“When?”
“What about tomorrow?”
She laughed again, in a way that made me happy and relieved.
“What about the day after tomorrow?” she said.
“That’s OK,” I said. “The day after tomorrow would be fine.”
“That’s settled then. Ring me when you’ve made your travel arrangements. I’ll probably drive.”
“Will do. And Clara …”
“Yes, Peter.”
“I look forward to seeing you.”
“Same here, Peter Lime. Same here.”
“I’m sorry if my speaking to the television news about the other report caused you problems.”
“Don’t think about it. I’m a big girl.”
“All the same.”
“I’ll tell you about it in Berlin,” she said, and hung up.
The rain in Berlin was icier than in Madrid, and now and then it turned into sleet, but this northern city was built for the cold, and Berliners behaved like a people who didn’t concern themselves about rain, as their city marched towards its new importance. I had only been to Berlin a couple of times since the Wall came down, and the rapid process of change had continued. The newspapers might write of Germany’s great economic crisis and the mental wall still dividing East and West, but Berlin gave the impression of being a city which hadn’t read the bleak words of its own press. Huge cranes towered above the centre, where glass and concrete blossomed like a symbol of the unified capital to which the German government would soon relocate. The streets were full of people with their collars turned up and umbrellas tilted against the cold and rain, struggling through the dismal afternoon like small, flustered sailing vessels. I was surprised again at how early it got dark in northern Europe. I loved the Mediterranean for its warmth, but also the light. The dismal, northern darkness made me melancholy, but the Berliners looked as if they lived with it without any problems. There were lots of people in the well-lit restaurants and cafés that emitted a rush of heat and food smells as the doors opened and closed. The streets were packed with new cars that slipped slowly through the rain gleaming in the beams of their headlights. Now and then a little Trabant appeared in the stream of Mercedes and BMWs, a small reminder of a recent past, when the city had been split in two. But mainly, with typical German meticulousness and efficiency, the last ten years had been an attempt to erase all signs of the emblem of a sacred communist peace that had divided the city, creating two completely different worlds.
My travel agent had made me a reservation in a smallish, but luxurious family hotel near Kurfürstendamm, and booked a room next to mine for Clara. I had rung her at the National Security Service in Copenhagen to tell her where we should meet, but learnt that she was no longer employed there. I was put through to various extensions before I got hold of someone who knew me and was willing to tell me that Clara Hoffmann now worked in the fraud division of the Copenhagen police. I rang and left a message with a secretary, and next day I caught a flight to Berlin.
I didn’t expect Clara to arrive until late, and as I waited for her I felt like an insecure young man. My heart thumped and the palms of my hands were sweaty, and there was a peculiar pressure in my chest that I had to take deep breaths to control. I was more than nervous about meeting her – I was terrified. To pass the time I did 50 push-ups, had a shower and went down to the bar and drank two whiskies even though I knew I shouldn’t. Then I went back up to my room. It was a good-sized double room with a wide bed beneath a gold-framed mirror. Only a faint hiss of tyres on the dark, wet streets outside penetrated the heavy red curtains into the warm room. There was a door between my room and what was to be Clara’s room. It was locked. I watched some television, but couldn’t settle and went down to the bar again, this time ordering a cola.
Finally I got the Herald Tribune from reception and went back upstairs, starting on page one, and when I got to Peanuts on the back page I heard a sound from the adjoining room. A door slammed and I pictured Clara shaking the rain from her coat and her hair. I got up to go out into the corridor and knock on her door, then sat down again with the paper on my lap, but neither Peanuts nor Calvin and Hobbes made any sense. Words and drawings blurred in front of my eyes. I was over halfway through my life and yet I felt like an adolescent again. I was here to see my Stasi file, but I knew that Berlin would also test whether I could love another person again. It couldn’t be like it had been with Amelia, but I had to discover whether I dared let myself go, which is an inextricable part of falling in love, and risk being hurt. Deep down, I had known this all along, although I hadn’t articulated it to myself before I sat there in the hotel room. I had no way of knowing if Clara Hoffmann looked at our meeting here in the same way.
