An Honest Man

by Ben Fergusson

Oz held his hand out and released a cascade of sorrowful Turkish, begging and gesturing. The older man covered his head and the younger man shouted as he led him away to a parked car at the other side of the square.

  ‘Are you all right?’ I said, searching Oz’s face, but he was uninjured.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Close the car doors. Let’s get in. Let’s get inside. Quick.’

  As we came up the stairs, my face and fist throbbing, Oz’s neighbour was standing at her open door opposite his flat.

  ‘Frau Riemann,’ Oz said, ‘it’s fine. You haven’t called the police, have you? You don’t need to call the police.’

  She threw a torn envelope on the ground in front of us and spat on the floor. ‘Filthy Turk,’ she said and slammed the door shut.

  Oz snatched up the envelope, unlocked his door and ran into the living room.

  ‘What the fuck’s going on?’ I said.

  He had taken a set of large photographs from the envelope and was flicking through them. He cried out in anguish and let them fall to the floor, rolling onto the sofa and gripping his head in the same gesture of despair as the man on the street.

  I picked up one of the pictures. They were colour images taken through the lens of a telephoto camera, the telescopic enlargement making the forms grainy and unsharp. You could see the blurred suggestion of two bodies entwined with one another, legs, arms and heads in the murky darkness of an unlit room, the suggestion of curtains at the edge of the picture. I thought, my heart thudding in my ears, that they were pictures of Oz having sex with another man in his flat, but then I shuffled through to the most incriminating picture, which was not a picture of sex at all. It showed Oz crawling across the floor of my hallway in Windscheidstraße – I recognised the pattern of the parquet floor – and me kneeling behind him, about to come after him, the top of my head in shadow, our bodies lit by the warm summer light. But in the foreshortened gaze of the camera, and the eye prepped with image after hazy image of us actually having sex, I appeared to be fucking him from behind, my laughter and his smile reframed as sexual glee.

  ‘Who took these?’ I said. My voice was husky. All of the saliva had left my throat.

  Oz fell back on the sofa, his head propped up against the wall. ‘They did,’ he said.

  ‘Who’s they?’

  ‘The Stasi.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To discredit me.’

  ‘They know about the file?’ I said.

  ‘Yes! I mean, I don’t know. Not necessarily,’ he said. ‘They definitely know about me, though. Fuck!’ he shouted.

  ‘What do we do?’ I said.

  ‘You need to go home.’

  ‘I don’t want to.’

  ‘Give me a week,’ he said.

  ‘To do what?’

  ‘Sort things out.’

  ‘How?’

  He got up and went into the kitchen. I followed him and found him searching about with a handful of his black hair gripped into a fist. He shoved his hand into an onion-shaped brass pot and shouted, ‘Where the fuck are my cigarettes? Fuck!’

  ‘They’re in your pocket,’ I said. ‘In your top pocket.’

  ‘No, I had some here,’ he shouted. ‘They’ve been in here. They’ve been fucking hiding things, fucking with the bulbs, and fucking hiding things.’

  I tried to touch him, but he knocked my hand away and said, ‘Just give me a minute, Ralf. Sorry. Just a minute.’

  He slumped down onto one of the kitchen chairs and lit a cigarette, drawing a long lungful that caused the tip to crackle and flash. He leant his elbow on the table and put his hand over his face. The smoke rolled out through his fingers, like smoke through the barred basement grate of a burning building.

  ‘Who were they?’ I said. ‘The men on the street?’ Though I knew. I only wanted confirmation.

  He let his hand drop to the tabletop, where it stood on its fingertips like a spider. He stared at the rising smoke and said, ‘My father. And my brother.’

  ‘They’d been sent the photographs too?’

  He nodded. ‘I’m sure anyone I’ve ever met has a copy.’

  ‘What about … ?’ I wanted to say, ‘What about my family, my friends?’ but it suddenly seemed incredibly selfish. He understood though.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘They could have picked photos where you were identifiable. Your face is cropped out in all of them.’

  From the kitchen door I could still see the photographs spilled on the living-room floor, still make out the two bodies in the beautiful tangerine sunlight. ‘Why didn’t they just blackmail you with them?’

