The Man Who Saw Everything

by Deborah Levy

  ‘I’m sorry to hear about your father,’ he said.

  ‘We were just talking about my penis, Rainer.’ The sun blasted through the grimy hospital windows. Rainer started to laugh. Jennifer laughed. Jack laughed. Obviously, they were much happier than I was.

  Jennifer looked down at my bare feet. Did she want to study the length of my toes and check if they were harmoniously and evenly spaced?

  ‘What I meant to tell you,’ she said, ‘is that your nephews are here.’

  There were two teenage boys in uniform sitting a few chairs along from us. They were playing cards. Jennifer and Rainer disappeared into the wall.

  I closed my eyes and searched for my hair so I could touch it. It was a useless search so I touched my knees instead and opened my eyes. Jack’s lips were somewhere near my ear, giving me information.

  ‘Their names are David and Elijah.’

  ‘Hallo, Karl Thomas,’ I said to the younger boy in German.

  ‘I’m not Karl Thomas. I’m Elijah. Matt’s son.’

  I switched back to English but I was not in England.

  ‘Shouldn’t you be at school?’

  ‘Yes.’ The older boy nodded. He was about seventeen.

  ‘Dad made us come to see you.’

  ‘So, Karl Thomas,’ I leaned over the chair and saw he had an ace in his hand, ‘have you learned your ten commandments for the new socialist human?’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Don’t you belong to a youth group? The Young Pioneers or the Free German Youth?’

  ‘I’m English,’ he said. ‘And my name is Elijah.’

  ‘Does your youth brigade help clean up the grounds in run-down blocks of flats? I expect you’ve been up on the roof doing small repairs.’

  ‘My father does roof repairs.’

  The older boy in uniform nodded. His hair was dyed green and his fingernails painted various shades of blue and purple.

  ‘I’m David. What commandments should we have learned?’

  ‘ “You shall help to abolish exploitation of man by man.”’

  ‘Sounds all right to me.’

  I looked at his brother, who was trying to figure out when to strike with his ace.

  ‘Elijah, don’t you enjoy the sense of belonging to something bigger than yourself?’

  ‘I’m in a play at school.’ My nephew laid down his ace on the seat of the chair and the game was over.

  David with the green hair told me they were going to spend the afternoon with their father talking to a man about doves.

  ‘What about doves?’

  ‘For Grandad’s funeral.’

  ‘I had a son too. His name was Isaac.’

  ‘We know.’

  The boys were trying to be polite. They gathered up the cards and dutifully endured a few more minutes on their chairs. The older one had a tattoo of stars and feathers on his left wrist.

  ‘Do you have any good ideas for a better society, David?’

  ‘We can’t find the exit,’ Elijah replied.

  ‘What do you think about Britain leaving Europe in the most promising years of your lives?’

  Jack pointed to the lift behind the chairs. ‘The lift will take you to the exit.’

  ‘That’s my friend Jack, by the way.’

  They nodded at him. He waved back as if he had known them for years.

  I walked my nephews to the lift.

  ‘Doesn’t your father mind your green hair and nail varnish?’

  ‘Nope.’ David shook his green curls. ‘He said he got used to it with you.’

  He pressed his painted blue fingernail on the button to call the lift.

  I was very pleased to see them. Much more pleased than they were to see me. ‘Perhaps we can play cards together one day soon. And give my regards to your mother.’

  David with the green hair raised his eyebrow, which he hadn’t yet dyed green. ‘Okay, we’ll see how that goes down.’

  ‘Your lift has arrived,’ I said theatrically, as if it were a limousine.

  After I said goodbye I walked back to my friend with the silver bun eating my scone.

  ‘Do you have ties, Jack?’

  ‘Do you mean as in a tie and suit?’

  ‘As in family. Are you a brother or uncle or anything like that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You never talk about your ties.’

  ‘Neither do you.’

  ‘True. I wanted to untie all my ties.’

