I felt as if a void had opened up around me. I realised that up until that point I’d always felt as if my life was following a clear course, but Oz had revealed the giddy multiplicity of lives that I might live, of people that I might be. The whole world had become unstable, the things that I believed, however laughable it may seem, to be permanent – my girlfriend, my friends, my family, my understanding of myself – had begun to shift. And I had the uneasy feeling that I was just old enough to see these things shifting for the first time, a snapshot of a much longer cycle, a split second in the inestimable history of my own deep time.
Almost a week had passed by the time I managed to get my mum’s notes back into her filing cabinet. I was sleeping at the flat again, so that I could exploit the first opportunity that it was empty to do so. Mum was happy, because she thought I was spending more time at home because of what she’d said to me at the Chinese restaurant. I would often catch her staring at me with dewy-eyed gratitude while we were all watching TV. It made me uncomfortable and I would lie on the sofa sandwiching my head between the arm and a cushion, or lie on the floor in front of the coffee table where she couldn’t see my face.
Once, when I fell asleep on the sofa I woke to find her pulling at my toe.
‘Ralf,’ she said. ‘Are you awake?’
‘I am now,’ I said.
She smiled down at me. ‘What is it?’ My mouth tasted foul and I was aware of the silence in the flat. ‘Where’s Dad and Martin?’
‘Dad’s taken Martin to the football. He’s going to do the shopping and then pick up Martin on the way back. Beate wanted to go and look at an allotment in Westend, so I’m going to tag along. I wondered if you wanted to come too.’
‘Not really,’ I said, sensing my chance to put the notes back.
She nodded. It was the weekend and she was wearing an oversized grey T-shirt over black leggings. Her feet were bare. She splayed out her toes and stared down at them. ‘Can we ever be friends again, Ralf?’ she said.
‘We’re not friends,’ I said. ‘I’m your son.’
She looked at me and considered what I’d said. I saw that there had been a shift in the balance of power, that in a discussion about relationships, about friendship and love, her opinion no longer took automatic precedence over mine. She had revealed herself to be just as weak as any of us. So she appealed to me. ‘Do you understand what I’m saying, though?’
I pushed myself up into a sitting position. ‘I think what you did is horrible. We can’t go back to how it was before, even if you stopped it.’
‘I know,’ she said. She let her feet drop and stared at the coffee table. She looked sad and lost, and I could suddenly picture her as a sullen teenager in front of a black-and-white TV in the 1960s. ‘I love you so much and I don’t know what to do. What should I do?’
I sighed heavily, because I was welling up. ‘I don’t think you can do anything,’ I said. A tear escaped down my cheek. She saw. Her chin puckered and her mascara began to run.
‘It didn’t have anything to do with you and Martin,’ she said in a choked voice, wiping away her tears with the sleeve of her jumper.
‘I know,’ I said.
She nodded. ‘Do you want me to tell your dad?’
‘Don’t ask me that!’ I shouted. ‘Don’t make me make that decision.’
‘No, no,’ she said, through her tears. ‘You’re right, I … I suppose I’m asking … No … ’ She took a deep, shuddering breath. ‘I suppose I’m saying that I’m not going to tell your father. Because it’s over with Tobias. And I don’t want to tell him. I don’t want to upset anyone else. You don’t have to keep any secrets for me, but if you don’t tell him, I won’t. And if you do talk to him about it, that’s OK too. But that’s what I want to do.’
‘OK,’ I said, my face wet.
She nodded and sniffed. ‘Can I have a hug?’ she said.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I still feel so angry.’
She nodded and looked down at my feet on the sofa. ‘Can I hold a foot?’
I laughed and she laughed. ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘I haven’t had a shower though, so they probably stink.’
‘I don’t mind,’ she said, grabbing my foot. ‘I don’t mind your stinky feet.’
I lay on the sofa, listening to Mum’s sandals snap against her soles as she left the flat and made her way downstairs. When the front door to the apartment block rumbled shut, I stood and took the files from my bag. I was surprised to find that my hands were trembling.
