An Honest Man

by Ben Fergusson

‘Did he win?’ I said.

  ‘Becker?’ Dad said. ‘Of course.’

  He turned over to the news and stayed standing with his arms crossed as he listened to the headlines. They talked about the build-up of East German refugees in Hungary and the story of Kurt-Dörsam Schulz from Weimar, who shared half of our surname and had been shot in front of his mother and six-year-old child trying to cross the Hungarian border into Austria. They showed the border, rolling curls of barbed wire laid along rolling green hills, what the presenter described as a ‘bucolic landscape of meadows and buttercups’, though I could see from the close-up of the site of the man’s death that the flowers were yellow field mustard, dandelions and showy goat’s-beard.

  My father nodded at the TV. ‘See,’ he said. ‘Always ends in violence. This is what I was talking about.’

  ‘They’re not sending in any tanks though.’

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘Read it somewhere,’ I said.

  Dad sat on the edge of the coffee table to watch and Dagmar Berghoff’s voice lulled me back to sleep. I was woken by Mum pulling on my big toe. The TV had been turned off and the windows were closed. The room was hot and airless.

  ‘Are you ready?’ she said.

  Miserable about Oz and furious with her, I grunted and rolled off the sofa.

  ‘You need to get changed.’

  ‘I’m wearing this,’ I said.

  Mum had on a white silk dress with a soft bow at the neck. She fussed with the white leather belt at her waist, then agitated the large pearls in her ears. I wondered if she’d seen Tobias since she’d returned the watch. Perhaps he’d said something about the conversation we’d had in the hall.

  ‘Can’t you put something nice on?’ she said.

  ‘What’s wrong with what I’m wearing?’

  I had on shorts, grubby white socks and an old white T-shirt with a cartoon orange on it that Dad had brought back from a business trip to Valencia. The orange had a plaster on its head and was saying ‘¡34º Congreso Nacional de la Sociedad Española de Farmacia Hospitalaria!’

  ‘It’s a private view,’ Mum said.

  ‘It’s Beate. She doesn’t care what I wear. She wore her dead dad’s old suit last time.’

  ‘That was art.’

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘This is art.’

  ‘You know,’ Mum said, ‘you’re very prickly at the moment.’ She looked small and angry, like a bird.

  ‘I don’t know what “prickly” means,’ I said, wandering to my room, her following. I pulled on my beaten-up Puma trainers, still caked in dry grey mud from the garlic-toad count. I had actually planned to wear a yellow polyester shirt that I saved for special occasions, but I wanted Mum to know how angry I was with her without actually having to talk about why.

  ‘You know exactly what “prickly” means,’ she said. ‘You always pretend not to know English words to win arguments. It’s very petty.’

  ‘If you say so.’

  Mum folded her arms, and touched her throat with her fingertips. ‘What’s up with you at the moment, Ralf? Is something wrong? Dad said you were up at six for some nature project this week. Do you want me to speak to someone at the Wildlife Trust? Dr What’s-His-Face?’

  ‘It’s not that,’ I said, pushing past her to go to the bathroom.

  ‘Well, what is it then?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I said. I had always been so convinced about my abilities to hold in my feelings, but I saw now that I’d been mistaken. Oz had asked me to act normally around my mother and I was failing. ‘I’m just tired,’ I said.

  ‘Do you want a tea? Or I could make us all coffee.’

  I waved the comment away and kicked the bathroom door shut behind me.

  *

  We could see the crowd as we turned into Schlüterstraße. In front of Galerie Schmelling a group of men and women in beautiful pale clothes were laughing and drinking Sekt. Now I wished I had changed. Mum had put on white broderie anglaise gloves to match her dress and looked like Daisy in The Great Gatsby. Dad was wearing a light blue suit, and even my brother was wearing chinos. I felt like somebody they’d bumped into on the street and had convinced to tag along.

  Beate greeted us effusively, covering me and Martin in kisses scented with sparkling wine and red lipstick. Mum became teary in her friend’s arms. ‘I’m so proud,’ she said, stroking her face. ‘I’m so proud of you, darling Beate.’

  Stefan appeared in white jeans and a white shirt, red leather slip-on shoes and a skinny red leather tie.

