An Honest Man

by Ben Fergusson

  ‘Ralf,’ Beate said, gripping my chin between her perfumed fingers, ‘I heard you rescued some Turk at Prinzenbad.’

  ‘What Turk?’ I said. I’d briefly mentioned the lock-breaking to my friends to excuse the time it had taken me to get changed, but it was a throwaway remark and the focus had been the lock and not Oz.

  ‘Stefan said he’d locked himself out or in or … ’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘No, he’d forgotten the code for his padlock.’

  ‘Oh, is this the queer?’ my mother said in the perfect but heavily accented German she’d learned as a student. ‘You didn’t tell me you helped him out. No wonder he was making eyes.’

  ‘You didn’t tell me he was gay,’ said Stefan, frowning.

  ‘I didn’t say he was gay.’

  ‘You said he was gay!’ my mother said.

  ‘Did you bum a gay Turk, Ralf?’ my brother threw in from the end of the table.

  ‘No, he was just very chatty, which, I don’t know, just got me thinking about whether you ever got gay Turkish people. He wasn’t even camp or anything.’

  This made Beate roar with laughter. ‘Why wouldn’t you get gay people in Turkey?’

  ‘Look, he’s blushing,’ my mother cried.

  ‘No, it’s wonderful, Ralf. Ignore these boors,’ said Beate. ‘Why live in West Berlin if you’re not going to have a few gay Turkish friends?’

  ‘He’s not my friend, he’s not actually Turkish Turkish – he doesn’t even have an accent – and he’s probably not gay. It just made me think.’

  ‘Think about bumming him?’ my brother said.

  I sat feeling raw as Beate told a convoluted story about Udo Kier and a lesbian woman she’d met in Marrakech. My father winked at me and then rolled his eyes to say, ‘Don’t worry about these two,’ as I made shapes on the table with the spilled salt. The bearded man only broke in once to say, ‘Andy Warhol was gay,’ to which Beate replied, ‘Everyone knows that, Bernd, and it’s hardly relevant,’ before continuing with her story. We didn’t see Bernd again.

  Seven

  When we collected our bikes from the courtyard, Stefan mimed zipping his lips and then pointed up at Tobias’s window. It was open, the lights were off, and Tobias was staring up at our kitchen window, where my parents, Beate and Martin still sat.

  ‘Look, look, look,’ Stefan whispered. ‘Watch his face.’

  I watched. In the dying twilight, it was a pale blue mask, his features deep, indistinct indigo marks, like an Easter Island head. With his foot, Stefan snapped his kick stand back and said loudly, ‘Oi Ralf, is that your chain on the floor?’

  Tobias glanced at us and then disappeared into the dark.

  ‘Oh my God,’ Stefan said in a stifled giggle as we wheeled our bikes out and set off to Der Gammler. ‘Something’s really going down. At what point do we call in the BND?’

  I cycled alongside him and shook my head with faux amusement. ‘He’s probably just in love with your mum,’ I said as we turned onto Kanstraße.

  *

  Der Gammler – The Tramp – had once been a classic Berlin Kneipe, and there were still a few battered locals who ignored its transformation into the owner Peter’s vision of a West Coast rock bar. Peter – an idealistic surfer from Sankt Peter-Ording with shoulder-length hair, who’d come to Berlin to avoid military service – thought that the bar would be patronised solely by American servicemen, but his carefully restored neon Miller Beer sign was not enough alone to attract them, particularly when they discovered he didn’t sell any Miller Beer. ‘It tastes like cat piss,’ he said, the few times Americans did come in, and was genuinely perplexed that they wanted to drink it or expected him to serve it.

  So Peter’s clientele were still the same locals that had always drunk there – striped T-shirts stretched across their stomachs and white hair sprouting from their necks, ears and noses, drinking Berliner Kindl with a chaser of Korn. And us. We frequented Der Gammler because it was convenient, lying in Schöneberg, roughly equidistant from Stefan and Maike in Kreuzberg and me in Charlottenburg. Petra lived in Wannsee and so was discounted from the equation. She had the advantage at the weekends, living walking distance from most of the scant green spaces we frequented with the Wildlife Trust.

