The Pages

by Hugo Hamilton

  His adoptive parents were hippies. New Age, neo-hippies. His mother was from the former East, from a place near the Polish border. She was a nurse by profession. She liked to wear those long flowing cheesecloth dresses and went out in the summer with a floppy, wide-rimmed sun hat. She had long red hair. She never shaved her underarms, so they looked like red nests of hair. The scent of a bakery, that’s how Armin described her. A warm-hearted woman with big breasts, like a power station, he told me.

  His adoptive father was from Augsburg. A professor of philosophy at the university in Frankfurt. Over breakfast he would ask the children questions like – what will happen when robots take over the world? He was big into John Lennon. The parents met when the Berlin Wall came down, she says. Armin told me there was a large photo in the living room of her stepping through a gap in the Wall.

  Her name is Hendrika, mostly Henny. His name is Thomas, mostly Tom. To Armin and his sister, they were Mama and Papa. The apartment was full of books. They had no car. The entire family went everywhere on foot, like a troupe going through the city, with people staring at Madina on her father’s shoulders missing her leg, Armin told me. In summer they often went walking in the hills and had picnics out in the fields, all of them naked, the entire family.

  They had two biological sons of their own, a couple years older than Armin. They were permitted to do anything they wanted. It was basically a house without rules. They got away with murder. They were caught smoking weed in school. They were caught stealing in shops and were brought home in a police car. They used to tell Armin he was not allowed to do anything bad because he was adopted. Now they’re both highly successful, he told me. One of them a producer working in the film industry, the other in genetics, something to do with stem cells.

  He started reading a lot, Lena says. That was the only way he could keep up with the older boys, picking up all the books his adoptive mother and father had around the house. It was his way of getting closer to them.

  Then they split up, Lena says.

  Ah, that’s sad.

  I get the impression, Lena says, he’s grateful for getting that wonderful start in life. Only that it made him feel like an orphan all over again.

  What caused the break-up?

  It was an open marriage, Lena says. They both had lovers. It was no big deal, apparently. That’s what Armin told me. She had this man who used to come to the apartment in the mornings in his tracksuit, like he would stop off during his daily run, then have a shower and continue running. Another man from Ireland would come in the afternoon with his guitar and start singing ballads, he would never leave.

  His father had girlfriends at the university. He would bring them cycling in the hills, or hang gliding.

  Then he won a big prize for a book he wrote on philosophy in everyday life. She started writing a novel about a hippie family going on a ship to Australia. They seemed to go their own ways after that, claiming back some privacy after all that open living. She went to live in Turkey with their two biological sons. Armin and Madina were looked after by other families around Germany until they were out of school.

  As a boy, he told me, he used to tickle his sister’s foot. The amputated one. He would tickle her phantom toes until she pulled it away and begged him to stop.

  That’s so sweet, Julia says.

  He wants me to meet her, Lena says. Madina. She’s a singer. I looked her up, she does tours of Germany with her band. People love her, she’s begun to build up quite a following. One of the images I’ve seen shows her on stage with long hair and long legs wearing silver shorts, like Beyoncé. Only that she has a prosthetic leg, a lightweight metal design, attached at the knee. There’s a photo of her with a prosthesis made of wire mesh. I’d love to hear her sing. A couple tracks I’ve heard on YouTube. Armin says he’ll get tickets when she’s playing in Berlin next, we might go if you’re free.

  21

  They seem to have no intention of going to sleep. Julia smiles when she hears her son snoring. He’s alive and well, she says. They sit drinking more and more mugs of camomile tea. Lena with the fridge at her back, shuddering now and again when it switches off. She tells Julia that she and Armin ended up in a small bar with a disco ball hanging from the ceiling. A late-night place where they sat at a table that had been converted from an old bumper car.

  They got talking to an English couple who had moved to Berlin recently. The man was drinking whiskey and soda, Lena says. The woman was doing a mai tai. They were terribly funny. They had us laughing a lot, she says.

  They offered to buy us a drink.

  His name is Geoff, he’s involved in some start-up company. Her name is Gill, she’s in food supplements and alternative medical products. They used to run a very successful health food business in a place called Stroud. They drove to Berlin in their car with two husky dogs.

  They told us about their wedding, Lena says. Before they left for Berlin with all their stuff and the two dogs packed in the car, they stopped off at Stonehenge to re-enact the wedding vows. She described how he went down on one knee, asking her to remarry him. He’s such a laugh, Gill kept saying, talking about her husband in the third person. Look at him, you’d never think it, he’s the king of romance.

  Gill put her arm around him and winked at us, saying – we had to wait for the full moon.

  They assumed that me and Armin were a couple, Lena says. She asked us how long we’d been married.

  She must have seen the ring on my finger, but then, for some reason, I laughed and said nothing. Instead of explaining that I was married to Mike back in New York, or going through a long story of why he wasn’t here, that he was coming over to Berlin soon, I kept it all to a minimum.

