‘I didn’t realise,’I said.
‘We should all go back to Frankfurt sometime. With Opa and Oma dead, there never seemed to be a good reason, but we should go. It’s your history too.’
I imagined Dad as a young man, sitting with his friends in a smoky pub, the table filled with diamond glasses and stout stoneware jugs.
‘Dad?’ I said. ‘Were you ever in love with someone before Mum?’
He looked shocked and frowned with amused disapproval. But then he seemed to understand and said, ‘Everyone’s had their heart broken, Ralfi.’ He picked up a last white sock, the toe and heel grey. ‘You keep your chin up,’ he said, and kissed the top of my head. ‘You know what Opa always used to say?’
‘They can lick my arse.’
‘Exactly,’ Dad said, gripping my ear and kissing me again. ‘Exactly.’
This was the closest I ever came to a coming out with my parents: a suggestion that they knew what was going on with Oz and a suggestion that I knew they knew. In the light of their many faults, I’ve always been grateful for that quiet acceptance. If they’d asked then for any kind of explanation, I couldn’t have offered them more.
*
At Schlachtensee, we wheeled our bikes to the edge of the lake and set up the barbecue on a small sandy cove in the woods where the clear water lapped the silt. Stefan lit the barbecue as Petra, Maike and I waded into the water to where the sand became velvety with rotting black leaves before dropping away completely.
We swam aimlessly, our heads above the water, our hair slick to our heads like seals. The setting sun turned the sky pink and the water reflected it, so that we appeared to be swimming in liquid light. The forest rose up around us, hiding the other bathers in their own coves. On our beach, Stefan squatted in front of the barbecue, the smoke of it stained blue by the dusk, rising straight up into the air like a signal. The smell of smoke mixed with the smell of lake water and we could hear the delayed crack and snap of the burning charcoal.
Maike swam back to tend the barbecue so that Stefan could swim. Then slowly, as the pink of the setting sun became purple and then blue, we returned to the water’s edge where a crowd of midges jangled in a golden cloud above our heads.
The bratwurst hissed when they hit the barbecue and we ate them hungrily with crusty rolls and a blue tube of Thomy mustard. Stefan just ate the rolls with butter and Petra took out a joint.
‘Where’d you get that?’ said Stefan, as she lit the end and blew out the flaming threads of tobacco.
‘Sven from work.’
‘Have to fuck him for it?’
‘I didn’t have to fuck him for it,’ she said, and took the first drag, passing it on to Stefan as she held in the smoke.
I lay back against the fallen tree beside Petra, Maike lay on her back, her head propped up on her rolled-up towel. Stefan lay against the thick stump of a felled ash, his hair still flattened to his head in damp curls.
‘I wonder what we’ll all be up to this time next year,’ said Stefan.
‘I wonder what we’ll be up to this time in ten years,’ said Maike.
‘Ooh, that’s a good game,’ said Petra. ‘Ralf, you start. Do everyone except yourself. Start with me.’
‘Well,’ I said, receiving the joint from Maike and taking a drag, ‘I think you’re all going to be biology and geography professors. You, Petra, are going to be the youngest recipient of the Nobel Prize. Stefan—’
‘No, no, no,’ interrupted Petra. ‘Was für’n Scheiß, Ralf. Jesus. Let’s say what we really think; completely honestly. None of this Nobel Prize horseshit.’
‘I do think you could all be professors!’
‘Yes, but you know I’m not going to make it. You know I’m not going to sail through it without a crisis. Say what you really think, otherwise it’s no fun. You don’t have to say I’m going to be a crack addict. Just say what you really think.’
The dying coals of the barbecue clinked and the tinny sounds of someone’s hi-fi drifted across the water from the bank at the other side of the lake. I stared at the embers of our fire, humped and orange like soft apricots.
‘I think you’ll be married,’ I said.
‘OK,’ said Petra. ‘To whom?’
‘Someone rich.’
‘Like my dad?’
I nodded.
‘Where will I live?’
‘Munich. You’ll be a professor there.’
‘Will I have children?’
