I pushed open the shuddering door to the block, always unlocked, filled with wired glass and covered in battered claret paint the colour of raw liver. I could already hear Beate’s high laughter from the courtyard, from which the smell of garlic, grilled vegetables and the sound of pleasant chatter emanated.
Beate rented a first-floor flat in the back part of the building and used another in a side building for her studio. She had filled the edges of the courtyard with plants, and once it became apparent that the neighbours didn’t care, she had annexed the rest.
The courtyard’s two original acacias towered above a garden of verdant leaves and blossoming flowers, planted into any kind of container that would hold them: wooden crates and terracotta pots, but also discarded drawers, metal and plastic bins, jute bags, any number of cups, teapots, jugs, jars and pans, as well as an upturned urinal that Beate had signed ‘R. Mutt’ in honour of Marcel Duchamp. These containers burst with lilies, roses, forget-me-nots and pansies, clematis, rustling bamboo, fragrant mock orange blossom, pampas grass, prehistoric gunnera, Japanese maple, ivy and two tall banana trees with glossy, shredded leaves that Beate moved into her studio in winter.
In the heart of her garden sat Beate in her kaftan, the same peacock blue as her eyeshadow, with a glass of red wine in her hand. Beside her, a bearded hippy with matted hair was grilling skewers filled with red peppers, aubergine, onion and courgettes, and peeping through the leaves were the hands, legs and faces of her guests, young and old. A child ran towards me waving a smoking joss stick in his hand. He stopped in front of me and said, ‘It’s my cigarette,’ and puffed at it like Liza Minnelli in Cabaret.
‘It’s lovely,’ I said.
‘Ralf!’ cried Beate, lifting her wine glass into the air, like a toast.
I waved. ‘Is Stefan in?’
‘He’s skulking about in the kitchen,’ said Beate, standing and covering my face in kisses. ‘I’m sorry about your friend. Have you seen him?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘You have to wait two weeks before they allow visitors.’
‘He’ll be well again. I know he will.’
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Thanks.’
Their kitchen was long and cool. In the middle was a huge wooden table with benches and a rocking chair at one end, where Beate sat when she was holding court in winter and couldn’t sit outside.
Near the windows, filled with green summer air and barbecue smoke, stood Stefan with a steaming bowl of potatoes, chopping them one at a time and throwing them into a large handmade ceramic bowl, shimmering with a thick blue glaze. ‘Ralfi! Alter!’ he shouted and gave me the Vulcan salute, then went back to his work, slicing each potato two or three times, letting the pieces drop into the bowl. ‘How the fuck are you?’
‘OK,’ I said, saluting him back.
‘That was fucked up, with your friend.’
‘It was,’ I said.
‘So he really was nuts, eh?’
I mounted the bench and held on to the varnished wood, like I was vaulting a pommel horse.
‘Seems so,’ I said.
Stefan inspected a potato, chopped out a black eye with the knife and flicked it into the sink.
‘So the dad was telling the truth?’
I nodded. ‘Yup.’
‘Scheiße, eh?’
Outside someone smashed a glass. ‘Just kick it into the flowerbed,’ I heard Beate saying.
‘What’s the occasion?’ I asked.
‘No occasion. It was meant to be a faculty meeting of colleagues from the Kunstakademie but it’s turned into a party. They always do. Once Günter Brus turned up and puked all over the jasmine.’
‘I don’t know who that is.’
‘Brus? He’s an artist,’ said Stefan, throwing another sliced potato into the bowl and looking out of the window, the light reflecting in his black eyes. ‘He makes videos where he cuts his leg open and pisses on himself.’
‘Well, let’s hope he turns up tonight,’ I said.
Stefan smiled, but it collapsed into a frown and he put down his knife and leant on the counter.
‘Ralf. Can I ask you something?’
I felt dry and nauseous.
‘Were you and this guy Oz, like, dating?’
My face flashed cold; the air between us was glacially clear. ‘Yes,’ I said.
He nodded. One of the children outside started crying.
