‘Not from down here. If we stay lying flat.’
He beckoned me over and I crawled laughing into his arms. We lay side by side staring at the pink clouds in the powder-blue sky, our bodies orange beneath it. I rested my head on his shoulder. The sky was turning indigo at its apex and the first stars dotted the clouds.
‘I wish you could stay,’ I said.
‘Shall I greet your parents like this?’
I smiled.
‘They’d like you,’ I said, ‘but with clothes on.’
I put my ear to his chest and listened to his heart through the soft crinkle of his chest hair.
‘Mum’s files,’ I said. ‘Did you find anything in them?’
‘We did,’ he said.
‘And?’
‘Two matched people who’d been blackmailed by the Stasi.’
I listened to the watery pulsing inside his body.
‘Ralf?’ he said.
I lifted my head.
‘This is good,’ he said. ‘It means we’ve got him.’
I couldn’t believe it. Everything he’d said was true. ‘What’ll happen now?’ I said, afraid.
‘They’ll come for him. They’re just waiting for the right time. You’ve done great,’ he said. ‘It’s all over now.’ He wrapped his hot arms round me and kissed my head repeatedly.
‘Can I come back with you?’ I said.
‘I want you to,’ he said, ‘but I have to go away for a couple of days’ The bass of his voice boomed in my ears.
‘OK.’ I pushed myself up on one elbow. ‘Where?’
‘Bonn.’
‘For work?’
He pressed his lips together and nodded.
‘Can you not talk about it?’ I whispered into his ear.
He smiled and shook his head.
‘It’s OK,’ I said. ‘I’ve got tons of things to do.’
‘Really?’ he said.
‘Oh yeah,’ I said. ‘I’m really busy.’
Twenty-Three
‘I’m coming anyway,’ I said to Stefan. I could hear the sound of Beate singing in the background as she cooked.
‘You’re just going to make it awkward,’ Stefan said.
‘So I’m never going to get to do any more Wildlife Trust stuff, because Maike’s grumpy with me?’
‘This Saturday it’s all grass and moss and things like that,’ said Stefan. ‘It’s her thing.’
I touched the rough poster paint on a childish picture of a bird-shaped plane that Martin had drawn at primary school. It was stuck to the side of the fridge with two magnets: a Berlin Zoo giraffe and a smiling ZDF Mainzelmännchen. Outside in the courtyard someone was playing ‘Voyage’ at full volume.
‘But all the Wildlife Trust things are plants or animals. No one’s trying to save any rocks, so I’m never going to get to go again.’
‘Of course you will. Just wait until things have calmed down a bit with Maike.’
‘Calmed down? She dumped me!’
‘Alter, hör mal, you were being a completely shitty boyfriend.’
‘Did she say that?’
‘No, that’s my own thesis based on empirical evidence.’
‘But peer-reviewed, I bet.’
Stefan sighed. ‘Look, why don’t you come to this exhibition – New Positions? Joachim asked me to go ages ago and Petra’s coming, but Maike can’t.’
‘Joachim? When did you speak to Joachim?’
‘You’re not the only one that can make new friends, Ralf.’
‘Fine,’ I said, the other option being sitting at home with my parents and Martin watching Wetten Dass. ‘But I’m coming on the next nature thing. I’m not going to be shut out of everything now. It’s not fair.’
‘Yeah, yeah, I hear you,’ said Stefan. ‘See you at five.’
*
Joachim, wearing a white vest and jean shorts, greeted me enthusiastically, holding my forearm as he shook my hand. ‘Everyone’s always telling me stories about Ralf. It’s good to finally meet you.’
‘We met at Beate’s private view.’
‘Yeah, of course,’ said Joachim, ‘I just meant good to finally meet you again.’
I tried to roll my eyes at Stefan, but he turned away. Petra pushed me through the glass doors into the gallery and whispered, ‘Stop being a dick, Ralf.’ I shrugged her hand off my shoulder.
We wandered through the cool carpeted rooms of the Neue Nationalgalerie. I’d been a few times, mostly on school trips, and loved how buried the building was, like a sea volcano with its true mass hidden beneath the waves.
