The phone rang. My aunt looked at it, the spatula still in her hand.
‘It’s fine,’ I said. ‘I’ll get it.’ I expected every phone call to be Oz, seeking me out again, despite me abandoning him twice over.
It was Stefan. ‘I’m coming over,’ he said.
‘From Hanover?’
‘I’m already back. For Christmas.’
‘When did you get back?’
‘Last night. You free now?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, come over now.’
‘You’ve got to be waiting for me in the street, though.’
‘Why?’
‘Just wait for me. I’ll be half an hour.’
I didn’t turn the light on in the staircase, and when I got to the hall I saw a figure standing in the gloom, silhouetted against the darkening blue of the afternoon sky.
‘Hello?’ I said uncertainly, stopping with my hand on the banister. I hadn’t put a coat on and realised at that moment how cold it was.
‘Ralf,’ said the figure. It was Tobias.
‘Oh,’ I said, ‘it’s you. What are you doing there in the dark?’
‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘I just got in.’
I didn’t believe him.
‘Any news about your parents?’
I supposed he couldn’t say ‘your mother’.
‘No,’ I said.
‘They won’t let you visit them?’
‘Yes, we’ve visited them. At least I did. Martin’s still a bit shaken up.’
I’d seen Dad first and then Mum. They were awful days, hours alone in waiting rooms and corridors, acres of polished green linoleum, distant frightening shouts, papers pushed under thick wired glass and high windows, unscalably high.
When I’d reached Mum, she was stoic and kind, turning back all the questions to me and Martin, citing tenuous positives in her incarceration: ‘I’m reading so much, Ralf.’ But Dad separated from Mum was tearful and ruffled, his hair crazy. There were patches of stubble on his neck that he had missed while shaving. He looked like a sick animal, too ill to care for its own fur.
‘I’m sure you must all be shaken up,’ Tobias said. ‘Were they—?’
‘She’s fine.’
He nodded. My eyes had adjusted to the dark, and I could make out the glistening whites of his. He was smiling sadly but gratefully.
I didn’t want to risk passing him again, so didn’t go back for a coat. I waited outside, jumping about to keep warm with my hands in the pockets of my jeans. There was no snow on the ground, but a hard cold seeped out from every surface: the pavement, the lumpy render of the buildings, the black trunks of the trees. In the apartments opposite, coloured lights blinked at the windows, and a plastic Santa Claus climbed the crumbling plaster of one of the balconies.
The dying blue made me think about Mum brushing her hair in the mirror when I was a child. The lights were off and the sky made everything in the room blue: the wooden floor, the walls, the upholstered chair she sat on, the sparks that appeared between the brush and her hair, which was long then. ‘Fireflies,’ I had said, the pungent smell of static in the air, and Mum had touched her sparkling hair and laughed. In the weeks since she’d gone, I was often assaulted by these forgotten snatches: Mum covering my pillow with a scratchy towel when I was sick; the sound of emery boards on her nails; the softness of her warm abdomen when I pressed my face against it at the side of the pool.
The few times that both Auntie Linda and Martin were out at the same time, I’d sat at Mum’s dressing table in my parents’ room. It was cold and had begun to smell of dusty radiators and long-stored bed linen. I picked up Mum’s makeup brushes and inhaled the smell of her face powder. The lipstick I touched once, but the scent brought her back too clearly, kneeling in front of me and Martin, licking a handkerchief to clean dirt off our faces before primary school.
An ancient silver Corsa rumbled over the cobbles and pulled into the empty space in front of me. Stefan climbed out, shouted ‘Na, Alter!’ and embraced me. He smelt different, like oil-fired stoves, incense and someone else’s washing powder. ‘I can’t believe you’re back,’ I said. ‘It’s been weeks.’
‘But here I am,’ he said. He released me and stepped aside to show me the car. ‘What do you think?’
‘It’s nice,’ I said. ‘Is it your dad’s?’
Stefan shook his head. ‘No, this one’s all mine.’
I smiled. ‘How did you afford it?’