Stefan began to chop the potatoes again. Their earthy smell reached me and I realised how hungry I was. ‘I wish you’d told me,’ he said.
‘I know. I owed you that.’
‘Fuck, Ralf, you don’t owe me anything. But I might’ve been able to help. You’ve been fucking about with some Turkish nut job and we didn’t know anything about it.’
‘He’s not a nut job,’ I said.
‘He’s been committed to a nut house, Ralf, and he hit you in the face.’
‘He didn’t hit me. That was his brother. He’d seen photos of us having sex.’
‘Right, but who sent the photos?’
‘The Stasi.’
‘OK. But we’ve since established that the Stasi aren’t after him. That he’s actually just crazy. Which means—’
‘I don’t want to think about what it means.’
‘It means that he had those photos taken. He sent them to his own family. That’s right, isn’t it?’
This I had worked out while I was holding Oz in the dark. It meant that he was very sick, and this gave me a little solace when he stared at me desperately, tears pouring out of his tired eyes, as the men marched him past me out of the apartment and down the stairs to the street. And, as strange as it sounds, the fact that he had made sure, even in his fevered delusions, that my face was obscured in those pictures felt like a kindness, and I was grateful to him for it.
‘He’s ill,’ I said to Stefan, ‘but he’s a good guy.’
‘Sounds like a fucking dream.’ He threw the last sliced potato into the bowl. ‘Can you go and get some chives from the garden,’ he said. ‘They’re in a pot by Mum’s feet.’
*
We sat at the table eating the potato salad with our fingers. We hadn’t turned the lights on and the darkening kitchen was lit in the circus colours of Beate’s tinted bulbs strung across the courtyard outside.
‘This is good potato salad.’
‘It’s my father’s recipe,’ Stefan said.
‘I like it better with oil and vinegar like this.’
‘What’s the other way?’
‘Mayonnaise. That’s the English way. How Mum makes it.’
Stefan nodded and licked the oil from his fingers. ‘But she’s, like, the worst cook in the world. You know that, right?’
I laughed. ‘It’s true.’
‘And when Oz said the shepherd’s pie was disgusting … ’
We started to giggle.
‘Alter,’ Stefan said. ‘It was incredible. Your mum’s face.’
‘Poor Mum.’
I looked into Stefan’s eyes. The bulbs outside were reflected in tiny coloured spots in his irises.
‘Don’t you mind about your dad? Not knowing who he is.’
Stefan pushed himself back, resting his arms on the arms of the rocking chair. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘It makes me really angry.’
‘I’m sorry.’
He shrugged. ‘Do we have to talk about all our problems now you’re a gayer?’
I smiled and shook my head.
‘Good,’ he said, leaning forward again and picking out more potato. ‘Hey, I talked to Maike. She said it’d be fine for you to come back on the Wildlife Trust things.’
‘What did you tell her?’
‘Just that this friend of yours had gone off the rails.’
‘Isn’t there only one count left, before you all leave for university?’
‘Yeah, but you’ll still be around after that. You can do them on your own.’
‘Fuck,’ I said, gripping my hair like Oz used to. ‘I know. Fuck.’
I had called Durham the day that Oz had returned from Bonn. ‘I deferred for a year. What the fuck was I thinking? He’s locked up, you guys are all gone … ’
‘You can hang out with Joachim.’
‘Great,’ I said.
‘He’s actually nice, and you should make an effort with him. He can be like your gay godfather. Show you the ropes.’
I threw a potato slice at him, which he batted off. It smacked onto the tiles in a dim corner of the kitchen.
‘You know, your mum won’t mind about you being gay,’ Stefan said. ‘If you want to tell her.’
‘She’ll love it. It’ll be awful.’
‘My mum’s sensed your “gayness” already,’ Stefan said. ‘Fuck, they’re both going to love it. It’s going to be so embarrassing.’
We laughed.
‘My dad though,’ I said.
‘Yeah,’ said Stefan. ‘I don’t think your dad’s moved on from missionary.’
