An Honest Man

by Ben Fergusson

I felt stupid. Stupid about reading Tobias’s actions through the childish spy games that Stefan and that Oz had played with me. But, more painful than that, stupid for thinking that, in its happiness, our family was special. Now I’d been shown that the tragedies of my friends’ families were the tragedies of my own. It was a deadening realisation and I was overwhelmed with disgust for my mother.

  Dazed, I cycled west to Grunewald to meet my friends. Between traffic lights I pumped at the pedals and rehearsed terrible confrontations with her, dramatically telling my father and Martin at the dinner table that Mum had been fucking our neighbour, leaving the flat and never returning. But when I stopped at a junction, when I listened to the ticking of the traffic lights and watched crowds of heat-tired workers and exhausted mothers with their children crossing in front of me, I also imagined pretending I’d seen nothing and avoiding my mother for long enough that I didn’t feel sick about it and that it didn’t hurt at all. Perhaps I could send a letter to her work, I thought. A warning from a ‘friend’, saying they knew all about it and that it had to stop.

  When I finally reached Grunewald forest to find my friends dappled in sunlight, smoking in front of their bikes beneath a canopy of softly rustling beech leaves, I thought numbly that I couldn’t say a thing. So used to burying any problematic emotions, I realised that I didn’t even know how to express what had happened, nor how I felt about it.

  ‘You all right?’ Petra said. ‘You look a fucking fright.’

  ‘Fine,’ I heard myself saying.

  I was silent and shivery as we trudged down to the bog at Langes Luch. Maike held my hand and said quietly, ‘You sure you’re all right?’

  ‘Fine,’ I said again and smiled at her, through leagues of unexpressed emotion. She squeezed my hand.

  Maike was no narcissist. She loved to be with her friends, but rarely talked about herself unless pressed. She wanted to hear what you had to say, but never probed you for information the way Petra did. Maike just listened. All the intimacy she required was physical. She wanted time with me, she wanted affection, she wanted sex. But she didn’t want to talk about how she felt. That was why we’d sought each other out, I suppose. It was this blissful distance, this smiling agreement to stand side by side in love, but to be allowed to be lost in one’s own thoughts and talk about the things that made sense: insects and plants and glacial landscapes.

  At Langes Luch, the heat felt tropical. The strip of boggy moorland linking Grunewald Lake with Krumme Lanke had once been a lake itself, but as the water was pumped out of the Havel to sate thirsty Berliners at the beginning of the twentieth century, it left behind a sea of sedge-peat bog with a thin channel of water dribbling down the middle, that in turn had become a haven for wildlife.

  The project leader from the Wildlife Trust was a dentist called Dr Ast. Balding, with a chubby shaved face and always dressed in shorts and a colourful Gore-tex jacket, there was something toddler-like about him. He handed out clipboards and pens, making jokes, calling us by our first names, but expecting us to use the formal ‘Sie’ in return and to always use his doctor’s title.

  He led us slowly through the centre of the bog. We wore shorts, T-shirts and wellies, our bare legs spattered with mud black as discarded tea leaves. It was early morning, already hot, and the ground smelt primeval; it felt like the beginning of the world.

  Mist rose between silhouettes of rotting logs and the early morning sun lit the sticky beads arrayed around the heads of the carnivorous sundews that we were counting. As we moved our meter sticks and scribbled on blue-lined journalists’ pads with orange biros, mosquitoes screamed near our ears and bit our legs and winged beetles rose up as black and shiny as molten tarmac, thrumming high into the air. I kept thinking about Tobias, his blue mask in the dark staring up at my laughing mother in our bright apartment, watching her the way I had so often watched him. It must have been his watch he was searching for, I realised, when he was tearing his apartment apart.

  There were sixteen other volunteers on the count, paired up, their colourful T-shirts dotted about the bog. I was counting with Stefan, and Petra was with Maike. They were far off, near the little canal edge, and intermittently I could hear Petra’s sharp cackle and Maike’s giggle. They made an odd couple, Maike so tall, the pale sun catching the gold of her huge glasses, and Petra, small, fair and busty.

  ‘You look awful,’ Stefan said. ‘You sure you’re all right?’