‘I’ve been saving up a bit. Mum lent me a bit. It was really cheap. It’s got like 180,000 kilometres on the clock.’
‘Is that bad?’
‘Pretty bad. You want to go somewhere?’
‘Where?’
‘Over the border, maybe?’
‘OK,’ I said. ‘I’ll have to tell my aunt.’
We followed the route I’d last travelled by car with my parents. Stefan asked me how I was and after I’d said, ‘Fine,’ I didn’t know what else to add. There was too much to say. I looked at the dark water of the canal as we crossed it and imagined what a shock the coldness of it would be if you jumped in, so cold it would be almost like heat. I imagined Martin in the back seat of our family car in November, shivering, knowing what was coming but not when it would come.
‘Mum said your aunt’s really nice.’
‘She’s all right,’ I said, touching the thick plastic strap on the car’s ceiling.
I looked at him. His hair looked strange, shaved slightly shorter than normal around the back and sides by a new hairdresser.
‘What?’ he said.
‘You look different. Like Hanover’s changed you.’
‘It hasn’t changed me. Not really. It’s a bit more fun now, though.’
‘I’m sorry I haven’t visited, but it’s been … ’
‘I know,’ he said. ‘What has it been like here, since November?’
‘Not that much different on our side,’ I said. ‘You still see a few stunned Ossis down Ku’damm and you hear the Trabis before you see them, but mostly life just goes on as if nothing’s really happened.’
‘I meant since your parents got arrested.’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Same I suppose. In a way.’
I felt a pain in my chest. It was disappointment that all of my secrets had now been revealed and yet there was still an insurmountable distance between the feelings I wanted to express to my friends and my ability to do so. Was this what it meant to be an adult? I thought, and felt sad.
There was a small queue at Checkpoint Charlie, where the border guards still half-heartedly checked IDs, but never turned anyone back any more. We drove up through Mitte, and looked at the brown concrete buildings in the dim ochre light. Bar the odd candle, the windows of the East were devoid of Christmas decorations.
‘Is there even anywhere to go?’ I said.
‘Joachim told me about this jazz bar on Schönhauser Allee.’
‘Herrlich,’ I said.
The band hadn’t started playing, but nearly all of the tables were full. A grumpy woman with large breasts and a Saxon accent took our order and we sat drinking Köstritzer on a bench with a wood-panelled back. Around the room, beneath an undulating cloud of smoke, were East German regulars, recognisable by their stiff shoes, imitation jeans and imitation leather bags, by their numerous shades of grey. But dotted between I saw Levis, Marlboro cigarettes and Puma trainers on other Wessies or Ossies who had already spent all of their welcome money on a few novel luxuries.
‘Have you heard from Maike or Petra?’ Stefan said.
‘Yeah. Petra’s fine, I think. The maths guy didn’t work out. Then she had some sort of American boyfriend, who wasn’t really a boyfriend. And Maike’s got a boyfriend. A geophysicist.’
‘Completely different to a geologist,’ Stefan said.
‘It is,’ I said, and we laughed.
‘And Oz?’
I stroked a square window in the condensation of my beer glass.
‘No sign?’ said Stefan.
I shook my head. ‘Why didn’t he just wait for me?’
‘Maybe he couldn’t. Or maybe it wasn’t him.’
‘Maybe,’ I said, but I knew it was. And really I knew why he hadn’t waited: he thought I’d rejected him again. I suspected he’d been following me ever since he’d left the clinic. In the chaos of the ninth of November he’d thought it was a chance to reveal himself. But I looked at him and then disappeared over the Wall and didn’t come back. He would have waited a minute or so after I’d seen him, while I lay flat on my back behind the Wall, and then he would have turned and disappeared into the park to make a new life in our new country.
In the bathroom, I discovered that the architecture of the building was exactly the same as in the West. It was more battered, but the windows and doors, the double wooden frames, were all familiar to me, the handles were the same ones we had in our apartment. Of course the building was as old as mine, so it shouldn’t have been a surprise, but I found it astounding, as if I’d discovered the dark side of the moon.
