I scanned the typed pages and guiltily read snippets from her summation of the Major-General’s problems:
The patient is forty-eight, male, and a high-ranking officer in the British Army. He is a smoker. Three years ago, he was diagnosed with Peyronie’s disease, a connective tissue disorder that leads to abnormal curvature of the penis when erect, making penetration difficult. The patient was referred by a German urologist Dr Gelbhaare, who is treating the disease with vitamin E, though the treatment has not yet been effective and the prognosis is unclear …
… The patient has been married for twenty years and has two children, 18 and 16, both girls. He has not had sexual intercourse with his wife for five years. He masturbates regularly. He has never been unfaithful …
… The patient shows clear signs of depression. He suffers from fatigue and insomnia, waking early in the morning and being unable to fall back to sleep again. During the day, he has a lack of energy and struggles in social situations. He also suffers from digestive problems and a loss of appetite …
… The patient sometimes self-medicates with alcohol, regularly drinking more than a bottle-and-a-half of red wine in an evening …
My prurient interest in the details of the man’s sex life flickered and died in the cold wind of his misery. I returned the file, put the notes in a hard-backed envelope from Mum’s desk and crept through the house to my room, where I stuffed the envelope into my rucksack. ‘I am a spy,’ I thought. I wanted these words to resonate, to make me feel something, but they didn’t. As my heart stopped thumping, I realised that my overriding emotion was sadness for a middle-aged Army officer and his patient wife.
Nineteen
At the Bavarian beer garden, it was my turn on the flat grill, turning the bratwurst and pork steaks, and pushing the curling squares of Leberkäse down with a spatula so that they browned on the edges. I did most of my shifts with Petra and a tall, overweight boy called Dirk, who had a repaired harelip. On him, the lederhosen that we all had to wear were so tight at the crotch that they parted his testicles in the middle, creating a puffy vulva beneath the suedette shorts. They only provided one size, and on me the same outfit was baggy, making me look like a five-year-old Alpine child.
Every hour we rotated stations – the grill, the till, the beer – until we’d done each job twice. In the first few minutes at the grill, as the savoury smoke wafted over my face in hot waves, I always thought I wouldn’t be able to bear it for the full hour, but at some point the process hypnotised me and I only realised how hot I’d been when I moved on to the relative cool of the beer tap, the smell of frying meat emanating from my hair and chequered short-sleeved shirt.
From the till, Petra shouted over her shoulder, ‘So where’ve you been for the last two days?’
I’d been expecting the question, but still didn’t have an answer for it. ‘Just cycling about, avoiding my parents.’
‘Someone was asking after you.’
‘Who?’ I said.
‘Oh yeah,’ said Dirk from the beer taps. ‘Woman with curly hair. She came and asked for you on Friday too.’
‘No,’ said Petra. ‘This was a man. A bit older with blond hair.’
‘What did they want?’ I asked.
‘She just asked whether you were around.’
‘Yeah, the man too,’ said Petra.
‘That’s weird,’ I said.
She shouted out the next order. I used the palette knife to flick the sausages onto the grill, pulled the plastic lid off the five-kilo tub of potato salad and dropped the basket of chips into the shimmering fat, where they bloomed in a frenzy of frantic bubbles.
‘What about you?’ I said, watching a wasp bounce along the roof of the wooden cabin. ‘What’ve you been up to?’
‘Saw Stefan actually, when we couldn’t find you. Haven’t been to his flat in years. His mum was being extra weird.’
‘Don’t call Beate weird.’
‘She walked through the living room naked, Ralf. Stefan didn’t bat an eyelid. And then he made me watch this pirate copy of a film called Andre Roubel …’
‘Andrei Rublev,’ I suggested.
‘Oh my God. It was a stone-cold Stefan classic. Black-and-white, Russian, naked peasants, mental people. It seemed to mostly be about a giant bell.’
‘He’s made me watch it. He says it’s the greatest film ever made.’