‘No. Your husband will think you want them, but actually you don’t and you won’t tell him. You’ll keep taking the pill and just pretend it isn’t happening.’
Petra smiled. ‘Yes,’ she said, pleased. ‘You see? You knew I wasn’t going to be winning any fucking Nobel Prize. Now what about Stefan?’
‘He’s going to fall in love at university,’ I said, looking at him. ‘She’ll be studying biology, but’ll become a teacher. She’ll hate it and give up when they have kids.’
‘So Stefan’s having kids?’
‘Yeah, four,’ I said. ‘They’ll just keep coming.’
Stefan laughed.
‘And the wife?’ said Petra.
‘She’ll find it all too hard, because Stefan will pretend he’s considering sharing the childcare, but really he won’t and she’ll have to give up her job so that he can keep working full-time. She’ll never really forgive him for it and they’ll get divorced.’
Stefan leant forward to take the joint off me.
‘We’ll stay friends though,’ said Stefan. ‘Me and my ex.’
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘The best.’
He smiled.
‘And Maike?’ Petra said.
Fire danced in the lenses of Maike’s glasses, obscuring her eyes, so that I didn’t know if she was looking back at me, whether her eyes were open or closed.
‘She’s going to be a big deal. Important books, prizes, head of department.’
‘Be honest, Ralf,’ Petra cried.
‘I am,’ I said. ‘Maike’s the one that’s going to really make it. She’ll live in Düsseldorf and have dachshunds, a husband, also an academic, and one very bright child called something old-fashioned, like Gisela, who’ll be tall and pale and play the piano very well.’
Maike laughed.
‘Now you, Maike – you start with Ralf.’
I watched the twin flames where her eyes should have been.
‘Ralf will go to university next year in England. He’ll hate it, but he’ll get through it and do well. He’ll keep thinking that he’s not really English any more, but also not really German, and it’ll make him miserable. Because he’ll have to face it. He’ll have to face the complexity of it and he won’t be able to hide from it there.’
‘Fuck,’ said Petra.
I smiled, but I felt that she was right and I was afraid.
‘He’ll meet someone later.’
‘Who?’ said Petra.
‘A man, I suppose.’
The smoky air cracked with the sound of burning branches that Stefan had thrown on the barbecue to make a fire and the high whine of water escaping from the wood.
‘He’ll do something more important than Ralf, or he’ll be older. Ralf would like that – someone to look up to. Sometimes he’ll stray.’
‘Ralf?’ said Petra.
‘No,’ said Maike, ‘the lover. But they’ll never leave each other. They won’t know how.’
I didn’t want to believe it, but it wasn’t impossible, I supposed. I pictured myself awake in an upstairs room in early-morning London light hearing the door below open and close, hearing my boyfriend coming up the stairs after a night out without me. But when I turned to him I only saw Oz. Perhaps that would pass. Perhaps there would be other faces after all.
We listened to music coming from the other side of the lake. Petra hummed along to it. I pulled on my jumper and pushed my bare knees together. The night air was cold now and smelt of smoke and minerals, the lake water lapped at the shore and, in the insi
stent breeze, the first dead leaves rattled above us among the green.
Thirty-Five
As Hutton and his friends discovered, the engine of geology is time. With enough time, anything can be metamorphosed even with the lightest pressure. If you put your hands against a wall and started pushing and kept the pressure up for hundreds of thousands of years, eventually it would become fluid beneath your fingers, and you could part it and walk right through.
There are also cataclysms, though. Sudden shifts that change everything, when all the hands are pushing in the other direction and the wall suddenly gives. The 1556 Shaanxi earthquake that destroyed every single building in Huaxian and killed 830,000 people living in cave dwellings carved out of soft loess, for instance. The Lake Toba eruption, pumping six billion tonnes of sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere, its glassy dust still found in the earth on the banks of Lake Malawi.
