As she stood in this stranger’s kitchen, wondering which cupboard held the glasses, that same feeling came crashing down upon her, landing with a thump in her chest, nausea making her reach for the sink. She drank from the tap, letting the water run about her face and neck, the indifferent smell of the metal calming her twitching stomach.
Back in the bedroom she watched Andi, his arm flung above his head, his lashes shivering on his cheeks. He was beautiful. It was pride she felt at having slept with him, a feeling she would never admit to another. She tried to dress quietly though every movement seemed to call out for attention. She never liked waiting for men to wake up. She would rather leave and be a memory that could be returned to. If she stayed, she would become her own bad habits, her stale morning breath, her repeated stories. It was all so very ordinary. She took her boots to the front door, bent to put them on. Would he stir? Call out her name, beg her not to leave? And if he did, would she stay? She liked to think she was strong-willed, but knew that if he woke, she would not walk out that door. Embarrassed by her neediness, she would not let him see it.
Down the stairs, two at a time, and she was swishing through the courtyard leaves that masqueraded as snow in the faint morning light. The air was sharp, winter just around the corner. Once on the street she pushed out her stride and her legs thanked her for it. Perhaps later today she would go for a run, sweat out the excesses of last night.
Connecting the dots on the metro map, she headed back to the hostel and gathered her things. She had been in Berlin almost two weeks and had photographed everything she wanted to. It was time to move on.
Once she had showered and packed, the day had started for everyone else. Trotting down the U-Bahn stairs she tried to keep out of the way of closed-faced people heading to work. The man at the hostel said all trains to Dresden left from the Ostbahnhof, so she found herself repeating the morning’s cross-city journey in reverse. She was glad to be on her way.
When Andi woke, she was not there. He threw back the sheets, scissoring his legs, as though he might find her snuggled like a cat in the warmth at the end of the bed. The water pipes were silent; he could hear no footsteps. He held his breath, warding off a false reading. She was gone.
Pulling on yesterday’s clothes, he could smell the sex and sweat that clung to him. Still buttoning his shirt, he stood in the doorway of the living room. Was it only last night that he had been right here, wineglasses in hand, watching her roll a cigarette? He had wanted to climb inside her mind, to understand exactly what she was thinking. She had moved so quickly about the apartment; he was certain that if he took his eyes off her she would cease to exist. And so she had. He had found himself following her as she moved from couch to bookshelf to window, a street mime copying her for cheap laughs. She had kept edging ahead of him, throwing her voice over her shoulder like a cape, and he found he could not quite keep up with her, as though the language delay was translating to the physical.
He grabbed his jacket and slammed the door shut behind him, fumbled with the keys in his hurry to lock it. Where would she have gone? Did he have any hope of finding her? The courtyard was too cramped a space to break into a run; he skidded across it and threw himself against the entrance doors. On the street, people marched by on their way to work, and he fell into step with them. His heart was beating so fast it felt as though it was growing inside him: it threatened to break out of his chest and scatter the morning commuters with its bloody shards.
He tried to commandeer his thoughts. Where was Clare planning to go today? She had told him of her travel plans, and he had listened in the way people do when the information does not concern them. Had he not actually thought she would be going anywhere? Or had he not thought he would care? He picked up his pace, headed towards the city. She could not be too far away. What time had she gotten out of bed?
Dresden. He broke into a run. She had said she was going to Dresden, that she wanted to photograph the buildings that had been put back together like a puzzle. Which meant she would be taking a train from the Ostbahnhof. He could catch one, too, he could follow her to Dresden and … And what? What was he doing? He could not chase her down; he would never find her. But still he ran, his feet slapping against the ground, a stitch stabbing at his side. At the station he barely waited for the doors to slide apart. He burst onto the concourse, conscious of his heaving chest, his expanding heart. He stared blindly at the departures board, the letters swimming about in a code he could not recognise, before running across the hall, dodging the travellers coaxing their wheeled bags. Stopping at the first platform, he looked out across the tracks. And there she was, waiting for him.
‘Don’t leave.’
The morning after the night before and there he was again. As he came lurching up the ramp to the platform, he looked more bedraggled than she remembered. Her stomach was burning — his presence or sudden hunger? She never could differentiate between her mind’s attraction and her body’s needs.
‘Come back with me.’ He delivered his plea with the now familiar jerk of his head, indicating somewhere both nearby and far away. She waited for the question mark, but it did not appear.
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘I can’t stay, Andi. I’ve got things to do.’
‘Like what?’
‘My photographs. The exhibition. The book.’ She was touched, and certainly tempted, but she wasn’t going to stay — this wasn’t part of the plan. She shrugged, apologetic, and tried to change the topic. ‘Don’t you think train stations just cry out for drama?’ Annoyingly, her voice wavered, and she tried to bring the situation back under her control. ‘Always scenes of parting. And desperation. Like Anna Karenina wanting to stand back up at the last moment.’ The soaring ceilings, the architecture that acknowledged these places as gateways to worlds of more possibility. Flying had appropriated the romance of travel, and budget airlines had killed it.
