Katherine Carlyle (6 page)

By the time I leave the café it’s after nine. I move through the city with no destination, no agenda, following whichever street
takes my fancy. Unlike Rome, Berlin doesn’t seem to have any hills. The sky, though cloudy, feels immense. At midday I catch a bus going west and spend the afternoon walking in the Grünewald. As I circle the Teufelssee, a small lake hemmed in by pines and birches, a woman appears on the path ahead of me. She’s wearing a one-piece bathing suit. Her feet are bare. She puts a hand out to steady herself, steps down into the lake, and then stands still. The water cuts her off at the knees. Her bathing suit and the water are both black, which makes her white limbs look detached, dismembered. At last she bends down and pushes forwards, her freestyle neat and confident, almost hydraulic. The lake peels back behind her, and suddenly my head is empty but for a single thrilling intuition. The world will part before me. I’m on a smooth sweet path to everything that matters.

/

Towards the end of the afternoon, on Heerstrasse, I hail a taxi and ask the driver to take me to Café Einstein. We labor east, through heavy traffic. Mist hides the tops of buildings and blurs the brightly lit shop windows.

I passed the Einstein on my first morning, noting the name on the liver-colored canopies above each window, and the inside of the café is just as ornate as the exterior. The rooms have high molded ceilings and dark wood paneling, and the décor is old-world, all pale custard, clotted cream, and eau-de-nil. The waitresses wear starched white aprons that reach down to their ankles at the front, and the coffee is served in cups whose rounded rims are encircled with a band of gold. Sitting at a marble-topped table I look sideways.
Infinite versions of myself curve off into the still green depths of a mirror.

I remember the time my father took me to a restaurant in Chinatown. This was during the winter when our house in Tufnell Park was up for sale. I would have been eight or nine. My father ordered Peking duck and chicken noodles. Afterwards, he bought me a gold cat with a paw that moved up and down in the air. He told me it would bring good fortune and I pretended to believe him, though I knew he had no time for lucky charms and wasn’t even remotely superstitious. I can still see the cat’s gold paw glinting and the red lanterns with their tasseled fringes swaying above the street. I can still remember the feeling of my hand in his. On our way home, as we stood on the lower deck of the bus, a man got on, his eyes so dark around the edges they looked burnt. He pointed a long trembling finger at us and said,
You’re terminated
. I looked at my father and we both began to laugh. Later, my father told me he thought the man was ill — he had got on at a bus stop outside a hospital — but it became our catchphrase. Until my mother heard it, that is. She had already been diagnosed with cancer by then, and she didn’t see the funny side.
Turn around three times and spit. Both of you
.

The waitress who takes my order has tawny hair that is pinned up in a chignon. Her features look chiseled but when she smiles her face lights up and softens. Strapped to her hip is a chunky leather wallet that bounces like a holstered pistol as she strides about. When she returns with my coffee I feel the urge to speak to her, though I can’t think of anything that isn’t superficial or mundane.

“I really like this place,” I say.

“It’s a strange place,” she says. “It has a history.” She tells me the villa was once the home of Goebbels’s mistress, a silent movie star, and also an illegal gambling den for SS officers.

I glance around but nothing of the past remains. “Despite all that, there’s something — I don’t know — relaxing about it.”

“Not if you work here.” The waitress smiles with her eyes. “Is this your first time?”

“Yes.”

“Did you see the garden?”

“No, not yet.”

“It’s at the back. It’s very nice to sit out there, especially in the summer.”

“I don’t think I’ll be here then.”

“That’s a shame.” She looks at me, her eyes seeming to narrow a little, as before. “Maybe you should come back — when the weather’s warmer.”

“I’d like to,” I say, “but it’s not so easy.”

“Oh.” Glancing down, she smooths her apron over her hips. “Well, anyway. Enjoy your stay.”

/

“I’ve been thinking,” Klaus says as he approaches my table.

It’s my fourth day in Berlin. The tree outside the café quivers in the wind, and a man hurries past, one hand pressed to the crown of his hat. Klaus is wearing a different overcoat, charcoal gray with black trim on the pockets and the collar, but his briefcase is the same, and judging by its ancient polished look I would guess
it’s a family heirloom, since he doesn’t seem the type to go to flea markets. I ask him if he would like to join me.