  The bar’s fittings mirrored those in the rest of Berlin: homely Sixties lamps, black-and-white photographs and blond wooden cladding, so that the narrow room felt like the belly of a cheap pleasure boat. There were even lace half-curtains along the window, stained tobacco yellow.

  We smoked red Marlboros, drank beer, played incessantly on the Evel Knievel pinball machine, the paddles painted with large-breasted women, while working our way through Peter’s record collection, placing LP after LP onto his wood-veneered Telefunken Rondo.

  Peter played American bands that no one had heard of yet: R.E.M., the B-52s, Jane’s Addiction, and at the end of the evening we filled the sticky floor in the bar’s darkest corner and danced with whichever of the locals were drunk enough to sway along with us.

  We sat around the table by the window and Stefan told Maike and Petra about Tobias and the man in the courtyard.

  ‘You’re not allowed to talk about Mum’s patients!’ I said.

  ‘Hey, I never said he was a patient. That one’s on you!’

  ‘OK, OK,’ said Petra, ‘we never heard he was seeing Ralf’s mum for his sex problems. Who is he?’

  ‘We don’t know,’ I said.

  ‘Some general,’ said Stefan.

  ‘We don’t know that,’ I said, hitting him on the shoulder.

  Maike tried to look interested and Petra, resting her head on her hand, said languidly, ‘This is a really great story.’

  ‘Fuck off,’ said Stefan.

  He downed the rest of his beer, then asked us who was going to join him the next day on a protest at Kurfürstendamm.

  ‘We’re meant to be prepping for next week’s marshland count with Dr Ast,’ Maike said. ‘I thought we were all going.’

  He turned to me pleadingly. ‘I’m going to the count prep with Maike,’ I said.

  ‘Me too,’ said Petra.

  ‘Ihr Lieben,’ Stefan said, ‘this one’s important.’

  ‘What’s it about?’ said Peter, turning chairs over and placing them on the tables so that the floor could be swept.

  ‘The protest?’ Stefan said. ‘It’s that strip of houses in Kreuzberg they’re trying to knock down, which is, surprise, surprise, full of squats.’

  ‘And communists?’ Peter asked, grabbing a bucket to empty the ashtrays into.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Stefan. ‘Communists and Greens. But also old ladies that’ve lived in their apartments for years, getting turfed out so some millionaires can make a few more millions. The police presence is gonna be massive. It’s all gonna go over one of these days. Shot like Ohnesorg and Dutschke, man.’

  ‘You’re hardly Rudi Dutschke,’ Petra said.

  ‘The police don’t care who they shoot,’ said Stefan.

  ‘When did someone last get shot?’ I asked. ‘And why’s the protest on Ku’damm if it’s about flats in Kreuzberg?’

  ‘They don’t need to shoot you, Ralf. They can just “accidentally” run you over. Like the tank man in Tiananmen Square.’

  ‘They didn’t actually run that man over,’ Maike said. ‘They went around him.’

  ‘Fuck off, Maike.’

  ‘What are you prepping?’ Peter said, wiping down the bar with a greyed floorcloth. ‘What is the next adventure for the Wild Bunch?’ Peter thought it was very funny that we still did what he called ‘nature shit’.

  ‘We’re counting sundews in Langes Luch next weekend,’ Maike said enthusiastically. ‘It’s a section of marshland in the woods at Grunewald. Then we’re mapping amphibian species in the Schöneberger Südgelände.’

  ‘Really?’ Peter said. ‘Frogs and toads?’

  ‘There are actually thirteen species of amphibians in West Berlin.’

  We played up to his teasing, try
ing to sound as geeky as possible.

  ‘Species like the garlic toad are highly endangered. It emits a garlicky smell when alarmed.’

  ‘Sounds like it should be highly endangered. Sounds gross.’

