An Honest Man

by Ben Fergusson

  ‘Us,’ I said. ‘Your family.’

  ‘Well, none of you guys are going to be here, and my family – those fuckers are never around anyway.’

  ‘Yeah, but then you’ve got the run of a villa in Wannsee, not some grubby shared room in some crappy part of Stuttgart.’

  ‘I’d rather have the company. I hate being on my own. Anyway,’ she said, lighting a cigarette, ‘there aren’t crappy parts of Stuttgart. Down south, it’s the land of milk and honey.’

  ‘Can’t understand a word they’re saying though.’

  ‘Probably for the best,’ she said and we laughed again.

  I stared at the last inch of beer in my bottle and felt sad for an imagined Petra alone in Stuttgart, and the rest of us awkwardly trying to make new friends. She and everyone else would make a success of it, I thought. It was only me who would really be alone, abandoned by my friends, abandoned by my mother.

  We said goodbye to Peter and knew we were very drunk because we hugged him and then we hugged each other.

  On the dark street, I pointed my bike towards Schöneberg and Petra said, ‘Why are you going that way?’

  ‘I’m taking the scenic route,’ I said.

  She frowned. ‘You would tell us if you were doing something stupid,’ she said seriously. ‘Just so we knew.’

  ‘What do you mean “stupid”?’

  ‘I don’t know. Heroin, prostitutes, gambling.’

  ‘I’m not doing any of those things.’

  ‘But you’re doing something.’

  My ears burned and I looked down at the cobbles on the pavement, belching and trying to think of the most evasive way of answering, already feeling tired of having to. When I looked up though she was already cycling away, impressively steady, her back straight.

  ‘Bye Petra,’ I shouted.

  I thought she hadn’t heard me until she took her hands off the handlebars and raised both middle fingers in salute.

  When I got to Oz’s bookshop, the shutters were down. It was too early; the sky had only just begun to blue. I didn’t even know if the shop opened on a Sunday. I was almost sure it wouldn’t, but decided to wait until morning anyway. It seemed very important to me that I see Oz before he saw me, so I locked up my bike further down the road, on the corner of Hohenstaufen Straße, and sat on the pavement diagonally across from the bookshop, behind a Saab, over the boot of which I could still see the shop’s shutters.

  I woke twice. The first time, to a dog licking my bare leg. I grumbled and kicked at it, thinking that I needed to open my eyes, but I was already gone again. The second time was to my name being called gently but insistently – ‘Ralf. Ralf. Ralf.’

  I looked up and saw Oz squatting in front of me. He was wearing chinos and a white polo shirt and was carrying a little paper bag from the bakery. Behind him, the Saab was gone.

  ‘Ralf, are you awake?’

  ‘I’m awake,’ I said, taking a deep breath, and rubbing my face with my arm. I stood, steadying myself against the crumbling plaster on the wall of the building behind me, and said, ‘Oh fuck, I’m sorry. I fucked up, I’m sorry. I was really angry and I ruined everything. I was drunk too, I think.’

  ‘I think you’re still drunk,’ said Oz, getting his arm round me.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I don’t want you seeing me like this. I’m going to go home and sleep it off, but first I wanted to tell you about all the terrible things I’ve done.’

  ‘Don’t be dramatic,’ he said. ‘I’m sure it’s not that bad. Just come and drink something and lie down for a bit.’

  ‘Where?’ I said.

  ‘At the shop. You can lie down in the stockroom.’

  ‘I can’t,’ I said, stumbling beside him, letting my head swing blissfully onto his shoulder, so that the skin of my face touched the skin of his neck.

  ‘Someone’s going to come and see me, though,’ he said. ‘So you’ll need to stay quiet.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes.’

  Sixteen

  I could hear the chirrup of an industrial fridge and a grumbling, ancient boiler. Oz had laid me down on a pile of cardboard boxes opened out flat for recycling. I could feel the corrugations beneath my fingertips and could smell the wood pulp mixed in with a scent that reminded me of my grandparents’ kitchen in Bournemouth: ancient foodstuffs in an unheated room.

  Oz was squatting beside me and stroking my cheek with the back of his hand. ‘What time is it?’ I mumbled.

  ‘Seven. How’re you feeling?’