  Maybe out of politeness to Armin, she says, I told them I was visiting relatives in Germany. I found myself telling them the story of the book, given to me by my father, and then stolen. It was Armin who found it on the ground in a park and brought it back to me. And then, guess what, they interpreted that as a major sign. Oh my God, Gill said, so that’s how you two met, it was the book that brought you together. She turned to Geoff and said – isn’t that amazing, they found each other with a stolen book. That book made up its mind to connect you, Gill kept saying.

  Which is all true, Lena says, but I didn’t know how to stop them putting such a romantic spin on it. Armin eventually brought it all down to earth.

  We’re friends, he said.

  The English couple thought that was even more hilarious – oh fuck, Gill said.

  They’re not married, Geoff said.

  Mistaken identity, Gill said. I swear, you look so bonded, like the real thing.

  Armin was totally cool about it, Lena says. He just started talking about the book, how it was about a man with a missing leg who plays the barrel organ. Armin said he happened to have a sister with a missing leg, he didn’t say why exactly, he made it sound like an accident. The English couple thought that was such an extraordinary coincidence, true life meeting up with fiction, like there was something in the book that had the ability to align the universe, Lena says.

  Gill said – oh my God, what a beautiful story. That’s mind-blowing, Geoff, don’t you think?

  Geoff got out his phone, saying – you know, I don’t think I’ve ever actually heard a barrel organ, live.

  He spent a moment searching and came up with that familiar melody of ‘The Teddy Bears’ Picnic’. Like a carousel, Lena says, with wheezing notes rolling along, stopping and starting. There was a sadness in it, even though it was meant to be happy. We listened to it for a moment over the sound of jazz playing in the bar. Gill said their son Dwyer had a children’s book about a man with a barrel organ. The story of a monkey and a parrot who escape from the organ grinder and make their way off to the Caribbean, stowed away on a navy ship. After a big sea battle with pirates, Geoff said, they run aground on a tropical island, back where they came fr
om.

  We had to read it every night, Gill said.

  And because they had been so funny earlier, Lena tells Julia, we were expecting a joke to come out of all this. But Gill started crying. Geoff put his arm around her. He then explained to us that Dwyer was dead. He was sixteen, Geoff said. He was beaten up one night in a random attack in the town, a very quiet place where you would never expect that kind of thing to happen. It was such a shock to the whole community, he said, nobody could believe it, not in Stroud.

  He was in a coma for weeks, Geoff said. Gill stayed with him all that time. I looked after the shop. Then we had to make the decision whether to keep him on life support or to let him go. He had no life expectancy.

  Gill was crying all the time, Lena says. Now and again she would take a drink to gather herself. I think she was on her third mai tai. She was taking out tissues from her bag, blowing her nose, trying to smile again.

  The whole thing was caught on camera, Geoff said. The attack. We saw it in court, he told us, when they played it to the jury. We could have stepped outside while it was being shown. It was hard, he said, but we did it for Dwyer, to make it right for him, to be with him through those terrible moments. So that he wouldn’t be alone.

  Geoff took her hand and kept looking at her, speaking for them both, Lena says.

  Two boys around his own age, Geoff said, from well-to-do families in the same neighbourhood. Determined to carry out this act of mindless brutality. We say mindless, he said, but it was totally deliberate. You think they have no feeling, no empathy, but it’s the opposite, they got their kicks out of his pain, they could feel his suffering, our suffering. The shock of the whole community is what they were after. They wouldn’t have done it if they didn’t understand pain. The violence was unbelievable, he said, we will never forget it. We can still hear the sound his head made. I know that’s an illusion, he said, because there was no audio. We must have imagined it. When we got home, Gill asked me if I heard his head knocking against the pavement and I said yes.

  We saw the fear in his eyes, Gill said.

  There’s no such thing as justice in a situation like that, Geoff said, holding her hand as though they had just come from the court, Lena says. No amount of prison time is going to bring our son back. We had the impression they apologized for their actions only to get a shorter sentence.

  I made a victim impact statement, Geoff said, and it was hard to put my anger aside. All I could find myself saying was that it had now become impossible for us to live in England. The smallest thing would remind us of what had happened. Every time we saw each other, every time we had breakfast or met each other on the stairs, we could only think of him missing. It was like we had begun to turn on each other. Like we could do nothing but blame each other for bearing a resemblance to the boy that was now dead. The brutality was in our eyes. The entire landscape was tainted by this one act of madness. In court, with the murderers of our son listening and staring at the floor, I found myself saying that England was not a country we could live in any longer, they had made it uninhabitable for us. We had everything going for us, a thriving business, a son who was a talented actor. After this, we had no option but to sell up and move abroad.

  That’s why we went to Stonehenge, Gill said. For Dwyer, like a pact we made around his death. We would never split up or drift apart, no matter what happened. That’s why we went to Stonehenge, to sort of get married all over again.

  She was trying to lighten things up, holding up her mai tai glass. We still have his monkey book, she said. We keep it open on a side table in the hallway, by the door. I change the page every day.

  We go back to visit his grave once a year, he said, on the anniversary of his death in December.

  He was a sweet boy, Gill said, really, really sweet. And so funny. A real comedian.

  I’m sorry for telling you all of this, Geoff said. We’ve just ruined your evening, haven’t we.

