by Deborah Levy
‘How are you, Jennifer?’
‘Why are you calling me?’
‘Because the firefighters are on strike.’
‘Who says the firefighters are on strike? First I’ve heard of it.’
I was holding the bag with the melting Brie in my hand. Jennifer was speaking in a friendly, casual sort of way, as if she had not turned down my offer of marriage, and, after making use of my body, had not more or less turfed me out of her bed, still bruised and bleeding from the accident.
‘The photographs came out well didn’t they?’ She started to talk about light and shadow and the angle from which she had taken the photos and how in the original photograph of the real Beatles, for the album Abbey Road, there had been an American tourist standing under a tree who just happened to be there at the time. I was peering at the paper bag with the wedge of Brie melting inside it. There seemed to be some kind of message written on the right-hand corner of the bag.
‘Are you okay, Saul?’
The shop assistant with the gentle hands had written the price of the cheese in biro and underlined it twice.
‘No, I am not okay, not at all.’
‘It’s like this, Saul Adler: fuck off.’
‘It’s like this, Jennifer Moreau: that’s exactly what I’m going to do.’
That night, when I packed my bag for East Berlin, I realized I had forgotten to buy the tin of pineapple.
6
East Berlin, September 1988
I spent a lot of time laughing with Walter Müller. It was a relief to hang out with someone whose life was not about material gain. Walter was a master linguist. He taught Eastern European languages to East Germans who were heading off to work in other socialist countries, and he was fluent in the English language as well. I liked him as soon as I saw him waiting for me at Friedrichstraße station. He was standing at the end of the platform, holding up a piece of cardboard with my name written on it. He was about thirty, with shoulder-length mousy hair, pale blue eyes, tall, broad shoulders. Muscular. There was a kind of energy in his body, a vitality that was relaxed but exciting. I told him about the nightmare train journey to the British airport and how the train had run out of fuel and how I’d had to wait for a replacement bus. Walter Müller shook his head in a vaguely mocking way to express the depth of his sympathy. Obviously, in his view, I was paddling in the shallow end of life’s problems.
‘That is very bad mismanagement of your country’s transport system.’
He steered me out of Friedrichstraße and asked if I wished to walk to his mother’s apartment or would prefer to take a tram. I agreed that we should walk. His English was formal, slightly uptight, unlike the confidence and zip in his body.
‘This is our city on the Spree,’ he said, waving his hands in the direction of the river. We walked along the grey waters of the Spree as we made our way past the Berliner Ensemble theatre, founded by Brecht, who had spent the Nazi years in exile. He had lived in at least four countries. I named them for Walter.
‘Sweden, Finland, Denmark, eventually America.’
‘Oh yes, Brecht,’ Walter said. ‘Did you know that Bruce Springsteen gave a concert here in July? He played for three hours.’ He corrected himself. ‘No. Four hours.’
I knew that Brecht had been regarded with suspicion by the authorities because he had chosen to live in America and not the Soviet Union. All the same, he had returned to East Germany to write his plays, hoping to play a part in building a new socialist state. It seemed that I was more interested in Brecht than my translator, so I did not tell him that I knew all the words to The Threepenny Opera (‘an opera for beggars’) and often sang ‘Surabaya Johnny’ in the bath. I looked down at two white swans swimming side by side on the Spree.
‘Swans like to live together,’ I said. ‘They establish strong bonds with each other.’
Walter tried to look interested. ‘Thank you for the information.’ His voice was serious but his eyes were laughing.
Walter told me he had just returned from Prague, where he had been translating from Czech into German for comrades who had signed up for an engineering course. When I thanked him for meeting me at the station, given that he had just returned from his own travelling, he laughed. ‘This walk with you is my good fortune. I can do something purposeful, like taking you for a beer.’ A fly was buzzing around his lips. He waved it away and then stamped his boot on the cobblestones to elicit extra fear.
‘Magic.’ He laughed, stamping his boot again.
‘Magic,’ I repeated. I wasn’t sure what was going on or why he was laughing.