I heard the shower running next door. She had said she was going to drive from Copenhagen. It was a good thing I hadn’t knocked on her door, of course she would want to freshen up after the journey. This gave me a few more minutes before we met, thank goodness. When she was ready we could have a drink in the room and then find somewhere to have dinner, and I would just have to see how it turned out. I took some more deep breaths and felt a little calmer.
I was sitting with the paper when I heard a key in the connecting door, and when it opened Clara was standing in the doorway looking at me. She was wearing the hotel’s white bathrobe, but the belt was only loosely tied so I could see her breasts and a glimpse of the black, thick hair between her legs. She didn’t say anything, but looked at me with a little smile, and I stared back. Then she stepped into the room and closed the door behind her, locked it and walked across to the door of my room and opened it, hung the Do Not Disturb sign outside, closed the door and locked it and put on the chain. It took no time at all, but it was as if I was watching her in slow motion. As if time ground to a halt and the world slowly ceased to exist. I watched her buttocks sway gently under the white towelling, the mature curves of her hips and the glimpse of the inside of a smooth thigh as she took a step forward. Her hair was damp and curly. The nape of her neck was pale and I had an overwhelming desire to kiss the little patch of neck below her ear. She turned round at the door. I stood up and the paper fluttered to the floor. My heart was pounding and the blood was roaring in my ears as if my head would explode. Clara looked me straight in the eye as she undid the belt of the bathrobe and stripped it off with an easy flourish and a little twist of her body, making her breasts swing gently. Her naked body was slim, but with a rounded belly and softly contoured hips. Her skin still bore the slight golden glow of summer. Her nipples were small and dark and not quite the same size. There was a little birthmark below her left breast. It was almost heart-shaped, like the one I remembered she had below her left shoulder blade. Her legs were slender, but she had small veins showing at the top of her thighs, making her even more attractive. She had painted her toenails the same muted red colour as her fingernails, and her lips glistened slightly. She stood completely motionless and let me look at her. It was as if she was saying, “Here I am. This is me. This is my body.”
She took a few steps and I took a step towards her.
“Clara,” I said.
She took three quick steps forward and put her finger on my lips and hushed me as if I was a little child. I could feel her breasts against my t-shirt and her nakedness against my erection. Her eyes were open and moist, as if she was frightened or just about to cry.
“Clara,” I repeated and she hushed me again.
“Don’t talk, Peter Lime. Don’t talk. Words mustn’t spoil it.”
20
After we had made love the first time, I began to cry. I don’t see myself as an emotional “new man”. Before Amelia and Maria Luisa died, I couldn’t remember crying as an adult, and I thought it was embarrassing when men bared their souls in the 1970s, and with tears in their eyes talked about how terribly difficult they found all that stuff with women. Fuck them and leave them had been my arrogant motto. But in that hotel bed in Berlin I couldn’t keep back the tears t
hat started out as one, then two, then three sobs, until finally Clara, even though I struggled, pulled my head against her breast and stroked my hair as if I was a little child who had hurt himself. I cried for all the wasted opportunities and the injustice of life, and because I would never get over my dreadful grief, but making love with Clara had also been a release. It was as if my subconscious – or, using that old-fashioned but fine word, my soul – had, at least temporarily, been set free from its anguished past. Perhaps that’s how people feel when they go into therapy and are surprised when they come through as more of a whole person, reaching an awareness of what had made them break down. Amelia and Maria Luisa would always be the most powerful memory of my life, but it seemed that I might start accepting that a bandage could be carefully wrapped round the wound, and I could move on.
My weeping subsided, to be replaced by a feeling of shame, and I tried to pull free. Clara leant over me and began to kiss the tears from my face. Drop by drop, she cleared the streaks of tears from my eyelids, cheeks, throat and chest, and then her tongue tenderly and carefully stroked my lips before her mouth closed over mine. Her tongue against mine rekindled my desire with a force that I didn’t think I had any more, and I pushed her onto her back and entered her with such intensity that she gave a little scream. But she quickly twined her legs round me, pressing me even further in and the world around us disappeared again.
I still hadn’t spoken a word to her.
