Leaving Berlin

by Britt Holmström

  Then there was Pierre. Pierre took large bites, assuming the whole dangerous cake was his to sprinkle with sugar and devour. He gobbled each bite whole and burped contentedly, then asked for more.

  When Pierre entered the art studio that Thursday night, Gunnar had not only frowned, he had turned pale. Had not known what to do, which was idiotic. Gunnar should have known better, he was an art teacher who claimed to have studied in Paris and Berlin, for heaven’s sake. Surely he ought to be used to the true artistic type. This was what the students had whispered to each other when Gunnar ushered Pierre into the office to have him fill out the appropriate forms, unsure if Pierre’s kind bothered with forms.

  Ought Gunnar not to have relished the outrageous, the new? Why had squat pear-shaped Gunnar felt so threatened? Was it because romance in Gunnar’s paint-splattered life was of the borrowed kind? Screwing the nude model on the couch in his office after class? As if nobody knew? He a married man and all?

  Pierre was tall and slender. His high-heeled leather boots added another inch and a half to his six-foot-plus frame. His dark hair flowed thick and straight onto his shoulders. You could see every muscle in his spidery legs in their painted on velvet pants. The pants were nicely topped off with a turtleneck and a hand-embroidered vest. In the vest’s embroidery, if you paid close attention, there were pictures. Pierre called it The Illustrated Vest. His grandmother had embroidered it. The pictures were from the fairy tales she had read to him when he was little. Pierre himself was a prince out of one of those stories. Moving with regal ease, ethereal but solid, prepared to live happily ever after.

  And on his left hand, that solid silver ring with its large green chunk of polished amber. When Emma looked at it up close to discover more of its secrets, she had asked him if the darkness and light were caused by irregularities in the stone or something more forbidding, something secret.

  “Well, if we knew that,” Pierre had reflected, “it wouldn’t be a secret, would it? What do you want, Emma-gemma, the unknown or certainty? There’s not such thing as certainty, don’t you know that?”

  His eyes had been calm and superior as though they, like the amber, held some hidden knowledge Pierre thought it immodest to flaunt. It had been a while since he had bothered to notice the commotion his appearance caused. Aware that he was avant-garde, he knew this brought with it certain responsibilities.

  He started at the art school that Thursday night and commenced not so much to stare at Emma as rest his eyes upon her. This continued through the entire three-hour lesson that first night, as well as Monday and Thursday the following week. He never said a word. To his chagrin she never paid any attention to him. So he thought.

  After three lessons he could no longer resist. Be that girl standoffish or not, he was determined to talk to her. He struck up conversation, only to find that she wasn’t standoffish at all. He could not believe his luck. What he really wanted to do was to kiss her right there and then and for the rest of the evening.

  They began having conversations that grew longer and longer until they became long ribbons tying them together.

  Pierre took to complementing her on the painting she had recently started, having given up on the nude. The new painting was a still life featuring an empty wine bottle (cheap Spanish), a bust of Beethoven, a rubber duck, and an economy-size pack of condoms (lent to her by a fellow student). It’s possible that Pierre meant what he said, blinded by love or some other crippling condition. He took to sneaking up behind her when she was attacking her canvas with a dripping brush, putting his hands on her shoulders, leaning his cheek against her hair in a gesture that would have been forward had it not been Pierre. Doing so, he would watch her work for a while. “That’s good, Emma-gemma,” he would say. “I like the way you’re contrasting that. That’s an unusual shade of blue, how did you mix that? You have a great eye for colour.”

  Soon it was as if they had been close since long before they met.

  Almost as close as Emma and her friend Helen had been for the last six years. Until Pierre showed up.

  Helen was Emma’s best friend. Her soap opera partner, as she now thinks of her. And what a soap opera it was. Up until Pierre’s entry into their lives, only the tawdry, like Gunnar’s affair with Hedvig, their middle-aged nude model, had added piquancy to their pseudo-artsy lives.

  When Pierre had been a student at the school for half a term, he brought an acquaintance of his to the studio. Leo attended briefly, though why he bothered was anybody’s guess. He had even less talent than Emma.