‘Not always,’ he replied.
He looked despondent, standing so close yet so separate, and she felt responsible. She knew nothing about this man, she didn’t want this connection. And yet she waited for him to reach out and take her hand, to make her stay. But he just pushed his hands deeper into his pockets, and she strengthened her resolve.
‘Just stay for a while.’ He sounded like a whiny child, and his eyes, which should have been pleading, were accusatory. ‘Last night … it was fun.’
With that, her compassion dissolved. It was hardly a declaration. She turned away, wishing that the train would arrive. She wanted to kiss him goodbye and climb aboard. Clickety clack, don’t look back. It was getting messy, this liaison. It was taking on too many locations.
‘So let’s leave it like that, Andi.’ She refused to look at him, to play his games. Fuck, she was so hung-over. She could feel the station leaning in on her, an overbearing parent waiting for her to confess to some playground crime. Why didn’t he touch her? It was disconcerting; it was as though he was not real.
They stood there in silence, each refusing to look, to hold, to walk away. Each wanting the other to force the decision.
‘Come back with me, Clare.’
He moved to hug her, and she thrust out her hand, wanting to force him into an awkward goodbye clasp. But he reached higher than she expected, grabbing her upper arm and squeezing. She could feel each individual finger pressing down. Later that night she would look at the bruised imprint of his fingers on her skin and wonder if he needed to be quite so forceful.
‘I want you, Clare. Stay.’
‘But I want to be away.’
It was the idea she had clung to from the moment she left that crowded kitchen of her childhood. That kitchen drenched with so much sunshine and goodwill that it dripped down the walls and pooled on the floor, causing everyone to slip and slide and crash into each other. She could see them all still there, grabbing at each other for
support, laughing as they fell over, helped each other up and fell over again until they were all in a heap. All of them like pick-up sticks not ever wanting the game to be over.
‘Everywhere is away from somewhere else.’ He squeezed her arm again, the pressure pulling her into the moment.
The sun was cutting through the glass beneath the awning; she felt as though it was chasing them up the platform at speed. Her hangover headache pounded at her skull, teasing her heart to beat faster.
‘Please stay, Clare. I really like you.’ His emphasis on the word made them both blush like teenagers. ‘I want you.’
Who could argue with being wanted? In a blaze of clarity, she saw how simple it was — he would care if she left, and there was no one in Dresden to care if she arrived.
‘Okay.’
And in response came that smile running across his face like an incoming tide. When they kissed the taste of him shocked her with its familiarity, so much so that she wondered whether it was, somehow, exactly the same taste as her own.
‘Let’s go.’ He took her hand, pulling her up from beneath all the other pick-up sticks, and not one of them moved.
As the leaves begin to unfurl on the city’s trees, Clare keeps her eyes closed and pretends to be asleep. She breathes long, deep and even, listening to Andi go about his morning rituals. The sound of his frothy spit falling into the basin, coffee bubbling on the stovetop. She wonders whether he looks at her as he goes in and out of the room, to the bed, the bathroom, the kitchen. She doesn’t dare open her eyes to check. Intent on the order of things, he is conservative in his morning movements, as though he may be taxed on too many trips between sink and breakfast table, fridge and bathroom.
Just before he leaves, he comes to the bed. She hears him pause by her side then feels his grip on the sheets, and they are pulled down to her ankles. The cool air licks across her back but, lying face down, she does not move. With one knee on the bed, he rests his palms on her shoulders before laying himself down upon her, mimicking the length of her body. His knees jut into the backs of hers. His hips are cushioned by her bottom. Despite being much taller than her, he seems, at these moments, exactly the same height.
Flattened beneath him, she feels more present than at any other time during the day. She can feel him along the length of her body, and the weight of him, the stillness of him, calms her. Like this, he cannot hurt her. She can hear his breathing. She wonders whether the earlier smells of coffee and toothpaste were real, or whether they were imagined precursors to this. He bites softly on her earlobe. The goosebumps sing up and down her arms.
‘I’ll see you tonight,’ he whispers, then gets up, takes his bag from the floor and leaves, closing the door behind him.
She lies still on the bed. With his weight removed, she feels light. In this way, every morning she is her very own zeppelin.
When she does get out of bed, she switches on the television. The deep voices of the newsreaders, who never seem to get too excited about anything, encourage her to feel that today is going to be significant. Something is going to happen, they assert with a firm nod. She watches the abbreviated news stories scroll across the bottom of the screen, the English words waving at her like old friends, while the German words slowly become familiar. The multitude of capital letters no longer make her feel as though she is being shouted at. From the newspaper, she cuts out individual letters to make ransom-note poetry. Poetry about the kitchen sink and the grey shrinking view from the apartment window. About the wide land back home, and grass that is never greener on either side. When the ink becomes too smudged to make out the letters, she cuts out more. She can only use the headlines because the other print is too small.
