An Honest Man

by Ben Fergusson

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, if you were looking out for a spy in your building, what kind of person would you be looking for?’ I thought of Tobias eating his bowl of soup. ‘It would be some white guy in a raincoat, probably. If I’m sniffing about and asking questions people just think I’m some nosy brown person. If they see me at all. And if they tried to describe me, they would just say I was an Ausländer. They wouldn’t be able to describe me after they’d met me. I’m twenty-two – even better, right? A Turkish youth. People actively try not to look me in the eye. It’s perfect. If people get suspicious, at worst they’re going to think I’m part of some sort of Turkish mafia. Either way, they don’t think I’m working for the West German government. I’m not married, so I’m hard to blackmail.’

  ‘Why aren’t you married?’

  He looked at me and frowned. ‘Ralf, you know why I’m not married.’

  I blushed and stared at the cigarette butts sprouting from his ashtray. ‘What do you do though when you’re not working?’

  He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I, er … I read. I read a lot. Go to the cinema. Listen to music. Go out and eat.’

  ‘What do you eat when you go out and eat?’

  He smiled. ‘What everyone else eats. Turkish, of course. German, Italian.’

  ‘What’s your favourite pasta shape?’ I said.

  He laughed, flashing his white teeth back to the molars. ‘Now that’s a good question,’ he said, grinning and wagging his finger in the air. ‘Now you’re going to get some real insight. My favourite pasta shape is … penne.’

  ‘Which one’s that?’

  ‘Like little flutes.’

  ‘Oh, OK,’ I said. ‘My favourite’s bow-tie shape.’

  ‘Good choice,’ he said. ‘Although it’s sometimes still hard in the middle bit, where the sides meet.’

  ‘True,’ I said.

  ‘You know, penne’s actually pronounced “pen-ne” with a stress on the “n” and if you don’t stress the “n” then it means “penis” in Italian.’

  I laughed. ‘So you could accidentally end up with a big bowl of dick.’

  ‘Covered in tomato sauce.’

  We both laughed at this.

  ‘And what about friends?’ I said.

  He shrugged again. ‘Not so many friends.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I mean, I had school friends. And I see my family, but I … I don’t know. I’m on my own in the shop or in the car most days. My only colleague’s my dad.’ He looked embarrassed. ‘Also, I’m shy.’

  ‘You’re not!’

  He laughed. ‘I am a bit. Really. And I’m not sure I’m someone people just like.’

  ‘What are you talking about? That’s dumb.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘My family aren’t that into all my books and films and music. They think it’s all a bit … I don’t know, poncey.’

  ‘What would they rather you were into?’

  ‘I think they’d rather I had a big group of mates, like my brother. I was the clever one, which meant I was going to be an accountant or a solicitor, or something like that, but I did cultural studies, and then dropped out of university after a year. It wasn’t for me.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I thought the other students were dicks, to be honest. Now I’m helping my dad out and, you know, saving the Western world. But I’m not going to do that for ever – you can’t, I don’t think. West Berlin’s too small and at some point people are even going to start noticing me. I still need to try and work out what the fuck I’m going to with my life. This is a process that’s been in motion for some time. Bit of a disappointment to my poor dad.’

  ‘I’m sure you’re not a disappointment,’ I said. We were overtaken by a red VW Beetle with Cologne number plates. ‘What about swotty school friends?’

  ‘I used to hang around with a group of guys at school, but they all ended up working at Siemens and Bayer and places like that – one’s at the Sparkasse. His mum’s happy. We left school like four years ago now; I don’t really see them. Turned out we didn’t have much in common. Not like you and your friends. You’re lucky.’

  ‘I am,’ I said.

  I stared across the flat fields of Bezirk Potsdam at the farmhouses with their high tiled roofs and the grey-brown render on their walls. ‘It all looks so bucolic,’ I said. ‘Do you think they think they’re oppressed?’

  Oz looked at me, then back at the road. I could see behind his sunglasses; his eyelashes were so long that they touched the lenses. ‘I don’t suppose so. Certainly not most of the time. Maybe once in a while, when they can’t get something. No one can think about something like that all the time.’