  Emma took one look at him and it was hatred at first sight. He was an inch shorter than she was, and she could not stand the sight of the little weasel. That is, until the day when she without warning fell madly in love with him. It did not make any sense at all, least of all to her. True, she had wanted to be madly in love for as long as she could remember, but it was not supposed to be with anybody vaguely resembling Leo. Loving Leo was unambitious, defeatist, pointless. It was truly baffling.

  Pierre noticed the change in her behaviour immediately. He grew pale, he mumbled when spoken to, refused to come to the coffeehouse after class. Instead he left early, making vague comments about being late for a date.

  Around the same time Helen carelessly threw caution to the wind and confessed to Emma that she had been in love with Pierre for some time. Somehow Pierre found out and at once — for some reason — pretended to be in love with Helen, which wasn’t very nice, but Leo and Emma were spending all their time together, putting their easels side by side, whispering exclusive confidences that were a thick wall shutting him out.

  The night when a laughing Leo smeared a dab of chromium yellow on Emma’s nose, Pierre packed up his stuff and left, claiming flu symptoms, coughing and hacking, looking suitably pale. He stayed away for two weeks.

  When he returned, he and Helen arrived at the art studio holding hands. They continued to do so. One evening they sauntered in wearing identical scarves that Helen said she had bought on sale, though they looked uneven and homemade. Their cheeks were flushed from what Emma assumed was love (and how it bothered her that it bothered her), but was in fact only the cold winter wind slapping them in the face on the way from the bus stop.

  It was a short-lived romance for all parties. A month later Leo disappeared and Emma found out that he was a drug addict. She also realized that she didn’t know his last name. Overnight Pierre lost interest in Helen. Then Helen got upset because Pierre was still in love with Emma, and Emma got upset because Helen got upset because she couldn’t stand the idea of hurting Helen who’d had a traumatic childhood that had left emotional scars. It did not take long for Pierre to get upset because Emma was avoiding him in order to make Helen happy, which did not work either, because Helen got even more upset because Pierre was upset. She told Emma that it was all her fault for being thoughtless and never thinking of anybody but herself. Emma apologized. Helen ordered Emma to be nice to Pierre. Emma in turn got upset that Helen got upset because she, Emma, had upset Pierre, when she had only upset him in order not to upset Helen.

  How they cared in those days! How exhausting it was! The simplest act was weighed down by an excess of emotion, broken hearts and shattered egos.

  Last Easter, as Emma, her daughter Frida and Frida’s best friend Jane, lay tanning in an early heat wave in the backyard, Jane asked Emma how they celebrated Easter in the country where she grew up.

  “Celebrate, not celebrated. They still do, you know.”

  “Whatever.”

  Emma, always eager for a chance to talk about the past, told Jane about Easter witches riding their brooms through the night sky with their kettles and black cats every Thursday before Good Friday.

  “Where are they going on their brooms? An annual witches’ convention? Joy-riding?”

  “Sort of. Every year at Easter all the witches congregate at a place called Blåkulla. It means ‘Blue hills.’ Apparently witches in olden days claimed to have actually flown. Some experts to
day say that the so-called witches were strung out on Belladonna, which they either ate or rubbed on their brooms, or some such thing, so they were probably under the impression that they really were flying, cats, kettles and all. But I don’t really know.”

  “Stoned out of their skulls, eh?

  “Probably.”

  “Talk about pagan traditions,” sneered Jane, who is Roman Catholic. Jane likes hanging out at her friend’s house. Frida’s mom has made it such an interesting place. She’s a very artistic person, Frida’s mom. Very charming. She always keeps bouquets of fresh flowers even though it’s nobody’s birthday. And stuff. Lots of stuff. She has this little glass shoe, for example, a man’s shoe, which sits in one of the living room windows beside the fireplace. She once told Jane it was one of the glass shoes that had once been worn by the prince who found Cinderella’s glass slipper and won her heart.

  “That’s right,” Frida’s mom said, “the prince wore glass shoes as well. I bet you didn’t know that.”

  Freaky, but kinda cool.

