The Man Who Saw Everything

by Deborah Levy

  He was listening to Rainer, unsmiling and stern. After a while he told him he doubted the camera would have been confiscated and the film exposed if there was nothing offensive on it. He did not sound like himself. I remembered Jennifer telling me there was a spectre inside every photograph she developed in the dark room. Rainer was laughing as he strummed his battered guitar. ‘Yeah, it’s true that we have many enemies trying to perpetrate sabotage wherever they can.’ Rainer didn’t sound like himself either, but as I hardly knew him, or Walter, how would I know that? Perhaps there was a listening device hidden behind the big mirror on the wall.

  All the same, Rainer was easy company. He told me he was part of a church discussion group promoting peace and a more relaxed way of living. In his view, if your government is violent to its people at home but preaches peace abroad, something is not right. Even though it was likely his group was under surveillance because there were quite a few punks and young green activists who wanted another system, including the priest himself, all they did was play guitar and sing and talk.

  ‘What did you do today? Did Walter take you for a beer?’

  ‘We bought a cauliflower,’ Walter replied.

  ‘Cool.’ Rainer was smiling again. His teeth were very straight and white and not at all British – or East German, for that matter.

  When I looked at Walter he wasn’t smiling. Perhaps he was tired from having to carry my bag and tie my shoelaces and walk at a child’s pace and pretend not to notice I was crying. After a while Rainer said he had to go, but to let him know if I needed any help with my research. I told him that actually I needed to photocopy some notes I was making for a lecture I was writing.

  ‘No problem.’ He stood up and fiddled with the straps on his guitar while I sorted out my crumpled illegible notes.

  Of course, I didn’t give him my notes on the psychology of male tyrants. On how Stalin’s father was a drunk who beat his son viciously, so he had a reason never to become the underdog again. No, I gave Rainer a comprehensive list of all Stalin’s achievements and a timeline. ‘I’ll have them ready for you on Monday.’ He flicked me a V sign, the one that means peace, and encouraged me to get drunk.

  A few minutes after he left, the mirror that was hanging on the orange wall fell down. The sound of it hitting the floor made me jump. The last time I had seen a shattered mirror was on the Abbey Road crossing. The wing mirror of the car, Wolfgang’s car, had exploded into a heap of reflective shards. Walter and I walked to the mirror and noted that it was intact. It had not even cracked. I was gazing at the wallpaper to see if there was a listening device underneath it but the surface looked flat and neatly papered. We each held a side of the mirror and hung it up again. When it was firmly attached to the rusty nail on the wall, I glanced at Walter in the mirror. His eyes were staring into my eyes. He was not making small talk with his eyes. And then he looked away. I could see him in the mirror looking elsewhere and I thought about the way Stalin had eradicated the past by deleting from the historical record whatever he found inconvenient. Yet I knew that look was a historical record of Walter’s desire. There was no way it could be deleted.

  His eyes were on me all the time.

  He watched me as I reached into the grey canvas sling bag that was usually crammed with the books I carried to my lectures. I took out a matchbox, opened it and showed him the spoonful of my father’s ashes inside. Walter looked baffled. I explained that my father, who had been a communist since he was fourteen, had recently died and that I wanted to bury part of him in the soil of East Germany. He had admired the GDR for attempting to make a society that was different from its fascist predecessors and so I needed to find a place to bury his ashes.

  Walter was examining the little wooden train. One of its red wheels had snapped off. He seemed disappointed and strained. I realized he must have thought I was reaching into my bag for the tin of pineapple I had promised to bring with me from London. When I made that journey to my local supermarket, still shocked from the accident, I had gazed for a long time at the rows of tinned fruit, every sort of fruit and every variety of tinned pineapple. Yet, somehow, I had been distracted and had moved on to the cheese counter. Walter was now looking at the wallpaper, the ceiling, the floor, anything but the matchbox in my hands.

  ‘I apologize, Walter. I forgot the pineapple.’