  ‘Bit rough,’ I said, sitting up cross-legged and pushing the heels of my hands into my eyes. ‘Fuck,’ I said.

  ‘Listen,’ he said, standing and picking up an envelope from the chest freezer. ‘My dad’s arriving soon, so we should head off. You think you can handle a car ride?’

  ‘Where to?’

  He guided an ancient kick stool along the floor with his foot and stood on it, reaching up to a high shelf and moving aside two large stoneware jugs. He hid the envelope behind them. ‘I’ll drive you home.’

  I shook my head, thinking of my mother’s crying eyes, and said, ‘I can’t go home.’

  ‘You want to sleep it off back at mine?’

  ‘At your parents’?’

  ‘No, my flat.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, my terror somewhat subsumed beneath my dizziness. ‘OK.’

  He moved the jugs back and stepped down from the stool, brushing his hands on his trousers.

  ‘What are you hiding up there?’

  ‘Nothing. I keep stuff up here that I don’t want Dad to find.’ He kicked the stool skitting across the floor to the other side of the room.

  ‘In his shop?’

  ‘They’re Bembel, the jugs. We lived in Frankfurt when we first came over and Dad thought that all Germans drank apple wine from these jugs. He got some deal on a job lot of them when we moved to Berlin, but no one here had ever heard of them. He didn’t sell one, so they’re all still up here. And he can’t throw anything away. For years, he used to send them back to Turkey as presents. There’s a whole corner of Izmir where all the flower vases, water jugs and pen pots are Frankfurter apple wine jugs.’

  I laughed. It made my head hurt.

  ‘So anything I want to keep safe I put up here. He’ll never sell the jugs and he’s run out of people to palm them off on.’

  ‘Why doesn’t he just sell them to someone back in Frankfurt?’ I said.

  ‘Too proud,’ said Oz. ‘In his mind, he’s never made a mistake in his life.’

  *

  Oz parked on a square centred on a deserted playground that was shaded by tall acacia trees. I followed him across a courtyard, into the back of one of the old buildings and up to the third floor. As Oz unlocked the door of his flat, there was a creak in the apartment opposite.

  ‘Frau Riemann at her spyhole,’ Oz whispered. ‘She’s been expecting the Soviets for forty years.’

  Oz’s apartment consisted of a small hallway, a living room, a tiny bedroom with a Juliet balcony, a kitchen with a yellow-melamine-covered table and chairs, and a long Berlin bathroom, with the sink, toilet and shower arrayed in a long line, one after the other. Everything was spare and painted white, except for the tiles in the kitchen and the bathroom which were a light mandarin orange, a colour I couldn’t believe had ever been fashionable or ever would be again.

  It smelt of all the scents I had smelt on him, but didn’t know for sure were his: the bonfire smell of his old coal heater, cigarettes, lemony aftershave, an indescribable male scent – not sweat, but something like clean scalp and clothes left for a long time in a dry closet.

  He took the can and wrapper from my hands and said, ‘Do you want to lie down? I’ve got some reading to do.’

  I nodded, pulled off my trainers and lay on his bed. The pillow was cold and smelt of his hair. He leant against the door and we stared at each other and smiled.

  *

  I slept for an hour or two and woke to gulp down a glass of water that Oz had
put by my bed. Then, half awake, I pulled off my socks, knowing that they were the hardest garment to remove erotically, and waited for him. I heard him click a fan on and felt its oscillating breeze buffeting my bare feet. I heard him turning the pages of a book and him filling a glass with water from the tap in the kitchen. I heard him using the toilet, heard that he put the seat up to pee, but didn’t put it back down again. I heard him boil a kettle, light a cigarette and stub it out.

  Eventually I climbed off the bed and walked into the kitchen, the floorboards pleasantly cool beneath my feet. He turned in his chair and stubbed out the cigarette he’d just lit.

  ‘How do you feel?’ he asked, waving the smoke away from his face.

  ‘Yeah, all right,’ I said, my heart thudding. ‘I thought … ’

  ‘What?’ he said.

  ‘I thought you were going to come.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘I thought you needed the sleep.’

