‘Yes,’ I said.
She shrugged. ‘I mean, her name was always in the visitor book when I started my shift, but I never saw her. And I cover visiting times, so I don’t think she could’ve got in to see him.’
I began to feel excited.
She took a cigarette from her handbag. The flame from her lighter added a tinge of orange to the skin of her face, which was powder-blue in the late September afternoon.
‘Did a bald man ever ask after him?’ I said, thinking of the crumbs of gold on my fingertips by the car’s bumper. ‘With a combover. Black hair – what was left of it.’
She sucked at her cigarette and shrugged an acknowledgement. ‘That’s all you’re getting, though. I shouldn’t’ve said anything at all.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’
I thought about her behind her desk and felt jealous of her. Jealous that she had seen Oz more recently than me and knew things about him that I didn’t know. And then it occurred to me. ‘Why weren’t you drinking from a can?’
‘What?’ she said.
‘When I came in. You were drinking Coke from a plastic cup.’
‘We’re not allowed cans – the patients can bend them into something sharp.’
‘What about glasses?’
‘The patients don’t have glasses. For the same reason.’
‘They wouldn’t have glasses at all?’
‘No,’ she said. There was a roar on the main road up ahead. ‘My bus,’ she said. She threw the cigarette on the ground and ran for it, clamping her handbag beneath her arm to stop it flapping. Above me, the streetlights came on, the fluorescent tubes blinking orange and then settling with a gentle buzz.
Thirty-Six
I waited under a balcony on the other side of the street for the shop to open, watching from a distance as Herr Özemir unlocked the shutters and pulled them up. I waited all day in the hope that he would take a lunch break or leave the shop for long enough to let me slip in, but at midday a young woman arrived – a sister of Oz’s, I guessed – with a stack of battered plastic boxes, and they ate together, using the corner of the counter as a table.
The following day when the routine began again, I realised that my only hope was to appeal to Herr Özemir, so I entered the shop and stood in the stuffy room waiting for him to notice me. He continued smoking, staring down at a crossword. From a radio beneath the counter, some sort of sports contest was being commentated in Turkish.
He looked up. He sighed when he recognised me, blowing out his cigarette smoke as he shook his head from side to side.
‘Herr Dörsam,’ he said. I was touched that he remembered my name, though of course he hadn’t recalled it out of affection.
‘Herr Özemir,’ I said.
He stubbed out his cigarette in the same glass ashtray I had watched Oz fill on that July morning. ‘He isn’t here.’
‘I know. I was here yesterday.’
‘I know.’
I nodded, no longer ashamed. It had all gone on too long to feel much shame about anything any more. ‘Do you know where he is?’
‘He told me Bonn, but … ’ He shrugged.
The high twittering of the fridge containing the soft drinks suddenly cut out and the shop fell silent.
‘I think he left something for me here,’ I said. I took the Hessen apple-wine glass Oz had left for me out of my rucksack.
‘Behind the jugs,’ he said.
I let out a little puff of laughter. ‘You know everything.’
‘Osman is clever, but he’s not always the genius he thinks he is.’ He climbed down from the stool and walked heavily into the back room. From there he shouted, ‘Well, come on then.’
Herr Özemir expertly flicked the kick stool across the floor towards me, where it skidded to a halt beneath the Bembel. I stepped up and parted the jugs where I’d seen Oz hide the envelope. The envelope was gone and in its place was a shoe box, taped up once round with silver duct tape. I took it down. It was heavy with papers that drummed against the side when I tipped it.
I looked over at Herr Özemir, and lifted the box. ‘Shall we look in it together?’
‘It is definitely not for me.’
I climbed down and stuffed the box into my bag. ‘Thank you,’ I said.
He flicked his hand towards the door, gesturing for me to leave.
‘Herr Dörsam,’ he said, when I was at the open door to the shop. I turned. He was climbing back onto his torn stool, putting on a thick pair of reading glasses. ‘Osman is a complicated man, but not a difficult man.’