  Born comedian, Gill said. He would sit at the table over breakfast and have us in a heap. I don’t know where he got it from. He saw a funny twist in everything. He would have had a great career in stand-up, Gill said, he was so utterly natural, with this expression of incomprehension on his face, like nothing in the world made sense, she said, I think that’s what made us laugh so much. I’m still cracking up at some of the things he used to say, Geoff said.

  Gill got up and started dancing, Lena says.

  Oh, quick, she said, the Rolling Stones.

  She made her way out onto the dance floor but she could hardly stand. She swayed with her elbows out. You know, Lena says, she was very graceful, smiling and crying at the same time. Her face was covered in those moving light spots from the disco ball turning overhead. She could not keep her balance. She collapsed gradually, with her hands up to her face. As if it was her son’s funeral and she was standing by his grave after the coffin was lowered. Armin went over to help Geoff get her up on her feet again. The barman called a taxi. They helped her out the door and I ran after them with her bag.

  22

  Lena and Armin sat for a while longer at the bumper car table, listening to the music. They were absorbing the story of the English couple. Or maybe trying to talk about something else. She wanted to dance, but it didn’t feel right.

  And then, Lena says, a man came in and started watching us from the bar. I would have paid him no attention, only that I sensed Armin was anxious. I got the impression that he felt threatened by this man. Big guy, wearing a leather jacket. At one point, Armin went over to speak to him. They stood at the bar looking at the row of spirit bottles in front of them.

  I assumed it was some kind of business.

  Who’s your friend? I asked him when he came back, Lena says. Would he like to come over and join us?

  My sister’s boyfriend.

  Is he the guy who cut the page out of the book?

  Ex-boyfriend.

  I looked over and saw him leaving, Lena says.

  Armin gave her the man’s name. Bogdanov. Ulrich Bogdanov. It’s become a bit obsessive at this point, Lena says, he’s stalking her in places where she performs in public. Armin said there was nothing she could do to stop him turning up at her gigs. He behaves like a fan. But then he interrupts her performance.

  Madina went to meet Bogdanov in a café one afternoon, Lena says. She told him once more that it was over, there was no going back. She berated him for extracting money from her brother. If he ever did anything like that again, she would go directly to his wife and tell her they’d had an affair behind her back.

  Don’t push it, she said to Bogdanov. I will tell your wife the whole truth, believe me.

  And guess what? Lena says. The guy just laughed.

  It’s over, but Bogdanov doesn’t get it. From what Armin told me, Lena says, Bogdanov even tried to get her to go to a psychotherapist to fix the affair. He was never going to leave his wife and kids. She didn’t want to break up a family.

  This is the thing, Lena says. He thinks he owns her. In the café where she was warning him to stay away from her and her brother, he kept saying he loved her. He’s never been with anyone like her before. His life is meaningless without Madina. He will do anything to get her back, walk out on his family, kill himself, all that stuff. Armin says he’s good with words. Totally credible. She had gone back to him a couple of times. Then he started saying to her that she was nothing without him. She couldn’t function, couldn’t be a singer, couldn’t make her own coffee. It was thanks to him that she made it in the music business. Her career was going nowhere until he discovered her.

  She told him to fuck off, Armin said.

  Without his backing, Bogdanov insisted, she would come to nothing.

  She shrugged him off, Lena says. Told him it was over, finished, end of story. Then he threatened her. Bogdanov must have realized that her weakness was not inside herself but in somebody close to her. Sh
e was exposed by having a younger brother. Leaning across to look straight into her eyes, he said – I’ll take it out on your brother.

  Something to that effect, Lena says.

  Asshole, Julia says. I know the type.

  Armin’s sister said she would go to the police.

  Bogdanov laughed. He said the police were his friends. They keep the law so he can break it.

  Madina said to him – Uli, have you no heart?

  She turned to the other customers in the café and said to Bogdanov – tell them what you just told me. I’ll take it out on your brother. That’s what you said, Uli. Isn’t that so? Your brother gets it. That’s what he said to me.

  Everybody in the café was watching. Bogdanov sat with his arms folded, insulting her with a comical face. Instead of being embarrassed at hearing his own words, he turned around to the other customers and said –

  She’s Muslim.

  That did it, Lena says.

  Madina reached under the table and unhooked her prosthetic leg. It took no more than a few seconds, like taking off her shoe. She stood up on her good leg and brought the artificial leg down on the table with a furious crack. It smashed Bogdanov’s cup to pieces. There were specks of coffee on his face.

  The customers in the café must have been astonished at the sheer velocity of the leg coming from nowhere. Not to mention the accuracy with which the heel of her shoe hit Bogdanov’s coffee. The noise alone brought an immediate silence. Everyone stopped talking. How does a woman do that kind of thing? they must have thought. Swing her leg one hundred and eighty degrees? The athleticism was inhuman. Standing there on one leg while the other leg performed an impossible arc over her head, more like a baseball bat coming down with a smack.

  Bogdanov didn’t bother wiping his face. He grinned. He turned to the customers and held his hands out in a gesture that seemed to say – look what I have to deal with – blaming her for making such a spectacle.