Rupert Thomson - Katherine Carlyle

“It’s not so bad.”

“How long do you plan to stay there?”

“I’m not sure.” Once again I look down into my coffee cup.

His gaze lingers on me — I can feel it, like heat — then he glances at his watch. “I must go.” He stands up. “Will you be here tomorrow?”

“Probably.”

He extends a hand. “Klaus Frings.”

I know .

“I’m Katherine Carlyle,” I tell him. “Most people call me Kit.”

“Kit.” He nods, then turns away.

Through the window I watch him run across the road. I don’t think it’s because he’s in a hurry. I think it’s because he knows I’m watching and he wants to look active, young.

By the time I leave the café it’s after nine. I move through the city with no destination, no agenda, following whichever street takes my fancy. Unlike Rome, Berlin doesn’t seem to have any hills. The sky, though cloudy, feels immense. At midday I catch a bus going west and spend the afternoon walking in the Grünewald. As I circle the Teufelssee, a small lake hemmed in by pines and birches, a woman appears on the path ahead of me. She’s wearing a one-piece bathing suit. Her feet are bare. She puts a hand out to steady herself, steps down into the lake, and then stands still. The water cuts her off at the knees. Her bathing suit and the water are both black, which makes her white limbs look detached, dismembered. At last she bends down and pushes forwards, her freestyle neat and confident, almost hydraulic. The lake peels back behind her, and suddenly my head is empty but for a single thrilling intuition. The world will part before me. I’m on a smooth sweet path to everything that matters.

/

Towards the end of the afternoon, on Heerstrasse, I hail a taxi and ask the driver to take me to Café Einstein. We labor east, through heavy traffic. Mist hides the tops of buildings and blurs the brightly lit shop windows.

I passed the Einstein on my first morning, noting the name on the liver-colored canopies above each window, and the inside of the café is just as ornate as the exterior. The rooms have high molded ceilings and dark wood paneling, and the décor is old-world, all pale custard, clotted cream, and eau-de-nil. The waitresses wear starched white aprons that reach down to their ankles at the front, and the coffee is served in cups whose rounded rims are encircled with a band of gold. Sitting at a marble-topped table I look sideways. Infinite versions of myself curve off into the still green depths of a mirror.

I remember the time my father took me to a restaurant in Chinatown. This was during the winter when our house in Tufnell Park was up for sale. I would have been eight or nine. My father ordered Peking duck and chicken noodles. Afterwards, he bought me a gold cat with a paw that moved up and down in the air. He told me it would bring good fortune and I pretended to believe him, though I knew he had no time for lucky charms and wasn’t even remotely superstitious. I can still see the cat’s gold paw glinting and the red lanterns with their tasseled fringes swaying above the street. I can still remember the feeling of my hand in his. On our way home, as we stood on the lower deck of the bus, a man got on, his eyes so dark around the edges they looked burnt. He pointed a long trembling finger at us and said, You’re terminated . I looked at my father and we both began to laugh. Later, my father told me he thought the man was ill — he had got on at a bus stop outside a hospital — but it became our catchphrase. Until my mother heard it, that is. She had already been diagnosed with cancer by then, and she didn’t see the funny side. Turn around three times and spit. Both of you .

The waitress who takes my order has tawny hair that is pinned up in a chignon. Her features look chiseled but when she smiles her face lights up and softens. Strapped to her hip is a chunky leather wallet that bounces like a holstered pistol as she strides about. When she returns with my coffee I feel the urge to speak to her, though I can’t think of anything that isn’t superficial or mundane.

“I really like this place,” I say.

“It’s a strange place,” she says. “It has a history.” She tells me the villa was once the home of Goebbels’s mistress, a silent movie star, and also an illegal gambling den for SS officers.

I glance around but nothing of the past remains. “Despite all that, there’s something — I don’t know — relaxing about it.”

“Not if you work here.” The waitress smiles with her eyes. “Is this your first time?”

“Yes.”

“Did you see the garden?”

“No, not yet.”

“It’s at the back. It’s very nice to sit out there, especially in the summer.”

“I don’t think I’ll be here then.”

“That’s a shame.” She looks at me, her eyes seeming to narrow a little, as before. “Maybe you should come back — when the weather’s warmer.”

“I’d like to,” I say, “but it’s not so easy.”

“Oh.” Glancing down, she smooths her apron over her hips. “Well, anyway. Enjoy your stay.”

/

“I’ve been thinking,” Klaus says as he approaches my table.

It’s my fourth day in Berlin. The tree outside the café quivers in the wind, and a man hurries past, one hand pressed to the crown of his hat. Klaus is wearing a different overcoat, charcoal gray with black trim on the pockets and the collar, but his briefcase is the same, and judging by its ancient polished look I would guess it’s a family heirloom, since he doesn’t seem the type to go to flea markets. I ask him if he would like to join me.

He sets his briefcase on the floor and sits down. All his actions are deliberate, precise. I’m beginning to be able to imagine his apartment. It will be ordered, spartan. Meticulously clean.

“I’m glad you came.” He sounds faintly disgruntled, as if there’s an aspect of meeting me that he finds difficult.

“I like it here,” I say. “The other place I like is Café Einstein.”

“Ah yes. The Einstein is very well known. An institution, really. I haven’t been there for years.”

“Perhaps if you live here …”

“Yes, perhaps.”

The waitress brings his coffee. He glances up and thanks her. She’s dressed more discreetly today, in a black ribbed sweater with a high neck.

He turns back to me. “Where you’re staying, it’s not a good area.”

“I know. You told me that yesterday.”

He sighs.

“There’s a nightclub,” I say.

“And prostitutes. There are also prostitutes.”

I remember the idling car and the woman in her shiny boots. I remember the laughter in the middle of the night. The creaking. The hot-pink blinds.

“It’s not safe,” Klaus says. “For a woman.”

As I watch him over the rim of my coffee cup, both my elbows propped on the table, something lifts inside me. I think I know where this is going.

“The thing is, I have a big apartment —” He pauses, then plunges on. “You would have privacy.”

“I think you might have missed a sentence out.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Are you offering me a place to stay?”

“Oh, I see. Yes. That’s what I wanted to say.”

“Do you live alone?”

“Yes.”

“Do you have a girlfriend?”

He hesitates.

A voluptuous woman in a dark-green dress stands smoldering beside him, one hand on his shoulder. Valentina . The expression on her face is privileged, dismissive. In her eyes I’m just another girl who is on the make. I may have high cheekbones and good legs but my breasts are small. I’m not a threat to her. I’m too skinny.

“No,” Klaus says at last. “No girlfriend.”

I signal to the waitress that I want to pay. When I face Klaus again he looks fearful, almost panic-stricken. Perhaps he thinks he has failed to convince me, and that he has blown his chance. The woman in the dark-green dress is gone.