  ‘Did you read about those people in Hungary?’

  ‘Going through the gate?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said.

  ‘Can you imagine things being so bad that you’d camp out by the border just in case? What if they’re there in winter? With kids.’

  ‘I can imagine it,’ he said. ‘If life was awful enough, I’d probably do the same. If the offer was good enough …’

  ‘Dad thinks the Russians are going to send in tanks.’

  Oz laughed. ‘They’re not sending any tanks. You need to tell your dad it’s not the Sixties any more.’

  ‘You think it’s going to collapse? East Germany?’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ Oz said. ‘I mean, at some point. Doesn’t mean things are going to get any better. Might turn violent. But it won’t stay the same.’

  I looked down at his hand resting on the gear stick. There was a ragged white scar that ran from his wrist to the knuckle of his thumb.

  ‘What’s that from?’ I said.

  ‘The scar?’ he said, flexing his fingers. ‘SodaStream.’

  ‘Really? How?’

  ‘I got my thumb caught between the handle and the machine. I wasn’t meant to be using it. I pulled the lever down and it trapped my thumb and I panicked and pulled the whole thing off the countertop. Ripped a great gash in my hand. It was gross. Hands really bleed. I’m still terrified of them.’

  ‘Hands?’

  ‘SodaStreams. It’s like Pavlov’s dog.’

  ‘Did he get his thumb caught in a SodaStream?’

  Oz laughed drolly.

  He held up the hand and said, ‘Touch it. It’s lumpy where one of the stitches got infected.’

  I reached out and touched his skin, stroking the white scar, forgetting that I was meant to be searching for a lump. The air filled with the wail of a truck horn and we looked up to see a lorry surging past, the passenger looking down into the car, laughing silently behind the glass of his cabin and using his middle and index finger to mime fucking. I pulled my hand away, and Oz’s hand drifted back down to the gearstick. ‘Bon voyage,’ he said and waved at them with ironic enthusiasm.

  I turned away from him, my ears burning with shame, and stared concentratedly at the hot countryside, listening to cars and lorries and – when we slowed at the final checkpoint to cross the border into West Germany – the shrill cry of grasshoppers in the dry grass by the side of the road.

  After Helmstedt, Oz pulled off the main road to Brunswick. We drove down a narrow country lane that turned into a trail, then wound up into high woodland. The canopy closed around us, the hot breeze brushing the leaves together like silk dragged across silk.

  Oz turned off into a clearing where he stopped the car and cut the engine. The ensuing silence slowly filled with the sounds of birds and the tick of the hot engine as it cooled. I could hear running water and smell sap, hot earth and hot dead leaves.

  ‘Where are we?’ I said.

  ‘It’s like this little wood on a hill,’ said Oz, pulling his keys out of the ignition. He reached over me, pulled open the glove compartment and tossed his sunglasses inside. They’d made a maroon ridge on the bridge of his nose. ‘Just somewhere to go for a walk. Unless you want to go into Hanover. Or Brunswick.’

  I shoo
k my head. ‘No, this is great.’

  I opened the door and climbed out. My T-shirt was stuck to my back and my underpants were uncomfortably bunched up beneath my shorts.

  ‘It’s just a wood. I stopped here once to have a wander – you can get really lost in there. I love woods.’

  ‘It’s the Lappwald,’ I said.

  ‘Is it?’ he said. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I read about it. There are some old watchtowers and the border passes through it.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s it. Sounds like you know more about it than I do.’

  ‘Have you got a route?’

  ‘No. I thought we could just wander.’

  ‘Fine by me,’ I said.

  We walked along forest paths, with steep banks covered in a stippled blanket of brown and ochre leaves. The foliage above formed a gauzy tunnel and the path below was unyielding, peppered with rocks and the perfect indentations of horses’ hooves set hard in the baked clay. The air was filled with buzzing insects that brushed our faces and the high whine and itch of mosquitoes, real and imagined.

  I saw some stone steps leading steeply up a bank and away from the path.

  ‘Let’s go up here,’ I said.

  ‘Oh,’ said Oz, out of breath. ‘OK. I don’t know what’s up there though.’