I waited for him to go on, but he settled himself, lit a cigarette and went back to his crossword. I thought he was just looking down at it so as not to look at me, but he fished out a biro from his shirt pocket and carefully filled out a clue.
*
I cycled home so fast that my legs were shaking when I went down the steps into the municipal cellar and shut myself into our section, walled off with high wooden slats. I wiped the sweat off my face with my T-shirt and sat down among the cardboard boxes, broken furniture, paint tins and oil tins that my dad had carefully sorted and stacked down there. The air was cold and moist and smelt of wet black things: coal dust and mildew.
I picked open the duct tape and pulled off the lid of the shoe box. On the underside was written: ‘For RD’. Inside the box were papers, photographs, letters and postcards. The first scrap was a receipt for petrol from the station near Helmstedt where we’d filled up the car before taking the transit road back to West Berlin. There were other things I recognised: a discarded green-and-white Wrigley’s Spearmint packet, a blue button that had pinged off my polo shirt while I was trying to get it over my head, an old parking ticket that I’d folded into the shape of a rhinoceros at Oz’s kitchen table while he sat in his yellow Y-fronts telling me about paintings he loved, his hands clasped around the back of his head, the hot summer air filled with the smell of coffee and cigarettes and the good smell of him.
Beneath this stratum tracing our brief time together, I uncovered a letter with Oz’s real name and an address in Frankfurt. It was from the Goethe University confirming that he had abandoned his course of study. There was an ID card as well, with a colour picture of Oz. He was wearing a crumpled white shirt and was looking just above the camera. There was a smile on his lips and his hair was fluffy and uncombed, bulging out in ungainly black clouds. Beneath were the three photos taken in the same booth, but rejected; his eyes were closed in two and in one he was smiling, laughing at something someone was saying on the other side of the curtain.
There was a swimming certificate for twenty-five metres from the Waldschwimmbad Rosenhöhe in Offenbach, another for fifty metres, a certificate for proficiency in Spanish guitar, a geography exercise book with carefully drawn volcanoes, and in the white rectangle on the orange sugar-paper cover was written ‘Osman Özemir, Geography, Class B, 1979’ in carefully joined up letters. An oak leaf was pressed into the back page.
Beneath the book, winding itself around the box, was a red, reticulated plastic python, its orange pattern worn to smudges beneath an insistent child’s fingers. I held it up and watched it sway from side to side.
The next layer revealed small colour photos with rounded edges, their surfaces textured like old wallpaper. Oz as a child in a German apartment sitting in the lap of his mother, a beautiful Turkish woman with a mass of black hair. She was wearing a forest-green polo neck, sitting in front of a table laid for dinner with a white saucepan decorated with brown and orange flowers. She was laughing like he laughed, her teeth a blur of white in the old picture. There was a photo of him as a toddler surrounded by sisters, the eldest, a girl with plaited pigtails and corduroy dungarees, kissing him on his fat cheek. Another photo showed him taking a flaky morsel of pastry from the hands of an old woman, in another he and his brother sat in a boat made of sand on a Mediterranean beach, their terrycloth nappies heavy with salt water.
A padded, red leather case popped open like
a purse to reveal facing black-and-white portraits of his mother and his father, the whites of their eyes retouched, the name of an Istanbul photo studio stamped elegantly in the corner of each. Tucked between the pictures was a yellowed funeral notice in Turkish with his mother’s name, Ela Özemir, and her dates: 1943–1978. Oz, I worked out, would have been ten, she thirty-five.
I lay back against the old top-loading washing machine that had once rattled about in our bathroom, and thought about how lucky I’d been to know him. Each fragment of his real life had been physically painful to open, to weigh in my fingers. I wished I’d known him for all of those years and I despaired for all the time in the past and all the time in the future that I would be without him. It was unbearable. And yet the box didn’t reveal anything new to me. It just showed me that other people had loved him, and that made me feel less alone.
I held up the only paper that didn’t fit. It was an olive-green library card for the East German Military Library for someone called Eckhardt Pietsch. It had been issued in Neuenhagen in 1965, before Oz was born. I put the library card in my pocket, and the rest I carefully packed back into the box and took up to my room to hide beneath my bed. Outside my open window a blackbird sang, unheard of so late in the year, and in the courtyard I heard Frau von Hildendorf laughing with her famous friend, a warm nostalgic cackle.