He sets his briefcase on the floor and sits down. All his actions are deliberate, precise. I’m beginning to be able to imagine his apartment. It will be ordered, spartan. Meticulously clean.

“I’m glad you came.” He sounds faintly disgruntled, as if there’s an aspect of meeting me that he finds difficult.

“I like it here,” I say. “The other place I like is Café Einstein.”

“Ah yes. The Einstein is very well known. An institution, really. I haven’t been there for years.”

“Perhaps if you live here …”

“Yes, perhaps.”

The waitress brings his coffee. He glances up and thanks her. She’s dressed more discreetly today, in a black ribbed sweater with a high neck.

He turns back to me. “Where you’re staying, it’s not a good area.”

“I know. You told me that yesterday.”

He sighs.

“There’s a nightclub,” I say.

“And prostitutes. There are also prostitutes.”

I remember the idling car and the woman in her shiny boots. I remember the laughter in the middle of the night. The creaking. The hot-pink blinds.

“It’s not safe,” Klaus says. “For a woman.”

As I watch him over the rim of my coffee cup, both my elbows propped on the table, something lifts inside me. I think I know where this is going.

“The thing is, I have a big apartment —” He pauses, then plunges on. “You would have privacy.”

“I think you might have missed a sentence out.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Are you offering me a place to stay?”

“Oh, I see. Yes. That’s what I wanted to say.”

“Do you live alone?”

“Yes.”

“Do you have a girlfriend?”

He hesitates.

A voluptuous woman in a dark-green dress stands smoldering beside him, one hand on his shoulder.
Valentina
. The expression on her face is privileged, dismissive. In her eyes I’m just another girl who is on the make. I may have high cheekbones and good legs but my breasts are small. I’m not a threat to her. I’m too skinny.

“No,” Klaus says at last. “No girlfriend.”

I signal to the waitress that I want to pay. When I face Klaus again he looks fearful, almost panic-stricken. Perhaps he thinks he has failed to convince me, and that he has blown his chance. The woman in the dark-green dress is gone.

“You can have your own room,” he says quickly. “For as long as you like.”

“I can’t afford to pay much money.”

“I didn’t ask for money.”

“You don’t know me. I could be anyone.”

“So could I.” He leans back in his chair. For the first time I feel a certain authority or confidence come off him. Once again I wonder what he does.

I finish my coffee. The bill arrives.

“I have an idea,” Klaus says. “Come and have a drink this evening. Then you can see the apartment for yourself.” He wants to
text me his address and phone number, but I tell him I haven’t got a phone. “No phone?” Like Oswald, he doesn’t know what to make of this. In the end he jots his details down on the back of my bill. “The old-fashioned way,” he says, and smiles.

I study the address I have already memorized. “What time should I come?”

“Seven.”

As I tuck the piece of paper into my bag I think of the dozens of messages I have received in the past few months, only to ignore them. Though this one is obviously for me — I’ve provoked it,
engineered
it — things haven’t got much clearer. I’m reminded of Magritte’s famous painting of a man in a bowler hat positioned in front of a mirror. Since the man is painted from behind, all anyone can see is his back. And in the mirror too that’s all anyone can see.

Something jerks at the edge of my field of vision. It’s the minute hand of the clock above the bar. I look at Klaus again. His eyes, small and steady, are fastened on my face.

“Won’t you be late for work?” I say.

/

When I was twelve and a half my mother took me to a nightclub on the coast road not far from Gaèta. We parked with two wheels in a ditch, then walked down a steep path between spiky clumps of aloe vera. The lanterns that hung on thin poles, guiding people to the entrance, swayed and flickered in the warm breeze that blew in off the sea.

“We’ll have to pretend you’re sixteen.” My mother gave me a sidelong glance. “Can you manage that?”

I wasn’t sure.

“Leave it to me,” she said.

Somehow we slipped past the
buttafuori
, with their muscular necks, their headsets, and their immaculate tuxedoes, and once we were beyond them my mother hugged me and then stood back.

