‘You didn’t answer my question,’ Maike said.
‘Fuck off, Maike.’ Petra held out her hands and pulled Maike to her feet.
I scrambled up after them, brushing the grass from my palms, taking the schnapps bottle from Stefan, who followed it and me reluctantly. I was drunker than I’d thought I was, but the air felt cool and good, and it felt good to hold Maike’s hand.
We dipped beneath the black trees, heading across the park to the Wall’s floodlights, accompanied by the flying insects that believed the light was the light of the moon. It was unbearable, when you thought about it: their visceral joy and then the feverish disappointment as they rubbed their abdomens against the hot glass of the bulb, bathed in the light they sought and finding nothing but death.
Where the grass of the Tiergarten ended, streetlamps marked a strip of red-and-white metal barriers designed to stop people wandering onto Ebertstraße. Between us and the street stood the statue of Goethe staring out East over the sheer, graffitied wall, which looked low and meaningless. Behind we could see the lamplit tops of buildings and a few light industrial chimneys steaming straight and thin in the hot summer air. The jumping insects chirruped in the stumpy trees behind us and we could smell cut grass.
‘It’s ugly, isn’t it?’ I said.
‘Mmm,’ said Petra.
She moved one of the red-and-white barriers; I was afraid that we were going to get told off, but when I followed and looked down the length of Ebertstraße, down to the pitted Brandenburg Gate trapped between the two borders, we saw no one, only the fluttering shadows of bats.
Petra skipped across the road and put her hand on the concrete. We joined her, also pushing our palms against it, but I didn’t feel anything. It was like a graffiti-covered concrete wall at the back of someone’s allotment, smelling faintly of piss and spray paint, like the lift in Maike’s building.
‘Do you think there’s someone behind there now?’ I said.
‘Hello!’ shouted Petra. ‘Border guards? Are you there? There are some teenage deviants back here waiting for you. Woods, beds, tents, you name it, we’ve fucked in it.’ She slapped the Wall with her hand. ‘We’ve fucked everywhere! We’re here waiting for you behind this wall. All you have to do is knock it down.’
‘Knock it down!’ shouted Maike drunkenly.
‘Knock it down!’ Stefan echoed.
I slapped the concrete too. ‘Knock it down!’ I shouted.
‘Knock it down!’ we chorused. ‘Knock it down!’
When we fell silent, we heard cars in the city accelerating, braking, sounding their horns. We wandered back through the park to the beer garden where we’d left our bikes, not talking, holding hands in a line like paper dolls.
Twenty
Oz was waiting for me at the open door of his flat. His hands were tucked beneath his armpits, and when he closed the door behind me, we stood opposite each other in silence. It was strange to see him washed and shaved, strange to imagine that he had been leading his life without me there.
‘Did you …?’ he said.
I nodded and took the envelope out of my bag. He moved towards me. I let him come. We held each other and he kissed my neck. We held each other for a long time.
At the kitchen table, we sat either side of the envelope.
‘Was it difficult?’
I shook my head. ‘She was out for lunch and the door was open.’
He pulled the onion-skin pages out of the envelope, frowned, and tipped them towards the light.
‘I know,’ I said, thinking he’d read the first lines of the officer’s file. ‘Depressing isn’t it?’
‘Are these the originals?’ he asked.
‘Of course,’ I said.
‘Scheiße,’ he said, and sat back in his chair, as if being near them was dangerous.
I went cold. ‘What?’ I said. ‘What’ve I done?’
‘It’s my fault,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘I said a copy of the file. Not the actual file.’
I touched my face. ‘I thought you meant a copy like the copy, not a photocopy.’
‘I should’ve explained it better.’
‘What’ve I done?’
He crossed his arms and then slowly reached up and covered his mouth as if he was trying to stop himself from saying something. ‘If I photograph these now,’ came his muffled voice, ‘can you get them back tonight?’
‘Mum’ll be there tonight. And tomorrow’s Sunday. She’ll be there all day.’
‘Fuck,’ he said, gripping his head. ‘When’s this officer have his appointment?’
