An Honest Man

by Ben Fergusson

  I shrugged.

  ‘Ralf,’ Oz said. ‘We’re already watching him. We’ve been watching him for a while. Anything you tell me, it’s not going to change anything. It just might speed things up.’

  ‘Can you tell me what’s he done?’

  ‘He may’ve done nothing, in which case you’ll be helping him.’

  I laughed. ‘I don’t want to help him.’

  Oz turned so that he was facing me and settled his shoulder into the seat. I could tell that the intrigue of the story was starting to overcome his anxiety about sharing it with me. He did odd jobs playing second fiddle to a father he felt he was disappointing, and then someone had asked him to help out with something real, something about life and death and nations at war. ‘This is like … ’

  ‘Top secret,’ I said. ‘I know. I won’t tell anyone.’

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘So, for about ten years, the BND have been after an undercover Stasi agent in West Berlin called “Axel” who deals in kompromat. It’s like compromising information about someone that you can use to blackmail them. The stuff that “Axel” gets hold of is really good-quality, and he’s never been caught out passing it back East. A few months ago, the BND turned a Stasi agent who was able to link “Axel” back to Windscheidstraße 53 – your apartment block.’

  ‘And you think it’s Tobias?’

  ‘Yes. No one’s seen “Axel”, but we know that he was in a sanatorium in East Germany for kids with polio – and Tobias limps – and the description in the register said he had red hair, which, of course, fits. The timing also fits – “Axel” started delivering the kompromat soon after Tobias “fled” to the West.’ He added the quotation marks around ‘fled’ with his index and middle fingers.

  I stared at the spotted bark of a young lime tree newly planted to replace one that had blown down in a thunderstorm the summer before. I thought about what Oz had said, but still wasn’t convinced. ‘Have you actually met Tobias? Or talked to him?’

  Oz shook his head. ‘I’ve just watched him.’

  ‘He’s nice. I mean he’s an arsehole, it turns out, but not like a Stasi blackmailer.’

  Oz smiled. ‘I’m sure he’s nice,’ he said. ‘And we don’t think he’s using the material, we just think he’s collecting it.’

  A woman rattled by on high heels. We waited in silence until she’d passed.

  ‘Why don’t they just arrest him?’

  ‘They want to catch him in the act, so that they can work out who his sources are. That’s why they asked me to watch him. The information he’s passing on is about important people in West Berlin from a lot of different walks of life and a lot of different places. That means lots of leaks that need to be found and stoppered.’

  I touched the steel keyhole of the glove compartment.

  ‘So what did you want me to do?’

  ‘Just keep an eye on him. Your flat looks directly into his.’

  I was well aware of this.

  ‘Did you know who I was and where I lived when you bumped into me at the pool?’

  He nodded. ‘But I wasn’t expecting … I mean, I was just going to try and befriend you, ask you a few questions. I wasn’t expecting … this.’

  I did believe him. Or rather, I believed that he believed that what he was telling me was true. But I still wasn’t convinced that Tobias was an agent for the East German government. I couldn’t tell Oz that I’d been watching Tobias for years and he’d never done anything to suggest that he was anything other than a charming, bumbling bachelor. He was affectionate and scatty, and that could lead to adultery, I supposed, but not to espionage.

  I did agree to help Oz, though. Because of the answer to my next question. ‘If it turned out he was this agent, would they still arrest him at some point? Once they’d worked out what his sources were?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘But they wouldn’t hurt him?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ said Oz. ‘He’d just go to jail. If he’s lucky, he’d be swapped back East after a year or two.’

  I nodded. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

  A fox trotted across the street. It stopped in Oz’s headlights and stared at us. I felt there had to be a consequence for what I’d done. People didn’t just take trips out of the city with strangers, didn’t just grass up their mothers, grass up people they’d once adored, men didn’t just kiss men without paying for it.

  ‘Good,’ said Oz. ‘If you didn’t want to, though … I mean, I’d still like to see you. If you didn’t want to help, or felt like you couldn’t.’