‘Eh, Manno!’ I shouted, kicking his chair.
Stefan laughed.
He leant over and touched the side of my head. ‘You’ve got a spider in your hair.’ He held out his hand. A tiny golden spider descended from his finger on a shimmering thread.
‘They’re called money spiders in England,’ I said. ‘Means you’re about to come into some cash.’
‘Herrlich,’ said Stefan, watching it crawl up to his fingers. ‘We’ll buy your mum some cookbooks.’
We started laughing again. He turned his hand over and the spider scampered across his arm and up the pale hairless skin of his underarm. Cigarette smoke floated in from the courtyard on the hot air and a dog’s bark echoed in the street.
Thirty-Two
Maike called me the next day; I was touched and surprised. It was good to hear her voice. She said she’d heard a bit about what had been going on and that we should meet up before we all did the last Wildlife Trust count. I agreed to meet her that afternoon after I’d visited a friend in hospital. The friend was Oz. They had just called to say I could come.
The hospital was nicer than I’d imagined. The reception area had large parlour palms and pale yellow curtains. There were silver-framed prints of ferns on the walls, and on the desk a grey glass vase filled with yellow dahlias and roses.
The visiting room was wide and bright and opened out onto a garden. At the far end in a grey tracksuit sat Oz, squinting into the afternoon sun. It illuminated a glass in front of him, criss-crossed with a diamond pattern, containing a sparkling soft drink the pale yellow of primroses. In my memory, he looked aged, but of course he was only twenty-two. To many of the other patients we must have both looked extremely young.
He smiled at me as I came close and stood up shakily. He seemed uncertain how to greet me. I embraced him and buried my face in his neck. ‘It’s good to see you,’ I said. He smelt institutional, of scentless soap and too much sleep.
‘Oh, you too,’ he said, patting me weakly. ‘You too.’
We sat in the garden on a bench watching a thin man digging up a plant and splitting it with a trowel. The man seemed content and undisturbed, as did the patient kneeling beside him with a white bucket filled with fibrous compost. There was no one dribbling, no one screaming. Maybe those patients were kept somewhere else, I thought.
Oz lit a cigarette. The flame trembled. I was surprised he was allowed to smoke. He sucked at the cigarette gravely. The tracksuit he was wearing was too big for him and made him look small. He stared at his drink. The glass was balanced on the wooden arm of the bench. The sun revealed a semicircle at the lip, where his chapped mouth had left a trace of saliva.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘About everything.’
‘Everything?’
‘No, not you and me, but … You know.’
I nodded. In a room somewhere someone started thumping out an inexpressive tune on a piano.
‘Have your parents said anything?’
‘Not really,’ I said. ‘I mean, Mum wants me to talk about it, of course, but I don’t want to. I think they get what’s been going on. I mean, between you and me, but … I don’t know. I don’t really want to talk about it. Not yet.’
‘Have they said anything about “Axel”?’
‘What do you mean?’ I said.
‘Anything that’s going to help us link “Axel” with Tobias?’ He looked out across the garden. ‘I’ve been thinking it over, wondering whether we couldn’t set up some sort of trap. Bit unorthodox, maybe.’
I felt tears welling up in my eyes. He still believed it all.
He noticed the change in my expression and said, ‘They really got to you, didn’t they? They’ve ruined me for you.’
‘No one’s ruined you,’ I said.
‘But you think I lied to you.’
‘Have you?’
He looked heartbroken. ‘No,’ he murmured.
‘You’ve always been completely honest, completely yourself?’
‘I mean, no one’s completely themselves,’ he said.
‘How were you not completely yourself?’ I asked, hoping he was creating an opening to tell me the truth.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Like Turkish stuff.’
‘What do you mean Turkish stuff?’
‘I mean, I suppose I tried to be more “Turkish” for you. A bit. You seemed to really want me to read you Turkish poetry and buy you Turkish food. I don’t eat that much white cheese. And I don’t make Turkish coffee at home – it’s a massive effort. Even when we were kids we just had filter coffee.’