  ‘If we get high enough we’ll be able to look down over the Weser-Aller-Flachland; we’ll be able to see the slope.’

  ‘The what?’ he said, as I clambered up. The stone steps disappeared, were replaced with a yellow carpet of dying leaves and resinous pine needles. ‘I’ll show you,’ I said, my face to the slope, so that it came out echoless and close. Brambles snagged my T-shirt and shorts and whipped at my legs like switches. The tiny cuts became hot and itchy.

  We reached a clearing with a broken view east where, among the woods and fields, we could see patches of the barbed-wire barrier and a concrete watchtower peeping out of the green canopy.

  ‘This is great,’ I said, stopping, out of breath from the climb.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Oz, panting, unconvinced. ‘Sorry, what are we looking at?’

  ‘So this is all the Weser-Aller-Flachland,’ I said, stretching out my hand to mime its flatness. ‘We’re at the highest point on this hill, which is why it’s full of old watchtowers.’

  ‘And new ones,’ Oz said, nodding towards the East German border.

  ‘Yeah, so this whole plain is tilted,’ I said, showing him with my forearm. ‘Starting up here at Bremen at like seventy or eighty metres above sea level, and then it slopes down all the way to Magdeburg in East Germany, dropping slowly, slowly, like a tipped plate. You can even see it in the flora.’ I grabbed his shoulder and pointed it out, aware of the bone and muscle moving beneath the pink cotton. ‘We’re not quite high enough, but you can see a bit here at the tree line, and over there where the poplars are.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know what a poplar looked like.’

  ‘The tall skinny ones. Can you see? And this bit we’re standing on used to be a hollow too, but all of this land around us was flooded and washed away and then flooded and washed away again, leaving this bit sticking out. That’s called a horst – it’s the same word in English. That’s why there’s so much coal here – because of the flooding. This would’ve all been tropical. Can you imagine? Giant dragonflies and huge plants. Like the Bahamas with dinosaurs. It’s great for fossils.’

  Oz laughed.

  ‘What?’ I felt myself going red and on my pale, freckled skin it spread in an expansive wash over my cheeks and out of my collar.

  ‘No, it’s amazing,’ said Oz. ‘It’s … you’re so enthusiastic about it.’

  ‘But it is amazing. To me. And we get so bored with all the same spots in West Berlin. It’s amazing just to have that vista, you know.’

  Oz’s smile faded. Sweat was beading his forehead and had formed dark circles under the armpits of his T-shirt. His breathing had calmed, the whites of his eyes widened. A woodpecker thrummed at a tree trunk deep in the forest and my nose filled with the smell of hot dead foliage and the green breath of the trees. He took a step towards me. His shoe was very loud on the dry bed of twigs and leaves. I swallowed drily.

  He grabbed my T-shirt. I looked down at the material bunched in his fist as he put his other hand on the back of my head, and found his way to my mouth.

  My heart beat so loudly that I was afraid he could hear it. But then we were kissing and nothing happened, nothing but the kiss. The woodpecker continued to thrum and then the forest was still. There was just the noise of our kissing, and my heart, and the creak of the cotton of my T-shirt gathered up in his hand.

  Twelve

  We joined the queue of cars leading to the checkpoint into the East, past the hitchhikers holding up their thumbs and cardboard signs with areas of Berlin in wild biro letters: Friedenau, Wedding, Neukölln. I felt cut loose from the world, floating dangerously free. I thought of the East German refugee who, that spring, had built a balloon out of polythene and Sellotape in his East Berlin apartment, filled it with gas and floated over the Wall. He must have felt free, he must have felt elated for a few minutes in the cold night air before the makeshift balloon climbed and climbed and finally crumpled in the thin air, falling 2,000 metres, thumping into the manicured lawn of a Zehlendorf villa.

  ‘It seems funny to have a sign, when they could only be going to West Berlin,’ I said.

  ‘There are so many, it’s good to know if they’re going to exactly your part of town. And sometimes they’re going to Warsaw, or somewhere like that. Do you want to take someone?’

  I loved him asking me, as if I had a say in what he did in his own car. ‘No,’ I said.