Oz’s incarceration, me abandoning him and then my friends leaving in the autumn of 1989 were of course not catastrophic changes. But their sudden disappearances transformed West Berlin for me overnight. The feeling in the apartment changed too. While I waited to hear if Durham would let me start in January, I got a job in an outdoor clothing shop in Steglitz and, like Mum and Dad, worked five days a week. When Martin sloped into the kitchen in the morning, Mum, Dad and I were already dressed and drinking coffee, our black bread and cheese packed and stacked in Tupperware, ready for our departure.
I thought about Oz constantly. Like a fan of some historical figure, I cycled about the city passing the sites that held some trace of him: his old flat, the bookshop, Checkpoint Alpha, Fellini’s. Every evening I cycled home via the clinic and stopped there at dusk, in the brief period when the lights were on, but the blinds hadn’t yet been drawn. From the road, I studied the faces that passed the windows, but never saw him, not once. I imagined his fiancée at his side, holding his hand. I hoped he was good to her.
I didn’t hear much from Maike, but Petra phoned surprisingly often and Stefan hitchhiked back from Hanover every few weeks, because so many of the students still lived with their parents and his university halls were dead at the weekends. While Joachim didn’t become my gay godfather, we often met up with him when Stefan was back in town and drank in Der Gammler, listening to Peter reminisce about the golden era of the West Berlin Wildlife Trust and Stefan complain about a Dutch anthropology student he was dating called Femke who didn’t believe in monogamy. ‘It’s very challenging,’ said Stefan.
‘For you?’
He shook his head. ‘For society.’
One evening it began raining heavily while we were drinking. After Peter closed up the bar, Stefan decided he didn’t want to cycle all the way back to Kreuzberg and invited himself back to mine. He made a fuss about having to sleep on the floor and told me to stop being an old maid when I questioned whether it wasn’t weird for us to share a bed. Since Oz, Stefan had become even more brotherly and explicitly unbothered by any show of intimacy; he was constantly pinching my cheeks and embracing me at the end of drunken evenings.
I slept uncomfortably sandwiched between him and the wall. The heat in the city was dying, but it was still warm at night, and every time his leg or arm touched mine a slick of sweat sprang from my skin like tears.
I woke in the night to find a void behind me, which I rolled into, enjoying for a moment the blissful semi-coolness of Stefan’s absence. But the reasons for the absence turned over in my mind and I opened my eyes to find him standing at my window.
In the half-light his body was as pale as his white underpants, the limbs long and thin, his curling black hair a felt-tip cloud scribbled above it. The moon was high and threw a shaft of blue light that lit up his face. He looked ethereal, like the pale boatmen punting across the river to the Isle of the Dead.
‘Stefan?’ I croaked, sitting up. My mouth was hot and sour.
He didn’t move, and for a second I thought he was sleepwalking. Then he said, ‘Ralf. Do you think someone’s watching you?’
I climbed out of bed and, still full of sleep, stumbled to the window, half slipping on a discarded packet of Chio Chips.
‘Look at that car.’
Automatically I searched for Oz’s green Mercedes.
‘The low car, kind of golden brown.’
I saw it. A wide flat Ford, but it was in a part of the street too dark for me to be able to see into the unlit interior. ‘Did you see someone in there?’ I said.
‘They’re there now.’
I stared but saw nothing except for the barest glow of the car’s phosphorescent dials. ‘I can’t see anyone.’
‘There’s something green and glowing.’
‘It’s the speedometer or something, isn’t it?’
‘No, it’s a watch. If you wait long enough it’ll move.’
Indeed, after a few seconds the glowing dial shifted.
I was hot and confused from sleep. My pulse throbbed in my neck and in my wrists.
‘It’s just a man in a car,’ I said.
‘Yeah, except why can’t you see into the car?’
‘It’s dark.’
‘But look, he’s parked exactly in between two streetlamps and underneath a tree. It just happens to be the darkest spot in the street.’
‘How could he have been sure of getting that spot?’ I said.
‘He was already there when we arrived. I mean, the car was. He wasn’t in it. Or she.’
I left the window and fell back onto my bed. ‘Why does that mean he’s watching me? Why are you trying to make me paranoid? I’ve had enough of paranoid people.’