I counted back. ‘Friday, I think.’
‘OK,’ Oz said, calming. ‘Then let’s get all of these back in place as soon as you can next week. Does she go for lunch every day?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘But maybe if I’m there.’
Oz looked unconvinced.
‘I’ll sort it out,’ I said. ‘I’ll fix it.’
‘Great,’ Oz said. ‘OK.’ His hands found their way back to the table.
‘I’m really sorry,’ I said. I was embarrassed to hear my voice trembling.
‘Oh, shit, Ralf. I didn’t mean to freak you out.’ He moved his chair around the table. I let him pull me close. His thumb burrowed under my T-shirt and touched my back. He kissed my neck and lingered there. The shaved skin around his mouth brushed my skin and I shivered. ‘I didn’t mean to scare you,’ he said, his breath wetting my skin.
‘I don’t want to fuck it up.’
‘You didn’t. I was only worried about you. I shouldn’t’ve asked you to get the files.’
‘I wanted to,’ I said, as I undid the top button of his shorts and slipped my hand into his pants. ‘I wanted to do it.’
*
The next morning I lay in his bed watching him pull on the pink T-shirt he’d been wearing the day we drove to the Lappwald. Thunderously loud in the courtyard outside, the bin men were rolling the huge metal containers out to the street to empty them into their rumbling truck.
‘Will you come back this evening?’ Oz said.
I shook my head. ‘I have to go home. I’m getting my A-level results tomorrow morning.’ It should have been the defining moment of the year, but I’d barely thought about it.
‘What’s that?’
‘It’s like an English Abitur. It’ll decide whether I can go to university or not.’
‘Oh, wow,’ he said. ‘Good luck.’ He took socks out from the drawer under the bed and unrolled them. ‘If you got in, when would you go?’
‘End of September.’
‘Fuck,’ he said, sitting on the bed and pulling the socks on.
I felt nauseous and stupid. I hadn’t yet connected leaving Berlin with leaving Oz. I sat up and gripped his back. The T-shirt was soft and creased, and after a brief moment I could feel the heat of him through it. ‘I’ll get like twenty weeks off a year, or something,’ I said. ‘I’ll be here a lot. I’ll definitely fly back for Christmas and for summer. Definitely for summer.’
‘Yeah,’ he said, encouragingly. ‘That sounds like a lot.’
‘Or I might defer for a year. You can do that. It’s something I was thinking about anyway.’
‘Why?’ he said, turning and putting his hand into my hair.
I shrugged. ‘I was just thinking about it.’
He smiled and kissed me.
‘Did you read the stuff?’ I said. ‘About that Major-General’s sex problems?’
He nodded. ‘Bent dick. That’s harsh.’
‘Bad enough to get him blackmailed?’
‘Dunno,’ he said. ‘I’d be pretty embarrassed about it.’
I stared sadly own at the sheets. ‘So what about Tobias? What happens to him if these files match up with someone that “Axel” has blackmailed?’
‘They’ll check if all of the leaks are coming from your mum. If they are, then all they need to do is arrest him. There’ll be no more leaks to be plugged.’
; ‘And Mum?’
‘Sounds like she needs to put a better lock on that adjoining door, but I’m sure everyone would rather keep all of this as quiet as possible. I’m sure she’s going to be fine.’
I thought about Tobias, tried to imagine him leaving my mother’s bed, hobbling into her office and going through her flat, then meeting his East German handlers in some park, Volkspark Wilmersdorf perhaps, beneath the golden deer. I hated him, but he still didn’t seem like a traitor to me.
‘Could someone else in the building be the Stasi agent?’ I asked
‘Ralf, this is all far more common than you think.’
‘But, do you know why he does it?’
‘As I said, we know he attended a children’s home and that he had polio.’
‘But how’s that explain it?’ I pictured Tobias as a child abandoned on the steps of an East German orphanage, his leg in calipers, and felt miserable. ‘He’s not the type.’
‘Ralf, is there a reason you’re defending him? You should hate him. You should be happy he’s going to be put away.’