  I explained how I was in a frantic rush when I left Britain. Meetings at the university, marking student dissertations, sorting out last-minute visa problems. I thought it best not to mention the abundance of the cheese counter, where I had become distracted by the gentle hands of the man showing me the wedge of ripe Brie. Walter glanced at the matchbox of grey ash on the table and shook his head. To swap the ashes of a corpse for a tin of pineapple was an affront, an insult. How had I forgotten the humble tin of pineapple he had requested? I could feel myself blushing. It was as if my whole body were on fire, which made me think of the fire in my apartment block when I returned from the supermarket without the tin of pineapple. I wondered if the fire that never happened was my own shame.

  ‘It’s okay,’ he said. ‘It happens.’

  I took out a wad of West German marks and laid them on the table. I was feeling very uncomfortable.

  ‘We can get the pineapple from the Intershop.’

  ‘You’re not supposed to have West marks here, put them away.’

  I was surprised at how authoritarian he sounded. That is to say, he was assuming an authority that I had not initially thought he possessed, or even wanted to possess. He was ventriloquizing the voice of the state and he sounded like my father.

  I suppose I wanted to prove myself to him as something more than a decadent bourgeois who had forgotten to bring a tin of pineapple to my hosts. I told him how my father had been a builder, a plasterer, and how he used to mix horsehair into the plaster to stop it from cracking. He called the tool to stack plaster, the flat square wooden board with a handle attached to the middle, ‘the hawk’.

  He worked with his hawk and his trowel all his life. Sometimes when he did an exterior job he would add marble dust to the plaster. My father’s oldest brother was a blacksmith, making not just horseshoes but parts for the railways and shipyards. And my brother was an electrician. I was the first person in my family to go to university.

  ‘Oh yes. Good for you.’

  He put on a Bruce Springsteen record and left the room. I saw him dancing around in the kitchen while he filled a pot with water. I quickly put the matchbox back in my bag. Even the backs of my hands were blushing. I made my scarlet right hand into a fist and started tapping it against the wall of the apartment. The tapping made me feel less fragile, as if I were searching for something that I alone knew was there. Walter watched me from the kitchen. He was laughing while he danced. At one point he shouted, ‘Found anything yet?’ When he came out carrying two small cups, he glanced at the place on my neck where the buttons were undone. I was still burning up with blush.

  ‘My mother has nearly run out of coffee but she’s got a good supply of sugar so this is mostly sugar and the rest is chicory.’

  We sat down on two hard chairs, facing each other.

  He leaned forward and, with his little finger, touched the corner of my eye. A speck of plaster from the wall had lodged itself near my eyelid.

  And then he raised his cup.

  ‘To meeting you, Saul, here in East Berlin in 1988.’

  I sipped the coffee that didn’t taste of coffee, but it was sweet and hot, like he said.

  ‘You know, Walter, I don’t think that’s the right date.’

  ‘So, when are you living?’

  ‘Further on.’

  The sun was setting over the bullet-wounded buildings.

  I leaned forward and whispered in Walter’s ear, like a lover, ‘Germany East and West will be one. There will be a revolution. With the exception of Romania there will be no blood shed on the streets.’

  ‘And what will be the motivation for these revolutions?�
�� He was whispering too, his lips near my ear.

  ‘In East Germany the motivation is not just for the better economic life over the other side of the Wall. Yes, I know you are frustrated with the authoritarian regime, but that is not the motivation either. The economy of the Soviet Union will be on the brink of collapse. Soviet communism is going to fall. General Secretary Gorbachev is the man who will end the cold war.’

  Our knees touched.

  ‘Listen to me, Walter. It will be possible for citizens of the GDR to cross the border whenever they please.’

  He started to cough.

  I did not know if the future I had outlined had stuck like a bone in Walter’s throat or if he was just overwhelmed.

  He stood up, walked to the kitchen and splashed cold water over his face.

  When he returned, Walter was pacing the room, his arms folded against his chest. His face was shockingly pale.

