Katherine Carlyle (16 page)

“That’s not the kind of thing a father’s supposed to say.”

“I’m new to this. I make mistakes.” He brings the cigar up to his lips. “Anyway, you haven’t agreed to be adopted yet.”

His phone beeps twice. It’s the taxi firm, he tells me. My car’s outside.

Our conversations always go like this. He veers between affection and callousness, and expects me to be able to handle both. There are times when he seems to think I’m too full of myself and wants to see me come unstuck. Like now.

I check myself in the mirror one last time. Thigh-length dress, gold high heels. I’m reminded of the girls I used to see on Via Flaminia, or on the dark sticky roads that surround the Stadio Olimpico. I have never looked so unlike myself, and for a moment I feel capable of anything. I put on my cashmere coat and pick up my purse, then I move across the hall to the front door.

“Not out of your depth, are you, baby?” Cheadle says.

I give him a look. “No one says
baby
anymore.”

He touches two fingers to his forehead in a mock salute.
“Viel Glück.”

The dim light in the corridor and the upright rectangle of the doorway combine to frame part of the kitchen. A man hunched over a simple wooden table. The blue of cigar smoke, the dull gold of a glass of beer. If it were a painting it would be an Old Master.

Later, in the taxi, my thoughts circle back to the American who keeps asking if he can be my father. There was an uncharacteristic tenderness in the roundness of his shoulders and the attentive angle of his head, and also in those last two words, which he probably didn’t mean to say.
Good luck
.

In Potsdamerplatz a man who looks Turkish steps out in front of the taxi. My driver brakes, then swears at him. There are too many bloody foreigners, he says. They’re taking all the jobs.

“So there are all these Germans, are there,” I say, “desperate to clean offices at night?”

“You know what I mean.”

The Kempinski slides into view, its lobby brightly lit, its front steps carpeted in red.

I pay the fare on the meter, then lean close to the grille. “I know one job they should take.”

“What job’s that?”

“Yours.”

Before the taxi driver can respond, a man in a top hat opens the car door for me, his face a mask, revealing nothing. I thank him and set off up the steps. In the lobby of the Kempinski there are shiny wooden pillars ringed with polished metal and sofas the color of tangerines. The murmur of voices mingles with subdued Peruvian pipe music. The air feels staticky, filled with ions, as if a weather front is moving in.

/

The moment I enter the Bristol Bar I feel his eyes on me, even though I have yet to work out which of the many men he is. I’m acutely aware of the skin that covers me; it’s as if I have goose bumps. Then I see him. He’s sitting on a bar stool. Dark-blue suit, white shirt. No tie. I walk towards him. He doesn’t look round but watches me indirectly in the mirror where all the bottles are. He’s built like a wrestler, with wide shoulders and a deep chest. His hair is black.

“Raul,” I say.

He turns to face me. “Yes.”

“I’m Misty.”

When I shake his hand it feels warm and smooth and oddly padded. I have the sensation that his fingers are stuffed with
something other than blood and tissue. Silicone maybe. Or down. I wonder if Raul is his real name. It’s possible we’re both using false identities.

“There is a car waiting to take us to the restaurant,” Raul says. “Or perhaps you would like a drink here first.”

His English is flawless. I can’t even detect an accent.

I look around. “This place is a bit depressing.”

He smiles, then makes a call.

As we leave the hotel a dark car draws up outside. Neon slides over the roof, smooth as a hand stroking a cat. The man in the top hat is there again, opening the door for me, and this time I sense something protective rising off him, something almost paternal, though his face doesn’t alter in the slightest.

Once in the car Raul addresses the driver in a language I have never heard before. I ask him where he’s from. Croatia, he says. Zagreb.

“I don’t know Zagreb,” I say.

“No.” He looks straight ahead and smiles, as if I have just stated the obvious.

For three or four minutes neither of us speaks. Now we are in a confined space I’m picking up a sweet charred smell, a little like burnt sugar.

“I’m glad it’s you,” he says.