  ‘That’s an outfit,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, Mum found the tie. The shoes were my dad’s.’ This was a running joke, since Beate claimed not to be completely sure who Stefan’s father was. There were a few candidates, all vanished. Stefan maintained that he didn’t mind and that it was his mother’s right to throw off the chains of the dominant patriarchy.

  ‘Well, you look lovely,’ Mum said, kissing him, leaving apricot-coloured smudges on his cheek. ‘Like you’re in Depeche Mode, or something.’

  I locked up my bike and stood with Stefan beneath a tall plane tree at the edge of the kerbside crowd. We watched the artists, dealers and local buyers mill in and out. Among the suits and sheer dresses were a few punks and pierced youths with black hair, some students of Beate’s from the Akademie der Künste.

  ‘All OK, Ralfi?’ Stefan said.

  ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Why?’

  ‘Your mum was looking for you yesterday. Said you weren’t at Maike’s.’

  ‘I was cycling about.’

  Petra tripped out of the gallery in an electric blue dress and gold high heels, carrying three glasses of Sekt.

  ‘Well you made an effort,’ she said, kissing me on the cheek and handing out the drinks. We clinked glasses and emptied them in one.

  Petra put a fist to her chest and burped. ‘Ooh, it burns,’ she said. ‘Maike not coming?’

  ‘She’s still ill,’ I said. ‘Period pains.’

  ‘She really bleeds.’

  Stefan nodded reverentially. He was, he liked to say, ‘very down’ with menstruation.

  We watched Beate kissing a new partner, a tall man with a beaten-up old rocker’s face, a leather jacket and hair too long for his age.

  ‘What’s this one called?’ I said.

  ‘Rainer.’

  ‘Is it a six-weeker or a six-monther?’

  ‘Six-weeker, I think,’ Stefan said. ‘He’s an artist and those ones never last very long. He’s already taken over a little corner of her studio, which she hates, and she’s started critiquing his woodcuts. Once she starts picking apart the work, they’re done for. It means she’s embarrassed by them.’

  Rainer licked Beate’s lips with a long, pink tongue and she roared with laughter.

  ‘Your mum doesn’t seem like someone who’s easily embarrassed,’ said Petra.

  Beate took out her lipstick and painted Rainer’s lips and the laughter of the crowd around her rose up to engulf her own. A tall man in jeans and a white T-shirt rolled up at the arms like a rock-a-billy strode across the street and joined the crowd around us. He looked about him, double-took and came over to us.

  ‘Hey, you’re Beate’s son!’ he said. His hair was straight and fair and he had a big friendly face, with a large knobbly nose.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Stefan.

  ‘I remember you from when you were this high,’ the man said, holding out a big hand.

  ‘I don’t remember you,’ said Stefan.

  The man laughed. ‘Joachim.’ He shook hands with Stefan, and then Petra and me, but he only glanced at us two. ‘I was your mum’s assistant for about a week back in eighty-three, but then got a place in Düsseldorf, so ran off West. God, you look really well.’

  ‘Oh, thanks,’ said Stefan. ‘Joachim, was it? Yeah maybe I remember. Vaguely.’

  ‘What are you up to now?’

  ‘Camping and masturbating,’ said Petra.

  Joachim acknowledged Petra’s joke with a brief smile,
then fixed his eyes on Stefan again.

  ‘I am camping,’ said Stefan. ‘We’ve all just finished school and are off to university at the end of summer. Ralf’s doing geology in England somewhere, Petra’s off to Hohenheim to do biology, I’m doing biology too, but in Hanover.’

  ‘What about your military service?’

  ‘This is Berlin,’ I said. ‘No one does military service here.’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ Joachim said, laughing at Stefan as if it was a joke and as if he’d said it. ‘Lucky. I did the social year and had to work in an old people’s home for eighteen months. Saw some sights there,’ he said, raising his eyebrows. ‘A lot of adult nappies.’

  Beate screamed, ‘Joachim!’ from the door.

  ‘Beate!’ Joachim said. ‘I haven’t seen a thing yet, but I’m sure it’s amazing.’

  He left us, squeezing Stefan’s shoulder as he went. We watched as Beate enveloped him, covering him in kisses.

  ‘I think Joachim was flirting with you,’ I said.

  ‘You think, Jessica Fletcher?’ Petra said.

  ‘Bit inappropriate.’

