Katherine Carlyle (9 page)

“No, no.” He laughs, then motions to me, and we walk to the nearest S-Bahn station, at Savignyplatz.

Once we’re on the train, I ask him where he’s from. He grew up in the south, he tells me. Near Stuttgart. His parents are still there. They’re really old. His father’s eighty-one. Even his mother’s seventy. I ask how old he is. Twenty-eight, he says, then nods firmly, as if he just split into two different people, one who reveals information, another who confirms its authenticity. It’s an irritating habit. I ask if he has any brothers and sisters. Three brothers, he says. They’re much older — more like uncles. His parents weren’t expecting him. He was an accident. His mouth twists awkwardly. He’s attempting a grin, but his feelings are too complex and it comes out wrong.

Rush hour is over and we’re alone in the carriage. Every time the train slows for a station, the brakes squeal and grate. Sometimes the overhead power lines give off a bright mauve-silver flash. I put
my face close to the window. There are no buildings anymore, only mile after mile of scrubby heath or parkland.

“They didn’t know what to do with me,” Oswald says. “I always felt guilty — you know, for turning up like that.”

“I was a miracle,” I say, startling myself.

“How do you mean?”

As we rattle through the darkness I tell him I was conceived by
IVF
, then frozen as an embryo.

Oswald is silent for a moment, looking at his hands. “At least your parents wanted you.”

“That’s true,” I say. “Up to a point.”

He doesn’t understand, and I choose not to explain. Just then there’s a whiplash crackle from the power lines and he peers through the window. “This is our stop.”

The sign on the platform says
GREIBNITZSEE
.

We hurry down a flight of stairs, then through a damp drafty tunnel. Outside the station is a parked truck with a bottle of Pilsner on the side.

Oswald beckons and we begin to walk. We pass a row of silver birches, metallic in the moonlight, and mansions with locked gates and darkened windows. The air is pungent with turned soil and fallen leaves.

“It smells like the country,” I say.

“There are lakes out here,” he tells me. “There are beaches. In the summer you can swim —”

A cock crows in the distance. So far, I have gone along with his idea, despite the fact that it has involved a journey to the very limits of the city. But now, finally, I’m growing impatient. This whole thing feels like a waste of time.

“Where are you taking me?”

“Don’t worry. We’re almost there.”

The houses become more modest — cut logs stacked against a garage wall, a rowboat covered with a moldy tarpaulin. We pass a gate, its upright metal staves shaped like feathers. The wind lifts. I can smell pine resin and something makes me think of winter. A tingle goes through me, behind my pubic bone.

“Will it snow soon?” I ask.

“Not yet,” he says. “Not until November.”

I doubt I can wait that long.

He stops at last on a stretch of road that seems utterly unremarkable. This was the only way into an enclave of houses known as Steinstücken, he tells me. The Berlin Wall ran down both sides of the road. He walks to the grass verge and begins to poke about. No trace of the wall remains, but he shows me where it used to be. Here, he says, and here. We move on. Before the wall came down, Steinstücken was a magical place, he says. Though it belonged to West Berlin it was completely surrounded by the DDR. It was like an island, with just one strip of tarmac — a causeway, really — to link it to the rest of the world. His brother, Friedl, rented a house in Steinstücken, and he — Oswald — would often visit. Friedl was twenty years older, more like an uncle than a brother.

“You already told me that,” I say. “So why are we here?”

Once, Oswald says, when he was staying at the house, he was suddenly hoisted onto Friedl’s shoulders and carried outside into the dark. He remembers cheering, and the tilting beams of flashlights, and people wielding sledgehammers, pickaxes, and bits of pipe. That night he found a piece of concrete lying on the ground, among the grown-ups’ feet. He plunges a hand into his pocket and
takes out a chunk of gray stuff about the size of a tennis ball. He stares down at it, his eyes distant, dreamy. It seemed really heavy at the time, he says. He was only four.

“That’s it?” I say. “That’s part of the Berlin Wall?”

He nods.

“And this is where it came from?”

“Yes.”

“So you brought me all this way to show me something that isn’t here?”

He hesitates.

“OK,” I say. “That’s great. Can we go now?”

His face widens in disbelief.