  I rested my head on Jack’s shoulder. He stroked my arm and sipped his tea. I felt relaxed in his loving company. He wore an ornate turquoise ring on one of his fingers. Its silver band felt cold and made me shiver as he stroked my arm. His fingernails were bitten down. After a while, he took off the ring and continued to stroke my arm. His hair smelled of woodsmoke. I wanted to sleep on his shoulder, but I feared he might not be there when I woke up.

  ‘When I was twenty-eight I fell in love with a man in the GDR.’

  ‘I know. We often talk about Walter. By the way, I’ve planted two more apple trees in your Suffolk garden.’

  I ignored Jack’s attempt to plant himself in my more recent history.

  ‘Walter Müller wore trainers that were not at all trendy. His mousy hair fell to his shoulders. His pale blue eyes were all over me. Surveillance was the air everyone breathed. He watched me all the time for various reasons, but mostly for lust and politics. Jennifer’s camera was on me all the time too, even when I slept, especially when I slept, but Walter saw me with his naked eye and he saw everything there was to see in me.’

  Jack’s new gentle fingers continued stroking my arm. After a while it was he who continued the conversation about Walter, while I listened.

  ‘When he first saw you at the station on Friedrichstraße, he had never seen crazy beauty like yours. He couldn’t believe you were real. There you were in front of him, with your Blade Runner blue eyes and soft lips. You complained about the trains in Britain.’

  ‘Yes, it was like that.’

  ‘You were pretty much tied up there,’ he said.

  ‘I did wear a tie in the GDR,’ I recollected. ‘I wore a tie when I visited Walter in Berlin last year. Before Britain set about untying its ties with Europe.’

  ‘Yes,’ Jack said, ‘I drove you to the airport. That was March 2015. I think you were changed by that second meeting with Walter in Alexanderplatz. You were happier when you came home.’

  21

  I stood by the World Clock in Alexanderplatz at two in the afternoon with Walter.

  I was not happy but he was not in the mood to indulge my middle-aged melancholy, though he was not unkind. I explained that I was functioning okay. I could hold a conversation and argue coherently with friends in the pub and walk across town and look respectable. My clothes were clean, no buttons missing on my shirts, no one would know I was indifferent to making it to my sixtieth year. I now lectured on post-communist Eastern Europe. My students could not afford the uncontrolled rising rents in the cities and lived with their ageing parents. Walter had lost some of his hair. It was now cropped close to his head, his face was thinner, he wore spectacles with light aluminium frames.

  I looked into his pale blue eyes behind the lenses and glimpsed the spectre of the younger Walter, the man who wore a felt hat when he took me mushrooming near his dacha. He told me how his mother, who was old now, missed her job making fish hooks in the factory. She worked two mornings a week as a receptionist in a nail bar. The two young women from Vietnam who owned the business liked her company. Ursula could give a lecture on Marx and Lenin to every customer waiting for a shellac manicure with acrylic tips and rhinestones, if they had the inclination, and some of them did.

  I still desired him. I wanted to touch his stomach and feel him tremble again, but this older Walter was not a man who trembled. That was me.

  This time he told me more about what had happened to him when the van stopped by the traffic lights in 1988. Everything I had imagined was true.
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br />   If I could have thrown myself under a tram on Alexanderplatz or a car on Abbey Road without being saved from my shame by citizens who thought life should be endured at all cost, I would have done so. The authorities had let him go after two days because they were more interested in Luna. They had put their scant resources into her medical training and did not want her to leave.

  When Walter embraced me (I was crying as usual), his arms were not desiring, they were maternal, paternal, perhaps brotherly. It was the embrace of compassion, of pity for my overweight, middle-aged self.

  ‘They would have come for her anyway,’ he said sternly. ‘They knew she was desperate to leave.’

  He wore a heavy coat, the collar trimmed with fur, a smart jacket underneath it. After a while, I reminded him how in the GDR it was hard to get him to put on his clothes.

  ‘You were naked all the time. Swimming in the lake, making coffee, mending the table, frying potatoes.’

  ‘We Germans have never been shy about being naked. But you were shy in this regard.’

