‘He has his moments.’
‘But …’
‘But what?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘He’s old, isn’t he?’
‘He’s twenty-seven,’ said Petra. ‘He runs that whole beer garden by himself. It was about to go bust before he took it over.’
‘Is it like a power thing then?’ I said, imagining all those desperate limbs, like a swatted daddy longlegs.
‘Not really. He just really wanted to fuck me. And he didn’t think he’d be allowed to. So when I let him, he just … ’ She mimed his head exploding.
‘That sounds like a power thing.’
Petra laughed. ‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘He’s got a BMW too. He bought me a Chopard.’ She held out her hand. On her wrist was a slim cocktail watch with a tiny oval face.
‘I didn’t think you’d care about that sort of stuff,’ I said.
‘What do you know about what I care about?’
Katja barked and got the last Salzstange.
We watched a repeat of the news – the Tagesschau – in Petra’s living room, sitting on a huge suite made of bent cane and a tropical blue fabric, covered in palm trees and parrots. We drank huge glasses of Apfelschorle chilled with wedges of ice that plunked out of the door of her giant fridge. I sank into one corner of the sofa and watched crowds of East Germans running over the Hungarian border into Austria. My face was hot and tight where Oz’s brother had hit me.
‘Do you think it’s all going to come down?’ I said.
‘Not in Germany,’ Petra said. ‘Not in Hungary for long either. And anyway, no one really wants reunification, do they? I don’t think Kohl does.’
I watched a family and a very blond, red-faced child weeping in his mother’s arms as they fled across a field carrying clothes in plastic bags and bin liners. I heard Lech Wałęsa’s voice briefly, before it was drowned out by the German interpreter. By the time they were reading the weather, I was dozing off, the skin around my bruised eye pleasantly cooled by the barest of breezes coming through the open French windows.
I woke deep in the night. The French windows had been closed and the room was empty. The light in the hallway was on. I pulled myself off the sofa and made my way through the hall and up the marble staircase, my bare feet slapping wetly on the cold stone.
I tried a few doors until I found Petra asleep with Katja. Her room had a pastel-pink carpet and glossy white furniture, but one wall was filled with ancient boxed insect specimens, the browns and beiges of moths specked with jade, ruby and agate butterflies that caught the light of the coming dawn through the old glass of the villa’s double windows. Beneath Petra’s bed I saw the glint of the kitchen knife.
I climbed in beside the dog and pulled the edge of the sheets over my leg. I imagined Oz’s frowning face in the car as he drove West. Was he thinking of me? I hoped he was thinking of me. I recalled our smiles in the grainy Stasi photos and felt afraid. Through Petra’s open window I could hear the trees rustle. The crickets had stopped and had been replaced by another sound, a lilting song, gasping and melancholy, peppering my thoughts and then my dreams as I fell back to sleep.
Twenty-Eight
When I returned home the next evening the flat was silent. A toilet flushed and Martin appeared from the bathroom, then froze in front of me as if I’d been brought back from the dead.
‘What’s going on?’ he whispered.
‘What do you mean?’
‘There are people here to see you. And your face.’
It had stopped throbbing, but around a small red cut a colourful aura of purples, maroons and yellows had bloomed.
‘Who’s here to see me?’
‘I don’t know. Some old man and some not-so-old man.’
I put my hand on the door handle and turned to leave, but heard my father call, ‘Ralf! Is that you?’
‘I’ll be there in a sec,’ I said.
‘Don’t run off again, Ralf,’ Martin said. He looked afraid.
‘I wouldn’t,’ I whispered, dropping my rucksack and going into the kitchen.
At the table sat my mother, my father and, I was horrified to see, Oz’s father and brother. In the harsh light of the kitchen, I could see that Oz’s father dyed his thinning hair – it was a monotone matt black – and that his face was even more like Oz’s than I had first thought, his eyes the same ochre brown, his skin more worn, but his nose easing into his cheeks in the same elegant way, his eyebrows joined by the same spray of black hairs. The brother looked younger sitting embarrassed by his father and, I was ashamed to see, had a blooming indigo and yellow bruise linking his ear to his eye.
