How depressing is it on a scale of one to ten?’ Petra asked. ‘Ten is every other film you’ve made us watch.’

  ‘Don’t be a twat,’ said Stefan, crunching on the Pez and straightening his baseball cap, from under which his curling black hair bloomed up like smoke beneath a door.

  ‘What is it then?’ I said.

  ‘I got a pirate copy of Ugetsu. It’s this very cool Japanese film.’

  ‘Is it black-and-white?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah, but it’s—’

  We all drowned him out with our groans. Like his reading, Stefan’s film consumption was fully improving. He was a collector of difficult movies, attracted to anything that had been judged important. Through various dusty out-of-the-way shops and underground film clubs, he managed to get hold of the most obscure titles, introducing us to Satyajit Ray, Jean Renoir and Yasujirō Ozu. He was the only person I knew who’d watched the whole nine hours of Shoah. His preference was for anything old, black-and-white and subtitled – a rarity in Germany, where most foreign films are dubbed, a practice, of course, that disgusted him.

  ‘It’s Kenji Mizoguchi! It’s one of the greatest films of all time!’

  ‘It’s too hot to watch girls laying eggs and cutting people’s dicks off,’ said Petra. She was referring to In the Realm of the Senses, which Stefan had made us watch that Christmas and which had become fodder for our teasing ever since.

  Stefan’s face flushed red and he said, ‘It’s a different culture. You’re just embedded in Western norms about sexuality.’

  ‘Just because Japan’s exotic to you, doesn’t mean it’s not sordid,’ Maike said, taking off her large gold-framed glasses and wiping sweat from her brow with her forearm. ‘They have really ingrained issues with prostitution; it’s tax-deductible if you’re a creepy old businessman. Whatever the cultural differences are, they’re stil
l people’s sisters and daughters and they’re still having sex for money.’

  ‘Fuck off, Maike,’ Stefan said.

  Maike listened, only speaking when she had something to say, but it was always concise and accurate when it came, and thus more devastating. It happened often enough that ‘Fuck off, Maike’ had become a phrase we used any time someone was about to argue back and we already knew our own argument wasn’t going to stand.

  I lay across the table with my hand out for a Pez. Stefan popped one into my palm and behind him I saw another flash of red – this time it was the man from the pool, the sun full on his back, catching the light in his wet black hair.

  ‘You’ll come, Ralfi. Alter, come on?’

  Stefan was the sort of only child who hated being alone and made siblings of his closest friends.

  ‘Not a chance,’ I said.

  ‘I’m showering,’ said Petra. Maike stood too, but Stefan put his hands behind his head and said, ‘It’s thirty-two degrees. There’s no point. We’re all going to be soaked in sweat by the time we get home.

  ‘Shower later,’ I said encouragingly, thinking of the man in the red trunks – that I might be able to catch another glimpse of him if I went to shower alone. I didn’t want to talk to him, certainly not be noticed by him, I just wanted to pick up some detail up-close: a gesture, a scar, the sound of his voice.

  ‘Yeah, I’ll shower when I get home,’ Stefan said.

  ‘No you won’t, you dirtbag,’ said Petra.

  The man should have already showered by the time I entered the changing rooms and, if I was lucky, have been pulling his clothes on in front of his locker. But when I walked in I found him still in his red swimming trunks, furiously spinning the wheels of a combination lock.

  ‘Scheiße,’ he muttered to himself.

  ‘Everything OK?’ I said.

  ‘Oh,’ said the man, straightening. ‘Yeah. My lock’s broken or something. Or I’ve forgotten the code.’ I’d expected him to have a Turkish accent, but he spoke accentless, idiomatic German. He laughed and said, ‘I’m a fucking idiot.’

  I hesitated, thinking I could get past him, leaving him to argue it out with the site manager while I watched through the crack of my cubicle door, but I said, ‘Well, if it’s a combination lock you could just crack it.’

  ‘What, like crack it off?’

  ‘No, crack the code.’

  He shrugged and smiled and said, ‘Mein Freund, you’ve lost me.’

  The word Freund made me feel good. Among my real friends and my family, no one called anyone else ‘friend’, unless they were being ironic.

  ‘Do you want me to … ?’ I gestured to the lock.

  ‘Be my guest,’ he said.

  I put the novel under my arm, pulled on the lock and turned the wheels. It was a cheap three-number padlock without false gates – you just had to feel for the give as you slowly turned each wheel. It was the sort of trick we practised when we were camping – lighting fires with flints, opening beer bottles with lighters, doing owl calls with our cupped hands. I worked it anxiously, aware of his eyes on me.

  ‘Fuck,’ the man said, close enough that I could feel the damp heat of his breath on my ear. ‘You reading Rushdie?’

  I realised that the book was facing him, cover out. Sweat burst from my skin so quickly that the plastic-covered book squeaked and I had to clamp my arm down hard to keep hold of it as I worked the lock.

  ‘Sorry,’ I muttered.

  ‘You’re sorry?’ said the man. He put his hand on the locker. I looked at it there, the bright half-moons of his neat nails and the fine black hairs on the wrist and on his fingers, between the knuckles. Over the chlorine, I could smell his fresh sweat and his breath, which was sweet, like warm milk. The first wheel clicked into place and the book slipped lower, so that I had to dig the bone of my elbow into the cover to keep it from falling.

  ‘I don’t really like it,’ I said. ‘I mean, I’m not sure I do.’

  ‘Huh,’ said the man. ‘I thought it was amazing. You just need to get through the first hundred pages.’