I walked silently into the kitchen, through the adjoining door and into Mum’s consulting room, where I put my hand up to the shelf with the African mask on it. I felt a hot wave of terror when my fingers alighted on nothing. I looked about in panic, opened one of the desk drawers and then another and – thankfully – found the key on its lilac plastic fob among coloured rubber bands, pencils, stamps and various quasi-practical trinkets gathered from foreign holidays: an olive-wood letter opener, a Majorcan pencil sharpener, a pen with a flamenco woman whose clothes fell off when you turned it upside down.
Relieved, I squatted by my mother’s metal filing cabinet and carefully replaced the notes. But the hanging file for Major-General Hillary Purser was missing.
‘Fuck,’ I muttered to myself.
I searched her desk and got on my knees to look about the floor for it.
I didn’t know what to do. I thought about cycling over to Oz’s, but our flat would only be empty for a couple of hours, and that would waste too much time. I went to our balcony in the hope that he might be parked on our street, but when I leant over I couldn’t see his green Mercedes, only swallows snapping up invisible insects.
The heat was everywhere, exuding from the plasterwork of our balustrade, from the painted metal table and chairs, from the cobbles on the street below that looked black as burnt loaves in the orange light. The open windows of the apartments filled the street with a song of radios, televisions and noisy meals, mixed with the hush of cars on Ku’damm and Kantstraße and the twitter of the sparrows in the acacia trees. The air smelled of lime blossom, exhaust and kebab meat. And I had waited too long to put my mother’s notes back and now I’d ruined everything.
A wasp swung into view and I brushed it away, but the movement of my hand encouraged it into an abandoned glass of Apfelschorle on the metal table.
‘Mist,’ I said and took the glass to the kitchen, where I emptied the trickle of juice and the sticky wasp onto the ivy that fringed our window. It rolled free of the clinging droplets, then stood on the dusty green leaf for a few moments, cleaning its antennas and buzzing its wings experimentally. It turned and droned deeply as it flew across the courtyard to the windows opposite. It was there, behind Tobias’s shut windows, that I saw a file on his kitchen table, the exact dirty moss green of the hanging files in my mother’s cabinet.
I grabbed the binoculars from my room and ran back to the kitchen, but couldn’t read the tab on the file, because the top of the file was obscured by the edge of a discarded newspaper. I knew that if I thought too hard about what I was doing I wouldn’t do it, so snatched up the keys for Tobias’s apartment from the bowl on the hall table and tried to look as relaxed as possible as I trotted over the courtyard in my bare feet. In the dim light of the cool back staircase, I knocked gently at his door and called his name. ‘Tobias? Tobias? Are you there?’
There was no answer. I unlocked the door and went in.
The smell of him that filled the little entrance hall made me feel unbearably nostalgic for all the years I’d watched him longingly from our kitchen window. Automatically, I reached out and touched one of his jackets hanging from a hook in the wall. It was soft and cold.
In the kitchen, the table contained the paper I’d seen from the window, a plate dusted with a few breadcrumbs and the green file. I moved towards it, had my fingers on it, but saw no plastic name tab, no Major-General Hillary Purser. I opened it and found, beneath the dog-eared paper, a pile of sheet music.
‘Herr Rode? Oh! Who are you?’
I turned.
‘Oh, it’s you!’
It was old Frau von Hildendorf from the ground-floor flat. She must’ve seen me come up the stairs from her spyhole and followed me up.
‘Are you meant to be here? Herr Rode didn’t tell me he was going to be away.’
‘He called,’ I said. ‘I had to check on something. And I’m going to go now and call him back from our flat.’
She frowned, unconvinced.
I rushed past her, back to the door. Her eyes followed me. ‘I should call him back straight away,’ I said. She followed me out frowning.
When I got back to my apartment, I could see her at her window looking disdainfully up at our kitchen through ancient, hooded eyes. Terrified, I found the number for Oz’s bookshop in the phonebook and rang it. A man answered.
‘Is Herr Özemir in?’ I said.
‘Yes, speaking,’ the man said.
‘Oz?’
‘Who?’
‘Osman Özemir?’
