Katherine Carlyle (25 page)

I climb the stairs to the third floor. In a corridor that is bright as the entrance hall and just as empty I put down my case and look around. There’s a strong smell of paint. With its gray doors and its imitation parquet floor the building reminds me of a show house — somewhere no one has ever actually lived. I stand quite still and listen hard, but can’t hear any sounds. No TVs, no voices of any kind. No running water. I unlock the door to my room, switch on the light. The twin beds have shiny blue covers, and the pale wooden furniture looks new, unused. Above the desk is a photo of an iceberg-studded sea, as if the management felt guests needed reminding of their whereabouts. A vent near the ceiling breathes warm, slightly musty air into the room.

I part the curtains. My view is of a rugged snow-encrusted hillside that lifts from right beneath my window, a number of heavily lagged pipes snaking up the slope to the top of the ridge. Like the hotel — like the room — I feel new. I’m a blank slate. A gamble. Axelsen told me there will be one last boat before the season ends. He said that when he returns, in a week’s time, he expects to find me waiting on the quayside with my case. He’s sure I will have had enough by then. I’m already looking forward to seeing his face when he hears that I’m staying.

That evening, at seven, I go down to the bar. A woman in a royal-blue tunic emerges from the kitchen and shows me into the far room through doors whose glass panels are engraved with polar bears and crossed pickaxes. There are maroon tablecloths and walls of lacquered pine. The TV is switched off. Only one table has been laid, and dinner is already waiting. A scoop of Russian salad, some sliced white bread. A jug of processed apple juice. No sooner have I sat down than two more dishes are put in front of me, a bowl
of hot clear soup with globules of fat floating on top and a small plate containing a thin piece of meat and a spoonful of plain rice.

I eat in silence, and alone. My vision blurs. A disco ball spins wearily. Its rails of silver light make the matte-black walls look dusty. A girl in high heels and a sparkly thong climbs awkwardly onto a low stage and begins to dance. Her solid, surgically enhanced breasts only serve to emphasize how thin she is; the tendons stand out in her neck and behind her knees. This is the dive Cheadle chose for his confrontation with my father, but Cheadle is long gone. My father sits with his head lowered, ignoring the tacky eighties music and the gyrating girl. He’s trying to process the information Cheadle has just given him.
Cherepovets, Arkhangel’sk …
But what if Cheadle never wrote to my father? What if he never summoned my father to that dingy club? Is there any other way my father could learn of his existence?

I replay the Berlin scenario. When my father reads my second letter, the letter Lydia hands him, he is bound to be concerned, but he takes Lydia back to his hotel and they make love. He falls asleep. An hour later, he jerks awake.
Of course. Why didn’t I think of it before?
While Lydia showers, he puts in a series of calls to fellow journalists. Using his contacts — his influence — he makes a televised appeal that goes out nationwide. This is a version of my father I have rarely seen before. For once, he isn’t an authority. He’s just an ordinary man, helpless and weak. Still, I don’t doubt he will bring a certain flair to the role. His voice will falter at exactly the right moment; he might break down, or even cry, which is what a parent who has lost a child is supposed to do.
My daughter, Katherine Carlyle, is missing … She’s all I’ve got … Kit, if you’re listening, please come home …
Most important of all, they will show a photograph of me, though hopefully it won’t
be the one in my passport. Taken when I was fifteen, I have dark rings under my eyes and hollow cheeks. When Massimo first saw it he laughed and said I looked like a junkie.

Cheadle will miss the broadcast — he doesn’t own a television;
TV’s for losers
— but Klaus Frings, who has three, one in the kitchen, one in the living room, and one in the master bedroom, sees my picture and almost chokes on his profiteroles. Still coughing, he calls the number given at the end of the appeal.

My father appears at the door of his apartment later that same evening. Klaus offers him a drink, which he declines.

“She lived here for about ten days,” Klaus says. “She often sat where you are sitting now.”

“When was this?”

“September.”

My father surveys the apartment — the coffee-table books, the soft furnishings, the art. At last his gaze comes to rest on the big unlikely German.

“I don’t understand,” he says. “How do you know my daughter?”

