‘We’re going to Der Gammler for a few drinks. Dad too and my sisters,’ Maike said. ‘Come along.’
We all nodded our assent.
‘Hey, Ralf,’ said Stefan, ‘is that your mum?’
We turned and saw her standing among the silver birches at the side of the car park, a bed of ochre leaves at her feet that made the red of her hair burn orange.
‘I’ll meet you at the bar,’ I said.
Thirty-Nine
In the cemetery, we found an iron bench strung with glassy raindrops, which we wiped off with our bare hands, and sat down side by side, our cold fingers pushed into our coat pockets. Mum was wearing a long beige trench coat with wide shoulder pads, its hem reaching down to her ankles. The air smelt of pine needles and earth.
‘I can’t ever come back,’ I said.
‘That’s very dramatic, Ralf.’
‘Is it? I think my parents are committing treason. Or did I miss something?’
A crow cawed high up in a dark copper beech. A surge of wind brought a rush of ginkgo leaves with it, a cascade of pale gold keys turning over in the grey air.
‘It’s never that simple.’
‘Isn’t it frightening how simple it is?’
Mum stared across gravestones old and new, battered crosses and armless angels, their faces streaked green and black with lichen and smog.
‘There are many small steps to the kinds of actions that seem most dramatic. No one gets up one morning and says, today I’m going to become a spy.’
‘But he made you.’
‘He didn’t make me, Ralf.’
‘He targeted you, because of your job.’
‘No,’ she said vehemently. Then after a pause: ‘Well, yes to begin with. I was a student still and doing secretarial work for Daddy at Gatow. I suppose that’s why he found me to begin with. But we fell in love very quickly and when he asked me to take a few files … Well … You know how it is.’
I didn’t respond to this.
‘So you’re a communist?’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘in spirit, I suppose.’
I thought about Gran and Grandad and Bournemouth, his liver spots, his bungalow, the soft biscuits and spongy lawn where Martin and I played swingball. We had last visited two years before, when Grandad took us to the beach and we waded into the cold sea and ate ice cream with desiccated coconut sandwiched between brittle wafers shaped like oyster shells. Dad surprised us with his love of cheap attractions, riding carousels and waltzers at the pier, feeding twopenny coins into the coin pusher and beating Martin at round after round of Street Fighter, heat radiating from our burnt shoulders. When it started to rain, Grandad bought us matching hooded ponchos of thin yellow plastic, and we trudged home like a bright coven of witches, water dripping into our sandals. It wasn’t how I imagined communists lived with the people they were betraying.
‘So your practice – it’s just a cover for getting compromising material to blackmail people?’
‘No,’ Mum said. ‘Not at all. I love my work.’
‘But you do leak what your patients tell you to the Stasi?’
‘Well … ’ she said, repositioning herself on the bench and tightening her coat. ‘Your father has access to it. I don’t get involved in any of that. He may not even use the files any more.’
‘You don’t believe that.’
She shivered and looked down at her knees. ‘After I qualified, I worked in a clinic, but kept doing a bit of office work for Daddy, so still had access. But then someone at the Army base asked me if I’d privately see a major and his wife for couples’ counselling. And of course your father was thrilled. And then that French ambassador got in touch and then … Well, I got a bit of a name for myself. It’s been very successful.’
‘Not for all the people whose secrets you’ve been selling.’
‘I haven’t sold anything!’ my mum cried. ‘I don’t get paid.’
‘But Dad must get supported by the East.’
‘I mean …’ She shrugged vaguely.
‘The flat that apparently belonged to our non-existent grandparents. I assume they pay for that?’
‘We own it. It’s in our name.’
‘But that’s not even a real name, is it?’
‘Legally,’ she said weakly.
‘And what about us?’ I said. ‘What about Martin and me?’
‘What about you?’
‘You put us in danger.’
‘You’ve put us in more danger than we ever put you in.’
‘Fuck you,’ I said. ‘That’s different.’