‘I’m not being funny,’ Petra said, ‘but how can he even judge that? He only watches those kinds of films. I tried to make him watch Working Girl and he wouldn’t even give it a chance. He makes me watch a film where they set cows on fire and he won’t watch ten minutes of Working Girl?’
‘Shift change!’ shouted Dirk, holding out one hand for the spatula and pulling at the crotch of his lederhosen with the other.
‘Hey, Arschloch,’ said Petra, over the sound of the gurgling beer tap, ‘why do you always kill the barrel just before changeover?’
She pushed the blue-and-white chequered curtain aside and retapped the metal barrel of Weizen, pulling off the plastic pipe with a hiss.
‘I didn’t know it was empty,’ Dirk said.
‘What, it’s just a coincidence, is it?’
‘It’s not a coincidence that you always moan about it.’
‘Is it a coincidence that you’re a cunt?’
I greeted the next customer, a stone-faced-looking couple, both in beige trench coats and hats despite the warmth of the evening.
Towards the end of our shift, Herr Kniff, who ran the beer garden, shoved open the flimsy wooden door. He was very thin and over two metres tall, having to crane his neck in the little shed. With his goggly eyes and protruding upper lip, he reminded me of tall bony birds – ostriches and rheas. ‘Someone’s complained,’ he said, his reddish moustache twitching, which it did when he was cross. He was often cross.
‘What about?’ said Petra, now at the grill and holding the palette knife in the air like a sceptre.
‘Swearing. Foul language in front of children.’
‘I haven’t seen any children,’ Petra said.
‘The worst possible language.’
‘I burnt my finger,’ I said.
‘Badly?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘but it hurt. And I swore.’
Herr Kniff pursed his lips. ‘What did you say?’
‘Oh bloody shit.’
Petra covered up a snort of laughter with a cough, putting her forearm to her mouth.
Herr Kniff looked at Petra, his wrists pushed into his hips, his large eyes quivering. ‘Just be more careful,’ he said.
When I turned back to the open hatch Maike was standing in front of me. She looked better, but tired. The sun was dying and behind her, pink washes streaked the sky, filling the garden of drinkers and diners with a golden light that stained her skin satsuma orange.
‘It’s good to see you alive,’ I said, leaning across the counter and kissing her. Her lips felt cool and familiar and I felt a throb of pleasure deep in my stomach, but also fear.
‘Isn’t that your neighbour?’ Maike said, nodding behind her.
It was Tobias, sitting at a long table near the entrance to the beer garden, his wood and green metal chair slightly turned so that he wasn’t facing me.
‘Yeah,’ I said. He was chatting to two young women his age. ‘That’s weird.’
‘Is it?’ Maike said. ‘It’s a pretty big beer garden near your house. And it’s sunny.’
‘S’pose,’ I said. Did Tobias know that I worked there? I’d never told him, but he must have seen me come and go in my lederhosen and made the connection. I had bumped into him before with his friends. But with everything that had happened the sight of his broad back unnerved me.
‘Maike!’ Petra shouted from the back of the cabin. It was five minutes before closing and she’d started to clean the grill.
‘Hi Petra.’
Petra stopped scraping and squinted into the sun, holding her hand above her face. ‘You look better,’ she s
aid.
‘I feel better,’ said Maike.
‘It really hit you hard this time, oder?’ I said.
‘It did,’ said Maike, ‘but Petra’s talking about last night. I threw up outside Der Gammler.’
‘She was fucked,’ Petra shouted.
‘A Weizen, please,’ said a small woman with a tight perm. Behind her, I could see that Tobias and his friends had already left.
‘Large or small?’
‘Is there medium?’
‘Yup,’ I said, and called the order out to Dirk.
‘Were you all out?’ I said to Maike, taking the woman’s money and shoving the till shut.
‘Don’t be grumpy about it, Ralf,’ Petra shouted over my shoulder. ‘No one could find you.’