‘Jesus Christ!’ said my mother in English, standing and reverting to German to cry, ‘What have you done to your face?’
I put my hand up to my eye. ‘I fell over.’
‘Did he hit you?’ Mum said tearfully.
‘Who?’
‘Oz.’
I frowned. ‘No, of course not.’
I looked at Oz’s brother. She turned to him and understood, letting out a sorrowful little yelp. She touched the skin on my face with her trembling fingers.
‘Mum, don’t.’
‘Can you sit down with us, Ralfi?’ my dad said.
Oz’s father stared down at an empty coffee cup. His hands were clasped together in a ball of rough fingers, the brother’s were hidden beneath the table. My mum gestured towards a chair that had been pulled out for me.
‘Please,’ Mum said, touching the chair.
I sat down reluctantly and looked at the empty cup that had been placed in front me. I felt ashamed and afraid.
‘This is Herr Özemir and his son Yusuf,’ my father said.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Herr Özemir has something he’d like to say to you.’
I forced myself to look up at him out of politeness and because my father had asked me to. Herr Özemir looked as embarrassed as I did. He swallowed hard and said, ‘Yusuf.’
‘I’m sorry I hit you,’ Yusuf said.
‘We don’t hit,’ Oz’s father said forcefully.
My mother nodded reverently and my father smiled as if everything was now resolved. But nothing was resolved – I had no idea why they had come. I didn’t believe they were there to apologise for hitting me.
‘Is that it?’ I said.
‘Ralf!’ my mother muttered. ‘Manners.’
‘What?’ I said loudly. ‘This is weird. I don’t know what’s going on.’
My mum stared at me furiously. Rudeness was never acceptable, even if it was aimed at someone who’d punched you in the face.
Oz’s father unclasped his hands and touched the handle of the coffee cup. ‘Osman,’ he said, speaking German with a Turkish accent, but in a gentle, fatherly cadence that made it hard to be angry with him, ‘is not a well boy.’
‘Why? What’s wrong with him?’ I thought they were going to tell me he had cancer.
‘He doesn’t have AIDS,’ my mother said.
‘What?’ I said, turning on her. ‘I didn’t think he meant AIDS!’
‘Ralf,’ my dad said. He raised his hand to calm us both. ‘Herr Özemir has come all the way over from Schöneberg to speak to you, because he’s concerned about you. Could you just listen to what he has to say and then we can discuss … whatever this is,’ he said, gesturing to the corner of the table where Mum and I sat.
I slumped red-faced in the chair. ‘Fine,’ I said, and stared at the man’s anxious fingers.
‘Osman has had a lot of troubles. He works in my shop on Eisenacher Straße, but only receiving papers and magazines in the morning and stocking up. He hasn’t been in proper work for a long time. He has problems.’
‘He’s manic-depressive,’ my mother said.
‘Right,’ I said, not looking at her.
‘Ralf, we know he’s a really close friend of yours,’ Dad said, ‘but it sounds like he’s repeating a pattern, something that’s happened before.’
‘Sometimes the
y get psychotic symptoms. It’s very common,’ Mum said. ‘It doesn’t have anything to do with you.’
‘I know what manic depression is, Mum.’
‘He has these phases,’ the man said, ‘when he’s very up and he stops taking his medication. He becomes very, er … ’ he searched for the word, ‘spontaneous, behaves quite erratically and forms these … ’ his hands moved side to side, ‘these very intense friendships. And he can be very convincing.’
All four of them looked at me, apparently waiting for a response.
‘OK,’ I said and stood. I felt that Oz’s father was trying to do what he thought was the right thing, but I didn’t believe a word of it. ‘Well, thanks for letting me know.’
The man sat up and touched his side as if it hurt. ‘He tells very tall tales and he gets very paranoid. About FBI agents and the government and espionage.’
I looked at Dad to try to glean how serious he thought he was being. He looked very nervous.
‘Is that what’s been happening, Ralf?’ Mum said. ‘Has he talked about the government, about people being after him?’