Mum held up an appealing hand. ‘Let’s not … I would never purposely put you in danger, Ralf, neither would your father. But we were already doing … it when I got pregnant. The choice was that way round; did we keep you or not? And then once we had you, it didn’t seem to make much difference having Martin.’ The wind came again and three pigeons took flight, twisting in the air, and landing on the stout crematorium chimney. ‘Anyway, I love being a mother, and if I’d had to whisk you all off to the East or hand in your father to save you, I’d have done it. I’d have made it work.’
‘You would shop Dad for us?’
‘For you two? Of course,’ Mum said. ‘Don’t tell him, though.’
I smiled involuntarily, but shook it off. ‘But how could you stay with him?’ I said. ‘After you found out he’d been lying to you?’
Mum released a short, contemplative sigh. ‘It didn’t come out like that. It wasn’t like I suddenly found his gun.’
‘Does he have a gun?’
‘No, of course not. I mean, I don’t think so.’ She frowned. ‘No, it came out in bits. First that he was a communist, or sympathetic. I found it a bit odd that he was so committed, but then he talked about it, explained the thinking, told me about all the fascists still in power here. I mean, it’s not like at home. There are real Nazis running companies! Then at some point I knew he was attached to the Communist Party and that the pharmacy was a place where people met. Then he asked if he could take a look at one of the files at the hospital. That was odd, but by then I loved him. When it was all out on the table, well …’ She shrugged. ‘I was sympathetic to socialism, he knew that, and he promised me it wasn’t the sort of thing that was going to get anyone killed. Exactly the opposite, in fact; it was to ensure peace. And I barely have anything to do with it. I’m just turning a blind eye.’ She squinted into the bright sky.
I shook my head; she was making it all sound so banal. ‘Mum,’ I said, ‘Dad was pretending to be someone he wasn’t.’
‘No, he was just pretending to have a different name and identity.’
I laughed in disbelief. ‘That’s the same thing.’
‘No it’s not.’
‘He pretended to be a West German pharmacist and he’s an East German spy.’
‘But he is a West German pharmacist.’
‘You just said he was a spy.’
‘He is, but he’s also a qualified pharmacist who works in West Berlin.’
‘I can’t believe you’re splitting hairs.’
‘I’m not splitting hairs, Ralf. He does that job. He’s done that job every day for the last twenty years. His customers like him, he helps support his family. All of those things really happened, they’re not imaginary. Of course, there are layers to his life, but that’s true of anyone. We don’t know anyone completely. What’s real is what people say and what they do. He’s been a good husband, a good father to you and Martin. That’s not changed. That’s real.’
‘But when you met him he was playing a part. He’d found out exactly what you liked, the sort of man you wanted, and he became it.’
‘Well, I don’t know about that.’
‘Of course he did.’
Mum shook her head. ‘But Ralf, he really is like that. He really does like cycling. He really does like separating out all the different bits of Die Zeit. He really does like Scrabble and books and … We love each other. We always have.’
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‘You sound so naive,’ I said.
‘Don’t tell me I’m being naive. Especially after what you’ve been up to for the last few months.’
I folded my arms across my chest. ‘I can’t believe you knew everything the whole time. All the lying … ’ I shook my head. ‘It makes me feel sick.’
‘We didn’t know everything,’ Mum said. ‘Just the broad strokes.’
‘Dad took pictures of me and Oz … ’
Mum sighed. ‘He had them taken. Someone else did that. And I didn’t know anything about that. He’s very upset about it. No one … saw anything. That was all done … ’ She waved her hand, implying somewhere far away. She pulled her coat tighter and nudged along the bench so that our hips were touching. ‘We all invent ourselves, Ralf. Whoever we are.’
‘Do you?’
‘Of course. I haven’t always … you know I haven’t been as good a wife as I could’ve been.’
I felt she was leaving a gap for me to chastise her. ‘Why Tobias?’ I said.
‘Oh Ralf,’ she said, her eyes glistening. ‘He’s a sweet man.’
‘Sweet enough to destroy his neighbour’s family.’