  I felt light-headed and cotton-mouthed, my fingers were tingling and the humidity made me feel breathless. ‘I’m fine,’ I said, suffused with relief and disappointment that I had denied my friends three times.

  ‘Maike?’ Stefan said.

  I shook my head.

  ‘Sex trouble?’

  I laughed and shook my head again.

  ‘Had sex with Petra again after we left Der Gammler the other night.’

  ‘Ach was!’ I said. ‘Fuck.’

  Stefan and Petra had slept with each other a few times. There was a week we spent walking the flats at Wadden Sea when they briefly became a couple. They walked side by side over the mirrored sand reflecting the setting sun, its image peppered with sandworm piles. Maike and I felt nervous, watching the dynamics of the group re-form around us. But the condom broke on the last night and Stefan and Petra argued about abortion – she for, he against, and defending his right to have a say on ‘whether his child lived or died’. There was no pregnancy, but the distance that had opened up between them at the first taste of discord was too great to bridge, and they broke up on the long coach journey home.

  I knew everything about Stefan’s sex life; he volunteered it earnestly as if it was educational for me, and in some ways it had been. He had slept with three girls: Karen Holt, a schoolfriend none of us liked who he’d dated for a year, an American he’d met on a school trip to Amsterdam, and a thirty-year-old friend of his mother’s called Jasmine, exotically pronounced ‘Yazmina’ in German. He told me where they had sex, described exactly what they did, what their breasts were like, the precise consistency of their pubic hair. He considered himself an enlightened lover, and lectured me on the location of the G spot and the importance of foreplay and the female orgasm.

  Once while he was dating Karen I called on him at the moment they were heading to the bedroom. I tried to leave, but he told me not to be such a prude and made me wait for him in the living room. I was there for forty minutes, leafing through battered copies of Die Tageszeitung, trying to ignore the intermittent gasps from the next-door room. Afterwards, I had to endure an excruciating round of coffee with them both red-faced, Karen a little dazed as Stefan talked about the Taoist concept of the joining of the essences.

  I made a few jokes as Stefan talked about his latest encounter with Petra, but didn’t ask for more details on the sex itself – I never did. I already had a vague sense of a time when he would know I was also capable of falling in love with men, and I didn’t want him to look back at these conversations and remember me grilling him for details.

  ‘Were her parents in?’ I asked.

  He shook his head. ‘They’re never in. They’re in Mallorca or Menorca. They’re always somewhere, little Nazi pigs.’

  ‘Are they?’ I said, thinking of her mother as I’d last seen her in a brightly patterned peach silk jumpsuit, crying with laughter as Stefan re-enacted a Loriot sketch for her.

  ‘Her dad is. Definitely. A little capitalist pig for sure. It’s more or less the same.’

  ‘Is it?’ Usually I ignored Stefan’s political pronouncements, but I was tired and upset about Mum and Tobias. What was I going to do? It was impossible. I had a stomach ache and wanted to lie down in the bog and close my eyes.

  ‘You know,’ Stefan said, ‘I was round there once and he was treating me like some sort of son-in-law in waiting. We all took a stroll around Wannsee in the sunshine and went past this school in some big villa and he pointed through the railings and said “Final Solution”. Just like that: “Final Solution”.’
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br />   ‘Final Solution?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Stefan. ‘It’s where they decided on the Final Solution. In some massive house by the lake. Like a couple of streets away, and he just points at it and says, “Final Solution,” like he’s telling me that some film star lives there.’

  ‘Doesn’t mean he’s a Nazi,’ I said.

  ‘Why are you trying to defend him?’

  ‘I’m not,’ I said. ‘I’m just saying it doesn’t mean he’s a Nazi.’

  ‘You know I read up on it. There’s this historian, Joseph Wulf, who spent years trying to get that house turned into a Holocaust memorial, but the pigs in the government wouldn’t let him do it. Just ignored him. And he was like, there are all these old Nazis working for companies, swanning around as MPs and bank managers, and fucking, I don’t know … people working at banks.’

  I laughed.

  ‘Ralf, this is serious.’

  ‘Sorry,’ I said.