There was a silence, and then the voice said, ‘No, he’s not here. Who’s this?’
‘Do you have a number for him? It’s important.’
‘I don’t know,’ the man said. ‘Just … ’ He put the receiver down and started talking to a woman in Turkish. ‘Have you got a pen?’ he said, loud again.
‘Yes.’ I wrote down the number on a receipt magnetised to the side of the fridge, thanked him, hung up and redialled immediately.
‘Özemir.’
‘It’s me,’ I said. ‘There’s a problem.’
Oz paused, then made a sound, like a soft whistle.
‘What?’ I said.
The sound came again and I realised he was shushing me. ‘Where?’ he whispered.
‘Where am I?’ I said. ‘Home, but I—’ He’d already hung up. I called back, but he didn’t answer.
I walked around the house sweating, not knowing what to do. I stared at Tobias’s windows, went to the toilet twice, stood on the balcony again peering down into the street, hoping to see Oz’s car. It was there that I heard a gentle knocking. It came again and I realised it was the door to the apartment. When I put my eye to the spyhole I saw Oz’s head distended by the convex glass, looking down at the floor.
I opened the door and he pushed me in, shutting the door silently behind him.
‘Are you alone?’ he whispered.
‘Of course.’
‘For how long?’
‘Like, a couple of hours,’ I said, looking at my watch.
‘You’re sure?’
‘Yes.’
‘OK,’ he said. ‘What is it?’
‘I tried to put the notes back, but the Army officer’s file was missing. Then I thought I saw it in Tobias’s flat, so I went over with our key, but it wasn’t the Army officer’s file. It was just a green file with his music in it. And then someone caught me.’
‘Who?’
‘Frau von Hildendorf. The woman who lives on the ground floor in the back building.’
‘Shit,’ said Oz, touching his forehead. ‘Who else has a key to his flat?’
‘No one,’ I said. ‘Not that I know of.’
‘Do you know where he is now?’
‘At the Philharmonie, I suppose.’
‘OK. Where’s your phone?’
I pointed him to the kitchen, where he snatched up the Gelbe Seiten and dialled the number for the concert hall. ‘Hello!’ he said, enthusiastically. ‘Yes, this is Müller from Berlin Water. I need to get hold of someone in the orchestra. A Herr Rode.’
From the receiver came a burst of buzzy chatter.
‘Yes, it’s rather an emergency, I’m afraid. There’s been a water leak in the adjoining building and we need to make sure it hasn’t come through to Herr Rode’s flat, which backs onto it … Yes … I understand … Yes … Thank you.’
There was a pause and he peered out of the kitchen window, down to Tobias’s apartment. A voice came on the line.
‘Herr Rode? Oh, they found you. That’s great. It’s Herr Müller from Berlin Water. There’s been a leak in the block adjacent to yours, the flat that backs onto your flat, as it were, and we urgently wanted to check whether there’d been any ingress into your apartment … No, we’re hopeful, but it is urgent. It was a broken washing machine … How quickly can you get back? Oh I see … No, that won’t work. Is there anyone in your block that has a spare key – someone that could take a look for you? OK … Duzm? Oh, Dörsam … Can you spell it for me? Front building, second floor … OK. Listen, Herr Rode, I don’t want to disturb you again, so why don’t I knock at the Dörsams’ and send one of them over. If you don’t hear back from me in the next half-hour, then you can assume that everything’s all right. Is that OK? Super … You too! Auf Wiederhören!’
He replaced the receiver and we were quiet for a moment. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘That’s sorted. When your neighbour tells him she saw you, it’ll back up your alibi.’ He was wearing a turquoise T-shirt and there were huge royal blue sweat rings radiating from the armpits. ‘Now, show me the filing cabinet.’
I took him through to Mum’s consulting room and gave him the key. He carefully slid open the cabinet and ran his fingers along the plastic name tabs. ‘Fuck, Ralf, it’s here,’ he said, lifting it up. ‘It was just out of alphabetical order.’
‘Oh fuck,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.’