Klaus looks past him, at the mysterious gray painting. “I also don’t understand.”

He describes how he first saw me, at the
café-konditorei
round the corner, on a foggy Tuesday morning. He says he suspects me of having followed him.

“
Followed
you? Why would she do that?”

“I have no idea.”

Klaus relays the explanation I gave him. It sounds even less plausible the second time around.

Impatient, my father asks for an account of the time I spent in the apartment. Klaus describes our evenings together — how we
drank good wine and talked, and how he sometimes took me to restaurants. He doesn’t know what I used to do during the day, while he was out at work. I was deliberately vague. Elusive.

“She was like a lodger, then,” my father says.

The idea that Klaus and I might have slept together doesn’t occur to my father, but Klaus, who is still tortured by the memory of his impotence, squirms on his chair.

“Yes,” he says miserably. “I suppose.”

“And when she left, where did she go?”

“I don’t know. She didn’t tell me.” Klaus gets up and walks to the window. “She said she’d met someone.”

My father holds up the photo of me and Oswald. “Was it him?” “I don’t know,” Klaus says. “Who’s that?”

“His name’s Oswald.”

“It’s not a name she mentioned —” Something occurs to Klaus and he stares at the floor, one hand wrapped around the lower half of his face. He remembers me talking about the man I was going to stay with.
He’s older — more like an uncle …

My father notices. “What is it?”

Klaus’s thoughts move back in time, back to the night in the Gendarmenmarkt when, heart still aching from the muted finale of Tchaikovsky’s
Pathétique
, he walked out of the concert hall. He looked for me in the main bar, and then in the smaller bar. He looked in the lobby. I was nowhere to be seen. Just as he was beginning to despair, he spotted me outside, at the foot of the steps, deep in conversation with a middle-aged man. In the taxi on the way back to Walter-Benjamin-Platz I showed him the card the man had given me. I mentioned the man’s name as well. Something foreign. Complicated. What, though? And then it comes to him: “Cheadle!”

“Is that a last name?” my father says.

Klaus nods. “Yes. I think.”

“Cheadle. You’re sure?”

“Absolutely.”

After dinner I return to my room and switch the TV on. I select a Russian news channel — no Norwegian channels are available — and watch a soldier reporting from the scene of a flood. I walk to the window. A snow-covered hillside, sheer as a wall, and half a dozen lagged pipes. That sense of isolation again. Oddly familiar. Comforting. What surprises me, in retrospect, is my efficiency, my focus, as if I have been following a particularly clear and comprehensive set of instructions.

Cheadle!

When my father asks where Cheadle lives, Klaus can’t help. All he can do is give my father a physical description. Would that be enough to go on? Were my father to wait outside the Konzerthaus every evening, would Cheadle eventually appear? In fact, what was Cheadle doing there in the first place? The more I think about it, the more out of character it seems. But he wasn’t easy to know, or to predict. He didn’t like to talk about himself
— I don’t do the past
, he told me once, when I questioned him about his life — though I did manage to find out that his parents were Austrian Jews who had fled the country shortly before the Anschluss, settling first in Milwaukee, then in Madison, Wisconsin, and that he had developed a passion for icons from a Russian émigré he had met in San Francisco in his late teens, a man who, as he said teasingly, had taught him “pretty much everything.” If I were to ask Cheadle why he was in the Gendarmenmarkt that evening, his answer would almost certainly be mischievous or flippant
— I was looking for you
,
baby
— but there would be a reason, and it would be unguessable. I imagine my father standing on the steps of the Konzerthaus, coat buttoned to the neck against the chill, on the off chance that the American might once again pass by …

Is there anything else he could do?

Hold on.

Everyone who lives in Germany is required to register with the police, especially if they come from outside the EU. Then again, Cheadle prides himself on being a renegade, and is unlikely to have paid much attention to the law. Knowing him, he will have engineered a degree of invisibility — as far as the authorities are concerned, at least. More fundamental still, there’s the matter of his identity. I have kept his card — it’s glued into my notebook — and I study it from time to time. Is J. Halderman Cheadle his real name? I wonder. I never saw his passport, only a bank statement that I suspect is fake. But if anyone can trace Cheadle my father can.