  We had a last beer while Peter swept and Petra and Stefan played table football. I sat with Maike stroking the soft skin beneath her arm as she leaned her head against the slimily polyurethaned wood panelling behind her. Like all people who are genuinely wonderful, it was almost impossible to define the exact nature of Maike’s greatness. She was clever and attractive, though her owlish glasses and height meant that she avoided much of the attention that Petra attracted from strangers. She could be funny, she was often kind, but there was something more fundamental. She was completely herself. I was constantly second-guessing what people wanted from me, always aware that there were many thoughts and feelings I was necessarily burying. Petra put on a front much harder than her soft underbelly. Stefan was endlessly picking up the tics and mannerisms of people he admired. But Maike was always Maike, thoughtful and reliable, genuinely listening when you spoke to her and genuinely interested in what you had to say. Still now, when I talk to mutual friends, they often cite a moment of realisation or insight that stemmed from a long conversation with Maike. I put this to her years later when we were both adults, married to other people with our own children, and she listed all of the ways in which she too was just pretending. But I wasn’t convinced. She is still the most genuine human being I’ve ever met.

  ‘How’s your mum?’ I said to her.

  Without lifting her head, she looked up at me, then her eyes saddened and dropped to my chest. ‘Same,’ she said.

  Maike’s mother had cancer. She’d been ill for almost ten years, and in Maike’s family these things weren’t talked about explicitly. The drugs left her exhausted, and a few times a year she disappeared for another operation or blast of radiation. She had stopped cooking when she first fell ill, so Maike’s elder sister Sandra had taken over until Maike turned twelve, at which point Sandra got her first boyfriend and Maike was expected to fend for herself.

  Maike’s father worked nights for the BVG – Berlin Public Transport – and was asleep on the sofa during the day with the curtains closed. Her mother took his place in the evenings, watching television and smoking. This constant parental presence meant that I had only been to Maike’s flat once, hoping to surprise her by picking her up on the way to Grunewald for a Wildlife Trust count. It hadn’t occurred to me that she would live in a tower block, until I parked my bike in front of it and searched for her surname on the huge panel of buttons. When I pressed their bell, a feathery voice answered: ‘Yes?’

  ‘It’s Ralf. I’ve come to pick up Maike.’

  There was an electronic crackle and whine and the magnetic door lock clunked open.

  I’d never been in an apartment block with a lift before and I stared about the aluminium box, covered in graffiti – mostly swear words, breasts and penises in black marker – that added a solvent note to the urine-scented air. Walking down the fluorescent-tube-lit corridor, past the faded rose pink of the flat doors that I’d only seen in films like We Children from Bahnhof Zoo, I felt lonely and afraid. It seemed so bare and inhuman. But I also wanted to be the sort of person who didn’t care where people lived. I had to fight it, though, because I did care. I wished that Maike lived somewhere else, in a house or in a flat like mine.

  Maike met me at the door red-faced, trying to pull on her raincoat.

  ‘I thought I’d surprise you,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah,’ she said.

  She pulled the door shut.

  ‘Could I use the loo?’

  She stared down at her hand on the door handle and said, ‘OK. But be quiet. Dad’s asleep.’

  She opened the door again and pointed to the bathroom. I crept across the landing, which smelt of cigarette smoke and acrid cleaning products, and looked towards the dark living room, where a split of white light in the curtains outlined a man on the sofa and what looked like a woman’s legs in slippers and thick tights. In the bathroom, I peed sitting down, afraid of making a sound, and looked about at the brown tiles that reached up to the ceiling and the avocado bathroom suite, dated but so clean it looked bewilderingly new. I could hear snoring and the deep hush of the municipal plumbing.

  ‘I wanted to meet your parents,’ I said, when we were outside.

  ‘You’ll meet them,’ Maike said, pushing her hands into her pockets.

  Someone tried to open the locked door of the bar and Peter waved them away. ‘Zu!’ he shouted, ‘Closed! Fermé!’

  ‘What about you?’ Maike asked.

  ‘Me?’ I said. ‘I’m OK.’

  ‘You always are.’ She smiled. Even when I was banal, she made me feel good about it. ‘You’re not really worried about Stefan talking about your mum’s patient, are you? She’s not going to get into trouble, is she?’

  I shook my head. ‘Stefan was just getting overexcited. He shouldn’t’ve said anything.’ I recalled the man’s stooping walk. It made me sad to think of someone who was meant to fight, who was meant to be brave, having problems with sex or with intimacy, especially because – to my eighteen-year-old eyes – he was so ancient. ‘Mum keeps asking about university,’ I said.

  Maike stretched out her long legs, laying them over my lap. She rubbed her hands together and smiled tiredly.

