Rupert Thomson - Katherine Carlyle

Towards dawn we collapse onto a park bench in Wilmersdorf. The sky is a marbled gray, like the endpapers in an old rare book. My legs ache and my stomach feels hollow. I haven’t eaten anything for eighteen hours. Oswald leans over, studying his pictures. Our faces have a radiance that makes us both look famous.

“When I first saw you,” he says, “my heart felt really strange.” He darts a look at me. “Like it was too big for my body.”

When I first saw you … I let out a sigh. It’s not that it’s not nice to hear, not that I’m spoiled, or arrogant, or vain. It’s just that people keep saying things and then expecting something in return, as if their compliments are a password or a payment, as if they are themselves ingenious and brave and deserve to be rewarded, and maybe they are, maybe they do, but I’m tired of it. I’m beginning to think that what I might be looking for is a place where things are no longer being said, where people don’t talk at all — or if they do, not in a language I understand. My body twitches, as it often does when I’m on the brink of sleep.

“What is it?” Oswald asks.

“Nothing,” I say.

He has just given me an idea.

/

By the time I let myself into the apartment on Walter-Benjamin-Platz, Klaus has already left for work. I find a note propped on the breakfast bar — Are you all right? Call me. Klaus — but there’s another call I have to make first, a call that is more pressing. I open my wallet and lift Cheadle’s card towards my nose. The earthy mushroom odor of an old man’s trouser pocket. I dial his number.

“Who’s this?” Behind Cheadle’s voice is a rushing sound, like taps running. His German accent is dreadful.

“It’s the girl from the Konzerthaus,” I say in English.

“How are you doing, Misty?”

Misty ? I’m about to correct him when I realize that being called something different might be useful. Misty isn’t a name I would have chosen, or even thought of, but at least it has no personal associations for me.

“Misty?” he says.

“I’m still here.” That watery sound again. “Are you in the bath?”

“I’m under a flyover, in Spandau.”

I picture him with a mobile clamped to the side of his boxer’s head, the gray plastic raincoat flapping round his knees. On the margins — that’s where he belongs. He’s like a character from a painting by Edward Hopper. Or George Grosz.

“So what can I do for you?” he says.

“I’d like to meet some Russians.”

“That could be arranged.” His voice swirls, breaks up, and then returns. “Call me tomorrow.”

I turn his card on the black granite surface of the breakfast bar. “What’s the J stand for?”

“The J ?”

“In your name.”

“Jeremiah.”

“Sounds kind of biblical.”

“The prophet Jeremiah. Much maligned.” Cheadle clears his throat. “We’ll talk tomorrow.”

I end the call.

Misty . Now I think about it I’m surprised I didn’t choose an alias myself, before I landed in Berlin. It’s not just the way it rubberstamps my break with the past. It’s the sense of release that comes with it. In The Passenger Jack Nicholson is David Locke, a reporter, but his real journey begins when he appropriates a dead man’s identity, an arms dealer known as Robertson. A new name will force me to re-create myself. It might also make me harder to follow, harder to find.

I google “Jeremiah” on Klaus’s home computer. Jeremiah was a prophet, just as Cheadle said. He warned the Israelites that unless they changed their ways they would face destruction and exile. They didn’t listen. Driven to extremes, Jeremiah walked the street with a yoke around his neck. He was thrown into a pit to die. In the end he was proved right.

Jeremiah , I think. Then I think, Misty .

I erase the history of my searches and click Sleep .

/

That evening, while exploring Klaus’s shelves, I come across a book called Farewell to an Idea . The title speaks to me directly, as songs often do. The book is about modernism — Cézanne, Picasso, Jackson Pollock — and its title is taken from a poem by Wallace Stevens. Farewell to an idea … The cancellings / The negations are never final. The father sits / In space, wherever he sits, of bleak regard … My throat constricts. Like the title, the poem seems to exist especially for me.

I have only been reading for a few minutes when I hear a key turn in the lock. I have been living with Klaus for nearly a week and he always comes home at roughly the same time — certainly never later than seven-thirty. I glance at my watch. It’s five past ten.

Removing his coat, he throws it over the back of his chrome-and-leather Barcelona chair, then walks into the kitchen and opens the fridge. He has been to a vernissage , he says. In Prenzlauerberg.

“Perhaps I should have invited you. I wasn’t thinking. I’m sorry.” He waves a bottle in my direction. “Some wine?”

“No, thank you.”

“You’re sure?” He pours himself a glass and takes a gulp. “Not even to keep me company?” Shoulders hunched, arms held away from his sides as if his armpits are wet, it’s obvious that he has been drinking.

I ask him if he has eaten.

He looks at the floor, ruffling his hair. “Only crisps.”

We decide on a take-away.

He rings a Thai restaurant and orders. When the call is over he asks me whether I have ever been to Thailand. “I know nothing about you,” he says, not waiting for the answer. “Nothing.” His face opens in wonder. He seems to find his ignorance exhilarating.

“I’m nineteen,” I tell him. “There isn’t much to know.”

“Nineteen? I forgot. I was thinking you were older.” He drinks more wine, emptying his glass. “All the same. I’m sure things have happened.”

It’s Adefemi who I see just then, on a wet night in May. We’re sitting on his faded pink sofa, my hands in his. I’m telling him how much I love him. But he’s my first, and I’m still young, and so I have to leave. I was seventeen when we met — he was four years older — and though I adored him from the first I always knew he couldn’t be the only person I ever loved. It’s the timing that’s all wrong, I tell him, not the feeling. He looks down at my hands. Nods slowly. Rain falling in the courtyard, both of us in tears.

“I’ve changed my mind about that drink,” I say.

“Good. I’m glad.” Klaus fetches the bottle and a fresh glass. “How was your day?”

“I slept for most of it. I was tired.”

Klaus fills my glass almost to the brim. “Were you out all night?”

“Yes. I had to meet someone. I didn’t know it would take so long. I thought I’d be home much earlier.”

He notices that I said “home,” and his face glows briefly, but he doesn’t realize how little the word means to me. It can be earned in a matter of moments.

I walk to the window with my drink, stopping when I’m close enough to feel the cold coming off the glass. I can see my own reflection; I’m made of shadows. The living room floats behind me, areas of bright gold suspended in the darkness, like a ghost ship or a distant galaxy. I see Klaus approach. He thinks I haven’t noticed. He thinks I’m looking at the view.

“When we met in the café,” he says, “on Giesebrechtstrasse, you told me that no one knows you’re here …”

“That’s right,” I say, but I don’t turn round.

“Is that really true? No one?”

“Yes.”

He moves into the space directly behind me, a second presence, inked in, opaque. He’s so close that I can feel the outer edges of his force field. I imagine tentacles or stamens. They are clammy, pulpy — the color of polenta.