I reimagine the showdown. This time it’s Cheadle who is summoned, Cheadle who is put under pressure. What kind of venue would my father choose? An embassy, perhaps — or even a police station. Somewhere that would serve to underline the gravity of the situation.

A windowless room. Bright lights. The table and the two chairs are screwed to the floor. In this encounter Cheadle is less enigmatic, more aggressive. He isn’t accustomed to forfeiting control. The door opens and my father walks in.

Cheadle toys with an unlit cigar. “You don’t look half as good in real life.”

“I’m sorry?”

“You look better on TV.”

My father smiles, then takes a seat.

“You must be — what do they call it? —
telegenic
.” Cheadle makes it sound like something you could catch.

My father leans forwards. “Tell me about my daughter.”

Within seconds of turning off the lights and the TV I sink into the deepest sleep, my dreams overlapping, incomplete, and when I wake, nine hours later, only fragments of an oddly luxurious state of anxiety remain — not enough time, too much luggage, a plane to catch … I lie on my side in bed, the darkness absolute. There’s a distant, dull, tumbling sound that reminds me of a cement mixer. When I think about where I am, on that steep slippery curve near the top of the globe, I experience a few moments of vertigo. Things are precarious, and I feel I might slide sideways or backwards, like someone clinging to a roof rack in a car chase. I doze for another hour. I’m tired, of course, but perhaps my body has realized I have reached my final destination and has decided to relax. Though I have met new people and visited new places, those aspects of the journey never had much relevance. What has interested me right from the beginning — what has preoccupied me above all — is the prospect of arrival.

/

When I walk into the bar at nine o’clock, an hour after the appointed breakfast time, a dark-haired woman I have never seen before steps out from behind the counter. She seems angry or exasperated, as if my appearance constitutes an infringement of some kind. Her face is round and white as a dinner plate, and the spaces below her eyebrows are swollen and slightly moist, like
hard-boiled eggs without their shells. She tells me breakfast is finished.

“Finished?” I say. “There’s nothing to eat?”

“No, nothing. You’re too late.” She points at an electric kettle on a low table by the wall. I can make myself a cup of tea or coffee, she seems to be saying, but that’s all there is.

Before returning to my room I arrange to have my evening meal at seven. I would like to crack a joke about not being late, but I lack the vocabulary and I suddenly remember Torgrim saying it was impossible to get a smile out of the woman who works in the hotel. This must be her.

That day I make my first reconnaissance of the town, surviving on TUC biscuits and Toblerone bought from the bar. Though it’s eleven o’clock when I step outside, it feels more like dusk or twilight, except for in the east, beyond the mine, where the clouds are a garish chemical yellow, like the flames in a gas fire. I follow an unpaved track that runs parallel to the fjord, passing buildings with smashed windows, an olive-colored van on wheel blocks, and several sledges propped upright against a wall. It’s hard to tell where the settlement ends. There are no markers or boundaries. The place just peters out in a tangle of smokestacks, gantries, conveyor belts, and sheds, the ground littered with wooden pallets and bits of metal whose purpose is obscure, coal everywhere, blackening the snow. A woman in Longyearbyen told me polar bears outnumber people on Svalbard, and that I shouldn’t venture out of town on foot unless I was armed. In Longyearbyen there were signs warning of the presence of polar bears. There are no signs here.

I turn back, moving past the hotel. The settlement occupies a narrow shelf of land between the fjord and a steep craggy ridge.
Though the buildings mostly face the water, they seem randomly arranged, as if they were dropped from a great height and then allowed to remain where they landed. Some look traditional, with intricate white fretwork around the doors and windows, their clapboard exteriors painted in yellows, blues, and greens that have been bleached and ravaged by the weather, but there are also larger, more utilitarian blocks made of bleak gray-brown brick. Municipal buildings like the school, the canteen, and the museum are to be found on or around the square. The naive, almost visionary murals on many of the facades — explorers, castles, whales, longships, domes — stand out against the landscape, like wishful thinking or white lies. There are very few people about — just, sometimes, a woman hurrying along with a plastic bag or a man wearing an orange helmet with a light on the front.