  ‘And they just ignored him. And you know what he did in the end?’ He waited wide-eyed.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  ‘Killed himself. Threw himself off his balcony, because he knew there was no hope for Germany.’

  ‘Fuck,’ I said. ‘Well, that was a really depressing story.’

  ‘Why are you being so glib?’ Stefan said. ‘I’m talking about the fucking Holocaust.’

  ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry, I’m just tired.’

  We carried on the count in silence until Stefan urgently gripped my shoulder and pointed. A fly had landed on the outstretched leaves of a sundew. It floundered among the sappy fronds, intermittently releasing a warm, plaintive buzz, until the plant’s gluey beads stuck its wings down. As the fly pulled frantically, the leaf kinked at the end, rose up and curled tentacle-like over its prey.

  ‘Sorry little bugger,’ Stefan said.

  ‘I hate flies,’ I said, feeling nauseous.

  When we reached Maike and Petra at the canal’s edge, Stefan hung back so that I would end up standing between him and Petra. Maike said, ‘Look,’ and with her boot gently lifted what looked like the sedge-filled edge of the water. ‘It’s floating.’

  ‘The sedge has seeded in the sphagnum moss,’ said Petra.

  ‘It’s a little floating ecosystem.’

  We all smiled and I was happy for a moment, but then I thought about my mother and Tobias, his body imagined in detail over many secret nights in my room now twisted around my mother’s bony frame. I shuddered and felt impossibly miserable again.

  *

  That evening, in search of garlic toads, we cycled with the other volunteers to the Schöneberger Südgelände, where trees and plants grow over the abandoned Tempelhof Railway Yard, creating an elongated oasis by the train tracks to Lichtenrade and the sprawling Steglitz allotments. The morning at Langes Luch had tired us out, though, and we kicked about haphazardly, failing to find a single amphibian. As the sky darkened, we deserted the others and climbed the hill at Park der Insulaner to lie among the observatories on sleeping bags, listening to the field crickets chirping among the tall dry grasses and staring at the hazy blanket of stars above us.

  I talked about the European Plain that we lay in, about the eastern edge, where Kazakhstania had crashed into Pangaea, forcing the Ural Mountains high into the primordial air and making the youngest supercontinent whole. When we camped out, it was always someone’s turn to talk about what they’d been reading, but my geological stories were the most sought-after, because they were the most sedative. It wasn’t that they were dull – or so my friends promised me – but rather the soporific effect of all that time and all that physical mass, the sense of extreme smallness it gave them.

  By the time I had got onto the subject of post-orogenic collapse, they were all asleep. I rolled over and looked at Maike. Her mouth was open and her arm was thrown out on the bare ground as if raised in protest.

  ‘I think my mum’s having an affair,’ I said, testing it out on her unconscious body. No one moved. ‘She’s having an affair with someone I was in love with,’ I said. ‘Or I’m still in love with.’

  I lay on my front and listened to my heartbeat and thought about Oz in his bookshop, imagining him beside me, his fingers laced through the hair at the back of my head. I fantasised about his green Mercedes parked at the bottom of the hill, the engine turning over, waiting to take me away from Berlin and from ever having to hurt anyone or ever having to have an awkward conversation again.

  *

  I woke because of the silence, or perhaps because of a change in the light. The crickets had stopped singing and the stars above us had been bleached by the risen moon.

  ‘Ralf?’ It was Maike. She was standing over me.

  ‘You OK?’ I whispered.

  She put her finger to her lips to shush me and held out her hand. I took it and she led me through the pale observatory buildings, round and rendered like dreamt-of adobe houses in a Mexican village. We walked in jumpy movements as the flinty stones in the mud dug into our bare feet.

  ‘Where are we going?’ I said.

  ‘To find a place,’ she whispered.

  The place was the moon shadow of the furthermost observatory, where she pushed me against the rough wall and kissed me. When I pulled her close and she let out a little moan, I whispered, ‘Here?’

  She nodded and kissed my neck as I slipped my fingers into her shorts. She gripped the hair at the back of my neck, then pulled away, squatted down leaving my fingers cold and patted the ground. I could feel the damp beneath my feet and said, ‘We can do it sitting up.’