  ‘That’s not how they work. They don’t want any information from me. I’m not important enough for them to have any interest in turning me. The little people, they just destroy. They make it clear that they have access to you – that’s what the lightbulbs were about, the cutlery, all of that – then they start to discredit you, with your family and your friends.’

  ‘Is that it, then?’

  ‘I doubt it.’

  He looked at my face. He looked furious, but then his mouth widened into a sad smile. ‘You OK? Is your eye OK?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘What about you?’

  ‘I didn’t get hit.’

  ‘I thought your dad was attacking you.’

  ‘He wasn’t hurting me. Not really.’ The cigarette was already spent and he stubbed it out in a used espresso cup. ‘You gave my brother a run for his money, though,’ he said, and chuckled. But his laughter died away almost instantly and his eyes became sad again. ‘I’m so sorry, Ralf. I’ve been really stupid. I didn’t think something like this would happen,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘What a massive fuck-up.’

  I sat opposite him and took his hand. ‘It’s OK,’ I said.

  ‘Go home,’ he said. ‘Go and be with your parents. Give me a week to sort things out. I’ll probably have to move out, find a new flat. You can’t come back here.’

  ‘Can I help?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘You can help by keeping away, staying safe, OK. If anyone asks you about anything, just play dumb.’

  ‘OK,’ I said.

  ‘I will sort this out.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘I know you will.’

  Twenty-Seven

  The Havel, a tributary of the Elbe, forms a large loop through Brandenburg, flowing into Berlin from the north and joining the Spree at Spandau, where genteel apartment blocks give way to brick mills, concrete factories and steel cranes. On its journey from Lake Müritz to Werben, the Havel flowed in and out of lakes that kept it eternally fed, slipping over the border into West Berlin at Heiligensee, sweeping past Spandau and Charlottenburg to pool extravagantly at Wannsee, where West Berliners swam and sailed and where the city’s finest villas were reflected in the river’s waters, before the river slid around the barbed wire at Babelsberg and pleasured the East Germans at Potsdam and Werder.

  Petra lived in one of those villas at Wannsee, an icing-white building with a huge, steeply sloped roof and historicist columns, loggias and towers, and it was there that I went that night, catching sight of the Havel behind the fine houses as I cycled the empty roads to Zehlendorf.

  I had to ring a buzzer at the gate of Petra’s villa and the dog started barking inside the house. When I said who it was, I heard Petra’s scratchy voice on the intercom saying, ‘Oh. Ralf. Fuck.’

  There was a screech and the gates swung open at an eerily slow pace. I squeezed through the widening gap and made my way up the gravel path between floodlit topiaried box trees to the colonnaded portico lit by a large hanging lamp with a bright yellow bulb.

  Petra opened the door, holding Katja, her large English sheepdog, by the collar. It barked, lifting its head to watch me from beneath its long white fringe.

  ‘Ralf,’ Petra began, ‘it’s half fucking eleven, are you … ?’ but then she squinted as the light from the hanging lamp shone full on my face and my throbbing eye. ‘Oh fuck, Ralf. What happened?’r />
  ‘I got hit in the face,’ I said from the bottom of the steps.

  ‘Who by?’

  ‘Oz’s brother.’

  ‘Why the fuck did Oz’s brother hit you?’

  ‘Because he found out about me and Oz.’

  I wondered if this was too vague, but Petra said, ‘You mean, about you and Oz fucking?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Wow,’ she said. ‘You better come in then.’

  I had only been to Petra’s house once, for her sixteenth birthday. Maike, Stefan and I and a girl called Bärbel from Petra’s primary school were the only friends of Petra’s who went. Every other guest was a colleague of her father’s; he did something important at Bayer. I’d never been inside a house so grand before. It had a hallway with black and white marble tiles like a chessboard, and at the foot of the stairs a life-size bronze of a plump-breasted woman with her arms raised over her head, as if she were fighting off a bird.

  ‘If you ask Klemens who it’s by,’ Petra had said, in her pink tulle, ‘he says he found it in a reclamation yard.’ Petra always referred to her parents by their Christian names.

  ‘Didn’t he?’ I remember asking, sipping sweet punch ladled into a red glass from a huge silver bowl on the hall table.