‘When are you going to go to England?’ Stefan said when I came back.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘They’re still holding my place at Durham, but … I don’t know now.’
‘You can come to Hanover, Ralfi,’ he said and pinched my cheek. I smiled at him. ‘You always can,’ he said, and I believed him.
A drunk with a Wolf Biermann moustache and a white T-shirt stretched drum-tight over his distended belly stopped on his way to the toilet and said, ‘You know you can fuck on your side too. You don’t have to come over here to do it.’
‘That’s a lovely sentiment,’ I said.
The man nodded humourlessly and walked on.
Stefan dropped me off in Windscheidstraße. We hugged in the car and I waved him off and saw, as he was turning into Kantstraße, that beneath the largest tree in the street there was a green Mercedes. I walked over to it, but it was empty and there were no Gitanes in the ashtray.
In the apartment, the lights were off, except in the kitchen. I found Martin at the table, his school books opened out around him.
‘This looks serious,’ I said.
He looked up and smiled. ‘Just geography.’
‘Where’s Auntie Linda?’
‘She’s gone to bed. She said she had to go back to England after Christmas. Did you know that?’
‘Yeah,’ I said.
‘Do I have to go with her?’
I shivered and leant against the oven, putting my hands flat on the door, but it was cold. ‘Do you want to go with her?’
‘Not really,’ Martin said. ‘But if you’re going to be at university, then … ’ He shrugged. ‘And I don’t want to be here on my own.’
I nodded. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I was thinking … ’ But I hadn’t been thinking, the thought was coming to me in that moment. ‘I was thinking I could keep my job at the shop maybe just for the next year and we could see if we could stay here. At least until you’ve done your GCSEs.’
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘But it’s better to start at Durham at the beginning of the year with everyone else and, I don’t know, maybe it’ll help to be working for a bit. The flat’s still in Mum and Dad’s name, so there’s only the maintenance charge to pay. I don’t know how much it is, but I guess it’s only a few hundred Marks. If Linda can help, or Grandad … ’
‘I could get a Saturday job, or something,’ Martin said, with an enthusiasm that made me well up. I blinked as if I’d got something in my eye and put the kettle on. ‘Sure,’ I said, with my back to him.
‘I’m going to have some coffee,’ I said. ‘You?’
‘I won’t sleep.’
‘OK.’
The coffee tin was empty, so I took a new pack from the cupboard.
‘Do you want to do the packet with me?’ I said.
He nodded, put down his biro and held his hands out to grip the golden brick. I stabbed the foil with a pair of scissors and we smiled as the hard block softened, emitting its thick roasted smell.
The bell for the apartment rang, meaning that someone was at our door, rather than down on the street where the intercom was. Martin frowned and got up. He opened the door, but all I could see from the kitchen was the dark stairwell.
‘Oh, it’s you,’ Martin said. ‘The light’s just here,’ and he reached out and turned it on.
Forty-Three
The arrival and the departure of a glacier is a permanent cycle of concealment and revelation. The glacier’s prodigious appetite is blind to weight, mass and genus, swallowing boulders, plants and animals, caught and slowly engorged – like a snake with an egg – and shifted thousands of miles from their place of origin.
Having retreated, the glacier leaves a raw battlefield, the rocks deeply scratched, the ground strewn with grey, glacial till. Often this jumble of forgotten rocks contains fossil hoards: trilobites, giant ferns and dinosaurs that tell the story of the life that once thrived there, a world of giant molluscs two metres wide that propelled themselves in tropical waters where now the ground is cold and bare.
But there is sunshine and water. There is wind carrying seedlings to the rock face, curious deer, goats and bears feeding and drinking, excreting, birds with fish eggs glued to their feet landing in ice-blue kettle lakes, paternoster lakes and tarns. The scant plants that take root die, soil forms, new forests grow on old rocks and are felled again. Cities, like Berlin, are built on the banks of the old rivers that cut through the young forest, they are sacked and rebuilt, divided and reunited.
There are a few plants, though, that were here when the ice came and returned when it left. The ginkgo, for one, its frilly fanned leaves present as fossils in the rocks beneath our feet, and also in the park opposite the Schöneberg Town Hall, where JFK declared that he was a Berliner some fifty years ago and where, an hour ago, I got married.