  We had left the known world too far behind and I didn’t understand the language in this new space we existed in. I could only make a gesture: I touched his scar, luminous in the dark, and got out of the car. The sound of him pulling away and the plaintive bleep of the horn made me feel desperate and alone.

  Thirteen

  Maike’s mother opened the door and I was shocked by how old she looked. A narrow flap of skin joined her chin to her neck and the shape of her skull was perceptible beneath her waxy, freckled forehead. Knowing about the cancer, I had expected her to be bald or at least be wearing a wig or a headscarf, but she had white hair permed into tight curls, clinging to her head like the wispy seed head of a dandelion.

  ‘Hello,’ I said. ‘I’m Ralf.’

  This didn’t seem to spark any kind of recognition.

  ‘I’m here to see Maike.’

  ‘This late?’ she said. ‘Well, I’m not sure she’s here.’

  ‘She’s in her room,’ came a weary female voice from the kitchen.

  ‘Oh,’ her mother said. Her eyes passed over my face. ‘Lena and Maike’s room’s on the left.’ She grabbed my arm – her grip was surprisingly powerful. ‘Leave the door open when you’re in there.’ And in response to a ‘Jesus Mum!’ from the voice in the kitchen, she said pleadingly, ‘Ajar at least!’

  I nodded, smiling as comfortingly as I could, and watched her make her slow progress back to the dark living room, where a ceiling fan rotated above her husband’s sleeping form.

  I pushed the door open to Maike’s room, feeling nauseous and light, my bare legs cold. It was dark and there were two single beds – one pushed against each wall. She’d never told me that she shared her bedroom with one of her sisters.

  The room smelled sweet, the artificial smell of bright, fruit-scented erasers. Although the heavy curtains were drawn, I could make out a desk separating the beds, strewn with stationery and neat piles of books and magazines. The sister’s side of the room was papered with posters and pages torn from Bravo and Mädchen, depicting famous young men from American bands, with teeth as white as the T-shirts they wore beneath their loose denim shirts. The images of these boys stopped in an almost perfect line where Maike’s half of the room began. Here hung only a large map of the world specked with a few coloured flag-pins.

  Maike lay on her side facing the wall. I knew that she had bad periods, and when she did she stayed at home. She always called me and told me it was coming on and then I didn’t hear from her for a few days. I’d never considered this odd. I put my hand on her bare arm and, without any movement to suggest consciousness, I heard her say, ‘Ralf? You all right?’

  In the dim room, with my hand on her arm, there was nothing I could say except for, ‘Me? I’m fine. What about you?’

  ‘It’s just my period. I called, but your mum said she hadn’t seen you in a few days.’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  The air outside was so warm that I didn’t notice the windows were open behind the curtains until a ripple ran down the length of them like a wave, releasing a pleasant breath of wind that cooled the sweat on my arms.

  ‘Is it really bad?’ I said.

  ‘No worse than it always is,’ she said. ‘You should go. I’m not going to be any fun for a day or two.’

  ‘You don’t have to be fun,’ I said, trying out on her the line t
hat Oz had used on me in the bookshop.

  She didn’t answer.

  ‘Can I get you something?’ I said.

  ‘No, it just hurts. I just have to wait for the pain to go away.’

  The pain, we would discover fifteen years later, was endometriosis. The lining of her womb had migrated onto her other organs, her fallopian tubes, her ovaries. When the same ovaries pumped out oestrogen each month, the tissue responded, leaching blood into her innards. Once she had been diagnosed, she had to be medicated with opiates. That was what was going on beneath her still fingers as she lay there on the bed – excruciating pain, like a monthly dose of appendicitis.

  ‘I was in the Lappwald today,’ I said.

  I waited for something to happen, for the question that would lance the boil and spill out the whole mess, infecting everything. ‘Schön,’ she said. I stared at the side of her body, trying to see if she was breathing, but she was as still as a dropped puppet. ‘You should really go,’ came her voice again. ‘But I do love you.’