‘Where were you?’ Maike said.
In the warm magic of the late-summer sun, I heard myself saying, ‘I was with Oz.’ I was desperate to uncork the terrible feeling that had been building up in me, part anxiety about another secret I had to keep, but part just missing him. Uttering his name seemed to be the only way to stop me from bursting.
‘Who’s Oz?’ said Maike.
Petra appeared by my side, frowning. ‘Who the fuck is Oz, Ralf?’
The woman with a perm muttered something about standards and wandered back to her table with her beer.
‘A friend,’ I said. ‘A new friend.’
We saw Herr Kniff advancing across the gravel towards us. ‘I’ll explain later,’ I said.
*
We sat in the middle of the Tiergarten smoking in the dusk. Through the arches of the trees the purple sky was broken with silhouettes of black branches, like church windows.
‘Can you smell that?’ said Maike, as the wind shifted the leaves above us.
‘Like smoke,’ I said.
‘We’re smoking,’ said Petra.
‘No, it’s like wood smoke. Or coal fires. It smells like autumn coming.’
Petra lit a new cigarette from the stub of her old one, and flicked the dog-end into the bushes. I watched it turn in the air, smoking wispily as it spun like a tiny stick of dynamite.
‘Ihr Lieben!’ It was Stefan walking towards us through the dark holding a pearlescent bottle of Küstennebel, an aniseed liquor none of us liked, but drank because it was cheap and very alcoholic. He joined our circle and placed the bottle in the middle. We sipped from it reverently.
‘Any sign of our Army officer, Ralfi?’ Stefan said.
I shook my head, imagining the poor man’s bent penis.
‘You remember Joachim from the private view? He was telling me how the British Army … ’
‘Hey, you didn’t tell him you’d seen him, did you?’ I said. ‘He’s one of Mum’s patients. You can’t talk about it.’
‘Oh no,’ Stefan said, unconvincingly. ‘We were just talking about it generally.’
‘Fuck,’ I said.
‘I didn’t say he was one of your mum’s patients. I promise,’ he said.
I took the Küstennebel from Maike and took a syrupy gulp of it, wincing as I swallowed it down, then passed it to Petra and stared at the patchy grass by my bare legs.
We were quiet for a while. I thought I heard a nightingale, but then the song changed from a jug jug jug to a rising whistle – a blackbird mimicking a nightingale. Behind us, the scrubby woods crackled with branches broken underfoot and the skipping firefly dots of men’s cigarettes as they waited for other men in the dark.
‘Have you guys ever had sex in the woods?’ Petra said.
Stefan shook his head. Maike and I nodded.
‘You two?’ said Petra. ‘Really? I don’t see the attraction, myself. I did it once. The feeling of sticks and wet leaves on your bare bum.’ She shuddered dramatically. ‘And I was terrified the whole time about getting a tick on my labia.’
‘Who were you with?’ asked Maike. Stefan leant back on the grass. He always tried to act particularly cool when Maike discussed her sex life. Jealousy, he liked to say, was a disease of the bourgeoisie.
Petra frowned and sucked at her cigarette, as if she was struggling to recall his name. She blew out a rolling cloud of indigo smoke and said, ‘Doggle, I think. He was an exchange student.’
‘Dougal?’ I said.
‘Maybe. Is that a name?’
‘Seems more likely than Doggle.’
Petra nodded her assent. ‘Come on then. Who’s this Oz? And why have you deserted your friends for him? Is he rich and interesting?’
‘Who’s Oz?’ Stefan said.
‘Ralf’s new best friend,’ said Petra.
I pulled my face into an expression of nonchalant semiboredom, as if I could barely remember. ‘He’s just a guy I bumped into. I actually knew him already – his dad owns some of the flats in our building. I mean, I knew him to say hello to. I just bumped into him and got talking. He’s cool. I’ll bring him along to something.’