  ‘Yes, true.’ I touched the top button of his shirt. ‘I have always been shy. But now that I have lost my looks I am less shy. It shouldn’t work like that, but it does. It is what it is. My body, I mean. Yet, Walter, I think you have become better-looking. You’re fit. How come?’

  ‘Healthier food.’ When he smiled his teeth were straighter and whiter. ‘I’ve swapped most of the beer for water.’

  I asked him if he had a lover.

  He glanced at the roll of flesh around my stomach.

  ‘Yes, so does Helga. We are parents to our children. We love each other in that way. And you?’

  ‘On and off.’

  ‘Which of you is more on than off?’

  ‘Jack is on.’

  We were silent for a while.

  ‘Is life good for you now, Walter?’

  ‘Yes. Thank you for the question.’ He dug into his pocket and took out a miniature plastic replica of one of the GDR watchtowers that were now being sold in the tourist shops.

  ‘I’ll give it to Jennifer,’ I said. ‘She watched me all the time.’

  I looked into his eyes and he looked away.

  ‘Yes, I know, Walter. Of course I know. I’m not interested in pointing the finger. It’s the better side of my carelessness.’

  He shrugged. ‘You can go find your file if you want.’

  In a way I was interested to know more about it. I asked him what he had written.

  ‘You were more paranoid than the Stasi.’ He took off his spectacles and slipped them in his pocket. ‘You had a big imagination. You made your hand into a fist and started tapping it against the wall of my mother’s apartment. You said you were looking for something but you were not sure what that might be. Was the wall hollow or was it solid? You said this action made you feel important, which made you wonder if you felt unimportant the rest of the time.’

  ‘Yes, I do feel insignificant.’

  Walter was laughing like he had in the old Germany when he did not have to work all hours to pay his bills and finding a cauliflower was a good day.

  ‘My English friend,’ he said, ‘you are only significant if you are significant.’

  He looked up at the leaden sky. I followed his gaze. There was nothing to see in the sky. Not even the trail from an aeroplane, or shifting clouds, or birds.

  ‘But I will tell you my conclusion when writing the file. I suggested that although Herr Adler has many psychological problems, he is harmless to other people.’

  He was still gazing at the sky.

  ‘The problem with my conclusion,’ he said formally, ‘is that it was not true.’

  ‘What part of it?’

  ‘That you are harmless to other people.’

  He leaned forward and kissed me like a lover under the World Clock as the skateboarders sped past us.

  ‘You still have your lips,’ he said, as if he were still taking notes. ‘Did you ever write your report on our economic miracle?’

  ‘Yes, I did. I engaged supportively with the realities of life in the GDR.’

  He laughed his excellent laugh, head back, new teeth bared; it was very open and sexy.

  ‘You are still crazy.’

  ‘Yes. And uglier.’

  ‘No,’ Walter said, ‘I can see something of the younger maniac in the older you. You can see something of the maniac wall in the older Berlin.’

  Soon I would walk away from the Alexanderplatz of the twenty-first century, past the Currywurst kiosks and fast food shops and drug dealers and buskers. A man was strumming his guitar, which he had plugged into a generator. He was singing about seeing clearly after the rain had fallen. I was not sure I could see anything clearly, never mind feel anything clearly, including the monuments that were supposed to mourn the murdered Jews, the murdered Roma, the murdered homosexuals.

  I told Walter I had something for him, too. He watched me dig my hand into the bag that Jack had recently given to me. It was made from jute and other natural fibres. I took out a tin of pineapple and handed it to Walter.

  He held it up to the light and read the ingredients.

  We both knew he could walk into Aldi or Lidl and buy as many tins of pineapple as he desired.

  ‘You know, I don’t eat so much sugar these days.’

  I gazed at the World Clock and counted the countries that had been added to it since reunification.

  ‘Walter, did you ever hear from Luna?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Why didn’t she take her son with her?’

  ‘It would have been foolish to risk his life. She knew we would give Karl Thomas a home.’

  ‘Is he my son?’

  Walter laughed again, as if this were not a question that had any significance. His mood had lifted in the last ten minutes.