  He seemed uncertain and I was worried that there’d been some misunderstanding. But I’d come so far and I was standing in his flat; the idea of leaving again without trying was more awful than walking away and feeling the emptiness I’d felt since the kiss in the woods. I touched his cheek. I felt like my heart had dropped into my stomach. He smiled and looked up at me, his eyes impossibly golden, his thick eyebrows black, pulled together in a sweet frown.

  ‘Is it going to hurt?’ he said.

  ‘What?’ I said. I thought I’d misheard him.

  ‘Sex.’

  ‘Oz,’ I said, stunned, ‘I don’t have a fucking clue what I’m doing.’

  His face softened instantly. ‘Fuck, Ralf,’ he said. ‘Me neither.’

  And we began to laugh.

  *

  What surprised me most about sex that first time was how like sex with Maike it felt, how alike two people in bed become. And also how completely unlike my blurred fantasies of sex with Tobias it was, which all involved someone face down in bed enduring penetration. Instead, my memory is of two bodies in a process of awkward but gleeful discovery. Stripped of my assumptions, a vast field of possibilities opened up in front of me, licking and touching, laughing, trying to ascertain from groans and mumbled ‘yeses’ what he and what I wanted. I came with my head pushed uncomfortably against the wall with my balls in his mouth, and when Oz came sweat bloomed across his skin, making him slick beneath my fingers.

  I lay panting on his chest, the grey plastic fan rotating at the end of the bed, the buffeting breeze drying the sweat on my back. I looked at my fingers in his black chest hair and the colour of his nipples, a dark liver-brown, his gold chain a blurred string of sparkling light far, far away at his neck. In that pre-digital age, his body was fascinating to me. Like all of my friends, I’d seen the ubiquitous soft-core pornography on late-night German television that our English relatives found scandalous. Police interviews, maths lessons, doctors’ visits turning unexpectedly sexual and ending with grunting dry humping. But I’d never seen an erect penis that wasn’t my own, I’d never seen a pale pink circumcision scar, I’d never seen, piece by piece, how a man’s body joins up, how the landscape of skin and hair changes in texture and tone, from the folds of the lips to the folds of the testicles, the tufts of black on his toes to the perfect triangle of hair above his buttocks on his otherwise hairless back.

  I lifted my head to kiss his other nipple, the one beneath my cheek, and touched his belly, rough where his semen or my semen had dried. I stared at his face. There was a speck of white dust stuck to the end of one of his long eyelashes. By his eyes, I saw a few very fine lines that would one day become crow’s feet, and between his thick eyebrows two lines that deepened when he frowned. I could see the tiny spots of his blue-black stubble already pushing through his skin, burrowing out from the surface. I touched his lips and pulled his bottom lip down, so that I could see his teeth and the inside of his mouth. He shot out his tongue like a snake.

  I laughed and snatched my hand away, sitting up in bed cross-legged. The breath of the fan swept past and cooled the sweat on my back and set the black hair on his body in violent motion.

  I looked about me. The walls of his bedroom were bare, except for a postcard in the centre of one white wall: a drawing on green paper of a man or a woman – I couldn’t tell – covering their eye with their hand, their head tilted back.

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Oz.

  ‘Why do you have it?’

  ‘It’s a postcard. It’s by Käthe Kollwitz; I got it at the Gemäldegalerie.’

  ‘I like it,’ I said.

  Along the floor, beneath the postcard, was a single row of books that circumnavigated the whole room. Thumbed and battered, I saw novels in German and French, books on economics and philosophy, books of poetry in German and Turkish. I picked out a slim Turkish volume. ‘Read me something from this.’

  He looked at the cover. ‘You won’t be able to understand it.’

  ‘No, but I want to hear you read it.’

  He pushed himself up on his pillow and opened the book in the middle. He started reading and I put my head on his chest, listening to the humming depth of it as he spoke.

  The old double window was open, but covered in a floor-length voile curtain, through which the sun beat, painting an elongated rectangle of bright light across the foot of the bed. Outside, beyond the courtyard, a lorry rattled over a junction. The air tasted dry and metallic. I put my hand into the sunlight, felt the heat of it and saw the skin of my palm become translucent, the blue veins threaded beneath, and listened to the booming poetry spoken in a foreign tongue.

