Rupert Thomson - Katherine Carlyle

“Are you free tomorrow night?” Oswald is eyeing me, head cocked, thumbs stuck in the belt hooks of his jeans.

“I don’t know,” I say. “I’m involved in some negotiations at the moment.”

“I thought you were a tourist —”

“And anyway, I can’t constantly be doing you favors.”

“It’s not a favor.” He scuffs the ground with the side of his shoe. “I’d like to show you something. I think you might be interested.”

I ask for his number. The fact that I don’t have a mobile surprises him — everyone has mobiles — but I choose not to explain. He scribbles his contact details on a piece of paper. I’ll call, I tell him, though I don’t say when.

As I turn away he says my name. I glance over my shoulder. With his flushed neck and his wrinkled black shirt he looks scorched, as if he just escaped from a burning building.

“You haven’t asked me what was in the bag,” he says.

“That’s true,” I say. “I haven’t.”

“Aren’t you curious?”

Other people’s mysteries — I’ve got no time for them. I’ve got too many of my own.

“It’s your business, isn’t it?” I say.

Then I walk on.

/

When I approach my hotel an hour later, a white car with a green stripe down the side is parked out the front. POLIZEI, it says. Police. My mouth is dry and I pause beneath a tree. Surely it can’t be me they’re looking for. Not so soon. I take a breath and push through the glass door. In reception two officers are questioning the woman who runs the place. She hands my key over and I move on down the corridor. A silence expands behind me and I sense the policemen watching me but they don’t call out for me to stop.

Back in my room I turn the TV on. My German isn’t bad — with Oswald I remembered the word for negotiations — but I need to become more fluent. On the news they discuss Angela Merkel’s chances of winning a third term in office. Later, there are bulletins about preparations for the Oktoberfest and about pollution in rivers. I think of all the e-mails, tweets, and text messages piling up inside my phone, or circling in the infinite expanses of the Web, unable to reach their destination, like planes kept in a holding pattern above an airport. My father likes to talk about traveling in the seventies and eighties, and how you would lose all contact with those you left behind. You might write postcards, he says, or letters, but you never used the phone, not unless it was a real emergency. When you were gone, you were really gone . It’s different for you, he says. You were born into a world where people communicate nonstop. It’s not a choice. It’s a habit — a necessity. Like breathing.

At eleven o’clock I switch the TV off. Outside, a heavy rain is coming down. I leave my room again. When I pass reception I ask the woman what the police wanted. They were looking for illegal immigrants, she says.

On the pavement I look up into the sky. The rain turns copper-colored as it drops through the light of a streetlamp. I open my umbrella. People are queueing on the other side of the road, and I can hear the thud of a bass line, fast and muffled, dull. The purple building seems to shake.

“Hey.”

A scrawny man peers into my face, his eyes hard and shiny, like ball bearings, a crooked fence of teeth. I move away, towards the railway bridge. He shouts after me, words I don’t understand. The bass notes fade. A train screeches in the dark.

I walk for an hour. The rain has driven most people indoors. At a T-junction near Potsdamerstrasse a woman leans against a wall, thigh-high patent-leather boots, gold handbag dangling from one shoulder. A car idles by the curb. I turn the corner. In the next street a balloon that says HAPPY BIRTHDAY is caught in the upper branches of a tree. When I think about how I came into the world, my body starts to throb. It’s like toothache, but all over. After eight years in a storage tank I was finally lifted into blinding daylight, a foretaste of the birth that was to come. They moved me from one thawing solution to another — T1, T2, T3, T4 — then put me in an incubator. I had been there before, of course. This was the place where I divided. Cleaved . But everything was different this time round. I was being prepared for implantation. I experienced a gradual loss of control, a delicious incontinence. I was unfurling, expanding. Taking shape. A sudden, hectic tumble into life. My cells were yellow — a healthy yellow — and the heat coursing through me triggered urgency and purpose. It wasn’t my decision to feel hopeful. Hope happened to me. And then the warm red darkness of my mother’s womb …

Later that night, as I lie in bed with the lights off, I hear distant yelling.

The scrawny man picking a fight.

Police arresting immigrants.

/

When I enter the café on Giesebrechtstrasse the following morning, Klaus Frings is already there, sitting at the same table as before. I take the table next to him and order a double espresso. Klaus leafs through his paper, seemingly oblivious to everybody else. Though his overcoat and reading glasses look expensive, I don’t see him as a businessman. He could be an architect, I’m thinking, or the curator of a small museum. I’m so focused on him and speculating so intently that I’m surprised he doesn’t sense my presence, but his eyes don’t leave the page, not even when he reaches for his coffee.

My espresso arrives. It’s time I made contact and I choose an obvious opening, the one least likely to arouse suspicion.

“Could you pass the sugar?”

He looks at me over the top of his glasses, his eyes wary, almost hostile, and I remember that this is a man who has recently been jilted. He might be feeling resentful towards women at the moment. He might have it in for all of us. Or perhaps it’s simply that he dislikes being interrupted.

“The sugar?” I say again, more gently.

“Of course.” He hands me the bowl.

Thanking him, I select two brown sugar lumps, drop them into my coffee, and pass the bowl back to him. “I’m sorry,” I say. “My German’s hopeless.”

“Not at all.” The angle of his head alters. “You were here yesterday.”

I smile but say nothing.

“What are you doing in Berlin?” He puts his paper down. “Are you a student?”

“Not exactly.” I lower my eyes, looking at my coffee. I imagine the sugar lumps dissolving — a thin layer of crystals on the bottom, and the hot bitter darkness overhead. “No one knows I’m here. In Berlin, I mean.”

“You’ve run away?”

“I’m nineteen. Nearly twenty.”

He looks past me, towards the door. “I didn’t mean —”

“It doesn’t matter. I can’t really go into detail, though. Let’s just say that I’m experimenting with coincidence.”

“Is that what this is — a coincidence?”

I give him a quick look. Has the Englishwoman been on the phone to him? We ran into this girl the other day — at the cinema … But no, why would she mention me? Above all, why would she mention me to him ? I didn’t even hint that I might be interested in her friend, Klaus Frings — and besides, it’s clear from his expression that he’s teasing me.

“So where do you live when you’re not” — and he pauses — “experimenting?”

“Rome.”

“Ah. That explains the tan.” He appears to think for a moment, leaning back in his chair, one hand massaging the back of his neck. “Are you staying in the neighborhood?”

“No.” I mention the hotel where I have spent the last two nights. He hasn’t heard of it, which is hardly a surprise. I tell him where it is. His frown returns.

“That’s not a good area. At night it can be —” He doesn’t want to say it. The word dangerous .