Our daughters run past the ginkgo, indifferent to its heritage, plumping instead for the autumnal magic of the conkers a few metres further down the path. They crouch down and show them to Stefan, with whom they are both earnestly in love. Maike, who flew back from Berkeley specially, passes them with Petra, who is trying to speak to her old friend as her own children paw at her skirt-suit jacket. A few metres ahead, their respective husbands and wives talk conspiratorially, having long since formed their own independent clan, which they call The Fringe.
It’s called Zersetzung – disintegration – what my father did to Oz, harassing and framing enemies of the state until you break them psychologically. Once the details were laid bare, it made it very difficult for me to have a relationship with Dad after he was released, despite his constant declarations of love and regret, his trembling hands touching my face every time I saw him.
In a way, he didn’t really survive prison. Like many of the hundreds of thousands of people who worked for the Stasi in the West, he was prosecuted but quickly released. He had lost the pharmacy though, and sat in the flat shocked by the new world he found himself in. He wouldn’t travel East, he wouldn’t even travel to East Berlin. Instead, he lived as if the Wall were still up, ignored by old acquaintances in the shops and restaurants he still insisted on frequenting, until he was found dead at fifty on the footpath that links Berlin Zoo Train Station and the Schleusenkrug beer garden, where the air smells of cake and coffee and the dung of exotic animals.
We wondered briefly if it was an old enemy taking their revenge, but the autopsy said it was a simple heart attack. When they opened up the Stasi archives and I was able to read about who he really was – the son of a mechanic from Chemnitz – I discovered that heart disease ran in our family.
My mother was in love with my father until the end; after he died, she never remarried. She continued to work in a newly unified Germany and is popular with her patients. She should have retired by now, but can’t bear the thought of doing nothing, so still has her practice and works two days a week. Her greatest sadness is
Beate, who couldn’t keep up their friendship after she found my father’s name in her own Stasi files. He had been reporting on her and her artist friends for decades. Since my father died, a loose contact has been reconstituted, but there is so much that can’t be spoken of that the intimacy seems to have been lost for good.
Alone now, my mother stops beneath the ginkgo tree, giving Martin her stick to hold. Martin’s wife, heavily pregnant, stops up ahead, shielding her eyes from the sun to see what’s happening.
Mum was upset that I hadn’t organised flowers, saying that some traditions matter. Flowers in buttonholes are only a thing at English weddings, I told her, and anyway, I said, the law that allowed us to get married only came into force this week; five days is not long enough to form traditions. But she wouldn’t be placated. She bends down and gathers a few yellow ginkgo leaves. ‘You must have buttonholes at least,’ she says, and tucks a bunch of them into Oz’s lapel and another bunch into mine. ‘Otherwise it’s like you’re pretending.’ Oz’s brother and sisters crowd around us and his father pinches my cheek with his thick fingers, which is the limit of his physical affection, but a limit I can live with.
Acknowledgements
If, like me, you have a tendency to flick through to the back matter of a book while you’re in the middle of reading it and in doing so ruin the plot, then be warned: the section of these acknowledgements that deals with my research contains potential plot spoilers, so, if you haven’t finished the novel yet, read on at your peril.
As ever, I am hugely indebted to my agent Karolina Sutton at Curtis Brown for her invaluable feedback on early drafts of this novel and her championing of my writing from the word go. I also owe a huge debt of thanks to my publisher Little, Brown, particularly Clare Smith, whose in-depth editorial engagement with all of my novels is an increasingly rare gift in today’s publishing landscape. Thanks are also due to Hayley Camis for her fine publicity work on this book, as well as Sophia Schoepfer for her editorial support. A special thank you also to Steve Cox for his invaluable proofreading skills.
I would like to thank all of the early readers of the book, particularly my mum, Loraine Fergusson. And I would especially like to thank my husband Tom for his thoughtful reading of countless drafts as well as for his constant encouragement.
An Honest Man Page 31