Thirty-Seven
The box didn’t help me find Oz. I had no way of getting in touch with him. I took the train to Bonn that October hoping that he or someone who knew him would find me. I knew how absurd it was, but I had to do something. I told my parents I was visiting Petra and spent two days sitting on benches near government buildings as golden leaves rattled past me on the loam-black footpaths. In the evening, I wandered past restaurants and cafés, starting whenever I saw someone with black hair, terrified of finding Oz with another man, imagining a clone of myself, but more attractive, funnier, a better spy.
At night I slept on a bench by the Rhine, shivering and waking every time a drunk passed or a police siren screamed, but I never saw him. I caught a cold and hitchhiked home, snivelling and staring out at the autumnal East German trees on the transit road, realising that the shoe box was a revelation, but also a farewell, and that I had no idea what I was going to do next. I was frightened and heartbroken.
I spent a long time thinking about the library ticket. I kept it on me at all times, taking it out of my trouser pocket when I was in my bedroom or on the toilet, scanning it for meaning. Neuenhagen, I discovered at the library, was a small town near Berlin in East Germany. There was a military base there, as the ticket suggested, but there didn’t seem to be any obvious link to Oz. I found a few famous Pietsches in the Brockhaus Enzyklopädie – a newspaper publisher, a resistance fighter, a racing driver – but no Eckhardt Pietsch. It could have been something from Oz’s work that had got caught up in the other ephemera, but it had all been so carefully sorted. Then I thought about the story he had told me about ‘Axel’, the red-headed Stasi officer with polio who’d been abandoned by his parents and who we had thought was Tobias. When the card was issued, Tobias would’ve been no older than five and far too young to be using a military library – I guessed that this was why Oz had included it. A final admission that in this he was wrong. Maybe in his guilt Oz felt it important to do Tobias a good turn. In a way, it was the perfect outcome: ‘Axel’ was real, Oz had worked for the BND, but Tobias wasn’t the man they were looking for. I was glad that I’d been right about Tobias, but also miserable precisely because it did relate to my and Oz’s story, was part of our shared history, and wasn’t a key to his whereabouts.
Durham wrote to say that I could start university in January and I threw myself into the reading, enjoying having something to occupy my mind, but also feeling that this was fair punishment for what I’d done to my family and Maike over the summer holidays.
Things with Mum couldn’t go back to the way they were, but they had improved a lot. Mum and Dad seemed close and happy and she was very conscientious with me, tactfully asking about the things that she knew were important to me: my friends and my reading for university. She didn’t mention Tobias and neither did I, and she only mentioned Oz once, when I found her sitting in the living room with her legs pulled up, a battered copy of Our Mutual Friend on the arm of the chair. She was biting her knuckle and staring at the floor.
‘You OK?’ I said.
She smiled. It was the first time in a long time that I’d invited intimacy rather than tolerated it.
‘I was thinking about your friend, actually.’
‘Which one?’ I said, though I knew by the microscopic pause before the word ‘friend’ which friend she was talking about.
‘Osman,’ she said. ‘I think about him sometimes. I hope he’s OK.’
‘Me too,’ I managed.
*
At the beginning of November we were invited to the Guy Fawkes Night dance at the British Military Base. I’d been reluctant to go, but had been won over by Dad’s pleading on behalf of my mum, both of them knowing that I rarely had any other plans now my friends were gone.
In her excitement at the prospect of us going out together as a family, Mum made dinner early and then shooed us into our rooms to get changed. When we re-emerged dressed and gelled, there was still an hour before we had to leave.
‘Can I watch telly?’ Martin said.
‘No, don’t, Martin,’ Mum said, distressed. ‘We’ll just talk. Let’s have a drink.’
She took a bottle of Sekt from the fridge, and said, ‘Let’s have a glass. Why don’t we all have a glass? Martin’s fourteen – that’s old enough for a glass.’