I’m not sure what he means or how to respond. Instead I ask him where we’re going. He says a name that begins with
B
. I stare out of the window. Judging by the route we’re taking, the restaurant is in the east.
A line comes to me.
But what shall I say of the night? What of the night?
I can’t remember where it’s from. A book I studied while at school. Something I loved. I feel Raul’s eyes move across my face, then down my body. This happens several times during
the journey and not always when I’m looking the other way. He doesn’t seem to care if I notice. He isn’t even faintly self-conscious or embarrassed.

We stop on a tree-lined street near the Gendarmenmarkt. The restaurant is located on the ground floor of a grand stone building that looks as if it might once have been a bank or an insurance company. When we walk in, I gather from the welcome we receive that Raul is a regular customer.

Once seated he orders champagne, then looks around. “Movie stars come here. And politicians.” He shrugs.

“Do you live in Berlin?” I ask.

“I live in Croatia.”

“But you’re often here. For business.”

“Yes.”

He holds my gaze for a moment. His eyes are opaque and lackluster, like someone who has been watching too much TV. I have the sense that I shouldn’t probe too deeply into his life. At the same time it’s my job to keep him entertained.

“This is my first time in Berlin,” I say. “I live in Rome.”

He looks up from the menu. “You’re Italian?”

“No, English. I was born in London.”

“An English girl,” he says slowly and sips his champagne.

The waiter arrives. I ask for the roasted gilthead. Raul orders breast of musk duck with glass noodles.

It occurs to me that I can trust Raul with anything, even the truth, because he doesn’t know me and he never will. He’s even more of a stranger than Oswald or Klaus Frings or Cheadle. He sits at the table like something built to hold a secret. Like a safe. It also occurs to me that I will have to do most of the talking. Despite
his command of the language he’s not a man who is profligate with words. For him, words are tools. Words fix things. Get things done.

“I’m nineteen,” I tell him, “but I’m also twenty-seven.” I reach for my champagne.

He stares at me and his face doesn’t change. He has a small scar near the edge of his mouth. His eyes are like wet wood.

“I was born twice,” I say.

He’s still watching me.

I tell him about my conception in a London hospital. I was an
IVF
baby. Does he know what that means? He nods. I tell him I was frozen. I was stored for eight years before I was finally implanted in my mother. I was put together — formed — but then I had to wait in the cold, with no knowledge of how long that wait was likely to be, or whether it would ever end.

“Like a hostage,” he says.

The analogy catches me off guard and though Raul remains quite still and solid the room appears to liquefy behind him.

“Yes,” I say. “Exactly.”

“But you don’t remember that. It isn’t possible.”

“How can you be so sure?”

He doesn’t answer.

Although I imagine him to be a man who has no patience with hypotheses and speculation, although his mind is almost certainly practical or even prosaic, he seems prepared to hear me out, and if I can find the right combination of words I might be able to convince him.

“Somewhere inside me,” I say, “there is a memory of that time. I
carry
it. Not in my brain necessarily — not
consciously
— but in my bones. My marrow.”

“Marrow?”

“It’s the fatty substance in our bones. But we also use the word metaphorically, to describe the very center of our being.”

He nods slowly.

I tear off a piece of bread. Since English isn’t his first language I’m having to alter the way I speak and it’s giving me an unexpected freedom. I can come at things from a different angle. Make discoveries.

“It’s not that I
remember
it,” I go on. “It’s more as if I have a sense of it.” I sip my champagne and the bubbles fizzle against my upper lip. “You know what it’s like to be caught in a thunderstorm? Well, the time I’m talking about is like the quiet before a storm arrives. It’s like uneasiness or apprehension. You feel the air begin to change. You feel something electrical —

“Or imagine you’re in a foreign city and you go to a movie and you get lost in it. At the end, when you walk out of the cinema, it’s not the city from the movie, and it’s not the city you’re used to either, not the city you know, it’s somewhere else —”

Raul is frowning. “This is how you feel,” he says, “when you think about this time?”

“Those frozen years, they’re still with me. They’re imprinted on my cells. On my
DNA
.” I pause. “I’m actually
made
out of those years.”

I finish my champagne. A waiter appears and pours me another. Sometimes I suspect I haven’t quite thawed out yet. My emotions are still frozen, my nerve endings numb. Sometimes I imagine I have been carved out of ice, like a swan in a medieval banquet, and that my heart is visible inside, a gorgeous scarlet, but motionless, trapped, incapable of beating or feeling.

