Rupert Thomson - Katherine Carlyle

I open my notebook. While I make a drawing of the Virgin’s hand, Pavlo tells me about the wanton destruction that took place during the years of the Red Terror. He once saw a piece of film footage in which Soviet officials emerge from a church with armfuls of icons, tear off the silver covers, and throw the actual icons onto a fire. He talks on. He’s a good talker, Pavlo. I imagine it comes in useful in his line of work. It might even be indispensable.

The gleam of gold leaf, the steady hum of the machine next door. The rain streaming down into the square.

Pavlo asks if I would like more coffee.

“No thanks,” I say. “I’m good.”

/

When I walk into Klaus’s apartment that evening I sense that he’s already home and that he has been waiting for me. The place fizzles with impatience; the air itself is on edge. Sitting in an armchair, he appears to be reading, but I’m sure he only opened the book when he heard my key turn in the lock and his eyes aren’t even focused on the page.

“You’ve been very kind to me, Klaus …”

In an attempt to avoid a gaze I know will be reproachful I move beyond him, to the window. The lights are on in the yellow gabled house across the street, but the rooms look empty.

“The time has come for me to leave,” I say.

“Where will you go?”

“Friedrichshain. I met someone who’s got an apartment there.”

“Who is he?”

“I didn’t say it was a he.”

“It is, though, isn’t it?”

“He’s like a father — or an uncle. He’s older.”

“Ah, so that was the problem. I wasn’t old enough.” Klaus laughs bitterly. “All this time you made me wait. You let me hope. Why didn’t you say something?”

I turn to face him. “How could I? I didn’t know.”

“Oh, you knew.”

“You’ve been lying to yourself,” I say. “You weren’t helping me or being generous. You were just out for what you could get.”

There’s an ominous silence during which he gathers himself. “If we’re telling the truth now, perhaps you’d be so good as to explain yourself.”

“Explain myself?”

He rises to his feet in stilted, loosely assembled sections, like a film of a dynamited chimney run backwards, then stands in front of me, swaying slightly, as if the film might start running forwards again, as if he might collapse. “Explain what’s been happening here,” he says.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

He grips my upper arm. “You and your games.”

I didn’t imagine he could be like this. My eyes drop to his hand but he doesn’t let go. If anything, his grip tightens.

“Does it excite you, being violent?” I say.

He releases my arm, then swings away, one hand reaching into his hair. When he speaks again, he has his back to me. “Did you honestly think I wouldn’t notice?”

All of a sudden he has a calm authority. This must be the voice his patients hear, when they’re undergoing those costly procedures.

“Notice what?” I say.

“Don’t act so innocent. I saw you follow me.”

I had no idea that he knew — that he has known all along. He kept it cleverly concealed. Perhaps he wanted to see what my intentions were. Or perhaps he felt empowered — emboldened — by the knowledge. My deception gave him license: any advantage he took would be justified, forgivable. What to say in my defense, though? I can’t tell him that he is merely a starting point. He will hardly want to hear about his relative insignificance, his disposability.

Before I can find an answer, he whirls round again. “Did she put you up to this?”

“Who?”

“Valentina.”

“I don’t know anyone called Valentina.” I push him away but he weighs almost twice as much as I do and he doesn’t move more than a step. “Who’s Valentina? Your girlfriend?”

Something in him seems to sour or curdle and he looks at the floor.

“You told me you were single,” I say.

“I could have you right now.” His voice has thickened. “I’d be within my rights —”

I stare at him.

“And afterwards I could kill you,” he says. “Do away with you. No one would know.”

You can never guess what lies behind the face a man presents you with, but it doesn’t surprise me and I’m not frightened. This is part of what I signed up for when I bought a ticket to Berlin. I don’t dare laugh at Klaus, though I’m tempted to. I still have to extricate myself. I need to think of an explanation, one that will make sense to him. No one does things for no reason.

I slap him so hard that his whole head jars. His cheek reddens, and blood blooms on his bottom lip.

“I’m sorry,” I say.

He leans over, cupping a hand below his chin, as if he expects a deluge. I leave the room, returning moments later with some kitchen roll.

“Thank you,” he says.

He’s docile, repentant. He seems to accept the fact that he was in the wrong.

“If I told you the story you wouldn’t believe it,” I say. “By this time tomorrow I’ll be gone. You won’t see me again.”

He sighs, then disappears into the kitchen, where he rinses his mouth with cold water. When he comes back, I’m sitting down.

“You don’t have to leave,” he says.

“OK, it’s true,” I tell him. “I followed you.”

“So I was right.”

“I thought you looked interesting, but I didn’t think I’d talk to you.” I consider him dispassionately, as if trying to rediscover that initial urge, the first tingle of curiosity. “I suppose I wanted to find out what kind of person you were. Sometimes you see people — in a café, or on the street — and you start wondering what they do, where they live, what their lives are like …”

“You don’t usually follow them.” His voice is gentler, and more understanding. There’s even the suggestion of a rueful smile on his face. He believes me.

I push my hair back behind my shoulder but don’t say anything. I simply let the new conciliatory mood establish itself.

“You thought I looked interesting,” he says quietly, after a long silence.

“Is that so strange?”

He gazes at me steadily and I know what’s going through his mind. And now? What about now? Do you still think I look interesting?

“How old are you?” I ask.

“Thirty-seven.” His large face lurches away from me. “Age doesn’t matter.”

My eye falls on the painting that cost him half his annual salary, and in that moment I think I understand what makes it good. Although I’m aware that the artist built the picture up slowly, layer by layer — Klaus told me as much — there isn’t a trace of effort or persistence in the finished product. It appears to have come into being in a finger snap. Glossy, smooth, and two-dimensional, its subject is the surface — the power of the superficial — but at the same time it’s an exercise in concealment, inscrutability.

/

Ostkreuz. Apartment buildings line both sides of the narrow street. Five or six stories high, their scabby grayish-brown facades are busy with graffiti. In the distance a red cross flashes on and off. APOTHEKE. I pass beneath a railway bridge. A train curves out of the east. Windows slide past, filled with brooding sky, and the stench of burnt rubber and electrics stings my nostrils. It’s hardly the kind of area where you’d expect to find a rich American.

Cheadle’s apartment is on the ground floor of one of the more run-down buildings. I press the buzzer several times. At last the outer door snaps open.

“Misty?”

His voice comes from the gloom beyond the metal lift-cage. I drag my suitcase down the hall, over broken brown-and-yellow tiles. Cheadle stands in a doorway in his raincoat, like a man expecting a storm. His eyes look muddy, and he smells of beer and tobacco.