  There is a marble in the glass shoe, barely fitting into the opening. A large marble with purple and yellow swirls. Jane wanted to know, had the marble belonged to the prince as well?

  Frida’s mom said, yes, as a matter of fact it had.

  She has a crazy imagination, Frida’s mom.

  That afternoon in the hot sun, Emma continued to tell them bits of myth and fact, not going into detail, lest she offend Jane’s Catholic sensibilities. “Little girls dress up like witches and tour the neighbourhood, borrowing their mothers’ brooms to ride on. And if you’re lucky,” she said, “you get a cardboard Easter egg, beautifully decorated, full of candy and other gifts. Frida used to get them every Easter when she was little. My mother used to send them. But it never meant as much to Frida. She threw the egg out when she’d finished the candy.”

  “Well, who needs all that candy anyway?” The girls are teenagers, full of modern anxieties about dieting and other measures necessary to attain physical perfection.

  It was the talk of Easter eggs that reminded Emma of the last Easter she spent with Pierre. Pierre, home for the holidays, had been given a cardboard Easter egg large enough to hide a small child in. The outside of the egg was beautifully decorated, the inside stuffed with every kind of sweet, chocolate, and licorice ever produced, and not the average street kiosk offering either. Pierre’s mother — she was half French, as one might have guessed, him having a name like that — had a friend who owned a confectionery called Lulu’s Sweet Dreams. It was located in a fancy area of the city and sold only expensive chocolates and an impressive assortment of imported candy, including twelve kinds of Dutch licorice. The kind of shop where snooty old ladies in fur coats shopped, tying their equally snooty lapdogs outside while they went in to select their next batch of sinful treats.

  Strange that his mum would give him so much dressed-up sugar, Emma thought at the time. By then he was twenty-one years old. Hardly a child. And as Pierre had never been a mama’s boy to start with, it didn’t make sense, though he did like chocolate an awful lot.

  Like Emma said to herself at the time, who doesn’t?

  She had not seen him for a few months before that Easter, but had heard that he was home on leave from the art school in Paris. More important at the time, she had caught a recent rumour that Leo was in the hospital dying of some terrible disease he had contracted in the Far East. The rumour said he might not have long to live. Hoping Pierre would know the truth of this tragedy, she decided to give him a call. She was not in the habit of calling Pierre, she always waited for him to call her. It made her feel wanted.

  Pierre was so ecstatic to hear from her that he nearly raised his voice. He asked would she please come over at once and share his Easter egg?

  “You got an Easter egg already?”

  “A big one, Emma-gemma. Wait till you see it. Are you on your way?”

  She was. She caught the next bus, not even checking her makeup and hair, and in no time at all they were cozy on his bed, attacking the giant egg. She gazed fondly at all his objects, feeling at home. As usual a vase full of flowers sat on the windowsill. That day it was white narcissus and daffodils, it being almost Easter. On each side of the bouquet, among the dancing peasants, sat a pot with a single purple hyacinth. Outside a curtain of spring rain shuttered Café Unwirklich from reality.

  Pierre had hidden some joints at the bottom of the Easter egg. They lit one and got stoned before digging into the several pounds of candy. After a while they smoked another joint, ate some more candy, smoked another one, munched some more sweet treats, until Emma heard music that was not playing. She closed her eyes and became equally convinced that she heard the glass slipper dance on top of the dresser, a rhythmic one-legged tap dance.

  It was in the middle of the music that was not playing that Pierre metamorphosed. Before Emma could grasp what was happening, her eyes conveniently closed, Pierre went from a big kid eating expensive candy to a young man with more advanced interests.

  (It’s entirely possible that she pressed up too close to him, knowing he was far from immune to her presence. Could be that she leaned her head against his shoulder while pretending not to, the better to hear the nonexistent music. It’s also possible that she felt a sudden need for physical closeness, a need to respond to a need, though she never was sure. She also liked the way he smelled.)

  Then he kissed her. It had taken him years to get around to it, though he had badly wanted to since day one.

  Which, to be honest, she had sensed all along.