  ‘Jesus, Ralf,’ said Stefan, ‘don’t be such a prude.’

  ‘I’m not being a prude. It’s just … You just might’ve confused him. Why didn’t you drop in you were straight?’

  ‘It wasn’t particularly relevant to the ten-second conversation we were having.’

  ‘No, I know,’ I said, embarrassed by myself, ‘but he might have got the wrong impression.’

  ‘Why would it matter what kind of sex someone may or may not be having?’ Stefan said.

  ‘He’s not going to prise Stefan’s bum open because he briefly didn’t know whether he was gay or not,’ Petra said.

  ‘No, I know,’ I said again.

  ‘Poor Ralf,’ said Petra, patting my cheek. ‘He lives a very sheltered life. The English can barely talk about vaginal sex.’

  ‘Fuck off,’ I said.

  Petra and Stefan laughed and I got cross and said, ‘I’m going to look at the sculptures now, otherwise it’ll never happen.’

  ‘Careful of the gays,’ Petra called out behind me. ‘They will bum on sight.’

  Galerie Schmelling was housed in the large ground-floor space of an old supermarket. The architect had stripped away all of the fixtures and fittings. The floor was polished concrete, still stained with beige patches where the old lino tiles had been torn up. The walls had been taken back to the brick, scarred with deep holes where shelving had been removed. It was stifling and the people wandering among the works were fanning themselves with the photocopied price list.

  Scattered around the floor stood Beate’s sculptures, like frozen shoppers. I had seen some of her new work through the windows of the studio. They were highly expressive, and for the last five years, since Beate’s father had died, had been made of bent iron and white plaster. She used a blowtorch to soften the rebars sourced from building sites, which she bent into shapes, always the height of a human being and always supporting themselves on the floor. The sculptures were finished with white plaster, which she dripped onto the rusting iron, so that the final expressionistic creations might have resembled creatures emerging from a swamp. Except that Beate exhibited the figures upside down, so that they seemed to be dripping backwards, pulled up into the air by a reverse gravity. In places, where the rebars still poked out, the plaster picked up the iron colouring, staining it orange and adding a sense of desolation to the objects that were, elsewhere, almost unbearably white, like shop-bought meringue.

  One sculpture seemed to be reaching an arm out, its skin pouring away to the ceiling, and beneath it I saw Tobias in a linen shirt squinting at the label.

  He noticed me and smiled. ‘Hey Ralf!’ he said. ‘What do you think of all this? It’s really good, isn’t it? I’ve never seen her stuff before.’

  ‘What are you doing here?’ I said coldly.

  ‘Your mum invited me.’

  I laughed in disbelief. ‘Oh right. Nice.’

  He smiled at me again, mistaking my tone. My mother shouted, ‘Tobias! Oh, I’m so glad you could come.’ She had the nerve to shake his hand as if they barely knew each other and they fell into an awkward hug. She blushed and gestured to him, saying, ‘Tobias’s brother is a sculptor back East. I thought he might like to see what Beate was up to.’ So this was why she’d dressed up so smartly, I thought, disgusted by her thin shoulders beneath the silk dress and her thin lips smothered in coral lipstick.

  ‘Well, now he’s seen it.’

  My mother frowned. ‘Are you all right, Ralf? Do you need to get some air? It’s so hot in here.’

  Tobias seemed to sense that something was up. He lifted his wine glass and said, ‘I’m going to have a browse.’

  ‘You do that,’ I said to his retreating back.

  ‘Ralf!’ my mum hissed. ‘What’s got into you?’

  I walked away from her to get another drink from the paint-spattered trestle table in the corner of the room.

  ‘Ralf!’ she said, coming after me. ‘Why are you being so rude? Tobias is our friend.’

  ‘Why did you invite him?’

  ‘I thought you liked him.’

  ‘No, I think he’s a dick. Doesn’t he have anyone else to hang out with?’

  ‘Ralf!’ she said, and laughed in exasperation. ‘You do know he had to leave his whole family behind when he fled East Germany? He doesn’t have any contact with them at all. He doesn’t have anyone. Can you imagine that?’

  ‘He has you.’

  Her smile wavered. ‘He has us.’

