Rupert Thomson - Katherine Carlyle

His face is blunt and dented as a boxer’s and his hair is thinning, wild. He’s probably about my father’s age but he has lived a very different life.

“I want to show you something,” he says.

First Oswald, now this stranger in a plastic coat. Everybody wants to show me something.

I hesitate. “But my friend —”

“He’s still inside?”

“Yes.”

“You’ll be back in five minutes. Ten at the most.” Mock-gallant, he places his hand on his heart. “I give you my word.”

We cross the Gendarmenmarkt. Turning right, then left, we emerge into another spacious paved area, bordered on the east side by the Staatsoper. According to the American, the opera house is closed for renovation work. In front of us, fifty meters away, a ghostly fan of light rises from the ground, reminding me of the photo booth in Hauptbahnhof Zoo. Portraits of me with my eyes closed, as if asleep or dead.

“That’s where we’re going,” he says.

Set in the middle of the square and flush with the paving stones is a thick glass pane. I stop at the edge. Beneath the pane is a brightly lit white room, its walls lined with shelves that are pristine, empty.

“This marks the place where the Nazis burned the books,” the man tells me. “One of the places, anyway. Forty thousand people gathered here to watch.”

The crackle of a fire. Pages lift, then shrivel.

The man looks away into the sky again. “In those days, the square was called Opernplatz, after the opera house. Now it’s named after August Bebel, one of the writers whose work was thrown into the flames.”

I stare down into the empty room. “If you keep looking you start to see a library.”

He nods. “Maybe that’s the whole idea.”

As he walks me back to the Gendarmenmarkt I ask what line of work he’s in.

“Import-export,” he says.

“I don’t know what that means.”

“I thought you knew everything.”

I give him a look. We’re acting as if we know each other, as if we’ve known each other for years, but he only walked out of the darkness half an hour ago.

“It’s an umbrella term,” he says. “Right now, I’m working with a bunch of Russians.” Outside the Konzerthaus, he turns to face me. “The city’s full of Russians.”

I sense a stirring inside me as if my body is a room with all its windows open and a breeze has just blown in. At that moment people come spilling down the steps. The concert is over. The man stands his ground, forcing the crowd to flow round him. Klaus appears, his mobile pressed to his ear.

“I’ve been looking for you everywhere,” he says.

“Did you think I’d gone?”

He puts his phone away. “No. I don’t know.”

“I came outside. I needed air.”

“You didn’t get cold?”

“No.”

The man gives Klaus a look that is challenging and oddly resolute, but Klaus doesn’t notice. Either that or he chooses to ignore it. Somehow it doesn’t feel right to introduce the two men to each other. I hardly know them myself.

“I called a taxi,” Klaus says.

As he turns away to scan the street, the man in the raincoat hands me a small white card. Putting his thumb to his ear and his forefinger to his cheek, he signals that I should call him, then he winks at me and walks away.

“Who was that man?” Klaus asks later, as we pass the Hotel Adlon.

I tilt the card so the streetlights play over it. “J. Halderman Cheadle,” I say, “apparently.”

“You met him tonight?”

I nod. “He’s some kind of messenger, I think.”

“Messenger?”

“He’s got something to tell me. That’s why he was there.” I look out of the window as the taxi accelerates past the Gedächtniskirche and on into the Ku’damm. “The weird thing was, he seemed to know it. They don’t usually know.”

“The way you talk.” Klaus gives a little exasperated waggle of his head. “You sound like a spy.”

I lean back, green and yellow neon streaming through the inside of the car. “So how was the Tchaikovsky?”

/

I meet Oswald on Tuesday evening, as planned, under the sign with the frankfurters and the flames. He tells me it’s a famous Treffpunkt — a meeting place — especially after hours. If you come at three in the morning you see millionaires, porn stars, criminals. He indicates the menu on the back wall. That should give me some idea, he says. Though the place functions as a fast-food outlet, offering the usual Currywurst and pommes-frites , I notice that Russian vodka is available, and Scotch, and even, at a price, Dom Perignon. All very interesting, but I have to remind Oswald, after a while, that I only agreed to meet him because he had something to show me. Unless, of course, this is it.

“No, no.” He laughs, then motions to me, and we walk to the nearest S-Bahn station, at Savignyplatz.

Once we’re on the train, I ask him where he’s from. He grew up in the south, he tells me. Near Stuttgart. His parents are still there. They’re really old. His father’s eighty-one. Even his mother’s seventy. I ask how old he is. Twenty-eight, he says, then nods firmly, as if he just split into two different people, one who reveals information, another who confirms its authenticity. It’s an irritating habit. I ask if he has any brothers and sisters. Three brothers, he says. They’re much older — more like uncles. His parents weren’t expecting him. He was an accident. His mouth twists awkwardly. He’s attempting a grin, but his feelings are too complex and it comes out wrong.

Rush hour is over and we’re alone in the carriage. Every time the train slows for a station, the brakes squeal and grate. Sometimes the overhead power lines give off a bright mauve-silver flash. I put my face close to the window. There are no buildings anymore, only mile after mile of scrubby heath or parkland.

“They didn’t know what to do with me,” Oswald says. “I always felt guilty — you know, for turning up like that.”

“I was a miracle,” I say, startling myself.

“How do you mean?”

As we rattle through the darkness I tell him I was conceived by IVF, then frozen as an embryo.

Oswald is silent for a moment, looking at his hands. “At least your parents wanted you.”

“That’s true,” I say. “Up to a point.”

He doesn’t understand, and I choose not to explain. Just then there’s a whiplash crackle from the power lines and he peers through the window. “This is our stop.”

The sign on the platform says GREIBNITZSEE.

We hurry down a flight of stairs, then through a damp drafty tunnel. Outside the station is a parked truck with a bottle of Pilsner on the side.

Oswald beckons and we begin to walk. We pass a row of silver birches, metallic in the moonlight, and mansions with locked gates and darkened windows. The air is pungent with turned soil and fallen leaves.

“It smells like the country,” I say.

“There are lakes out here,” he tells me. “There are beaches. In the summer you can swim —”

A cock crows in the distance. So far, I have gone along with his idea, despite the fact that it has involved a journey to the very limits of the city. But now, finally, I’m growing impatient. This whole thing feels like a waste of time.

“Where are you taking me?”

“Don’t worry. We’re almost there.”

The houses become more modest — cut logs stacked against a garage wall, a rowboat covered with a moldy tarpaulin. We pass a gate, its upright metal staves shaped like feathers. The wind lifts. I can smell pine resin and something makes me think of winter. A tingle goes through me, behind my pubic bone.

“Will it snow soon?” I ask.

“Not yet,” he says. “Not until November.”