‘But I saw the same car parked outside the squat when we went to that party with Joachim.’ He looked up at me with his black eyes. ‘I mean, what if Oz was right?’
I recalled picking up my bike and drunkenly scratching the golden car, but I couldn’t remember if it was that car. ‘Stefan! Please don’t freak me out,’ I said. ‘My head’s fucked enough as it is.’
‘Fine,’ he said. ‘But if my boyfriend kept telling me the Stasi were after him and then it turned out I really was being followed, I’d want to know. I’d want to check it out, at least.’
But it was too much. It was all too much.
He lay down next to me and I shifted back into my spot against the wall, thinking about Oz in the car smoking his Gitanes as I fell anxiously back to sleep.
*
The next morning Beate rang early to tell Stefan to buy light bulbs and cigarettes on the way home. We ate Toppas at the kitchen table, then sat on the living-room floor with Martin watching Alf. Stefan hugged me before he left.
‘Is Stefan a bender now as well?’ said Martin, yawning and walking through the hall.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘we’re all benders now.’
‘Bums ahoy!’ Martin said and farted.
At my bedroom window, I watched Stefan push his bike past the gold car and peer in through the window. He looked up at me, pointed to the car and shrugged, then cycled off towards Kantstraße.
I ignored Stefan’s appeal for as long as I could. I cut my toenails and argued with Martin about using my razor for the peach fuzz on his upper lip. I had a bath, lying deep in it so that the water filled my ears. I blew bubbles into the milky water, thinking about Oz and the apple-wine glass he had left me at the clinic.
Down by the car, I held my hands over my eyes like binoculars and peered in. The interior was cracked toffee-coloured leather. The seats and brown plastic dashboard were worn and scratched, but otherwise the car was devoid of mess, except for the ashtray, which was overflowing. The stubs were all Camels. I looked gingerly around the side of the car and saw, above the bumper, the bright white scratches I had made with my bike pedals in front of the squat. I recalled the man with the combover trying the door, and looked up and down the road, expecting to see him dipping into the doorway of an apartment, but the street was empty.
I cycled to the Park Klinik, taking all of the main roads that I usually avoided. Behind the
reception desk, the nurse who’d told me off about the glass was there and recognised me, over the rim of the plastic cup of Coca-Cola that she was draining. She wiped her mouth with her thumb and forefinger and forced her face into an expression of patient affability.
‘Hello,’ I said. ‘It’s Ralf Dörsam. I wanted to visit Herr Özemir today. Osman Özemir.’
‘He’s no longer in our care,’ she said, without having to look up his name.
‘He’s been released?’ This is what I’d come to find out, and yet hearing it made me well up at the idea of him free in Berlin without me.
‘I can’t give you any details about patients, I’m afraid, Herr Dörsam.’
‘OK,’ I said.
*
I waited for her on the junction of Sophie-Charlotten-Straße. Approaching in casual clothes, she looked older, the September light making the blonde in her hair look grey.
She recognised me and tried to walk past, but I said, ‘I’m sorry. I don’t want to get you into any trouble, but I’m just worried about my friend.’
‘I can’t tell you where he is,’ she said.
The sound of her jeans was audible as she strode past – swish swish, swish swish.
‘Could you just tell me if he was better when he left.’
She stopped and stared at me. I tried to make my face look as pathetic as possible. ‘Please,’ I said.
‘He was fine. He was always fine.’
‘What do you mean?’
She adjusted her handbag strap and shifted her weight. ‘Usually the depressed ones try not to be involved at all when they’re having their lows. They don’t want to do anything they don’t have to. But he did everything, he went along with everything, but he seemed … ’ She frowned. She was having trouble defining it. ‘It was like he was on his best behaviour, agreeing to all his mistakes and going to all of his groups.’
I didn’t know what to say. It just made me very sad, the idea of him boyishly behaving himself.
‘Have a lot of people been coming and asking about him?’
She shook her head.
‘His fiancée?’
‘The woman? Ashley, or something? Foreign surname?’
An Honest Man Page 26