‘There are people after him,’ I said. My mum let out a cry of distress. She looked tearful. ‘It’s true, Mum,’ I said. ‘I’ve seen it myself.’
‘Was it the lightbulbs?’ his father said.
I didn’t answer.
‘He unscrewed all the lightbulbs in our flat and replaced them with dead ones,’ Yusuf said, speaking for the first time. He sounded just like Oz. ‘He said the Stasi had done it so they could hide little wires in them to listen in to us.’
Oz’s father had tears in his eyes. ‘He’s a good boy,’ he said, his voice breaking. ‘He’s a good boy, but he gets very afraid. He needs to go back to the clinic.’
‘What clinic?’ I said.
‘He needs to start his treatment again.’
Mum stared at me pleadingly.
‘But all his bulbs had blown. And you saw the photographs,’ I said to his father.
‘Oh God,’ Mum said.
My father held out a calming hand towards her again, but turned to me seriously and said, ‘So you’d left the flat with him and came back with him and all the bulbs were blown? Or did he just tell you about it.’
I felt hot and confused. ‘Well, no, but … Look, I don’t know what this is,’ I said. ‘But you seem like nice people and like you’re really worried about him. So thank you for coming over.’
‘We need to find him,’ my mum said, standing and touching my shoulder. ‘He’s been missing since yesterday.’
‘I don’t know where he is,’ I said. ‘And I’m sorry, but he’s not crazy.’
I went to my room and shut the door. I lay on the bed without turning the lights on. I heard the mumble of the Özemirs leaving and then the inevitable knock. I got up and pushed my chest of drawers against the door. It opened a crack and stopped abruptly. My mum said, ‘Ralf! Can you open the door, love.’
‘I’m going to bed,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to talk about this.’
‘I love you, darling, and I want to talk to you.’
‘Yeah, I love you too, Mum, but I don’t want to talk about this. This is crazy. I can’t talk about this.’
I lay back down and wrapped my pillow around my ears, so that the feathers drowned out the knocking and my mother’s voice. I listened to the feathers creaking and forced myself to think about Stefan telling us about the common eider plucking the feathers from its breast to build a soft grey nest for its eggs. I imagined winter-hardened Norwegians and Scots gathering up the sea-ducks’ down after the birds had flown south with their young, the heat it would provide already palpable on their calloused fingers. I listened to the drakes’ ‘an-hoo’ and dived with them into the shallow water, nibbling at the rocks for molluscs, until the imagined sound of the waves above calmed me down enough to take the pillow off my head and hear that the house had gone quiet, that I’d finally been left alone.
Twenty-Nine
While I waited for Oz to make contact, I tried to avoid talking to Mum and Dad, though they were both gentle and sweet with me, not asking any questions, not asking about Oz again.
Our evening meals were subdued. Conversation was only sparked by my mother if Tobias played his viola. Then she would talk loudly over the pleading strings, asking Martin about football or saying how worried she was about a friend who was having a hard time at work.
I cycled past the bookshop on Eisenacher Straße early in the morning, but the shutters were always down. In the late afternoon the shop was open, but I only saw Herr Özemir through the open door filling in a puzzle in a magazine, a soap opera playing unwatched on a small television above his head.
I cycled around the square in front of Oz’s flat, but the lights were always off and the ripples in the curtains never shifted. Whenever anyone turned to look for their bus, handed me a receipt in a shop, knocked into me on the street, my stomach would clench, in anticipation of a message. But there were no messages, no files, no threats.
I accepted extra shifts at the beer garden so that I had something to do, but also so that I could cycle back and forth on roads that Oz had driven me down. As I filled large glass steins with Pils and Helles I looked across the crowd wishing his face would appear at the open hatch, but it never did.
‘Have you heard from the Turk?’ Petra said from the grill.
I shook my head and told her about the visit from Herr Özemir and Yusuf. I’d already begun to doubt myself.
‘Fuck,’ Petra said. ‘That’s some messy shit.’