  On the transit road, I watched the purple sky darkening over the fields and read the road signs for the exits that the East Germans were allowed to take into Bezirk Magdeburg. ‘What’s it famous for, Magdeburg?’ I said, not because I cared, but because I wanted to hear his voice.

  Oz looked up at the sign. ‘There’s a cathedral. And the Elbe runs through it. There’s a famous statue – the Magdeburg Rider.’

  ‘Why is it famous?’

  ‘Because of the poem.’

  ‘What poem?’

  ‘You know. “The auburn spray of hair entwined, the horse’s head appealing”.’

  I shook my head. ‘Never heard of it.’

  ‘Where the hell did you go to school?’

  ‘The British School. In Charlottenburg.’

  ‘Oh!’ he said. ‘That explains it. We all had to do it in German.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s one of those ones that’s easy to study. It’s about women and patriarchy and German history. Dream combination, if you’re a German teacher.’

  I yawned and stretched in my seat, pleasantly warm and tired. ‘Who’s it by?’

  ‘Ingrid Mandelbaum. My sister was very into her. Lots of female friendship, duty, pregnancy, that sort of thing. I think she was the first person to refer to menstruation in print.’

  ‘Really? That’s funny.’

  ‘She also translated lots of English poems. If you read anything Victorian and English, she’s almost always translated it.’

  ‘And she’s from Magdeburg?’

  ‘No. Berlin I think. But she died years ago; her husband was Jewish. They were all shipped off to Sachsenhausen or Auschwitz; one of the two. I can’t remember.’ He looked behind him and pulled out to overtake a lorry. ‘He had a sister too who was in parliament before the war, but I think she was gassed as well. There was an article about it in Die Zeit a few months back.’

  ‘That’s really sad.’

  ‘I know,’ said Oz. ‘The daughter was on the Kindertransport, though. She writes children’s books in London.’

  I smiled.

  ‘What?’ said Oz.

  ‘Just you and your books and your women’s poetry.’

  ‘As I said, we all had to do it. And my sister was the fan.’

  ‘How many brothers and sisters
do you have?’

  ‘Five sisters, one brother.’

  ‘Really? No wonder you know a lot about menstruation.’

  Oz chuckled.

  ‘Are they all … ’ I paused, unsure if I was phrasing it wrong, ‘Muslims?’

  He looked amused. ‘Of course. We’re Turkish. Did you not …? You noticed, right?’

  I hit him on the shoulder and he laughed.

  ‘But I mean, do you all do the praying and the headscarves?’

  ‘Well, I don’t wear a headscarf,’ said Oz.

  I rolled my eyes. ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘Yeah, I mean, one sister is married to a man called Cem, who no one likes. He’s from quite a devout family – that’s not why we don’t like him, by the way – he’s just a dick. And she wears a headscarf. But the others don’t and my mum only did when we had Dad’s family over from Turkey.’

  ‘Isn’t it weird never seeing your sister’s hair?’

  ‘Well, first, my sister’s hair isn’t that exciting, and, second, I do, because I’m her brother. She only wears the headscarf in front of strangers. Strangers who are men. You, though, are gonna miss out.’

  ‘Just my luck,’ I said.

  We passed the sign that read ‘Welcome to Berlin, the Internationally Recognised Capital of the German Democratic Republic’. The car slowed down to queue for the checkpoint and I thought about the men and women in the newspaper fleeing across the Hungarian border. As we passed into Berlin and were released from East German restrictions on speed and distance, Oz kicked down on the accelerator and the Mercedes sped over the baked tarmac of the AVUS motorway. I touched the luminous dials on the car radio. ‘I want to stay in here for ever.’

  ‘I know,’ said Oz. ‘Me too.’

  When we parked back on my street I didn’t move.

  ‘I’m sorry about your mum,’ Oz said. ‘Maybe you should just ask her about this guy.’

  I lay back in the seat and looked at him. In the dark of the car, his eyes were mahogany and flecked with the bluish light of the dying day. ‘That’s what I wanted to tell you,’ I said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The affair. It’s Tobias Rode. The neighbour you asked me about.’

  ‘Shit,’ he said. ‘So you have seen him doing something suspicious?’