  ‘I love you too,’ I said, and I did. In leaving the room, though, I recognised that I’d failed to reconcile the world that contained Oz and the real world that I lived in. I’d failed because it was impossible.

  *

  When I got home, I shut the front door very gently and slid over the parquet, the streetlight from the living-room windows reflecting in amber stripes on the polished wood. In my bedroom, I dropped my rucksack onto the floor and pulled open the wooden double windows. When I turned back to the room and my eyes adjusted to the darkness, the panes of the wardrobe mirror glowed blue grey and my bed sheet was picked up by the wind, lifted and then resolved into a human figure.

  I inhaled in terror.

  ‘Ralf?’ the figure said.

  ‘Jesus Christ!’ I said, my hand clamped to my mouth.

  ‘It’s just Mum.’

  The fear burst, creeping away into my extremities.

  ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ I said.

  ‘I was waiting for you to come home. I fell asleep.’

  ‘Fuck.’

  I switched on my table lamp and she turned her face from the light, closing her eyes and shielding them with her hand. She was wearing a satin nightgown the purply silver of river water, from which her shoulders emerged, hard and freckled. She smiled, squinting. Without make-up, she looked puffy and lipless.

  ‘Why the fuck were you waiting for me in the dark?’

  ‘It wasn’t dark when I started waiting.’

  ‘Why were you waiting at all?’

  Her hand smoothed the cotton of my bed sheets. ‘I changed your bed.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You haven’t been home. I haven’t seen you in a week.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘You weren’t here for dinner on Sunday. Stefan wasn’t even sure where you were.’

  ‘I’ve been with Maike.’

  ‘She called. She was ill. A bad period.’

  Maike had just told me that. I was frustrated at being caught out in a lie and terrified that Mum might somehow have found out about Oz, so I desperately threw out, ‘What, you’ve been spying on me?’

  ‘I haven’t been spying on you, Ralf. Why are you being so arsey?’

  ‘Because you just scared the shit out of me.’

  ‘I said sorry.’

  ‘No you didn’t.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, and blinked. ‘Well, I’m sorry.’

  In her nightdress, on the edge of the single bed, in the low light from the desk lamp that threw her shadow giant and brown onto the wall behind her, she looked like a fallen woman from a Walter Sickert painting.

  ‘Is everything all right with Maike?’ she said.

  ‘Yes. Why wouldn’t it be?’

  ‘You’re upset about something.’

  ‘Well, it’s got nothing to do with her.’

  She considered this. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘these early friendships and relationships seem terribly important when you’re your age, but it’ll be a different world at university.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Just that they’ll make new friends too. And you’ll meet new people, fall in love—’

  ‘I am in love. You just don’t like her.’

  ‘Did she say that?’

  ‘No, you make it completely obvious.’

  She wrinkled her nose. ‘I do like Maike. She doesn’t like me. She doesn’t say a word to me.’

  ‘You said she was cold.’

  ‘She is cold, Ralf. She’s very cold with me. And I don’t think she’s all that warm with you. You’re never over there. We’ve never met her parents.’

  ‘You wouldn’t like them. They’re poor.’

  She jolted upright. ‘What do you mean? What on earth do you mean? “They’re poor.” That’s your judgement. I’ve never even met them. Your grandfather was from Hull. We’re not snobs.’

  ‘You don’t know anything about it,’ I said.

  ‘No, clearly I don’t.’ She screwed up her face as if she’d eaten something disgusting. ‘And you’re being very unpleasant.’

  ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘I’m a terrible person. Can I go to bed now?’

  ‘Of course,’ she said, defeated.

  She stood, put her hand on my shoulder and kissed my cheek. Her face was hot from sleep, like a child’s. I found it hard to bear.

  ‘Night then,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, night.’

  Once she was gone, I undressed, turned off the light and fell onto my bed, feeling like I’d already let Oz down by losing my temper. My pillow smelt of her perfume. I threw it to the floor and tried to sleep face down on the bare sheets, but then my eyes opened in the dark. Was she going to leave us? It was the first time the thought had occurred to me. I pictured my father, Martin and me abandoned, watching our mother and Tobias home-making in the flat across the courtyard.