I nodded. She put down the spatula to put her arm around me and her soft breasts pressed into my elbow. She had never been so tender.
*
For the first time in weeks, I was home for our Friday dinner with Beate and Stefan. When I heard Beate’s laughter, I didn’t move from my bed, where I lay staring at a crack that ran from the cable of my lamp to the window frame. I was thinking about the imperceptible movement of our apartment block, thinking how even buildings were in constant, sluggish motion. I thought about bergschrunds, the long crevasses that form when the glacier pulls away from the stagnant ice at its sides. There were so many stories of climbers falling down these crevasses, stories that had once terrified me, but I now imagined lying at the bottom of one, the snow beneath me soft, ice crisp in my nostrils, the high walls around me a perfect powder blue, the rough surface extracting every sound, so that all I would be able to hear would be my heartbeat in my ears, the creak of my clothing, my breath. As the cold turned to warmth I would grow sleepy and the white of the sky at the top of the crevasse would widen until it enveloped me and became everything. That would be a way to go, I thought, dissolved in glacial whiteness.
Stefan knocked on my door and opened it. From the bed I gave him the Vulcan salute.
‘Na, Alter!’ he said. ‘Hey, I caught you doing nothing. You’re usually so productive.’
‘That’s just for show,’ I said.
‘Pretty convincing.’ He fell onto my red beanbag. ‘Petra told me you had some freaky meeting with some Turks about your friend. And that your friend’s brother punched you in the face.’
‘Yeah,’ I said.
‘She said this friend of yours has disappeared. Sounds like you were really close.’
He said the word ‘friend’ – Freund – very carefully, which in gendered German means both friend and boyfriend, depending on the context. I felt he was inviting me to explain myself. I had imagined that telling Petra would have a powerful effect on my ability to talk about Oz, but years of silence had left the connection between my mouth and my heart atrophied, like a vestigial organ – the withered legs of a whale or a mole rat’s sightless eyes. The language to say to my childhood friend, ‘Yes, I love him,’ didn’t exist. When I looked for the words, I found nothing. I just stared at Stefan’s trembling eyes, so full of good intentions that they seemed to hum like a machine.
‘I’ll live,’ I managed.
His body sank i
n relief and disappointment. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘You’ll live.’
There was prosecco left over from Mum’s birthday and Dad doled it out generously. Even Martin was allowed a mouthful, though he grimaced when he swallowed it. Mum had cooked a version of shepherd’s pie with lentils, which was one of the less disgusting things she made.
Beate and Mum came up with a story we’d never heard before about Mum in the Seventies successfully smuggling tights into East Berlin before Beate had fled for the last time. Mum had got a day pass and gone over wearing ten pairs at the same time under her jeans, but was so hot that she fainted on the escalator at Friedrichstraße Station. The description of my mum slumping down and rolling to the bottom left us in hysterics.
‘How did you get East?’ Martin said to Mum.
‘Well, they’d started letting people through back then if you had the right papers, and I was British, which helped a little bit, but not much.’
‘And Beate couldn’t come the other way?’
‘No,’ Beate said. ‘Old people can, because they aren’t going to be working any more. And you can apply to come over, but I was an artist and had left before, so they always rejected my application.’
‘Then how did you come over the last time? When you fled?’
‘Swam,’ said Beate, forking mash into her mouth.
‘Aren’t the canals full of barbed wire and things?’ I said.
‘Beate swam the sea route,’ said Mum.
‘Fuck,’ I said. Dad frowned at me for swearing and I corrected myself, saying, ‘Wow. Sorry. I can’t believe I didn’t know that. I didn’t realise that was even possible. Where did you go over?’
‘Stralsund.’
‘And you can just swim round to the next-door beach?’
‘Sadly not. If you try, they just fish you out.’
‘Where did you swim to then?’
‘Denmark.’
Martin and I frowned. ‘How is that … ? I don’t understand how … ? How long did it take?’
Beate put down her fork and leant back in her chair. ‘It’s hard to say exactly.’
‘You must have worked it out. Beforehand, you must have checked,’ said Martin.
An Honest Man Page 22