There were a few paintings I liked, but generally the pictures, with their emphatic lines, made me uncomfortable. Perhaps that was the point. I had a feeling that this kind of expressionism would be something I might like when I was older, developing a taste for it like for the bitterness of wine and beer. Up ahead, Joachim and Stefan barely seemed to be looking at the pictures at all. They just kept giggling at the labels.
‘What’s up with them?’ I whispered to Petra.
‘What do you mean?’
‘When did they get all pally?’
Petra ignored me and moved into the next room. In front of a Cy Twombly canvas, covered in scratchy lines and scarlet splotches, a woman whispered, ‘It’s almost like a crazy person painted it.’
I smiled at her. She was tall with a beaky nose and brown clothes and shoes. ‘He’s not my favourite either,’ I whispered back.
‘It’s like he did it for therapy,’ the woman said, and we both laughed. As the woman moved away to the next painting, she muttered, ‘Keep away from the Turk.’
‘What?’ I said too loudly.
The woman turned and looked at me shocked, as did a young couple that had just entered the room, the man in a baggy Keith Haring T-shirt.
‘The talk,’ the woman said, her face pale. ‘I just said, keep away from the talk. The one this afternoon about Cy Twombly. It’s … it’s …’
‘You said “Turk”.’
‘I didn’t,’ the woman said.
My face burned. ‘I thought you said Turk.’
‘But I didn’t,’ she said.
The woman scuttled on and I stared about the beige room unnerved.
*
When we came out of the exhibition, Stefan and Petra had to pee, so I stood in Mies van der Rohe’s high glass hall with Joachim. I stared out at the grey square, watching the beaky woman escaping past the Staatsbibliothek and the Philharmonie where Tobias played and which emerged golden from the ground like a chunk of sulphur. I kept rerunning my brief conversation with the woman, feeling shame consuming my initial fear. The rash on my hand itched and I rubbed it against my shorts.
‘Stefan takes a piss every ten minutes,’ Joachim said, as if I didn’t know.
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘He’s always been like that. He drinks too much water.’
Joachim put his hands in his pockets and scuffed his sandals on the veined marble. Even with the limited emotional awareness I had at eighteen, I knew that I primarily disliked Joachim because he was a threat, hanging out with my friends when I wasn’t there. But I also had a feeling about him then that I struggled to articulate. It was a sense that his unselfconscious openness was the real threat, promising to unseat me with his terrible honesty.
‘So, Stefan said you were going to do geology. That like rocks?’
‘Not just rocks, but, yeah, rocks, earth, glaciers.’
‘What’s this?’ he said, nodding at his feet.
‘What, the floor?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Marble,’ I said. ‘Some kind of greeny marble.’
‘Where’s it from?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Maybe you’ll learn in your course.’
‘Probably not,’ I said.
‘No, probably not. Sorry. I’m just blathering.’
Then I felt bad, so I asked him what he was working on.
‘I’m doing a project at the Kunstgewerbemuseum just o
pposite.’
He told me about the work and invited me to come and look at the collection. Something metal was dropped, cracking like gunshot onto the marble floor, and the sound reverberated around the great hall. I looked about instinctively for Oz or the beaky woman in the brown clothes, but instead saw, with relief, Petra and Stefan emerging from the galleries below.
‘What are you guys up to now?’ Joachim said as we unlocked our bikes from the racks outside.
‘Fuck all,’ said Stefan.
‘I thought we were going to Der Gammler,’ I said. ‘If I’m still allowed.’
‘Why are you being so grumpy?’ said Stefan.
‘Have you got your period?’ said Petra.
‘A couple of friends of mine’ve put on an exhibition down in Neukölln by the canal,’ said Joachim. ‘It’s in this squat above a pharmacy there and you can get up on the roof. It’s pretty cool. And it’s the night for it.’
‘Sounds great,’ said Stefan. ‘Come on, Ralf. Stop being such a misery guts.’
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘If that’s what everyone wants to do.’
‘It is,’ said Petra.
‘Fine,’ I said.