We shrugged our approval and Dad gathered the Sekt glasses from the cabinet. ‘When we were in France I saw five-year-olds drinking wine with dinner,’ he said.
‘We also saw a man with a smoking monkey,’ said Martin, and we all laughed. Mum popped the cork, poured it frothing into our glasses, and we clinked them together.
‘Let’s listen to some music,’ Mum said, and turned on the hi-fi. A thudding beat started to throb out of the speakers, a song that I’d heard countless times over the summer on roofs, in bars, in clubs and at the lakes.
‘What’s this?’ Mum said.
‘I don’t know. It’s not mine,’ said Martin.
‘It’s the radio,’ I said. ‘Is this what the kids are listening to now?’ Mum said.
‘Not me,’ said Martin.
‘Ralf?’
I shrugged. ‘I’ve heard it, but … ’
‘At the disco?’
I smiled and nodded. ‘At the disco.’
Mum started to dance, biting her bottom lip and throwing out her arms in awkward staccato movements.
‘Mum, don’t,’ said Martin.
But Mum frowned and started to wave her hips, saying, ‘Come on, guys. If this is what’s “cool” now, let’s get down to it, like a family.’
We started laughing and she pulled Dad to his feet and he began to move too in jerking, flicking rhythms. Martin and I laughed so much that our bellies hurt. In his uncontrollable giggling, Martin farted, and this sent us all into howling paroxysms.
The drive to the party was spent recalling the dancing and the fart, and was accompanied by new outbursts of laughter.
‘Your father was actually a very good dancer, back in the day,’ Mum said. ‘When he still had sideburns.’
We laughed at this. There was a black-and-white picture of them just after they’d met, my father’s hair already greying at twenty, that made Martin and me particularly hysterical. I looked at my father and wondered if I would also start greying prematurely. My dad caught my eye in the rear-view mirror and winked.
The car slid onto the motorway and I watched Dad’s eyes and nose in the rectangle of the rear-view mirror, watched the light of the streetlamps skim rhythmically across his head like the light of a photocopier – chin to forehead, chin to forehead – turning his white hair orange in rhythmic bursts.
&n
bsp; My skin began to tingle.
There weren’t any colour photographs of his childhood. The few pictures we had of him were all black-and-white.
My throat felt tight as I said, ‘What colour were Dad’s sideburns?’
Dad’s eyes flicked back to mine in the mirror as my mother laughed and said, ‘Oh, still squirrel-red back then. Grandad used to call us the ginger nuts.’
She misunderstood my silence and reached round to playfully slap my leg. ‘Are you worried about your hair? Oh, Ralf! Doesn’t greyness go down the mother’s side? Or is that baldness?’
What did I really know about my father’s youth, I thought, other than tall tales about my grandfather? I thought about the richness with which my mother and Beate talked about their past lives. Dad’s childhood in Hessen was always re-created in repeated stories and cultural facts, like the apple-wine glass. Wasn’t this just Dad, though? Wasn’t this just the way he related to the world? A bit dry. A bit uptight.
The indicator stopped clicking.
What was I saying? That my father had invented his youth? Had lied to us about it? That he had been accessing Mum’s files? What would that mean? That he was really East German? That he was a spy? My ears burned. Dad reached across to Mum and took her hand in his. At the corners of his pale lips, the same colour as the skin on his face, there was the hint of a forced smile.
‘Dad?’
His eyes locked onto mine again in the mirror.
‘Do you know someone called Eckhardt Pietsch?’ I said, repeating the name I’d read on the library card that Oz had left for me.
His eyes didn’t change, but that was the giveaway. He didn’t react at all, just stared at me, immobile.
‘Who’s Eckhardt Pietsch?’ said Mum.
I waited, but Dad didn’t answer. The red light of someone’s brakes flashed and his eyes switched back to the road.
‘I found his library card in an old box. I thought maybe it was someone Dad used to know,’ I said, turning away to the road, my skin cold and clammy like a dead thing’s. ‘But maybe I got the name wrong.’
An Honest Man Page 27