‘I’d’ve drunk filter coffee,’ I said.
‘I know, I just thought it would feel a bit more’ – he shrugged – ‘authentic, or something.’
I laughed and he laughed lightly, shaking his head. He offered me a cigarette, but I said no.
‘Were there other people?’ I said. ‘People like me?’ I had been planning to get the question in somehow, and now that I had uttered it I waited for the answer with my mouth strained and my eyes half closed, as if waiting for a humane bullet to the head.
‘No,’ said Oz, sitting up excitably. I sighed audibly. ‘No, not at all. It was just you.’ I saw how bloodshot his eyes were. He looked afraid. ‘You have to understand that every word I said to you, everything we did, it was true.’
‘In your head,’ I said.
‘No,’ he said.
‘But you were taking medication. Lithium, or something. And then you stopped taking it.’
‘Did my dad tell you that?’
‘I saw the packet at your flat.’
He looked at his hands. The skin on them was dry. ‘Yeah, I did take medication. I got really depressed in my first year at university before I dropped out. It’s why I dropped out. I didn’t know what I was doing with my life. So I took lithium for a while and it helped. And then after I’d been back in Berlin for a bit I felt better and I stopped.’
‘But Mum said that people with depression sometimes lose touch with reality. They have like a psychosis.’
‘Well, I’m sure that happens. And I was a bit depressed, like I said. But I wasn’t psychotic.’ He looked up at me. His golden irises were undimmed. ‘I really think I wasn’t.’
A nurse with short, bottle-blonde hair leant out of the French windows and said, ‘Another ten minutes, OK?’ The patients looked up at her with automatic, gentle smiles, Oz too. A girl in a headscarf was crying, and I felt relieved that someone else was sad, not just numb and exhausted.
‘They’re always warning you like that,’ Oz said. ‘You can’t concentrate on what you … Why do they have to keep saying twenty minutes, ten minutes? I hate it.’
‘I’ll come back on Monday,’ I said.
Oz seemed upset and frustrated. ‘Ralf, I’m going to be here for a while. You do understand that? They’ve made sure of that.’
‘That’s OK,’ I said. ‘It’s really close to our flat. It’s like a ten-minute bike ride.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘You need to go to England. Call the
university. Change it. Your friends are leaving, I’m in here. What are you going to do in Berlin?’
‘I’ll earn money. See you.’
‘I can’t … ’ He closed his eyes, and rubbed at his creased forehead with his middle finger. ‘I can’t be responsible for you being in Berlin. It’s not fair. And it’s not safe for you with “Axel” still out there.’
‘I’m fine. And I don’t mind being in Berlin. I’ll visit you,’ I said. ‘Maybe they’ll let you out a bit earlier if they know I’m around to look after you when you get out. I can check your medication, things like that.’
‘Look after me?’ he said. He seemed exasperated. ‘I don’t think you thought that was what you were getting yourself into.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘But no one ever really knows what they’re getting themselves into.’
He laughed.
‘What?’
‘You and your wise words.’
The nurse leant out of the door again and said, ‘Can visitors start to say their goodbyes and patients make their way back to their rooms or to the social room.’
Throughout the garden and the visitor room, parents, partners and children separated themselves from patients, who moved towards the building like ghosts called back to the grave at the break of day.
‘That wasn’t even ten minutes,’ he said. He was on the verge of tears.
‘Hey, it’s fine,’ I said. ‘I’ll come back on Monday.’
He nodded. We stood and I hugged him.
‘Ralf,’ he said into my ear. ‘You mustn’t come any more.’
‘I can’t keep away,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry. I love you.’
‘It’s too dangerous for you. Please.’
‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘I’m always going to be around.’ But he clung on to me as if it was the last time.
I sat in the clinic’s garden for a while, alone on the bench. Oz had forgotten the glass, and I poured the contents into the flowerbed, careful not to wash away the film from his lips. As I was leaving, the woman at the reception desk said, ‘Excuse me, but you can’t take anything away with you.’
An Honest Man Page 24