Twenty-Four
We cycled over the vast concrete square. Having been baked by the sun all day, it radiated a particularly oppressive heat, reminiscent of gridlocked freeways in American movies. We found the Landwehrkanal and followed it down through Kreuzberg to Neukölln and locked up our bikes by the canal railings, where the green vegetation hung over our heads in drowsy boughs, entwined with bindweed dotted with bell-shaped white flowers. The ground was covered in cigarette butts, drink-can ring-pulls and broken bottles and the air was full of clouds of insects and the smell of stagnant water.
The block Joachim led us to was noticeably rougher than the other Neukölln buildings, with peeling plaster and paint, bed sheets for curtains blooming out from the open windows of each of the five floors, and so much graffiti at street level that it was almost neat, the way it stopped just above head height. On the wide blank side of the building, someone had used a roller to paint ‘Those who do not move do not notice their chains’ in giant square letters. From the open windows, we could hear the thudding beat of electronic dance music and the muffled din of intoxicated voices.
‘Welcome to the squat!’ Joachim said. ‘I lost my second virginity here.’
‘What do you mean, “second virginity”?’ I said.
‘Bumming.’
Petra nodded approvingly.
As we crossed the street, two Turkish children sped past us on bikes shouting to each other in Berlin dialect. On one side of the pharmacy was a shop selling stockings, tights and socks, on the other a Turkish greengrocer with a green articulated awning. As we approached, the breeze skitted silver onion skins over the pavement towards our feet and I could smell traces of oranges, mint and cucumber. I suddenly pictured another me in Bonn, another in Frankfurt and Munich, Oz arriving at their doors and feigning innocence before bedding them. Was that what he was doing in his work for the West?
Joachim knocked on the door of the squat. It opened a few centimetres revealing the face of a woman made up like a Chinese opera singer, her face painted white, her eyes swathed in sweeping pink make-up, the same colour as her doll-like lips. She stared at us for a second and then the mask broke into a smile. She fell backwards and pulled the door open, revealing a tiny figure with thin arms sticking out of dungarees, under which she appeared to be wearing nothing. Her hair was crow-black and hair-sprayed up into a wild pile as high as her face was wide.
‘Joachim, you came!’ she said and threw herself at him, clinging to his neck. Her compactness made him look like a giant. She released him and grabbed my cheeks, her fingers smelling of cigarettes.
‘Look at these babies you’ve brought us,’ she said, and cackled. Her back molars were missing on both sides.
We climbed the stairs, following a constant trail of graffiti, dominated by crapping dogs who were saying, ‘Schuldig!’ and ‘Keine Kneipen für Nazis’ and in English: ‘Fucking is more important than Germany’.
Joachim led us into a large flat that had been emptied of furniture and painted white – the doors and window frames, but also the floor, the lampshades hanging from the ceiling, even the curtains, which were stiff and locked into their folds like asbestos roofing.
Paintings covered the walls, giant canvases showing women driving cars with a range of surreal passengers. They were painted in bright colours with expressive cartoon strokes and the perspective in each was either front-on or slightly diagonal to the car, cropped close, so that the woman driving was prominent and the cars seemed to be bearing down on you, driving homicidally into the room.
In one the passengers were all large men who seemed too tall for the car, and were hunched over with aggressive smiles, their faces cut off in the middle by the top edge of the windscreen. In another the passengers were vegetables – a cucumber, a carrot, a leek. In another children. In another the same woman who was driving was also all of the passengers, front and back.
‘They’re by this guy,’ Joachim said, gesturing to a man in his thirties surrounded by a clutch of admirers. His white shirt clung to a beer-belly out of proportion with the rest of his body, as if he were pregnant.
‘Joachim, you cunt,’ the man said. He appeared to already be wildly drunk. The men embraced and the artist held Joachim at arm’s length. ‘Look at you, you beautiful shit.’ He patted his cheek. ‘You wonderful shit.’
‘This is Stefan, Petra and Ralf,’ said Joachim.
‘Oh, you’ve brought children,’ the artist said. Petra smiled witheringly at the repeated joke. He kissed all of us on the hand with his chapped lips. ‘Kurt,’ he said.
‘I like the paintings,’ said Petra.