  ‘Just go to London.’

  I frowned. ‘What if it overwhelms me?’

  She pressed her fingers against my cheeks. ‘Why is it overwhelming, sweet Ralfi?’

  ‘It’s big,’ I said, pushing her hands away. ‘And who am I going to be there?’

  ‘Who are you here?’

  ‘A ginger Englishman. A would-be geologist.’

  ‘And there?’

  ‘They’ll all be geologists and geographers. And they’ll all be more English than me. I’ll be the weird German.’

  ‘You’ll still be ginger.’

  ‘London’ll be full of gingers.’

  Maike laughed and took my hands. ‘None of them will be as sweet as you though.’

  ‘It’s only you that thinks I’m sweet.’

  ‘And your mum.’

  ‘And my mum.’

  We filtered out of Peter’s and said our goodbyes. It was almost two in the morning, dark, but still hot enough that we were comfortable in our T-shirts. Petra and Stefan left me and Maike to a lengthy goodbye of kissing and almost parting, until she broke from me and walked off to unlock her bike, her hands pushed into the pockets of her shorts, her head lolling happily.

  She mounted her bike and said, ‘I’ll pick you up at six thirty, yeah?’

  ‘Wow,’ I said. ‘That’s going to be, like, four hours’ sleep.’

  ‘I can just go with Petra. Honestly.’

  ‘No, I want to come. Pick me up on the way, OK?’

  She nodded and smiled and cycled off.

  ‘I love you!’ I shouted.

  She raised her arms in a mime of celebration and I laughed. When the red light of her bike was out of view, I climbed onto mine and rode home, feeling guilty about lying about my four hours’ sleep, because I was planning on getting up in three and cycling to Eisenacher Straße.

  Eight

  The next morning, my body still heavy with sleep, I cycled over Winterfeldtplatz, where the metal frames were being clamped together for the market. A few vans had already arrived, and men in jeans and T-shirts were shouting to each other, emptying boxes of oranges, salad and flowers, and clattering open the green metal legs of folding tables. A middle-aged Turkish man in a bloodied white butcher’s coat carried a giant skewer of muslin-wrapped doner kebab meat on his shoulder, the size and shape of a wasps’ nest.

  I crossed the road by the red-brick church and the Catholic school that Maike, Petra and Stefan had attended, and cycled down Eisenacher Straβe, carefully reading the shop names. A woman passed with a shih-tzu on a lead and stared at me disapprovingly. Then I saw th
e sign, and my heart thumped in my ears. It was half in German half in Turkish: ‘Özemir’s: Turkish and German Newspapers, Books and Magazines’.

  I locked my bike onto a lamppost and walked tentatively to the front of the little store, staring up at the hand-painted sign, peeling red on white, and smiled at the thought of the fantasy Oz I had gone there to shape in my mind, him standing at the door, inviting me in. It hadn’t occurred to me that it was unusual for the shutters to be up this early in the morning, so I put my face to the glass and made binoculars of my hands to stare into the dim reaches of the room behind, savouring a new, completely authentic setting for my fantasies.

  I recalled his voice and went over the mental snapshots of his body that I’d saved up at the pool. I knew that, for a few days at least, and certainly that night, he would replace Tobias in a convoluted set of repeated tableaux. Most would be sexual – him inviting me into the changing cubicle at Prinzenbad to peel off his red trunks, the skin of his belly cold against my lips – but many would be deeply sentimental – us hand in hand in the woods, his leg pushing up against mine in the cinema, us sharing a tent on the beach on the North Sea coast, his bare foot sliding through the open side of my sleeping bag.

  The walls of the shop were filled with paperback books stacked haphazardly, and in the centre of the room was a low table, covered in German magazines – Der Spiegel, Stern and Brigitte – mixed in with Zaman and Hürriyet. Dotted about on the thin grey carpet tiles were piles of newspapers bound tightly together with electric blue twine.

  The back of the shop was darker, but I could make out the counter and there, as the blood left my face, I saw Oz. He was standing on a chair behind the counter, reaching up to a dead lightbulb above his head. He looked over at the window lazily then, recognising me, he smiled and abandoned the job, clambering down off the chair.