“I’m living in a different way now,” I say. “I’m trying a new approach. I think it’s working.”

Our food arrives.

Head lowered, Raul inspects his duck.

“I’ve gone out on a limb.” I watch him as he picks up his knife and fork and starts to eat. “Do you know that phrase?”

Perhaps I’m talking too much. How much champagne have I drunk? Two glasses? Three? It can be exhausting, having to listen to someone. But I’m supposed to entertain him, aren’t I.

“It’s when you step onto the branch of a tree,” I say. “You begin to walk along the branch, cautiously, because you’re not sure it will take your weight. But you keep going. At any moment the branch might break. At any moment you might fall. That’s going out on a limb.”

“I understand.”

“I thought you would.” I’m smiling. “Your English is very good.”

He looks at me. “No. Not really.”

I eat a mouthful of gilthead, which is so soft that it seems to melt on my tongue. A bottle of wine arrives in a large silver bucket. The waiter pours us both a glass.

“How is the fish?” Raul asks.

“Delicious.” I reach for my wine. “There’s something I forgot to say. It’s exciting, going out on a limb. No, exciting isn’t the right word. It’s too small. Too weak. When you go out on a limb you feel alive — in every part of your being. Your whole being sings.” I look at Raul and see him as a man who has taken more risks than I can possibly imagine, and so I say, half to myself, “But perhaps you know that already.”

He pushes his fork into a slice of duck but doesn’t lift it towards his mouth. He hasn’t touched the noodles.

“You’re beautiful,” he says.

His voice is so grave that it makes me laugh. Once again I wonder if I’ve had too much to drink.

“Thank you,” I say. “Are you married?”

“Of course.”

“Do you have children?”

“One child. A boy.”

“He’s in Zagreb?”

“In the country. Outside.”

I tell Raul about my childhood, and how I associate the grayness and rain of London with stability and contentment, and how the sunlit years that followed were years of illness, frailty, and sorrow.

“We moved to Rome because my mother was diagnosed with cancer,” I say. “We went because she wanted to. All her life she wanted to live in Italy.”

“Your mother’s dead?” Raul says.

“She died six years ago. I scattered her ashes myself. I did it secretly.”

“And your father?”

“He’s a journalist.”

Raul pours us both another glass of wine. Black hairs bristle on the backs of his fingers. The symbol on his signet ring is an animal. I can’t tell what sort.

“You’re not eating,” he says.

“I’ve been talking too much. Am I boring you?”

“I like to hear you talk. It’s relaxing.”

“Relaxing?” I laugh again.

“Did I say something strange?” For the first time I sense that he might be vulnerable, and that the balance of power has shifted in
my favor. But it doesn’t last. Aware of the lapse, he makes immediate internal adjustments.

“You make it sound as if I’m playing an instrument,” I say. “As if you’re listening to music.”

He nods. “Yes.”

Later, as we speed back to the hotel — he doesn’t offer to drop me where I’m staying — all the energy drains out of me. The tires hiss on the road and everything beyond the window gleams; it must have rained while we were having dinner. The driver has turned up the heating. I can’t seem to draw any air into my lungs. The car rocks and sways, and I could easily fall asleep in my seat, but Raul’s gaze is on me, just as before, and I dare not close my eyes.

The Kempinski appears. Gold lights bouncing, a blur of tinted glass. As I climb out onto the pavement, Raul takes me by the arm and guides me up the steps and into the lobby. Behind me I hear the car glide off into the night. The sound of the engine fading is like loneliness. Raul’s thumb presses into the slender muscle in my upper arm. Everything feels different suddenly. There’s an urgency, an undertow — and the way the car raced away the moment the doors were closed, as if fleeing a crime scene … But we’re in the corner of the lobby, near the black doors of the lifts, before I find my voice.

“What’s going on?”

He still has a tight grip on my arm and he is breathing heavily like someone who’s been running.

“You come to my room, yes?” His English has deteriorated since leaving the restaurant.

“I should be going home,” I tell him.