‘Oh, you’re sweet,’ Kurt said, peering about the room. ‘The series is called “Women Driving Cars”. It was a hard title to come up with.’
I laughed, but Kurt didn’t smile and I realised too late that he wasn’t being ironic.
Someone shouted, ‘Kurt, you fuck!’ from the door and Kurt pushed past us shouting, ‘Alfred, you desperate cunt!’
‘He’s going to drink himself to death,’ Joachim said, as we wandered around the rooms, looking at the woman in the car joined by Saudis in dark glasses, joined by Christ and Buddha and, finally, the woman alone. It was impossible to read from her expression whether the emptiness of the car was a relief or a tragedy.
‘Do you like them?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know,’ said Joachim. ‘I can’t really judge Kurt. It’s hard to separate it from him, if you know what I mean?’
I nodded, because Joachim seemed very sincere, but I didn’t know what he meant at all.
I saw another man staring at the pictures who looked as confused as I felt; someone Kurt’s age but alone and apparently bewildered, conspicuous in the dullness of his clothes – grey trousers, a white short-sleeved shirt, tinted glasses – and a combover that had shifted in the heat of the afternoon revealing a shaft of glossy scalp beneath the carefully greased hair.
‘Who brought their accountant?’ said Petra, and we sniggered.
The squatters used the second floor as their living room and kitchen and it was filled with mattresses, herbal cooking smells and marijuana smoke. In one corner, a series of large brown buckets were filled with water, and next to them were three gas camping stoves in various stages of rusted disrepair. The third and fourth floors were filled with more mattresses and were hung with woollen blankets that separated different sleeping areas. As we passed the open doors, I heard, beneath the chatter of several transistor radios, the sound of people fucking.
The fourth floor led up to the attic and a door that opened straight onto the roof.
The sky was honey-coloured. Around a large brick and plaster chimney, men and women drank, danced, and lounged on sofas that had improbably found their way up onto the large flat roof. A black man in sunglasses sat in a folding cha
ir by the record player, from which two long cables snaked away to two standing speakers pumping out the electronic dance music that I’d heard from the street. The bass was so commanding that the floor seemed to liquefy beneath our feet every time it reverberated.
Joachim guided us over to a group of friends on one of the sofas. He embraced them all, introducing them to us one by one. One girl was completely naked. She was chatting so seriously and unselfconsciously to another woman that I felt as if I was just imagining her nude.
We were given warm bottles of beer and sat with our backs to the chimney in front of the group, asking questions and discovering that they were all artists, filmmakers and photographers, except for the naked woman who worked at a Penny supermarket in Wedding. Then it emerged that one of the photographers worked in the same supermarket, and as the sun went down and they became more intoxicated we slowly understood that almost none of them just painted, made films or took photographs. They all also worked in galleries, in publishing, at petrol stations and in bookshops. That was why they admired Kurt so much; he had given his life to it. Even Joachim was doing a PhD and teaching in Düsseldorf.
As the sun burst into reds and pinks and the lights of the city shimmered, Joachim had to take Stefan to the other side of the roof to point out where, behind the planes landing at Tempelhof, you could almost see the block of concrete that Albert Speer had built to test the firmness of the Berlin soil, to find out whether it would take the weight of Hitler’s giant domed Reichstag. I was relieved to see the naked woman pull on a large mustard-coloured jumper, though she continued to flash her bush every time she moved her arm to pick up her beer from the side of an empty rabbit hutch. I also spotted Petra drunkenly trying to talk to the man with the combover, who scampered away from her down the stairs.
‘What did you say to him?’ I asked as she walked past.
‘If he wanted to fuck,’ said Petra.
‘And?’
‘Apparently not.’ She winked at me and danced backwards into a gathering crowd gyrating near the speakers.
I pushed myself to my feet. I had pins and needles, and felt drunker standing up than sitting down. At the edge of the roof, I looked out across the city, where West turned to East, and saw the death strip of the Wall, a bright highway cutting the city in two. On the Eastern side, the street lights were dimmer, a grubby orange, the colour of unsmoked tobacco.
An Honest Man Page 18