  ‘No, he bought it. For thousands. It’s Arno Breker.’ She waited for a spark of recognition and when it didn’t come, added, ‘Hitler’s favourite sculptor.’

  I frowned, trying to pick shredded mint out of my teeth. ‘Why did he buy it then?’

  ‘Oh, people love Breker. Certain people. Klemens isn’t a Nazi, but he doesn’t mind people thinking he is.’

  ‘That’s mental,’ I said.

  ‘I know,’ said Petra. ‘He’s the worst.’ She held her punch glass with both hands like a little girl and stared at the sculpture’s pneumatic breasts. Petra had powdered her face so that the line between her skin and her straw-coloured hair, scraped back like Grace Kelly, was almost indistinguishable. ‘If work people recognise it they think he might be a Fascist. And if they aren’t interested in all of that then they just think it’s a sculpture of a woman with big tits. Either way it works.’

  I stared at the woman’s face. She looked like she was sniffing the air, trying to trace a scent caught in the wind.

  ‘You know that Bayer made the gas for the concentration camps?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  She nodded.

  It was only towards the end of the evening, when I was standing on the jetty with Stefan in a haze of midges, that I realised that the concrete wall behind a line of trees on the opposite bank of the lake was not a private security measure, but marked the edge of East Germany. The villa on the other side of the river was boarded up, the tower at the end of its garden was a watchtower, and sitting in it, staring out of scratched glass windows at the summer party opposite, were two East German border guards dressed in green, the tips of their rifles just visible above the windowsill.

  Three years later, as the first black eye of my life swelled into a hot lump, Petra and I sat on deckchairs with our bare feet on the villa’s wooden balustrade, the lawn sloping away below us to the water. In the dark, the grass was sea-green and the rhododendron bushes around it were drenched with chirruping crickets and white and cerise flowers, pale and luminescent like moons among the indigo leaves. The border at the other side of the lake was lit floodlight-white; it reflected in the water in waving lines, its gloss dulled by dead insects and fallen pollen. In the watchtower sat different men to those who I’d seen before, but they were wearing the same uniforms, had the same dead gaze.

  ‘So how long’s this sordid affair been going on?’ Petra said. She was wearing a white bikini top and shorts, a chipped ceramic ashtray in the shape of an open hand balanced on her outstretched legs. I’d cycled to Wannsee because I knew she would enjoy the confession more than she would judge it, and she would be thrilled to be told first.

  ‘Since the beginning of summer,’ I said.

  ‘Fuck,’ she said. ‘Dirty birdy.’ She took a drag of her cigarette. ‘And Maike?’

  ‘She doesn’t know anything about it.’

  ‘But it started before you two …?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. I picked up the citronella candle from the balustrade edge and lit my cigarette from it. The dimpled yellow glass was hot. ‘What a cunt, right?’ I said, blowing out a cloud of blue smoke.

  ‘Bit,’ said Petra. ‘Who isn’t a bit of a cunt though? Maike got fingered by some Swede when she went on that fjord cruise last year, so …’

  ‘Are you joking?’ I said.

  ‘Oh, what? You’re going to judge her for that after this?’ she said, gesturing to the black eye.

  I sat forward and gripped my knees. ‘She’s always talking about that trip.’

  ‘Well, now you know why.’

  ‘Fuck,’ I said. ‘Who the fuck are we?’

  ‘Oh grow up, Ralf. It was only a finger.’ She flicked the ash off her cigarette. ‘A couple at most. She wasn’t mounting Turkish booksellers.’

  I slumped back in the deckchair.

  ‘How did Oz’s brother find out?’

  ‘Dunno,’ I lied.

  I could hear laughter coming from someone’s garden. Despite it being almost midnight, I caught a trace of grilled meat in the air.

  Petra shook her head. ‘I knew something was up. I thought it was crack.’ She took a drag on her cigarette. ‘In a way I was right.’

  We laughed, but then I thought about Oz alone in his flat with the photos. It made me nauseous.

  I stared at the garden morosely, at the lawn where a child had abandoned their bike. Petra had a much younger brother born when she was ten.

  ‘When are your parents back from Spain?’ I said.