‘Whatever you do,’ he said, ‘when you write your report on our republic, don’t say everything was grey and crumbling except for the colourful interruption of red flags positioned on buildings.’
‘Absolutely not.’ I looked into his pale blue eyes with my intense blue eyes. ‘I will note there are flies. And that many of the tram drivers are female.’ I did not yet know him well enough to tell him I had become used to being censored because Jennifer had forbidden me from describing her in my own old words.
We continued our convivial conversation. Walter walked briskly in his heavy winter coat while I tried to keep up in my light jacket. He told me how much he liked the name of a certain cake in Prague. It was called a ‘little coffin’ and was mostly made from cream. I reckoned he was talking about an eclair.
He asked if I knew the work of the Czech artist Eva Švankmajerová. I did not. He admired a sentence she had written; he would try and translate it for me now. He shut his eyes – ‘Here goes’ – and frowned for a long time as he tried to gather the words across three languages, Czech, German, English, then he opened his eyes, punched my arm and shook back his hair. ‘It’s not possible to translate.’ What he really liked to do in Prague was to knock back a shot of slivovitz, ‘a very old one, from Moravia’. Soon he would introduce me to the university director, who was likely to offer me a good-quality schnapps.
After a while he asked why I was limping. I told him in German about the near accident on Abbey Road and he said in English, ‘So are we speaking German or English to each other?’
‘Well, maybe we can do fifty–fifty,’ I said in German.
‘How come you speak fluent German?’ he asked in English.
‘My mother was born in Heidelberg.’
‘So you are half German?’
‘She came to Britain when she was eight.’
‘Did she speak German at home?’
‘Never.’
This time he did not thank me for the information.
When I continued to limp, he bluntly asked if I was lame.
‘I am not lame. I’ve just got a bruised hip.’
I said this loudly and with feeling. I did not want to seem pathetic to Walter Müller. No. Not at all. I wanted to seem something else, but the truth was that I had a pain in my stomach. It felt as if something were being removed from my guts with a knife.
He offered to carry my bag. I refused but he took it anyway, slinging it over his shoulder as we walked down a cobblestoned road called Marienstraße. After a while he pointed to the hospital where his sister worked as a nurse. ‘The doctors are very good,’ he said, ‘but it’s best not to have to stay the night there. She could arrange an X-ray for you if you like?’
‘No!’ I thumped his shoulder so hard he began to laugh.
‘You’re stronger than you look.’
I don’t think he meant it because he pushed me away when I tried to get my bag back from him.
A tram was clanking by in the distance.
‘Sit down, Saul.’ Walter pointed to a stone step at the entrance of one of the apartment blocks.
I sat down on the step as instructed. He sat next to me, my bag shoved between his knees. Everything was peaceful and calm. I noticed that Walter had now put on a pair of spectacles and was reading his newspaper. The sky had darkened and his left arm was resting across my shoulders. I felt happy. Inexplicably happy. It w
as like the moment I’d sat on Mrs Stechler’s sofa with the illegal poodle on my lap. We sat like that for a long time.
After a while, he folded his newspaper and patted my shoulder.
‘Tell me about your accident.’
I began to speak. I heard myself say things I did not know I thought. I told Walter that what really worried me on Abbey Road was that my mother had died in a car crash when I was twelve. Somehow, irrationally, I thought Wolfgang – that was the name of the driver, I told him – might have been the same person who had killed her.
‘That is an understandable fear,’ Walter said.
I told him how my hands had started to shake when I returned to the site of the accident and how I sat on the wall with the woman who had asked me to light her cigarette. The shaking, I told him, was to do with the memory of the first seconds of hearing the news that my mother had died and would never be coming home. And then a second memory of realizing that this meant I was to live with my father and brother without my mother, who had used her body like a human wall to protect me from them.
‘You needed protecting from your father and brother?’
‘Yes. They were big men. They would have liked you.’
He shook his head and laughed. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘Walter,’ I said, ‘where is the Wall? I can’t see it.’