We put the notes back in and locked everything up. When we were back in the cool hallway he clasped my head, shaking it gently. I was so hot and so ashamed of myself.
‘Ralf. You can’t phone me. I shouldn’t be here, not when there’s no one else around, OK? If you’d said anything over the phone about this … Fuck,’ he said.
‘Do you think our phone’s bugged?’
‘Probably not, but it isn’t worth the risk. Tell me again why you went into his apartment.’
‘There was a file there. Like one of Mum’s files. I thought it was the one missing from her filing cabinet. I thought you’d be pleased and that it would all be done and all be over.’
‘Just leave that to me now,’ he said. ‘We just need to be patient.’ He rubbed my cheeks with his thumbs and laughed, shaking his head. His face was lit orange by the sinking sun. ‘Fuck,’ he said. ‘It’s good to see you, though.’
*
We lay side by side on the hallway’s slick parquet. The flat was filled with purple light and a hot breeze slunk through the rooms. I was watching my own stomach heaving up and down as I tried to get my breath back. My shorts lay discarded near the door, and I could smell Oz’s breath and the sickly sweet jasmine that grew in pots on the balcony. He touched the hair sticking to my forehead and said my name.
My pants were still clinging to one of my ankles and I kicked them off and walked to the bathroom. When I emerged Oz was standing naked in the living room, the setting sun painting a thick russet shadow down his spine and between his buttocks.
‘Snooping?’ I said.
He turned and smiled. ‘Maybe. Grandparents?’ he said, pointing to a photograph of my German grandparents on skis in the Alps.
‘Opa the Great,’ I said, ‘and Oma the Big-Hearted. They’re legendary. Opa was tortured by the Nazis.’
‘Fuck,’ Oz said, crossing the room. In the shadow of the doorway he kissed my bare shoulder. ‘Can I see your room?’
I shook my head. ‘It’s really embarrassing.’
‘Please,’ he said.
I watched him take in the desk, the stickered mirror, my posters and pictures of insects, forests, volcanoes and cliffs. ‘You weren’t lying about the nature shit,’ he said.
I laughed.
‘Where are all the rock pictures?’
‘There are some,’ I said, pointing them out. ‘Mostly volcanoes though, a few caves. You get more animal pictures in the magazines, obviously, and I like animals too.’
‘But not as much as rocks.’
‘Not as much as roc
ks.’
‘Who’s this?’ he said, pointing to a sepia postcard of an old man with mutton-chops in a leather armchair. ‘Is this my competition?’
‘No,’ I said, laughing. I held him from behind and rested my chin on his shoulder. ‘This,’ I said, touching the picture, ‘is Charles Lyell. He wrote Principles of Geology, which is one of the most important books on geology ever written. Before him, it was all vicars and their wives stumbling around caves finding fossils of dinosaur turds.’
‘Nice,’ he said. ‘And this?’ He pointed to a painting of a rotund woman with a sack and a small border collie at her feet.
‘She’s just hot.’
Oz laughed.
‘That really is your competition,’ I said.
He turned his head and kissed my cheek. His back began to sweat where we were pressed together. ‘No, that’s Mary Anning,’ I said. ‘She was a famous fossil hunter on the Jurassic Coast. It’s like an hour away from where my English grandparents retired to. She unearthed ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs. She sold the fossils. She even had a visit from the King of Saxony.’
‘It’s so cute,’ he said, putting his arms around my back, locking his hands together above my buttocks. ‘It’s massively geeky.’
I laughed. ‘I know.’
‘And now you’re in your bedroom with a naked man.’
‘That would’ve blown my mind about … well, about six weeks ago.’
‘And now it doesn’t?’
‘In a different way,’ I said.
I looked across the hall to the open French windows in the living room and said, ‘I’d love to watch the sunset with you on the balcony.’
‘Why not?’
‘Someone’ll see us.’
‘We’ll go like this,’ Oz said, dropping to his knees. He crawled naked across the hall, and I got down on my knees and followed him through the living room, stopping as he lay down on the balcony floor by the table.
‘Can’t the neighbours see you?’ I said.
An Honest Man Page 17