  I reached over and touched the buckle of his belt. I could hear a voice in my head like the loudspeaker of a train announcing ‘Attention’, but it was too late. My right hand reached for the ends of his long hair, which smelled of brown coal. He pushed me away. It was insulting but also flirtatious, a display of his physical strength, perhaps a threat.

  The door opened and a woman walked in carrying a bag of flour.

  ‘Hallo.’ She slammed the flour on the table.

  ‘My name is Ursula. I am Walter’s mother. It’s so warm today my sister tells me the youngsters are swimming in the fountain in Leipzig.’

  Walter’s heavy coat was draped over the back of a chair. Perhaps he did not possess clothes for the end of summer when it was still warm. I smelled the heady scent of roses. Ursula was wearing a strong, sweet perfume.

  ‘Good evening. I’m Saul Adler.’

  ‘I know. Who else would you be?’

  She shook my hand. Her hair was dyed a deep red. It was fading at the roots.

  ‘I’m stocking up on flour,’ she said in English, ‘because I’m going to bake Luna a pineapple cake.’

  Her hand lingered in my hand.

  ‘It’s her birthday next week and she says she would have our wall built one metre higher for just one piece of pineapple.’

  8

  The librarian in charge of the archive at the university seemed to have a very low opinion of me. I spoke either too loudly or too softly or too fast or not fast enough. She did not seem to know much about the various newspapers and journals I needed to access for my research. When I asked to speak to another member of staff, she told me, in a voice that resembled two hundred kilometres of barbed wire, that I was being disrespectful.

  The textbooks I was given by the secretary to the director of the university were all propaganda, so were the newspapers and TV programmes, but none of it was unfamiliar to me. I had heard it all before from my father. I knew the Stasi would be interested in my presence at the university but not fascinated. After all, I was not a spy or here to encourage anyone to flee the country. All the same, it was likely there would be an invisible eye and ear somewhere nearby. My own eyes and ears had become hyper-alert, but so far, apart from the librarian, I had not seen anyone watching me. Yet the fact that I was searching for someone who might be there, as if their absence were more threatening than their presence, as if lack of surveillance were more peculiar than constant surveillance, reminded me of how I felt after my father died. It was hard to believe he was no longer here to find fault with all I said and did and to punish me for my flaws. I think I was paranoid way before I arrived in East Berlin.

  I began to regard my own eyes and ears as advanced surveillance technologies.

  With the exception of the librarian, most of the staff were helpful and welcoming. I was content to spend most of the days researching the inspiring youth movement that had begun in the Rhineland as an alternative to the quasi-military culture of the Hitler Youth, of which membership was compulsory after 1936. Endearingly, they’d named their group the Edelweiss Pirates. Most cities in western Germany had had some kind of Pirates group, even if they hadn’t got together under that name. Their ages ranged from twelve to eighteen, they wore bohemian checked shirts, sang parodies of the Hitler Youth anthem and were keen on the jazz and blues coming through from France. The boys grew their hair long to protest against the mindset of their fathers. I would have been happy to lend them my orange silk tie and faux-snakeskin cap. They were all the more impressive because most of the young Pirates had a school education that was under Nazi control. It took some doing to resist their minds being invaded before Poland was invaded.

  Our song is freedom, love and life,

  We’re the Pirates of the Edelweiss

  Their parents would have read newspapers such as Der Stürmer, crammed with ugly cartoon caricatures of Jews. On the way to school they might have passed shops that sold instruments to measure the difference in size between Aryan and non-Aryan skulls. The young Pirates attempted to make all this go away for a few hours when they met together. My subject was cultural resistance to Nazism, yet the advice of scientists, doctors, academics and lawyers had been enthusiastically given to the Nazi racial programme. Genocide offered opportunities to acquire wealth: abandoned factories, shops, family properties and furniture. Seventy-two trainloads of gold were sent to Berlin from Auschwitz. The gold had been gouged out of the teeth of men and women who would never see their home again. Fascism, working hand in hand with nationalism, had industrialized mass murder, organized the transportation of cheap poison gases and recruited euthanasia operatives.