“We did it,” she said. “
You
did it.”

I wish I had a photo of that moment — her face lit up and full of glee, and only the glittery Neapolitan darkness behind her.

I drank my first ever glass of
prosecco
that night. My mother drank two. Later, we danced. I let the music take me over. My hair grew heavy, spiny with sweat. You could go inside if you wanted, but there were outdoor dance floors too, some cut into the hillside, others down by the water. Steps that were tiled or inlaid with mosaic led from one level to the next. Intense green spotlights made the plants look hyper-real. Far below, white lines expanded sideways in the dark where the waves broke against the rocks.

A man with a shaved head asked my mother if she would dance with him.

“No,” she said. “I can’t.”

He looked puzzled. “Why not?”

“I’m dying.”

“All the more reason.”

They stood still, staring at each other. Then my mother shook her head and took my hand and led me to the low wall where we had left our drinks.

I liked the man for his directness and his restraint. Round his left bicep was a circular tattoo, an armband made of ink. His shaved head shone. When my mother turned him down he shrugged and moved away, and though he continued to watch her from a distance he didn’t approach her again. I don’t think she wanted anyone to enter the world she had conjured for us. It wouldn’t sustain another presence. It was too fragile and too rare, like bone china or gold leaf.

“I’m sorry,” she said later, when we were sitting on a bench next to the sea. “I don’t know why I said that.”

“To frighten him away,” I said.

She looked at me, her face as still and deep as water at the bottom of a well, and I thought I could see myself in it, far away and small and slightly blurred. She drew me close and kissed my hair. She told me she was proud of me and would always be proud of me. She said I should never forget that.

At two in the morning we drove north, back to Rome. A dense fog swirled around the car. We were passing through the Pontine Marshes, my mother said. Before Mussolini drained the area, it was a breeding ground for malaria. If the pumps were switched off, she told me, the water level would rise in less than a week. The fog thickened. She had to slow right down. It was as if we were motionless and big pale rags were being thrown at us. The temperature dropped and she turned the heater on. The heater — in July! Once, I peered upwards and saw a patch of dark clear sky loaded with stars, then the fog closed round the car again.

“We’re very late,” my mother said. “Your father’s going to be worried.” She sighed. “It wears me out.”

I didn’t know what to say.

“He hates me for being ill,” she said. “He thinks I’ve let him down.”

“He loves you too,” I said.

She reached across and squeezed my hand. “I know, angel. I’m sorry. You probably think I’m talking nonsense.”

“I think you’re beautiful.”

She began to cry and the trunk of a tree leapt towards us. She swerved just in time. “Oh God.” The car bumped up onto the verge. She put the handbrake on and wiped her eyes. “Fuck.” Now we were still, bits of fog drifted through the headlights like a flock of ghostly sheep.

“Are you all right?” I said.

I saw her gather herself, all the bravery and sparkle.

“You’ll have a wonderful life,” she said, “I know you will. You’ll sleep in palaces, and dance with presidents, and —”

I must have given her a funny look because she broke off and started laughing.

“You’ll see,” she said.

Then she shifted into gear and drove on.

I dozed with my forehead against the window and when I woke we were passing the Colosseum. In the moonlight it looked like a big piece of bone picked clean by vultures.

My mother looked across at me. “Say what you used to say. You remember? When you were small?”

I smiled because I knew exactly what she meant.

“Go on,” she said. “Please.”

I took a breath and turned to her.

“Are we there yet?”

/

“I love this painting.” Klaus stands next to the canvas, arms folded. “It cost half my annual salary. What do you think?”

The painting in question, which is enormous, glossy, and uniformly gray, hangs on the back wall of his living room, next to the arch that leads out to the hall.

“Very atmospheric,” I say.

“Atmospheric.” Klaus laughs. “That’s good.”

“I studied art history. At school.”

“Did you?” Still chuckling, he turns away. He runs his fingertips along the spines of a row of hardback books, then he lifts the corner of a kilim that is draped over the back of a chair and stares at it with unfeigned admiration. He seems constantly astonished by his environment, even though he’s the person who’s responsible for it.