“Look, I’m sure this is important to you,” I go on, “but none of it’s much use to me.”

“This isn’t about what’s important to me,” he says. “It’s the past. It’s
history
. I’m trying to show you something.”

“I don’t care. I’m not interested.”

“You’re not
interested
?” He’s staring at me, horrified.

“No, not really.” I look around. “You’re just someone I happened to run into in a supermarket. You talked to me. I did you a favor. That’s it. That’s all.”

“A department store,” he says.

“Sorry?”

“I work in a department store.”

“Whatever.”

“You’re harsh, you know that?”

“Oswald, you’re not listening to me. I don’t have time for this. I’ve got stuff of my own to deal with.”

“How do you know this isn’t part of it?”

This is clever of him and it brings me up short, but only for a second. “I just know.”

“You’re lost, you are. You’re —”

“Fuck you.”

He flinches, then moves away from me, into the road. When he speaks again his voice is so subdued that he could be talking to himself. “If you’re not careful you’ll get hurt.”

Light explodes inside my head, as if I’ve tapped into the S-Bahn’s power lines, and suddenly I’m so close to Oswald that I can’t even take in his whole face. Just a chin, half a mouth. The meager iron filings of his stubble. My eyes feel white hot. It’s a wonder he doesn’t start to smolder.

“You’re an idiot,” I shout, switching to English for the first time all evening. “You’re a fucking fool. Don’t you see
anything
?”

A figure looms in a nearby driveway.

“Get lost,” a man’s voice says, “or I’m calling the police.”

Oswald steps in front of me.

“My brother used to live here,” he says. “He used to live in your house.”

A security light clicks on. The man’s face is in shadow.

“Piss off, both of you.”

Oswald glances at the piece of concrete he is holding. His hand tightens round it, then his arm unwinds into the air. There’s a bright jangling noise, and a black star appears in a downstairs window. The man lets out a string of curses and lurches towards us, light from the house silvering one raised fist.

Oswald says, “Run.”

We turn and race along the road, back the way we came. I glance at Oswald but he doesn’t look at me.

“Keep going,” he says.

Somewhere behind us a car starts up.

We run for perhaps a kilometer. My throat burns and I taste blood. Near the station we scale a wall and scramble down a railway embankment. A siren wails. We hide under a bridge, among Gourmet salami wrappers and empty yogurt cartons.

“I think we lost him,” Oswald gasps.

A train flashes past. I feel as if someone stabbed me in the ribs.

Oswald leans over, hands braced on his knees, and spits into the grass. “Do you think he saw us?”

I tell him I don’t know.

The siren fades. I can’t hear any voices, only the low hoarse barking of a dog.

“I can’t believe you did that,” I say.

“I was angry.”

“But your piece of concrete — your special piece of concrete …”

He nods, then looks as if he might be sick.

“Maybe you had it for long enough.” I’m trying to make him feel better.

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“In any case, it was a great throw.”

Smiling bleakly, he glances at his watch and then stares off down the track. “I think that was the last train.”

/

We have no choice but to walk. Near Wannsee, the hard shoulder almost disappears and trucks slam past, dangerously close. After that, we opt for smaller, more residential streets. Wind in the trees, the
far-off rattle of a train. The flicker of a TV in an otherwise lightless house. Once, I hear a couple making love, the woman’s cries louder than the man’s. Oswald speeds up, careful to avoid my eyes.

On a street in Steglitz a new noise seems to detach itself from the silence — a high ethereal humming.

“What’s that?” I say.

Oswald stops and listens.

The sound is coming from behind us. We turn slowly, apprehensively. High above the treetops, at the end of the street, is a spaceship. Lit from the inside, it emits a steady whirring as if powered by a single engine. It has a rounded top and a skirt around the base, like a saucer. A flying saucer.

“It can’t be,” I say, “can it?”

Oswald says no.

But we both keep staring, and the spaceship goes on being a spaceship. What should we do?

Then, by small degrees, its shape begins to alter. I realize it must be turning. As it swings round, it becomes more elongated, and the word
SIEMENS
appears on the side. This gradual transformation happens with such complacency and confidence that it’s like the punch line to some convoluted joke. I look at Oswald, and we both begin to laugh.

