An Honest Man Read online

  In 1989 my family – my parents and my younger brother – lived at Windscheidstraβe 53, a nineteenth-century apartment block in Charlottenburg. The ornate plaster façade had been damaged during the war and covered over with flat brown render, but past the large wood-and-glass door, everything was original: the tiled hallway, the grey wood of the staircase treads, the elaborate plasterwork on the ceiling still visible beneath a thick layer of paint, the colour of chickens’ eggs.

  I passed the staircase and wheeled my bike through the back door into the courtyard. Like most Berlin apartment blocks, the flats were built around a central space, with larger flats, like ours, on the street side and smaller, cheaper flats in the side and back building, all looking down into this inner core. Here too, the grubby plaster walls and windows were original, except for the top-floor flat at the back, which had a gap, like a missing tooth, where a bomb blast had knocked out a single room. I often wondered about that gap; wondered if anyone had been in there asleep, the only person to be killed in the whole block. I suppose, back then, such accidents were commonplace.

  I tucked my bike beneath the green-mossed bitumen roof that covered the bike racks and bins. The cracked concrete beneath my feet was covered in white pigeon droppings, also sprayed celestially across the dark ivy that carpeted the flowerbed beneath the horse chestnut. The pigeons cooed above my head, where the tree’s wide leaves brushed together, cooling the air and making the light on my skin aphid green.

  There was a baker on the ground floor of the front building and the air smelt deliciously of bread. I could hear Herr Klee’s rattling cough coming from the second floor and the agricultural chuckle of his humidifier. And I could hear someone’s awkward steps on the front staircase, which at that time of day would usually have been one of my mum’s patients. But I knew it was Tobias Rode, the neighbour that Oz was watching, because he walked with a limp, and the melody of his rocking gait – slap-thud, slap-thud, slap-thud – was one of the happiest sounds of my adolescence. Tobias was a viola player with soft strawberry-blond hair who’d fled the East and arrived in our building when I was seven, and he was the first person I’d ever fallen in love with.

  It hadn’t felt like a revelation at the time, and the truth is it hadn’t bothered me at all. I didn’t feel ashamed about it, though I was aware it was something I wouldn’t be able to talk about until I was very grown up, perhaps at university. It hadn’t crossed my mind that I could actually do anything about it, with Tobias or anyone else.

  Even after I fell in love with Maike, there didn’t seem to be any reason to put an end to my imaginary affair with Tobias. I didn’t see that there would be any consequences to separating these things off – it was just a trick of the imagination. At school, I would joke with the rest of the kids about the teachers who we thought were ‘benders’, coughing ‘poofter’ whenever Mr Lawson, the French teacher, turned his back on us. It didn’t occur to me that this was hypocritical, even when Kevin Cuddon drew a penis on Mr Lawson’s door and I took the permanent marker from his hand to add, ‘Sailors get it here.’ Masturbating at night, while dreaming of a soft knock at my door, the sound of Tobias’s belt buckle striking the parquet as his trousers came down, the first touch of the long amber hairs on his bare chest, was just fantasy. But pouring so much youthful emotion into a part of my brain that I’d dammed up had left it in danger of bursting.

  Tobias played his viola in the afternoon, and for me, who’d only ever heard the scraping of violins in the primary-school orchestra, the shuddering vibrato was intensely melancholy and beautiful. He was in his late twenties, always friendly, charmingly unselfconscious, wearing loose collarless shirts, shorts and Birkenstocks. In winter, his woollen jumpers had holes in them. And as patronising as I know it now sounds, his limp gave him a sweet vulnerability that I found delightful.

  I could see the windows of his apartment from our kitchen, and as a young teenager would sit in the dark watching him read, smoke, drink coffee and listen to records. Sometimes he brought women home. They might have been friends from the orchestra, they might have been lovers. It didn’t bother me either way – it made him all the more unattainable, and thus a perfect fantasy.

  I’d been caught in these lovelorn stakeouts twice: once by my younger brother and once by Stefan. My brother was easily put off the scent with a punch to the shoulder, but Stefan was more suspicious. Sick with shame, I blurted out that I thought Tobias was an East German agent and that he was spying on our apartment, because Mum used to work for the British Army. I don’t think Stefan ever really believed me, but the idea was captivating enough for a thirteen-year-old in Cold War West Berlin to want to play along.

  My lie had a huge and unexpected benefit. For two years, whenever he came over, Stefan wanted to play spies. If he spotted that Tobias was in, Stefan turned the lights off and we watched him together. For my fourteenth birthday, Stefan gave me binoculars and a journalist’s notebook, and entreated me to keep a log of Tobias’s comings and goings. There were further notebooks and many nights huddled in the dark with Stefan and me watching Tobias eating black bread and pre-sliced cheese while he read the newspaper. He did many things that appeared suspicious to us – taking calls late at night, leaving the flat at strange times of the day, burning notes in his ashtray – but of course, as teenage boys, we had no idea what the lives of single, adult men looked like, and whether these were the normal comings and goings of a cultured bachelor.