‘No, I know,’ I said, thinking of his sweet, gappy teeth. ‘It’s just, I’ve talked to him. I know him. He’s clever. He knows how fucked up the East is. Everyone I’ve ever met from the East knows it was fucked up.’
‘Yeah, but those are the people that escaped. There are loads of people over there who are completely convinced that communism is a great thing, however much Schwarzwaldklinik they’re illegally watching.’
‘But you’re saying he’s an actual spy, not just someone who’s going along with things. Why would he become a spy?’
Frowning, he pulled on a pair of white Reeboks and did up the laces. He seemed to be wondering whether he should go on.
‘What?’ I said.
He kicked his heel on the floor to get his shoe on properly. ‘Well, I can tell you exactly why. And, you know what, my handler let me read what they had on Tobias – sorry, on “Axel” – and I actually sort of got it.’ Oz leant back on the bed. ‘So, his mum has him when she’s sixteen, there’s a sister too. But Mum’s not interested in either of them. She doesn’t even tell them who the father is; maybe she doesn’t know. The children are shipped off to her parents, who are both proper, committed communists – were communists before the war and really suffered. So that’s all this boy hears – Nazis are terrible, West Germans are Nazis, et cetera, et cetera. Then, when they’ve had enough of them, the boy gets sent off to an East German children’s home in Königshain. He’s six, but this is a pretty nice children’s home, as far as East German children’s homes go. They do drills all the time and get visits from Walter Ulbricht. And for this kid, he’s finally got a family. He’s finally got someone to believe in.’
Oz got up and picked up a battered book of Stanisław Lem short stories. ‘Here,’ he said, and took a folded A4 sheet from its pages.
I opened it up. It was a photocopy of a diary page written in a young person’s hand, with tight letters and conscientious loops. The dates had been redacted out with thick black strips.
‘What is it?’ I said.
‘From his diary.’
‘Why do you have it?’
‘It was in his files. I copied it on the fax machine at the shop. I couldn’t get it out of my head. It’s not marked or anything. Out of context, if someone found it, it wouldn’t mean anything.’
I read:
If I can’t sleep, I think of two things and both make me feel guilty. I imagine being a really important official and living in Berlin, with my own bathtub in one of the new buildings on Karl-Marx-Allee with a television set and a sofa. I imagine a family, a boy and a girl. Maybe more. And a wife, also passionate about our state and work and our family. Someone who loves our family. The other thing I imagine is Papa coming. I imagine eating in the canteen here and the door being thrown open and a man, a strong man with kind eyes shouting my name and us running towards each other, embracing each other. Then we get in his car and drive away. Where are you Papa? Are you still alive? Is it impossible to think you’re searching for me?
‘Jesus,’ I said. ‘That’s really sad.’
‘Right?’
‘So you think Stasi agents are just really damaged? That’s why they do it?’
‘No,’ Oz said, taking the piece of paper and putting it back in the book. ‘No way. Most of them are just arseholes. Loads get something practical out of it. Nice apartment, place at a good university, constant back-patting. And there are loads of people, especially the petty informants, who are just reporting on their neighbours because they hate them. But with this guy I really felt like I got it. The state really did look after him. I’m sure his dad never turned up, but he got a flat in the West in your nice block in Charlottenburg with a sofa and a TV.’
‘Tobias doesn’t have a TV.’
‘OK,’ he said, conceding the point with a smile. ‘But he doesn’t have to queue to buy bread and he can eat all the bananas he likes.’
‘Still not sure that excuses him becoming a Stasi spy.’
‘I didn’t say it excuses it, but don’t you think it makes you see how it’s all just a human process? You’ve got to believe they’re humans, otherwise you never dig any of them out.’
He bit his lip and looked worried.
‘I’m not going to talk about it,’ I said. ‘Who am I going to tell?’
‘No, I know,’ he said and kissed me.
‘And I don’t think you should keep copies of this kind of stuff in your flat,’ I said.
‘Oh what? I should just take the originals?’
I responded with a sarcastic laugh.
‘You’ll put the notes straight back, the moment you have the chance, OK?’ he said.