Maike picked at the grass by her legs, pale in the twilight, while Petra pondered what I’d said. ‘And you spent two days with him?’
‘No. Well, I got drunk with him and then ended up crashing out on his sofa. He lives in Schöneberg. He’s Turkish,’ I added, hoping somehow that that might help my case.
They looked confused. ‘I don’t understand why—’ Maike began.
I broke in with, ‘I was just trying to get out of the house.’
‘Why though?’ said Maike.
‘I think my mum’s having an affair.’ It was my final card.
Petra sat up and Maike raised her eyes to mine. She took my hand. ‘What?’ she said.
‘Fuck, Ralf,’ said Petra.
Stefan just said, ‘Ralf?’ very quietly and very sadly.
‘I didn’t know what to do,’ I said, on the verge of tears, not about my mother, but because for a second I thought it was all going to come out, everything dishonest that I’d ever said or done. ‘I just wanted to get out, get away from her.’
‘When did you find out?’ said Petra.
‘At the private view,’ I lied, because I felt embarrassed I’d known for so long and not said anything.
‘I knew there was something up,’ said Petra triumphantly.
‘Fuck,’ said Maike. ‘Who’s she having an affair with?’
‘Tobias,’ I said.
‘The guy at the beer garden?’ said Petra.
‘No wonder you went white when you saw him,’ Maike said.
‘Your neighbour, Tobias?’ said Stefan. He looked furious.
I nodded.
‘Eh, du Scheiße,’ Stefan said under his breath. ‘What did your dad say?’
‘Nothing. I haven’t told him.’
‘Why not?’
‘He’d be crushed.’
‘Fotze,’ Stefan said, sitting up. ‘We always thought he was up to something.’ He looked worried. ‘You don’t think our stupid spy game meant we missed the signs?’
I didn’t think so, but before I could answer, Maike said, ‘It’s not your responsibility to spot the signs. It’s no one’s.’
‘No,’ Stefan said, ‘I suppose not.’
‘I’m really sorry, Ralf,’ Maike said.
‘Thanks.’
I told them about the watch and what Mum had said about not leaving. They called him names and asked me lots of questions I couldn’t answer: How long had it been going on? Does your brother know? Was it the first time she’d done it?
A plane rose in the East and turned, avoiding the proscribed air space above us. Its jet roar softened to an insistent, pulsing murmur.
‘I was the affair once,’ Petra said. ‘I dated one of my dad’s friends. Very suave. But under all those lovely clothes he was just a middle-aged man, with a paunch and a hairy back. He even smelled like one, d’you know what I mean? They smell different, middle-aged men. Like dads. Something about the smell of the office in their shirts. Tobacco. Neat, unwashed hair.’ She shook her head in disgust. ‘I stuck it for long enough for Papa to find out and be furious, then I dropped him. I felt
bad, because he kept crying. He had white hair; can you imagine? You don’t imagine men with white hair crying.’
‘That’s awful,’ I said.
‘Awful,’ echoed Maike. Stefan said nothing.
‘Oh, it wasn’t so awful. I wouldn’t call it awful. Not like you and your mum.’
I swigged from the schnapps; it burned. The plane thundered distantly and faded.
Petra lay on her back on the grass and closed her eyes. Maike and I lay down too, but rolled over so we were facing each other.
‘Are you OK?’ she said.
‘Yeah, I’m fine. Really.’
‘I miss you,’ Maike said, tears filling her eyes. ‘I feel like we’re barely seeing each other at the moment.’
I wiped away Maike’s tear with my thumb. ‘I know,’ I said. ‘We can do something together tomorrow.’
She nodded.
‘Come on, misery guts,’ Petra slurred, getting to her feet unsteadily like a newborn foal. ‘I want to go and look at the Wall.’
‘Why?’ Maike said.
‘I’m not going anywhere,’ said Stefan, reaching for the schnapps.
‘We’ll go and pray to it and then go home. I have another shift tomorrow.’
An Honest Man Page 14