But we did afterwards. We lay in bed talking and drinking red wine which I fetched from the minibar. We didn’t talk about us, but about ourselves before us. I did most of the talking, first about Amelia and Maria Luisa, but also about my childhood and my adolescence and my problems with alcohol. Clara lay in my arms and asked a few questions, but mostly she just listened. She didn’t tell me much about herself. She said she couldn’t remember her childhood very clearly. Perhaps because it had been so happy in that nice, orderly home? She had the usual memories of puberty and senior school. Her life had been rather straightforward until her marriage. She didn’t think it was particularly interesting, maybe because there are never stories to be told about the happy times only the unhappy ones. Perhaps she felt that it actually wasn’t any of my business, or perhaps she just didn’t want to talk about herself.
“I bet you were the sweetest girl,” I said.
She sat up and leant against the headboard, stretching her arms above her head, and arousing me again.
“I was very spotty,” she said. “And now I’m hungry.”
I was too, ravenous; I wanted meat and mountains of potatoes and hearty German gravy. But it was past midnight, and when I rang room service all they could offer was vegetable soup, sandwiches and omelettes, so I ordered some of each plus a bottle of wine and some mineral water.
Clara got out of bed and, still naked, went out and came back with her clothes and a little suitcase.
“I think we can cancel the other reservation,” she said. “If you want to, that is?”
“Why did you do it?”
“I’ve wanted to ever since I first saw you, even though that’s not quite how I thought about it. You were married and … I’m sorry. I shouldn’t say it like that.”
“It’s all right, Clara.”
“There haven’t been all that many men in my life, Peter. I have needs like everyone else, but it just didn’t seem worth the effort after the divorce. I didn’t really have anything against bringing men home to my bed, the problem was getting rid of them afterwards.”
“I’m glad you made the first move. I don’t know if I’d have dared.”
“I’m sure you would have. Anyway, I was sure you lusted after me. I remembered seeing it in your eyes this summer. I could see you wanted me. And standing in the room next to yours I suddenly thought ‘I’m mid-way through life, and I’ve already seen people my age dying. There’s no reason to waste time. All that can happen if you take a chance is that you get your wings singed again. But the first burn is always the worst.’”
I got up, walked over to her and kissed her tenderly, my hands gently caressing her breasts.
“I’m glad you did it,” I said again.
She pulled away gently and pointed at the bathroom door.
“Don’t you think you should make yourself a bit respectable before room service arrives?”
We ate as if we hadn’t seen food for days. And although I usually get full rather quickly, now I ate until there was nothing left.
“You haven’t told me why you changed job,” I said to her when we had finished.
“When there’s awkward business in Denmark, someone always ends up carrying the can, otherwise it won’t go away. It was my turn this time.”
“Because of me?”
“Yes. Because of you, Peter.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Well. Don’t be. Give me a cigarette – although I’ve stopped smoking,” she continued. “I needed to get out of the NSS. And it’s Denmark, after all, so they don’t fire you. They find you another job, further down the ladder. A blot on your record, same pay, but a sign in neon lights that your career is no longer running according to plan. Denmark doesn’t like to see blood spilt, but we cleanse just as clinically as everyone else does. Only we do it without leaving too much blood on the carpet.”
She was smoking furiously and I could tell she was angry and hurt.
“I was angry, Clara,” I said. “Angry and ashamed and hurt and drunk.”
“I’ve told you not to give it a thought. I quite understand. It’s just that …”
“What?”
“I’m in the fraud division, in a junior position. I get all sorts, asset-strippers, tax evaders, the sort of fiddles that are virtually impossible to convict people for. And it doesn’t look good, does it? What does that Hoffmann woman actually do? She’s not securing too many convictions. We’d better give her something else, something even less consequential, to do. Still, this time I carried the can, but I’d probably have been given the elbow anyway. Lime or no Lime.”
“What do you mean?”
“The service is under the spotlight after the recent revelations. The politicians have realised that while every other intelligence service has cut back since the end of the cold war, the NSS has increased its staff by 60 per cent. And what the hell are they all doing now the war’s over? There’ll be cuts, no doubt about that. So maybe I got out just in time.”
“You sound bitter.”