  Petra blew out a long stream of smoke and shrugged. ‘No fixed date.’ She fed the dog a pretzel stick. It munched it into an ochre dust that clung to its wavy beard. ‘The contract’s only for a couple of years, I think.’

  ‘A couple of years? I thought they were on holiday.’

  ‘No, Klemens is setting up a new factory there. They really like it, I think.’

  ‘Why didn’t you go with them?’

  ‘I had to finish my exams.’

  ‘How long have you been here on your own?’

  ‘Oh, eight months or so.’ The dog scrabbled to its feet and put its paw on Petra’s leg. She gave it another pretzel stick.

  ‘Jesus, Petra. I wish you’d said.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I would’ve come over more.’

  ‘What, and looked after me?’

  ‘Why not?’

  Petra sucked thoughtfully at her cigarette. The tobacco crackled and the crickets lifted their chorus. The stars glittered in the black sky. ‘It’s all right,’ she said eventually. ‘At night, I sometimes get scared that someone’s going to break in. Katja sleeps upstairs with me, though she’s not meant to. And I keep a kitchen knife under the bed.’

  ‘You do not.’

  ‘Of course I do,’ said Petra. ‘The house next door’s owned by Americans and there’s never anyone there. And Frau Landau on the other side hates me, so no one’s going to hear me being raped, or care.’

  A frog croaked near the house. ‘Do people get raped in their beds? Outside of films?’

  ‘I’m sure some people do,’ said Petra. ‘I met this guy at the beer garden once – before you started – whose wife had rape fantasies. That was her thing.’

  ‘That’s awful.’

  ‘I know. And you thought being a bum boy was bad.’

  ‘I should’ve gone to Stefan’s,’ I said.

  ‘Oh no,’ said Petra, touching my arm. ‘He’d’ve got really deep about it. Really into it.’ We started giggling and Petra frowned and impersonated him. ‘Ralf. Alter. Boning guys is cool.’

  ‘Ralf, Alter,’ I said, ‘my friend Joachim’s a bummer. It’s so cool.’

  ‘Ralf, Alter. Vaginal sex is so bourgeois.’

  We laugh
ed until our stomachs hurt.

  Petra lit another cigarette and wiped her eyes with the tip of her middle finger. ‘It’s more common than you think,’ she said.

  ‘Bum boys?’

  ‘No, rape fantasies.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said.

  ‘This guy, the beer garden one – he had to pretend to break in and then, like, fuck her really roughly. She was a primary school teacher.’

  ‘That’s terrible,’ I said. ‘Makes my sex fantasies seem so dull.’

  ‘Like what?’ said Petra.

  ‘Oh, like, having sex with a man. Honestly.’

  Petra laughed. ‘I bet it’s more fucked up than that.’

  ‘It isn’t!’ I said. ‘It really isn’t.’

  ‘You should read Nancy Friday. The things that women are into. Do you want to know what my sex fantasy is?’

  ‘I’m scared.’

  Petra smiled and stubbed her cigarette out. ‘That one of the border guards has always been in love with me. Is sitting up there with a boner the whole time. An aching boner. And that one night he’s so desperate that he shoots the other guard and swims over to fuck me. Not in a rapey way, though.’

  ‘Still, you wouldn’t know it was him breaking in. So you’d probably just stab him to death with your kitchen knife.’

  ‘That’s true,’ Petra said, frowning. ‘Maybe I’ll get some pepper spray.’ She leant forward and slapped a mosquito dead on her leg.

  I turned to her, lying on my side on the deck chair, curled up like a foetus. ‘Why don’t you have a boyfriend, Petra?’

  ‘I hate that question. As if I’d know.’

  ‘But you’re so pretty.’

  ‘Oh, am I the next stop on the Ralf Dörsam fuck bus?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Of course not, but … But don’t you miss having sex?’

  ‘Oh, I have a lot of sex.’

  ‘Yeah, with Stefan.’

  ‘Stefan? Hardly ever. There was that artist Mo at the squat party. Herr Kniff from the beer garden.’

  I burst into laughter. ‘I’m being serious.’

  ‘I am too,’ said Petra.

  ‘You’re not,’ I said, beginning to doubt myself. I sat up cross-legged and frowned. ‘Are you, Petra? Herr Kniff? He looks like a pelican.’