She let this comment go. ‘I could list off the reasons,’ she said. ‘He made me feel desirable, he was very romantic … But really you don’t think these things through in the moment. And when the advance comes, submitting is like … Well, like a kiss. A kiss is easy. And then once you’ve kissed someone … It’s all very silly and meaningless. It shouldn’t be as terrifying and destructive as it is.’
‘Love?’ I said.
She shook her head. ‘That wasn’t love.’
It still made me feel nauseous, this talk of romance and desire and submission. I wonder if the children of good parents retain the myth that their mothers and fathers are not hot-blooded creatures like themselves, do not form childish crushes, do not masturbate, are not easily flattered and afraid of dying.
‘Why did you do it?’ she said.
I imagined the information about the Army officer going to Oz, to his handler, to some faceless official, skipping through West Berlin like a dry leaf lifted by the wind.
‘I was in love,’ I said. ‘I was angry. About you.’
Mum nodded.
‘And I suppose I couldn’t really believe that anything I did would actually matter that much. It’s like smoking or having unprotected sex. You’ve been told what the consequences are, but they seem so … I don’t know, alien. So far away. They don’t seem to have anything to do with you.’
Mum folded her hands in her lap. ‘Have you been having sex without protection, Ralf? I mean, proper sex.’
‘Mum, it was just a simile.’
‘Well?’ she said.
The tips of my ears burned.
‘Ralf Dörsam, you’ve gone beetroot!’
‘Mum, I’m not … Jesus. Of course I … I don’t want to talk about it.’
‘Have you heard of AIDS? It comes from gay men and Africa.’
‘He’s not African.’
‘Where do you think Turkey is?’
‘Asia. And Europe. And he’s not even from Turkey. He’s from Berlin. And I don’t think he’s riddled with AIDS.’
‘Don’t say “riddled”. You know Rock Hudson died of AIDS.’
‘I don’t know who that is,’ I said. ‘And I don’t know why we’re talking about it.’
The bells of West Berlin’s brick and concrete churches began to sound and a double-decker roared past behind a bank of oaks.
‘Ralf, I want you to come back home with me,’ she said.
‘I don’t want to come back home. I can’t face him.’
‘Where are you going to go?’
‘I don’t know. Stay with Stefan, then get away from Berlin. Then go to Durham in January. Then I’ll be out of your hair.’
‘Out of my hair! What’s that going to achieve?’
‘I don’t know. There’s just something … honest about it.’
Mum sat up and tucked her feet beneath the bench. ‘Ralf, whether you go to university or India or wherever you go, soon you’ll be gone for good. I’ll never have you both around again. Do you know how awful that is for a mother? You’re not going to be living with us for the rest of your life.’
‘I can’t see how—’
‘And with Honecker gone in the East, and these protests in Leipzig, I don’t know … ’ Her voice broke. She was crying. ‘I don’t know what’s going to happen if … ’
‘Dad said it’s not going to change anything.’
‘Your dad’s stubborn!’ she shouted. ‘I’m sorry.’ She found my hand and held it. Hers was cold and dry like a pebble. ‘I’m sorry. Your father’s very stubborn, and he’s often right, but it just feels like sixty-eight again, like things are in motion and we don’t know what’s going to happen next. And whatever that is, I want you to be home with us.’
‘I don’t know if I can do that.’
‘Oh, Ralf,’ Mum said, resting her chin on her chest, tears washing away her eyeliner. ‘What about lunch tomorrow? Could you come back for that? Then we’ll see.’ She squeezed my hand.
‘I doubt it,’ I said. ‘But I’ll think about it.’
We sat a little longer holding hands, not speaking, until I leant in and hugged her. I left her on the bench and walked back to the bus stop, passing a section of new gravestones in shockingly glossy marble, jet-black, with gold lettering. The chimney of the crematorium, built stout so as not to be reminiscent of Auschwitz or Birkenau, began to smoke. Was there no other way of doing it, I thought, wondering if it was already Maike’s mother being burnt beneath my feet and belched out black into the white sky. I supposed not.