  Seventeen

  Beyond the bedroom, Oz’s small kitchen contained a gas stove, the yellow table, two mismatched chairs and a large window, surrounded by ivy, that looked over the leaf-spotted earth and rusting bicycles of the back courtyard. In the bathroom, the window had been replaced with stacked and ribbed glass blocks softly misted with limescale, the grout between the blocks speckled with mildew. One block swung open – a rudimentary window – but the hinge was broken and the block had been strung to the shower head to keep it permanently ajar. When I showered, I could peep out of the gap there and see the swaying branches of an acacia tree filled with large magpies that screeched, fought and coupled in the branches.

  Like the bedroom, the high windows of the living room were swathed in thin voile curtains that moved languidly in the warm wind, rolling and parting. Almost all his furniture – a divan made of stacked Arabic-looking mattresses, a scratchy Turkish rug on the wooden floor, a brass rice tray on folding wooden feet – was made up of damaged cast-offs from a shop that his dad ran selling orientalist furnishings to West Germans. The only item Oz had bought himself was the hi-fi, which was surrounded by his cassettes stacked in tumbling plastic ziggurats. He played me Echo and the Bunnymen and Kraftwerk, and when I asked him to play me something Turkish he put on Müzeyyen Senar, a folk singer. Her deep voice seemed more full of feeling and despair than anything I’d ever heard before.

  It was in this landscape that we made love for what seemed to me like years, but could only have been a day or two. Never dressing, we wandered the rooms like two Adams, every kiss, every tenderness leading to sex, until I felt too hot and too full up and didn’t want it any more. But then he touched my leg, then the skin of my inner thigh, then he raised my hand and put my fingers in his mouth and it would begin again.

  When he left to get food I begged him to go to the Turkish supermarket and buy us something ‘authentic’. The oven was never turned on. Instead we sat naked on the floor eating sticky baklava, stuffed vine leaves cold from the tin, oranges, pears, dates, wrinkled olives and salty strings of dil peyniri cheese. He introduced me to flaky börek pastries and rings of sesame-encrusted simit bread, foods that I still love and eat when I have a night to myself, thinking of his fingers stained red with paprika. We drank tea from tiny glasses, strong powdery coffee, and in the evening got drunk on Efes beer and rakı made cloudy with wate
r.

  As August rolled to a close, the storms arrived. The weightless curtains of the bedroom flicked open and we felt rain on our skin, but we didn’t close the windows to the courtyard. Oz said that on the Turkish coast storms sweep away summer’s dusty mugginess, but not in Berlin. I told him that the difference was the climates: Mediterranean versus continental. I talked about Wladimir Köppen in Hamburg establishing weather forecasts and mapping out the climatic regions of the world, I told him about Glenn Thomas Trewartha reclassifying the middle latitudes. He listened, never looking bored, asking questions, asking me to pause when he had to go to the toilet or boil the kettle for more tea.

  I could imagine no end to it. But the end did come. I knew that Mum would be calling round my friends, so I phoned when I knew no one would be home and left a message on the answering machine saying that I was staying at Maike’s. Connecting with the outside world made me feel nervous and uttering Maike’s name made me think of her lying on her side in pain in that bedroom. But her fuzzy shape in the darkening room was like the memory of a film I’d once seen. It felt like another life with different rules to this island apartment in Berlin-Schönenburg.

  Oz and I sat on the living-room floor, our legs entwined. It was dark outside and the room was lit with a single candle stuck to a broken saucer. Graceland was playing on the hi-fi and I was reading a few pages of On Photography by Susan Sontag that I’d found lying on the dusty brass side table in the corner of the room.

  Oz was smoking with a grey glass ashtray on his naked belly. He had just told me that he had to be at the shop that afternoon while his dad was at the wholesaler’s. I had murmured to acknowledge I’d heard him.

  ‘Ralf?’ he said.

  I looked up. He was frowning and looking down at his knees.

  ‘You’re going to ask me about Tobias, aren’t you?’

  ‘I feel dumb asking,’ he said. ‘It feels like I’m spoiling something.’

  I put the book down on the floor.

  ‘I’ve only seen him once since you asked me about it. It was at this private view and my mum was there. And I got cross with her again. I told her I knew about the affair.’