  ‘Whatever,’ I said, fishing out a dripping bottle of Sekt from a plastic washing-up bowl. The ice had long since melted, and the slippery labels that had come loose from the cooling bottles brushed against my hands like trout in a stream.

  I filled up my glass, and when I turned back I saw that her expression had changed. She looked tearful and her chin had wrinkled and was jutting forward, which meant she was holding back angry tears. ‘Ralf!’ she said. ‘You are being absolutely horrible to me at the moment. And I think it’s very cruel.’

  Tobias was an amber blur behind her, leaning on his good leg, casually staring at a sculpture. I heard my dad laughing outside. For a moment I didn’t care what Oz had said to me about acting normally, I just wanted to hurt her. A moment later the feeling was gone, but by then I’d already said, ‘Cruel, like fucking your crippled neighbour?’

  She drew her chin back and her mouth opened a little. Her eyes relaxed too and the first large tear that escaped from them was a tear of genuine misery. The anger had dissipated the moment I offered her a salient explanation.

  ‘Has it been going on for years?’ I said.

  She looked so heartbroken.

  ‘You’re going to leave us, I suppose?’

  She frowned. ‘What are you talking about?’ she whispered.

  ‘Are you going to leave us? It’s a simple question. Are you going to leave us for your new lover?’

  She shook her head, dazed. ‘Ralf, I’d never … ’

  We heard a smash and turned. Rainer, Beate’s rocker, had drunkenly kicked a glass over and was apologetically dabbing at a young woman’s leg with a tissue.

  ‘What kind of rocker carries tissues with them?’ my mother said absently. It was the sort of joke that would have made us laugh a month ago, but she didn’t laugh and neither did I.

  I turned away, but she gripped my arm just long enough that I had to pull it to release it, touching the spot where her fingers had been as if she’d hurt me. I knew this would upset her. I heard her high heels snapping on the concrete floor as she ran to find a toilet to weep in.

  I found Petra and Stefan beneath the tree. Joachim had returned, guffawing at a story Stefan liked to tell about falling into salt pans in the marshes on Juist and soiling himself. Petra looked bored and was draining another glass of Sekt.

  ‘Do you wanna get out of here?’ I said to them.

  ‘Where too?’ Petra s
aid.

  ‘Der Gammler?’

  ‘Sure,’ she said.

  ‘I’m going to stay and make sure Mum’s all right,’ said Stefan. Joachim smiled.

  Petra and I unlocked our bikes and Petra tucked the skirt of her dress up under her bum as she sat on the saddle. ‘Tell me if my Muschi’s showing, yeah?’ she said as we cycled off, loud enough for my father to turn and raise an eyebrow as we passed.

  Fifteen

  Petra and I sat at the bar at Der Gammler. We’d been drinking bottles of Jever for some time. Peter locked up and washed and dried the last of the glasses. ‘How was the exhibition?’ he asked.

  ‘Good,’ I said. All I could recall was my mother’s face and all I could think about was how impossible life had become.

  ‘Do you think, though,’ Petra said drunkenly, ‘without Stefan here to worry about, do you actually think they’re good? Because I think they might be shit.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I think they’re genuinely good.’

  ‘Anywhere else in Germany people would think they were shit. She’s just got a captive audience of Berlin weirdos.’

  ‘You’re a Berlin weirdo.’

  ‘You think?’ she said.

  ‘Of course. I don’t know what you’re going to do when you get to Stuttgart. They’re going to chase you out of town with forks.’

  ‘Forks?’ she said, looking confused.

  ‘Like pitchforks. Like in villages in films.’

  ‘I thought you meant dinner forks,’ she said. ‘Like I was a sausage.’

  This non-joke sent us into fits of giggles, causing Petra’s mascara to run down her cheeks and me to lay my head on the sticky bar and honk like a seal.

  After a few more swigs of beer, and once our tears had dried, she said, ‘There’s got to be some weirdos in Stuttgart. I’ll find them.’

  ‘Weirder than you, though?’ I said, as Peter lined up three shot glasses and poured us a round of Fernet Branca. We knocked it back and grimaced.

  ‘Aren’t you going to miss Berlin?’ Peter said.

  Petra shrugged. ‘Shouldn’t think so.’

  ‘But you’ve never lived anywhere else.’

  ‘That’s why I won’t miss it. And what’s there to miss?’