Forty
Maike’s family had drifted away one by one and left the four of us at the bar with Peter. ‘It’s like old times,’ he said. We toasted Maike’s mother and talked about what we thought of as our new lives, not understanding that the changes we were experiencing were small compared with the great shifts that would remake our lives over and over again.
I kept the events of the past week to myself, telling instead funny stories about the customers in the outdoor clothing shop where I still worked. It made me feel sad and alone that the few weeks we had all been apart had generated so many more secrets to keep. They didn’t ask about Oz, but all gave me loaded, sympathetic glances and squeezes whenever sex and relationships came up. Maike said she loved university, the lectures, her new friends, all of it. It was clear that she was thriving away from us, and although it made me sad, I was also happy for her.
Petra was having a harder time, but had met a couple of ‘weirdos’ – ‘Thank God,’ she said – and ‘an absolute non-starter from the maths department. He’s sweet and forces me to talk about my work, but I’m days away from scaring him off.’ Stefan said it was fine, it was all fine, but the Dutch girl had changed her mind about monogamy when she met a Spanish exchange student called Jesus, and Stefan wondered whether he might not in fact have been in love with her after all.
‘You never seemed that enthused,’ said Petra.
‘Yeah,’ said Stefan. ‘But now I think maybe she was really amazing.’
The door to Der Gammler was shoved open and the stuffed seagull on the ceiling swayed on its cord.
‘Turn on the news,’ came a woman’s voice from the door.
There was a general moan, but the woman said, ‘It’s the border. It’s important. Something’s happening.’
‘What’s happening?’ said Peter.
‘I want to see it,’ the woman said, pushing through to the back of the bar where the small television was balanced on a high plinth for football games. She turned on the TV and it flickered to life.
‘Hey,’ said Peter, emerging from behind the bar. ‘You can’t just come in here and … ’ But he stopped short when he saw the newsreader and a crowd of tense Germans jostling around one of the border crossings.
‘Which side’s that?’ Petra said, but no on
e answered. The bar fizzed with low chatter. The sound was on on the telly, but it was too tinny and distant for us to properly hear what was going on. There were shots of nervous East German border guards, then the red-and-white barrier went up and the crowd surged forward. In the room, there was an audible intake of breath.
‘Is it open then?’ Stefan said.
The bar erupted with chatter and people started paying up, pushing notes into Peter’s hand with overgenerous tips so that they could get away.
‘We’ve got to go and see,’ said Stefan.
‘Do we?’ Petra said.
‘Of course we do,’ said Maike.
‘Of course,’ I said.
We followed a drift of Berliners up Potsdamer Straße to the Kulturforum, past dazed-looking prostitutes in high heels and leather jackets watching the exodus with folded arms. The night was cold and the road damp and our breath condensed into clouds as we talked.
‘If it is open, it’ll be shut again before the evening’s out,’ Maike said.
‘But what if this is it?’ said Stefan. ‘What if it comes down tonight?’
We walked side by side silenced by the magic of what Stefan had said, but it was broken by the low growl of a car, its engine old and very loud. It spluttered towards us and, as it passed, we saw the driver astounded and half-smiling and the passenger, a woman, laughing hysterically.
‘It’s a Wartburg,’ said Maike.
‘What’s that?’ said Petra.
‘It’s from the East.’
As we made our way to the Wall more cars passed, coming in dribs and drabs: a Lada, a Trabi, a Skoda, more Wartburgs, their engines gurgling like old motorbikes, spitting out thick clouds of metallic-tasting exhaust, their horns tooting, their occupants laughing and waving.
When we reached the Wall, we saw that a crowd had started to gather. We were a little way down from the Brandenburg Gate, and people seemed unsure of what to do, standing in gossipy groups, swigging schnapps and beer and laughing nervously.
With the help of his friend, a man in a black bomber jacket jumped up and gripped the edge of the Wall. We watched him pull himself up and stick his head over.
An Honest Man Page 29