‘Like a good boy.’
He slapped my foot. ‘Hey, I almost forgot: I got you something.’ He brought his holdall into the room and opened it up. ‘I was in this antiquarian bookshop round the corner from yours and they had loads of English stuff.’ He retrieved a brown paper bag and gave it to me. ‘It might be really boring, but … I don’t know, I thought it looked cool.’
Inside the bag was a folded map that smelt of ancient, yellowing books. I opened out the foxed paper to reveal a large cross-section of a mountain, tinted in pastel shades and marked with the names of each rock stratum and drawings of the flora and fauna found at each level. On the other side was another cross-section, but of a volcanic landscape, with the title of the map, ‘Ideal Section of a Portion of the Earth’s Crust, Intended to Show the Order of Deposition of the Stratified Rocks with their Relations to the Unstratified Rocks’.
‘Is this original?’ I said.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I think so. Do you like it?’
‘It’s William Buckland’s wall map.’
‘Says “Thomas Webster”,’ Oz said, pointing.
‘Yeah, but it went on the front of Buckland’s Bridgewater Treatise. It’s a really important book.’
‘Well, they didn’t have the book, just the map. I thought you could put it on your wall.’
‘This is amazing,’ I said, smiling at him in disbelief.
He chuckled and kissed me.
‘It’s perfect,’ I said.
‘Good,’ he said, and kissed me again. ‘I’m glad.’
From the bed, I listened to him descending the stairs and crossing the courtyard, then I showered, and wandered dripping through the flat, flicking through his books and burying my face in the clothes he’d discarded on his bedroom floor. In the bathroom, I touched the hairs caught in his comb and in his safety razor, and carefully pored over the contents of the cupboards, finding earplugs, deodorant, ancient toothbrushes and battered boxes of aspirin, antacids and something called Hypnorex retard – a name I would’ve laughed about with my brother – that contained lithium. I didn’t know what lithium was back then, or what it did.
I put on a Joni Mitchell cassette, made myself coffee and ate a breakfast of stale flatbread, tinned olives and slices
of smoked Circassian cheese. I ate it staring at the pages from the officer’s file on the kitchen table. In my mother’s tight hand was her little signature, ‘Patricia Rees’, full of neat English loops and slanting consonants.
Twenty-One
When I arrived back at Windscheidstraße I felt like I’d been away for years. I was shocked at how unchanged the apartment looked, how homely it smelt. Did Tobias go straight to the files, photograph them and leave? Did he go through everything? Our drawers? My cassettes? Had he seen the logbook that Stefan and I had kept on him? Surely he didn’t care about those things. I hoped he didn’t.
I dropped my bag in my bedroom and followed the chatter of the television to the living room, where I found Martin watching Bundesliga.
‘I’m home,’ I said.
‘Coo-ool,’ he said slowly and unenthusiastically, without turning to look at me. He had his arms behind his head and the sunlight through the window lit the straggly blond hairs thickening in his armpits.
‘Is Mum cross I’ve been away for a few days?’
He paused, waiting for Jochen Sprentzel to stop speaking, then turned to me and said, ‘No. You left a message saying you were at Maike’s, didn’t you?’
‘Yeah. But I never stay at Maike’s, so … ’
He looked over at me open-mouthed. ‘It’s Maike, Ralf. No one’s worried about you staying with her. No one’s cross. No one talked about it.’
‘Fine,’ I said.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘Great chat.’
I sat at the open window in the kitchen and read a few pages of Midnight’s Children, but it felt like a completely different person had started reading it and I found it impossible to concentrate. I hoped that Martin would suddenly need to leave the flat so that I could put the notes back, but when had that ever happened? He was fourteen – he had nowhere to go.
Tobias began to play his viola. His music stand was always set up to the right of his living-room window, so that when he practised you couldn’t see him, unless the music became particularly expressive. Then his bow would poke into view, shuddering at the summit of a mournful vibrato. Without the surrounding orchestra, the pieces he practised often sounded unfinished, oddly broken for gaps that would be filled by other instruments. It was very lonely music.
An Honest Man Page 15