  To make up for lost time he continued to kiss her ravenously for more than an hour, by which time they were both exhausted and had to rest. Luckily he was extremely good at kissing. The discovery came as a delicious surprise. He buried his hands in her hair and went at it as if Emma were Easter egg candy, licking, tasting, savouring, devouring, while she wondered fleetingly where he had acquired this experience. He was far tastier than the imported chocolates, and God knows the chocolates were exquisite. Emma went limp and surrendered, savouring him right back, hoping poor Leo would not die for another day.

  Pierre kissed her with persistent passion, and with gentle gratitude for the fact that here she was, Emma-gemma of the dyed gypsy hair, yielding in his arms, her face in the cup of his hands. Every so often those hands broke the cup in half to find their way into her hair once again, holding on to it.

  “Pierre,” she gasped the first time she surfaced for air, “I like the way you kiss.”

  He smiled but did not reply, simply went on kissing, outdoing himself. That was all he did, he never went on to grope or try to undress her, he simply kissed her as though it was an act of reverence. And Emma loved it despite the imposition of the reverence, which she preferred to close her eyes to. As far as kissing went they were hugely compatible.

  It was a marvelous afternoon.

  Before she left, she lingered in the doorway, her normally straight mane a tangled bouffant, her face blotchy from a million kisses. She had arrived with a question, and now she remembered to ask it, off hand, pretending it had just occurred to her, which in fact it had, as for the past few hours it had completely slipped her mind, dancing like a solitary glass slipper straight out of her head.

  “Pierre?”

  “What, Emma-gemma?”

  “Do you by any chance know if it’s true that what’s-his-name, you know . . . that friend of yours . . . Leo? . . . is in the hospital? I have . . . some books of his I want to return.”

  “No,” said Pierre. She could tell by the way his eyes clouded over that he was lying. But so was she. She had nothing that belonged to Leo. It was a safe bet that Leo was not a reader.

  “Do you at least know his last name, so maybe I can mail the books to him?”

  That much he offered, but with a startling lack of grace, before closing the door in a manner that made her feel locked out. Dismissed.

  She worried all the way home. What if he refused to ever kiss
her again?

  With the help of a last name she was able to confirm Leo’s whereabouts when she called the hospital. He had been admitted a week earlier. Sweet Leo with his curly auburn hair, she thought. Or what was left of him. It had been three years of non-Leohood since she last saw him, though God knows she had coped remarkably well without him. Now here he was, within reach, somewhere in one of the buildings in the hospital compound.

  Emma was so nervous she felt faint late Sunday morning when she pushed open the door to a hospital room, knowing that on the other side would be long lost Leo, a languishing stick figure beneath a white sheet, unable to speak as she bravely held his skeletal little paw in hers.

  “Hey!” he hollered as the door opened, before he could even see who it was.

  Emma was so frightened she shrank in the doorway. She wanted badly to turn around and run, only by then it was too late.

  “Hey!” she replied and entered the room.

  There was Leo sitting up in bed, smaller than she remembered him. Unless it was the big hospital bed than made him look so puny. He looked uglier too, somehow. “Oh,” he said when he saw her. He looked surprised, puzzled, trying to place her. “Oh, right. It’s . . . you!”

  “Yes, it’s me. Emma”

  “Right! Nice to see you!” His smile was so insincere she felt a strong urge to slap him in the face.

  He was not alone. He was sharing a semi-private room with his girlfriend who sat, knees drawn up in an equally large bed. She said nothing, but Leo introduced her as Cara. It sounded invented. (It was. Her real name was Klara.)

  Leo and Cara had been shipped home from Turkey, riddled with cheap drugs, hepatitis, jaundice and whatever else that part of the world bestows upon careless travellers. They were, however, in no danger of dying, though they were fond of claiming it had been touch and go, each disease an adventurer’s badge of honour.

  It was horrible, but Emma forced herself to stay for nearly half an hour — it felt like a year — and looking relaxed, said she had been to visit her grandmother and had heard he was here, so she thought she’d drop in, kind of thing, you know? “And Pierre says to say hi.” She sat on the edge of the huge hospital bed that contained the Leo-person, whoever he was, conversing strenuously with him and his girlfriend.