  The next number clicked into place and I looked at him surprised. ‘You’ve read it?’

  ‘I had a magical realist phase a few years back.’

  ‘Garcia Marquez?’ I said. I had just finished One Hundred Years of Solitude and had been dreaming of studying plant life on the banks of the Orinoco and making Humboldtian voyages in the Colombian jungle in search of rare butterflies.

  He laughed. ‘That’s it. Grass, Marquez, Kafka. Anything a bit weird.’

  ‘You a teacher, or something?’

  ‘No, but my dad has a shop on Eisenacher Straße. Used to be all Turkish books and newspapers, but he let me build up this little German literature section.’

  ‘Huh,’ I said. ‘You don’t look like you work in a bookshop.’ I blushed and tried to pick out something about him that would make what I’d said sound less offensive, but he was only wearing swimming trunks, the gold watch and the thin gold chain. There was a smile at the edge of his lips, but it changed, the mouth softening and the eyes looking at me more intently, as if he was trying to place me. The lock clicked open beneath my fingers and he broke into laughter.

  ‘Look at that,’ he said. He put his hand on my bare shoulder; his palm was dry. ‘Alter, I owe you,’ he said and in his wide smile I saw the narrow gap between his two front teeth.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ I said, ‘Just a … ’ I gestured vaguely at the locker.

  He offered up his other hand and I shook it. ‘Oz,’ he said.

  ‘Like the Wizard,’ I said, aware of his thumb pressing onto the back of my hand.

  ‘It’s short for Osman.’

  ‘Like the bulb.’

  I was embarrassing myself again, but Oz gave me a comforting grin, which he paired with a frown and little jolt of the head. ‘Hey, you don’t … ? You know, I really feel like we’ve met, or …’

  I blushed again; out of the corner of my eye I could see the redness spreading across my chest and felt it burning the tips of my ears. ‘I live at Windscheidstraße 53. You’re always parked on our street.’

  ‘Shit,’ he said, releasing me and opening his locker, ‘I’ve been busted.’ For a second, as he pulled out a towel and threw it around his neck, he looked worried.

  ‘I didn’t … ’ I said, ‘I mean, it’s just a coincidence. I didn’t follow you here, or anything. I don’t care what you’re doing.’

  He shook his head and said, ‘It’s fine. I know. I’m not worried.’ He held the ends of his rolled towel and said, ‘Your surname’s not Rode, is it?’

  Rode was the surname of our neighbour Tobias. ‘No,’ I said, ‘Dörsam.’

  ‘Oh, OK. Fine.’ He relaxed. ‘My dad owns a couple of flats in your building.’

  ‘I thought he ran a bookshop.’

  ‘He does. And a shop. And a Turkish bakery. But he also owns a few flats, here and in Frankfurt.’

  ‘And what’s this Rode done?’

  ‘Illegally subletting. Dad thinks he’s got someone else renting a room in his flat and he’s not declaring it. And if he is, then Dad can void his contract and either kick him out or up the rent.’

  I nodded. Oz smiled and shook his head. ‘You’re him, aren’t you?’

  ‘I’m not,’ I said, laughing. ‘Honestly. But I do know him.’

  ‘Oh fuck,’ said Oz. ‘He’s really nice, right?’

  I nodded. ‘He’s pretty nice.’

  He laughed. ‘Well, rules is rules.’ He began to transfer his clothes and a battered Puma sports bag to one of the nearby changing cubicles. ‘We don’t own your flat, do we?’ he said.

  ‘No,’ I said, watching him pick up his trainers and throw them into the cubicle. ‘We own ours.’

  ‘Fuuuck,’ he said, throwing back his head with lazy drama. He stopped and put his hand back on my bare shoulder. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Ralf,’ I said.

  ‘OK, Ralf. So if your parents own a
flat then they’re on the landlords’ committee, and they might not be too happy about my dad spying on his tenants. And with all these tenants’ protests going on at the moment, being a dick of a landlord isn’t a great look if you don’t want your car set on fire. And, although Dad is a bit of a dick, he’s also my dad. So what I want to know is what can I offer you not to tell your parents or Herr Rode about this conversation?’

  ‘Offer me?’ I laughed and held up my hands. ‘It’s … My lips are sealed. Honestly.’

  ‘Really?’ he said. ‘How about something from the shop? You like reading, right? You can come and pick up a book? Just as a sweetener.’

  ‘I don’t need a book,’ I said.

  ‘Well,’ he said, letting me go and sticking his head into the cubicle as my shoulder cooled in the shape of his fingers. ‘This is my card. The address is the address of the shop.’ He produced a silver cigarette case, which he popped open and offered up. The little white cards read ‘Osman Özemir, Executive, Özemir Holdings GmbH, Eisenacher Straße 62, Berlin’. I reached out to take one and Midnight’s Children slipped from beneath my arm into a puddle of water on the red-tiled floor that had gathered at Oz’s feet. I looked at them, smooth and brown, the toes short and thick, and I tried to lock them into my memory, so that that night I could imagine him putting them into my mouth.

  Four

  It is odd to think of how little happens on some days and how much on others; how global histories and personal histories eddy and brew like the weather, coalesce after years of calm into squalls that wash away lives and borders that had once seemed so permanent. In the year before I’d met Oz, there’d been a presidential election in the United States, the usual scattering of natural and man-made disasters, a few political scandals and surprises, but little that suggested to me, to my friends or my family the storm gathering on the horizon.