In the long afternoons, she reads the poetry aloud. Demanding the attention of absent crowds, she performs it in bombastic ways that she would not dare to attempt if other people were present. In Budapest she spent a night in a tiny bar listening to poetry. She understood nothing of the language, allowed the unfamiliar sounds to rain down on her until she was slick with the musicality of it. It was not a spoken-word night as she knew it; there was no underlying desperation to remind the audience that poetry as an art form was entertaining, relevant, important. Instead, it was proud literary cabaret: the darkened room, people gathered round the tiny tables, perched on bentwood chairs, smoking, drinking and wallowing in the sea of words. She performs her poetry as though she is back in that room, as though no one can understand a word she is saying, but they do not care, wanting her sounds and listening with rapture.
In the evening, he goes through the sheets of paper, smoothing their curled corners. He reads closely, asks questions. At first, she thought he was making fun; her answers then were curtly monosyllabic. She cringed at the way he enunciated each word, the way he repeated each line with a different emphasis. But she continues to cut out the letters, to shuffle them about into constructions, to glue them in place and dry them by the radiator.
She dreams that there are no more words left in the world. That the authorities have come to her door, knocked, and politely informed her that she cannot use any more letters. Told her that there will be no more newspapers — the population is getting too upset at all the bad news so they will not be printing any more. They tell her that she must recycle her recycled poems, and she does, cutting them up and gluing them down until the letters become ghosts on the page, haunting her with reminders of what has been lost.
~
‘Can we walk back along the Wall?’ Clare called out to him, pointing at the strip of graffitied Wall that ran beside the river. Andi had paused outside the Ostbahnhof to phone the school and plead that he was too ill to work. He was almost disappointed that the receptionist took his excuse without question. Actually, I met someone, he wanted to tell her. It all started in a bookstore. No, in a park. But the receptionist just wished him well and hung up.
‘It’s not really on the way.’ He hitched up Clare’s bag — the straps were cutting into his shoulders.
‘There’s no rush is there?’
Of course there was. He wanted to be fucking her. To have her back in his apartment, where they would not have to consider anybody else.
‘I just want to get you home. Far away from those mischievous trains that want to whisk you away.’
‘I thought you might want to show me your city,’ she said, waiting for him to catch up to her and taking his hand. ‘I am a tourist after all.’
‘There will be plenty of time for that.’ He squeezed her hand and could barely believe it when she squeezed his back. He began walking towards his apartment, refusing to let her go. ‘Anyway, that bit of the Wall is not real.’
‘How do you mean?’ She stopped. ‘I thought it was the last bit of the Wall still standing.’
‘Well, it is. But it’s not what it was really like, not how I remember it. There were two walls, with the death strip in between. This bit of wall was on the East side; you could never graffiti it — it was kept completely blank. All those paintings are from after the Wall fell. It’s not what it really looked like.’ He tugged her arm, made her keep walking.
‘How old were you when it came down?’ she asked.
‘Twelve.’
‘What was it like, living like that?’
He shrugged. He never knew how to answer this question. Nothing he could say ever seemed to be the truth. It couldn’t encapsulate how normal it was, how definite. How East Germany was a world built on ideas rather than money, that, beneath all of the bad, there was some good. People from outside could never see that.
‘It was just how it was. When I was born, the Wall had been up for twenty years. Everyone thought it would be up for a hundred more. It was just the way things were. But it all changed faster than anybody expected.’
‘It’s odd,’ she said. ‘Most people feel as though their childhood happened in a world so far awa
y that it doesn’t exist anymore. And yours actually did.’
‘I guess. In a way, it was like a childhood for everyone — the government was like a parent.’ He walked faster, knowing that she was only just keeping up but aware that every minute they were out here, she might change her mind, return to the station. ‘Not that parents always know best.’
‘But they usually have their children’s best interests at heart.’
‘True,’ he agreed. ‘They wanted to produce a society that was as perfect as they knew how. But in the end they screwed it up — just like parents do to their children.’
‘You can’t blame parents for everything. We all have to grow up at some stage, don’t we? Childhood will always hold the attraction of innocence, but it’s not a way of living. I suppose the Wall coming down was like a massive teenage rebellion.’ She pulled her hand from his and stopped walking as she swept her hair up, tied it with a rubber band from her wrist.
His own hands twitched, impatient. He wanted her, wanted to be home.
‘Don’t you wish you could just go back to being a child though?’ he asked. ‘Someone else making all the decisions for you?’
‘You’re like Peter Pan. The boy who never wanted to grow up.’ She grabbed his hand; now it was her pulling him forward. ‘I can’t see you in green tights though.’
Laughing, she lifted his hand to her lips and bestowed a kiss, which he returned. He remembered the story well enough; it was one of his father’s favourites.
Finally, they reached his building, and he led Clare once more through the courtyard and up the stairs. As he unlocked the door, she pushed him aside. ‘Race you to the bed!’
Hours later, standing naked in the lounge room, Clare pointed at the television tower. ‘It’s kind of weird, isn’t it, to know just about everyone in the city has the tower in view.’
Berlin Syndrome Page 4