“I am bitter, Peter. About a lot of things. A lot of things in my life. It didn’t turn out as I’d expected. I’m halfway through it. I’ve got a job I don’t like, and in which I see no future. I’m on my own. I’ve got a large, pleasantly decorated, empty flat, where I talk to the pot plants. Maybe I should get a cat? I’m on my own, and it scares me.”
I took her face carefully in my hands and kissed her. Now it was Clara’s turn to have tears in her eyes. I kissed her and held her tenderly.
“Make love to me again, Peter,” she said.
We went to bed and made love, this time slowly and gently. Afterwards she lay on her side with her back to me and I remember feeling happy and sad at the same time as I listened to her slow breathing and felt her heart beating through her soft skin against the palm of my hand. I thought about how banal love is, and yet how different and new it is for every single person who is lucky enough to experience it. And, for the first time in a very long while, I slept without waking and without being able to recall my dreams.
Even so, I woke early, and could tell from the sound of the traffic that it had stopped raining. It was strange to wake up next to someone again. For a second, between sleep and consciousness, I thought it was Amelia’s naked, soft belly that my hand was resting on, that I was breathing onto her neck, but then the morning came into focus and I was momentarily torn between shame and pride that Clara was lying beside me.
When I came back from the bathroom, she was sitting up in bed.
“What an early rise
r” she said, looking at me with no hint of shyness.
“Sleep,” I said.
“No. No,” she said, swinging her legs out of the bed. “Go down to breakfast. I’ll join you in a minute. You’ve got an appointment with the past.”
“So soon?”
“Ten o’clock in the old block on Normannenstrasse. They’re very busy. Lots of people would like to forget the past, but first they want to re-examine it. I had you squeezed into the queue. I forgot to tell you last night,” she said, smiling at me. “I had other things to think about. But now we must get down to business.”
We took a taxi to the eastern part of Berlin. It was a cold, clear day, with a pale November sun shining through the forest of cranes, their long arms swinging whole sections of buildings into place in what seemed like one gigantic construction site. It was hard to imagine that the city had once been divided, even though it was obvious from the change in the style of architecture as you crossed the now invisible border. In what had been East Berlin, concrete blocks were arranged like soldiers on parade, lined up in serried ranks, but the people wore the same kind of clothes and shivered with cold in just the same way as those in the west. You had to remind yourself that there was a mental boundary dividing the two Germanys. It was hard to imagine the astonishment and euphoria when, on 9 November 1989, the spokesman for the East German regime, Schabowski, told a press conference in an almost off-hand manner that the border crossings between East and West Berlin were now open. I had heard it in the afternoon on CNN in New York, and had jumped on the first available flight back to Europe, wanting to be there to see a new world being born. I had taken a whole series of photographs, but had never sold any of them. They were good photographs, but mine were no different from those of my competitors. I had been elated, and returned to Madrid with adrenalin pumping, convinced that the world had changed fundamentally and would never be the same again. It was a miracle that I had never expected to witness in my lifetime – people all over East and Central Europe had changed the world, just as we had dreamt of doing in the late 1960s. Gloria had been elated too. Unable to stand still, she had paced back and forth, kept returning again and again to the incredible footage being shown on Spanish television. Oscar was bad-tempered, drunk and surly He kept repeating that it would soon all be forgotten, and the Ossies would rue the day that they had thrown themselves into the arms of West Germany. Gloria and I had danced round the room to the glorious music surging from the crowds, laughing at Oscar sat there looking like a crotchety old man. A year later, when the two Germanys were reunified, Oscar got drunk again. At first I thought it was from pleasure, but the evening ended in a violent quarrel between him and Gloria, in which I had to intervene. He accused her of having betrayed their youth. She accused him of living in a past that was irrevocably over. It all ended in the usual scene about their mutual infidelities, and I had to put Oscar to bed and then sit and listen to Gloria’s complaints. Oscar had a violent side to him, especially when he drank and took speed at the same time. Gloria was afraid that he was getting into it again. He had hit her in the past, after all. The next time I saw them they were stiff and polite with one another, but a month later they went to Hawaii and fell in love again.
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