  Do we all believe that our mothers are powerful, loving and infallible, interested only in us and our needs? This is how my mother had always seemed to me. In her wit, in her small, wiry frame, she seemed to embody a brisk vigour whose sole focus was the protection and care of our family. Even her job I understood as a way to keep us fed and safe and to stay near us as she did it.

  And now? Now she had become human. Her fallibility had been exposed in an instant, like the lights going on in a club, revealing the shabbiness of all the dark forms that had a second earlier seemed so solid and so exquisite. Lying on the fresh sheets that she had changed for me I realised that this mortal form of my mother was able to make mistakes, to make selfish decisions, to leave us because it suited her, and that new possibility terrified me.

  I closed my eyes and forced myself to think about Oz, seeing snatches of him in the woods, still feeling the burn of his stubble on my chin. With him on my mind, I was able to drift off, but woke up a few hours later needing to pee. When I crossed the hall to the bathroom, I could hear Mum crying and my father’s soft, comforting voice emanating from their bedroom. Sitting on the toilet listening to the diminutive scream of a mosquito from the ceiling, I rubbed the palms of my hands into my eyes and smiled a little because although my life was coming to pieces, I was at least in love.

  Fourteen

  I felt like the kiss with Oz in the Lappwald had changed everything. I held on to the feeling throughout the stilted breakfast with my family, which I spent avoiding my mother’s gaze, until she addressed me directly to remind me it was Beate’s private view that evening and that I had to be ready by seven. I spent the morning lying on the sofa, while Martin lay on the floor, watching the beginning of the US Open in a stupor broken only when a wasp flew through the window and had to be urgently batted out because Martin was allergic.

  As I pulled the window shut, I saw the tall man with neat hair that Stefan, Martin and I had seen in the dusk on the day I’d met Oz. He was walking out of the courtyard, away from our side of the building where he must’ve been seeing Mum again. Was he suspicious? I th
ought. It was odd that he didn’t use the front entrance. But taking the back entrance only led him past Tobias’s windows, not to his front door.

  I looked up to see if Tobias was there, thinking perhaps that they were able to signal to each other, but Tobias’s flat was empty and the man was walking unhurriedly with his head down. In the daylight, his hair was very white, but still full, and he was wearing pale trousers and a white shirt, all beautifully cut and expensive-looking, but oddly unfashionable. It meant that he was probably someone important in the British Army – Mum had a few of those patients.

  The man stopped; was this the moment? But instead of turning to Tobias’s apartment he turned to me and squinted, and I saw for a second his pale blue eyes and the large raised mole caught between the deep frown lines on his forehead. I pretended to be looking about for something in the courtyard, then turned and fell back down onto the sofa. He was probably just some old Army officer who was in love with one of his privates, I thought. It all seemed possible now.

  It was during the breaks in play, as I stared at the cloudless sky thinking about Oz, that I began to understand that, seen from any distance, the kiss was nothing, that everything in my life wasn’t dramatically collapsing, but was completely unchanged. Oz wasn’t a part of it. He was an adult gay man, I realised, with a sinking sense of disappointment. I had read an article in Stern in which a gay man, blacked out to hide his shame, talked openly about his sexual partners, how he met them in the woods around the Aachener Weiher in Cologne. When the interviewer asked the man how many sexual partners he’d had, he couldn’t even count. Hundreds, he supposed. That was Oz, I realised with a heavy heart: a gay man who’d eyed me up and I’d got into his car. The kiss must have been a huge disappointment. He was probably in a bar on Motzstraße now regaling his friends with the story of the ginger Englishman from the traffic lights who talked about horsts and hills and just kissed him.

  Once Boris Becker was ahead in the match, I fell asleep. I woke up to find my dad clicking through the three channels, his thumb on the thick chrome buttons of the veneered set.