  ‘No,’ she said, feeling around her wildly like a seer, ‘I want to be in the dark. I want to be covered in you.’

  She let out a sharp intake of breath and put her finger in her mouth.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nettle.’

  ‘We can go back if you want,’ I said, but half-heartedly, because I was already hard.

  She crawled forward to the dry ground of the path and pulled down her shorts, rolling over, so that her buttocks were exposed, pale and round in the dark. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘But cover me.’

  ‘Can they see us?’

  ‘No,’ she said, but she hadn’t looked. She slipped her hand between her legs. ‘Ralf,’ she said, and I pulled down my shorts and we had sex on the bare ground, my face full of her hair and her mouth, my elbows and knees digging painfully into the hard stones.

  *

  ‘Hey,’ someone said. ‘I don’t think you can sleep here.’

  I rolled over and saw that it was light and a nervous-looking pimpled student in an orange windcheater was standing over me. Maike was back between Stefan and Petra, fast asleep.

  Bleary-eyed, we rolled up our sleeping bags and stuffed them into our rucksacks, then coasted down the hill on our bikes, winding down the wooded paths half conscious. In Berlin, we were almost never allowed to camp out where we actually did camp out, and so expected this kind of awakening. It didn’t worry or annoy us. We just cycled to the main road, then split up and cycled back to our various homes. It was only when Stefan left me at Kolonnenstraße and I was alone that I realised how terrified I was of going back to Charlottenburg.

  Ten

  A walled-in exclave surrounded by a hostile country with sweltering summers and glacial winters did not make West Berlin an attractive destination for many Germans in the Bundesrepublik. The city’s special status, however, afforded us a few advantages, as West Germany and the occupying powers pumped in huge quantities of money to keep the shopfront of democracy looking as shipshape as possible. One such advantage was the West Berlin flat rate – a fixed price for a phone call within West Berlin no matter how long that call lasted. We treated our telephones like intercoms, ringing friends and chatting idly, staying on the line while the caller went to the toilet, took something out of the oven, got dressed. People watched TV together at opposite ends of the city, smoking a cigarette in silence with the receiver under their chin, only speaking
sporadically to comment on Dagmar Berghoff’s ugly blouse on the Tagesschau. It was not uncommon to find our phone lying on the kitchen floor, hanging from its spiral cord. You would pick it up and say, ‘Hello?’ to see who was there. Sometimes Beate was at the other end, sometimes Stefan, sometimes the caller had long since hung up.

  The flat rate meant that I was able to avoid my mother that Monday by talking to Maike for three hours when Mum got home from work. I then skipped dinner and went and watched Aguirre, The Wrath of God with Stefan at his flat. Petra and I worked at the beer garden on Tuesday evenings, and when I came through the door, my skin and hair smelling of fried Leberwurst, the lights were off and everybody was already in bed. On Wednesday mornings my mother did paperwork and so slept in an extra hour, so I got up at seven to get out of the house before she woke up.

  When I came into the kitchen from the shower my father was already at the table taking apart Die Zeit, and the room smelt of coffee. He frowned and said, ‘You all right, Ralfi? Couldn’t you sleep?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘We’re doing a nature thing in the woods.’ The vagueness was intentional – I’d watched an episode of Tatort in which one of the detectives had said that you could tell if someone was lying if their story was too elaborate.

  ‘Bit early, isn’t it?’

  ‘A bit.’

  I opened the fridge and took out a yoghurt. The day was already so hot that I lingered in front of the cool fridge for longer than I needed to, feeling the cold air on my bare chest, still damp from the shower.

  ‘Do you want a boiled egg or something? You’ll need more than yoghurt if you’re going to be out all day.’

  I shook my head. I had barely eaten anything since I’d bumped into Tobias and seen the watch in his fingers and the smile on his lips. ‘Stefan’s bringing Franzbrötchen.’ It was awful how easy it was to lie to my father and terrible how he just accepted it. He was too good, betrayed by everyone around him. It made me sick, thinking of him climbing into their bed, not knowing that Tobias’s body had been pressed into it a few hours earlier.