  ‘Luna was close to Herman, a radiologist at the hospital where she worked. Sometimes I think she might have been pregnant before you arrived. She was always craving tinned pineapple.’

  We stood under the big Berlin sky, looking out at the Japanese noodle bars and trams and at two young girls, perhaps seven and nine, riding their bicycles. One of them wore trainers two sizes too big for her feet. She kept losing her grip on the pedals. Her sister was struggling in a coat that was clearly meant for someone younger. The sleeves came up to her elbows. Three of the buttons were missing. I thought they were refugees because their clothes were not their own clothes. ‘Yes,’ Walter said, ‘we know they would prefer to wear their own clothes and ride their own bicycles and have their mother and father nearby, but war is war.’ He tapped my arm and pointed to someone walking towards us in the distance.

  A young man in jeans and a T-shirt, perhaps in his mid twenties, carrying a small black dog in his arms, was making his way through the crowds. He wore sunglasses in the rain. We both watched him stroll serenely towards us. His headphones were clipped over his ears as he waved to his uncle, who had been a father to him.

  I wondered what I could say that would be worth lifting the headphones off his ears to hear? Attention, Karl Thomas. There will be no wars that will destroy your life as you know it. You will always wear your own clothes, your shoes will always fit your feet and you will never have to sleep in an asylum shelter in a foreign country. A new Europe has been forged. The corpses scattered in the ruins of 1945, the rubble of the smashed buildings, the blown-out windows, everyone on the move in search of home and food and missing people and no one owning up to being the sort of person who would have anything to do with genocide, none of this will ever happen again. Would that be a lie or would it be the truth? Or would it be truth and lie knotted together? What if it was more of a lie than truth? And what if it was absolutely the truth?

  I felt that I deserved everything that was coming to me from Karl Thomas, who might or might not be my son.

  I heard my own plea in my head. Please, Karl Thomas, do not say, ‘I believe you knew my mother.’

  He was more or less the age I h
ad been when I first visited the German Democratic Republic, which was living on borrowed time and had dissolved a few months after he was born. If Luna had waited a few more weeks, she might have danced on the Wall in the glare of floodlights from the media crews who were filming that night of 9 November 1989. Perhaps she believed she would be reunited with her son, but that did not happen. Instead, Karl Thomas grew up in a united Germany, separated from his mother. I wanted to tell him how Luna had sung and danced for her freedom that night in the dacha, but I felt unqualified to give him this information, as if I were linking myself to his history when I had not played a part in his life. What was the point in giving him stained, old memories? Would they be a gift or a torment? He was the age that Isaac would have been, had he lived to argue with his parents and wound our pride and make culprits of us both. How could I tell this young stranger that in the month of September 1988 I impregnated one and possibly two women who did not want me in their lives at all. What kind of man would he think I was, and indeed, what kind of man did I think I was?

  Karl Thomas lifted his headphones, his left hand resting in the fur of the black dog. He said hello.

  I reached out my hand and stroked the black dog in his arms. We stayed like that, all three of us stroking the dog while the rain fell on the solar system floating above the World Clock in Alexanderplatz.

  Isaac. Karl Thomas. His hair was as black as mine had once been. It fell in curls to his shoulders. My father also had sooty-black hair in his youth, but he never wore it long to his shoulders, it was a short back and sides all the way to his grave.

  When Karl Thomas finally removed his sunglasses, his eyes were bright, clear blue, shocking as a snake bite. I wondered how he would use his extreme beauty, which is always useful and always a burden, sometimes even freakish.

  I was just about ready to speak to him, to ask him questions about his life, his friends and where he lived, when I felt a hand on my shoulder.

  ‘We are late for our film,’ Walter said. ‘We must move swiftly if we don’t want to miss the beginning.’

  ‘Don’t leave just yet,’ I pleaded. ‘Life is big and new with you both in it.’ But they had made plans and Karl Thomas had to get his dog home first. Walter thought they’d make it if they left right away. They walked off together, the dog more or less in step as they dodged the crowds and traffic.