  I had found a blue eyeliner pencil in one of my pockets. It was called Ocean Spray and had been given to me by Jennifer for my last birthday. I usually wore a suit and tie to the library, hoping to signify I was a serious scholar with thoughts that were in total sync with a regime ideologically policed by old men in suits. Yes, the regime and I could sit on a sofa together and breathe in time with each other, serene, warm and loving, enjoying a companionable silence. I was starting to look too much like my father, so I smudged a little Ocean Spray under my eyes and set off to research cultural resistance to Nazism in 1930s Germany.

  Ocean Spray proved to be a tidal wave.

  The librarian leaned forward over her desk and gazed directly into my Oceanic eyes. We resembled malicious cats taking up strange positions in an attempt to work out why the other might be an adversary. It was only eyeliner. We sort of stared each other out. She was doing something weird to signal her disapproval. It involved moving the muscles of her chin and lips so that her nose crinkled and her nostrils became bigger. I was glad she was not armed with a pistol.

  I’d never discussed my research with my translator, who had more or less disappeared, as had Luna. I had not yet met her. Ursula told me that her daughter was sleeping in the flat of one of the radiologists at the hospital because she had signed up for extra training.

  ‘Blood transfusion training,’ she said curtly.

  Ursula had not yet forgiven me for forgetting the tin of pineapple.

  I was lonely but Rainer was good company. He took me to bookshops and theatre shows and introduced me to some of his punk friends in the church group.

  One night, when I was walking home from the library, I became aware that a man was following me. Tall and muscular, he walked on the opposite side of the road, always in step with my step. Obviously, my Oceanic eyes had been reported to the authorities. When I stopped to buy a version of a hot dog called Ketwurst, he waited for me by a lamp post. Every now and again he would light a cigarette, take two puffs and stub it out again. He wore a heavy grey coat, his mousy hair falling to his shoulders. When I limped, he limped. When I stopped to gaze at the destination on a tram, he stopped to gaze at a hole in the pavement. As I had learned from that very first walk with Walter on the day I arrived, he had infinite patience. His pale blue eyes were on me, that was for sure, but I did not regard his gaze as sinister. If anything he was ashamed and embarrassed at being told to stalk me. His heart wasn’t in it. At
one point I stamped my boot and said ‘Magic’ out loud, just to let him know that I did not blame him for being obliged to chase an insignificant fly like myself. I had deciphered the message in his eyes in the mirror and understood that he did not find me unsightly.

  Walter turned up less covertly in the library at the end of the week, and requested we speak outside. Apparently, he now had a free weekend. Would I be available to travel with him to the family dacha on the outskirts of the city?

  It was the season for mushrooms. If we were lucky we could ‘harvest’ some of them for dinner.

  ‘I would like that very much, Walter.’

  Out of the blue, he asked if I had a lover back home.

  ‘Well, I did,’ I replied, ‘but she doesn’t think I’m a serious contender.’

  ‘Oh, why is that?’

  ‘I don’t know. She’s mostly focused on her career.’

  ‘What is her work?’

  ‘She’s an art student.’

  ‘What kind of art?’

  ‘Photography.’

  ‘What kind of photographs?’

  I was embarrassed because I did not know how to talk about Jennifer’s art and I did not want to tell him that as far as I knew, most of her photographs were of myself. I did not understand those either, except for the one titled ‘Saul at His Desk’. I still remembered Walter’s reproachful tone when Rainer told him about his sister’s girlfriend having her camera confiscated and the film being exposed by the authorities. It was quite an odd moment. I suppose his tone was fogged at the edges because he didn’t really believe in the worth of the words he was saying. Jennifer believed in the worth of her photographs, though she did not believe in the worth of my words when they involved anything to do with her. I began to wonder what it took to believe in anything at all. God or Peace or a Classless Society? Perhaps it took magic.