‘It is everywhere.’
I told him that my mother’s fatal accident and my minor accident had become blurred in my mind and how I was still insatiably angry with the driver who had run her over. I regarded him as her assassin. Time passing had not made my mother’s death less vivid. All the same, I had not really been paying attention when I crossed the road.
‘Ah, yes.’ Walter folded his newspaper, first in half, and then again. As I watched his fingers smooth out the corners, I noticed they were covered with grey ink from the newspaper. Random words were smudged like ash on his fingertips. I could hear the sound of typing in my head. The keys hammering a page. It was as if I were informing on myself. Herr Adler is a careless man. But those were not the words Walter was saying to me now.
‘Perhaps you needed to repeat it or something?’
‘Repeat what?’
‘History.’
He leaned forward and asked if he could help tie my left shoelace. It had come undone on our walk. My humiliation was unending. He was kind and unjudging, as strangers sometimes can be, usually because history has not got in the way. I stood up and began to walk on without him. I had no idea where I was heading but I did not want him to see my tears. I had just arrived and here he was, carrying my bag, tying my shoelaces, and now I was weeping. When he caught up with me he had taken off his spectacles. There was a welt on the bridge of his nose where the plastic had pressed into his skin.
‘Hey, Saul, wait for me.’
He was standing next to a woman carrying a wooden box. It turned out to be full of small cauliflowers. Walter spoke to her in a dialect I did not understand. I think he was giving me time to discreetly wipe my eyes. The problem was that my eyes would not dry up. I’d wipe them and then more tears would pelt down. I was embarrassed beyond measure to have brought such a large portion of my own sorrow to the GDR. Yes, it was such a big helping. I needed my friend Jack, who finished off everyone’s food, to take some of it from me. Jack’s ungenerous nature was the opposite of Walter’s, though Walter was no less sophisticated. He was certainly less stylish and less aggressive. I began to understand more of what he was saying to the woman holding the box. He was talking about cherries. Something about the cherry tree on the allotment of his family’s dacha. He had also planted cauliflowers but they had not taken. All of them were blighted. She looked into the middle distance, somewhere just above my head, but I knew she was looking at me.
I waved to her. She did not respond, her face a façade of stone. I suddenly understood that it might be dangerous for her to make contact with Westerners. Someone would report her for waving back at me. I could see no beggars or junkies or pimps or thieves or anyone sleeping on the streets. Yet the expression in her eyes stayed with me, as did her red lips. Would I prefer to have my wallet stolen if it meant I felt free to greet a stranger without fear? She and Walter seemed to know each other because he kissed her cheek and she gave him a cauliflower. Walter reached into his pocket and took out a red string bag. He dropped the cauliflower into the bag and slung it over his shoulder.
‘Quite good luck,’ he shouted to me.
We continued walking. It was easier now that the pain in my stomach had faded. I asked him about his allotment. He told me he was looking into keeping bees and invited me to spend a weekend in the dacha on the outskirts of the city so I could see it for myself.
‘I would like that very much, thank you.’ Apparently, we were still a long way from his mother’s apartment. I asked him why his sister was called Luna.
‘The moon is a source of light. And Luna is my mother’s source of light. Her first daughter did not survive.’
To hear those words touched a pain that was deep inside me, along with all the other pains. Like a pond of black water. Lit by the moon.
When I wasn’t limping, I was crying. It was a terrible start.
‘Not long to the pub,’ Walter said, ‘but first I must drop off the cauliflower.’ He led me through the inner courtyard of an old stone building and told me to wait by the stairwell.
Once again, I sat on the steps. This time I tied my own shoelaces.
The walls of the apartment block were gouged with bullet holes from the last war. My father would have got straight to work on plastering the walls of the GDR. I found myself preoccupied with Walter’s description of the blighted cherry tree that grew in the garden of his dacha. Although I was sitting on a stone step in East Berlin, I was receiving images from somewhere else. They were all in black and white, like Jennifer’s photographs. A clapboard house on Cape Cod, America. The house was built from pine and cedar. Inside it was a large fireplace. The windows were hung with wooden shutters. Jennifer was somewhere in that house and her hair had turned white.