“I thought it was a spaceship,” I say. “I mean, it really looked like one — for a while.”

Oswald’s nodding. “I thought it was aliens. I thought they might transport us to another planet. Do experiments on us.”

“You should have taken photographs —”

“I didn’t think of it. I was too busy being amazed.”

Suddenly we have more energy. We walk faster, keeping to the middle of the street. We seem to know each other better. We talk nonstop. Fifteen minutes later an U-Bahn station appears. Next to the ticket machine is a photo booth, and I suggest we have our picture taken, to mark the occasion.

When the photos drop into the slot, Oswald makes to pocket them, but I grab hold of his arm. I should have them, I tell him. As a souvenir. After all, I’m the tourist. What’s more, it was my idea.

“I paid for them,” he says.

“All right.” I let go of him. “They’re yours.”

My sudden indifference unnerves him. He folds the strip, then tears it in half. “Two for you,” he says, “and two for me.”

Towards dawn we collapse onto a park bench in Wilmersdorf. The sky is a marbled gray, like the endpapers in an old rare book. My legs ache and my stomach feels hollow. I haven’t eaten anything for eighteen hours. Oswald leans over, studying his pictures. Our faces have a radiance that makes us both look famous.

“When I first saw you,” he says, “my heart felt really strange.” He darts a look at me. “Like it was too big for my body.”

When I first saw you …
I let out a sigh. It’s not that it’s not nice to hear, not that I’m spoiled, or arrogant, or vain. It’s just that people keep saying things and then expecting something in return, as if their compliments are a password or a payment, as if they are themselves ingenious and brave and deserve to be rewarded, and maybe they are, maybe they do, but I’m tired of it. I’m beginning to think that what I might be looking for is a place where things are no longer being said, where people don’t talk at all — or if they do, not in a language I understand. My body twitches, as it often does when I’m on the brink of sleep.

“What is it?” Oswald asks.

“Nothing,” I say.

He has just given me an idea.

/

By the time I let myself into the apartment on Walter-Benjamin-Platz, Klaus has already left for work. I find a note propped on the breakfast bar
— Are you all right? Call me. Klaus
— but there’s another call I have to make first, a call that is more pressing. I open my wallet and lift Cheadle’s card towards my nose. The earthy mushroom odor of an old man’s trouser pocket. I dial his number.

“Who’s this?” Behind Cheadle’s voice is a rushing sound, like taps running. His German accent is dreadful.

“It’s the girl from the Konzerthaus,” I say in English.

“How are you doing, Misty?”

Misty
? I’m about to correct him when I realize that being called something different might be useful. Misty isn’t a name I would have chosen, or even thought of, but at least it has no personal associations for me.

“Misty?” he says.

“I’m still here.” That watery sound again. “Are you in the bath?”

“I’m under a flyover, in Spandau.”

I picture him with a mobile clamped to the side of his boxer’s head, the gray plastic raincoat flapping round his knees. On the margins — that’s where he belongs. He’s like a character from a painting by Edward Hopper. Or George Grosz.

“So what can I do for you?” he says.

“I’d like to meet some Russians.”

“That could be arranged.” His voice swirls, breaks up, and then returns. “Call me tomorrow.”

I turn his card on the black granite surface of the breakfast bar. “What’s the
J
stand for?”

“The
J
?”

“In your name.”

“Jeremiah.”

“Sounds kind of biblical.”

“The prophet Jeremiah. Much maligned.” Cheadle clears his throat. “We’ll talk tomorrow.”

I end the call.

Misty
. Now I think about it I’m surprised I didn’t choose an alias myself, before I landed in Berlin. It’s not just the way it rubberstamps my break with the past. It’s the sense of release that comes with it. In
The Passenger
Jack Nicholson is David Locke, a reporter, but his real journey begins when he appropriates a dead man’s identity, an arms dealer known as Robertson. A new name will force me to re-create myself. It might also make me harder to follow, harder to find.

I google “Jeremiah” on Klaus’s home computer. Jeremiah was a prophet, just as Cheadle said. He warned the Israelites that unless they changed their ways they would face destruction and exile. They didn’t listen. Driven to extremes, Jeremiah walked the street with a yoke around his neck. He was thrown into a pit to die. In the end he was proved right.