I could hear the cries of gulls from the Cape Cod seashore and the banks of the Spree in East Berlin.
When Walter came down the stairs he was holding a tiny toy train carved from wood.
‘I have to mend it.’ He slipped the train into the pocket of his coat. ‘The glue is at my mother’s place.’
He was trying to explain something complicated to me in German. It seemed to be about how he did not live with his mother and sister. I didn’t understand and asked if we could speak seventy per cent English instead of fifty until I found my feet.
I placed the palm of my hand on his chest, leaning into him while I got my breath back from the shock of glimpsing that wooden train. One of its wheels, painted red, poked out of Walter’s coat pocket. I had seen that train before, or dreamed it, or even buried it, and here it was, returning like a spectre to torment me.
‘You all right, Saul?’
‘Most definitely,’ I replied.
Walter suggested we take a tram to the pub.
7
The flat that I was to share with Walter’s mother and his sister Luna was surprisingly spacious. Three of the walls in the living room were covered in orange swirling wallpaper. Walter told me that in winter this room was heated with brown coal. He showed me the ceramic-tiled coal oven. It smelled acrid, nothing like sooty black coal, but that was apparently because the brown coal came in briquettes. It was one of the few national resources in the GDR and was heavily mined, so whole regions had been stripped bare. The coal man arrived early in the morning carrying bags of these heavy briquettes to the courtyard. It was Luna’s job to clean out the ashes and she always complained like a spoilt czarina, but it was not a big job. Right now, his sister would be queuing for a very rare delivery of bananas after work. She was crazy for fruit. Any sort of fruit except apples.
‘I never get stressed about bananas.’ Walter sounded quite stressed. ‘I
don’t need to eat bananas when they became available. But I do like the oranges when they arrive from Cuba.’
I looked around the living room while he spoke. We were getting nearer the subject of pineapple and I suppose I was searching for somewhere to hide. The telephone that was placed in the middle of the table looked like Mrs Stechler’s phone in London. A tray positioned near it was set with a tall white teapot, two china cups and saucers stacked next to it. A mirror framed in heavy dark wood hung on the wall, and oddly, next to it, a calendar from 1977, a pin-up of a woman posing in a gold leopard-spotted bikini with matching gold fingernails. A fake yellow rose was pinned to the left side of her hair. After talking about fruit for a while, Walter showed me my bedroom. A chaste single bed was pushed against the wall. It was made up with two blankets and one small pillow, a blue towel folded neatly on the covers. He told me his mother would be home soon to cook something, but usually he did all the cooking in the family. Someone was knocking on the front door. First a loud knock, then three light taps.
It turned out to be a colleague of Walter’s from the university. His name was Rainer and he had strapped an acoustic guitar across his khaki jacket. Rainer was dressed in hippyish clothes and held some sort of administrative post, helping with photocopying and seminar-room bookings. He was dreamy and quiet in his khaki jacket and purple flares. They were too long for him so he’d turned up the ends. Rainer told me he liked to read the American beat poets but had to smuggle their books into the GDR. Walter asked after his sister, who had been unwell. ‘Oh, she’s still angry.’ He strummed a few chords on his guitar and explained how his sister was part of a youth brigade who had recently helped clean up the grounds of an apartment block that was run-down. She had been up on the roof doing small repairs; it had been a hot summer so she had worn shorts and a bikini top. Her friend who was also part of the youth brigade had taken a photograph of her, but her camera had been confiscated and the film exposed by the authorities so now her mother had said she couldn’t see her girlfriend any more. Earlier, when Walter and I were having a few beers in the pub, he had told me how he had also been part of a youth group in his teens and the point of it was to create solidarity between young people who felt materially inferior to the West. He thought that was a good thing, but he didn’t like wearing the uniform.