  As we neared sixteen, Stefan lost interest in the project. But I still had the books, and often sated my longing for Tobias when he was touring with his orchestra by leafing through the heavily imprinted biro letters describing his quotidian movements. And whenever Stefan was round and caught me looking at the apartments on the opposite side of the courtyard, I was always able to say, ‘Just keeping an eye on Comrade Rode.’

  Tobias limped into the sunny courtyard from the front building and smiled at me. ‘Ralf!’ he said.

  ‘Hi, Tobias.’ I had thought about how I was going to formulate the revelation that Tobias was being spied on by his landlord. ‘You know what I found out today?’ I was going to start with, enjoying his confusion as I built up to the revelation. But with my hands shoved casually into the pockets of my shorts, I was able to stroke the edge of Oz’s card and recall his sweet frowning smile. I couldn’t quite imagine myself actually cycling to Eisenacher Straße for the promised book, but I didn’t want to betray Oz and kill off any of the blissful impossibilities that the morning had suggested. So I said, ‘You don’t sublet your flat, do you?’

  Tobias frowned. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Why?’

  ‘I just read something about it. About how landlords are cracking down.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said, confused.

  I smiled. This was enough, wasn’t it? If something happened, I could always say I’d asked. And if he was illegally subletting, then at least I’d sown the seed that it might not be a good idea. ‘Did you want to get your key?’ I said. We had swapped keys after he’d come over for dinner at ours the second time, and since then we had emptied his letter box when the orchestra was touring and he had watered our plants when we were on holiday.

  Baffled again, he laughed. ‘My key? Ralf, what are you talking about? I feel like I’ve gone senile.’

  ‘Wasn’t that you coming down the front stairs?’

  ‘Oh,’ he said, and then, for the first time in six years of spying on him, I caught him in a real lie. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I just got in.’

  I was looking forward to telling Stefan about this slip-up, not believing for a moment that Tobias really was up to anything suspicious. All those years of playing at espionage had inured me to it.

  ‘Dear Herr Rode!’ It was Frau von Hildendorf at the window of her ground-floor flat. She had been an actress in the Fifties and thickly painted her ancient face with the bright make-up of that era, missing the true lines of her wrinkled lips, eyes and jaw. Her arm, all tendon, gripped the edge of her open window frame, and she
said, ‘You promised me thirty minutes of your viola. You absolutely promised.’

  ‘Can I knock in ten?’

  ‘Of course,’ the old woman said drunkenly. ‘I’m expecting a visit any time soon from my friend Eve Harris. She’s in town for a play, but I haven’t been able to get hold of her. She might call, though. If you can bear the interruption.’

  ‘I can bear it,’ Tobias said.

  He could bear it, because Eve Harris’s presence had been anticipated for decades and she had never arrived.

  ‘She should have been less in the movies in the Sixties anyway,’ Frau von Hildendorf said. ‘Theatre’s her true talent, but the money. Mein Gott, the money over there.’

  ‘Ten minutes,’ Tobias repeated. He winked at me and hobbled across the courtyard to the back building. Frau von Hildendorf slammed her window shut – she had no interest in teenage boys – and I listened to Tobias slowly climbing the stairs to his apartment, wondering if he had ever seen me staring at him from the kitchen window. The thought terrified me.

  Five

  There were two front doors on the second-floor landing and they both belonged to us. The story went that my German great-grandparents had bought the flats after the war and knocked them through into one large apartment. When her husband died, my great-grandmother locked the adjoining door in her kitchen and rented out the rest of the flat to a very short obstetrician called Dr Geisler in order to pay off the remaining mortgage. Despite the loud and deeply private conversations that Dr Geisler had behind the door about failed episiotomies and prolapsed uteri, Oma refused to wall it up, intending, until the day she died, to annex the old rooms again once she had the money. When my parents moved into the flat a few years before I was born, Dr Geisler was already an old man, but they still heard him behind the door having brief but loving conversations with his children. By the time the same children moved him into a home, my mother had qualified as a psychotherapist, and gave up her secretarial work with the British Army, taking over Dr Geisler’s rooms for her practice. The convenience of the door was suddenly a blessing.

  My mother specialised in sexual disorders and relationship problems. Grandad – Mum’s dad – had been a doctor in the British Army and his final posting had been a long stint in Berlin. My mother did her A levels at the school I had just left and then worked part-time as a secretary at the military hospital during the four years she was studying psychology at the Freie Universität. She stayed on at the British hospital even after Grandad retired, because she had met my father by then. Her secretarial work kept them afloat while she completed her training and my father qualified as a pharmacist.

  Learning her lesson from Dr Geisler, Mum re-arranged the flat, setting up her consulting room in his old living room and using the room behind the adjoining door in our kitchen for her waiting room. This was the only room we could clearly hear into from the kitchen, and then only if the couples were arguing in English or German. We rarely saw the patients, because they came up the front stairs and through Dr Geisler’s old front door. If we did leave as they were arriving, they couldn’t know from the nameplates on the doors that we were their therapist’s children, because my mother practised under her maiden name, Rees.

  Our flat was empty when I entered, but something felt different or smelt different; the air didn’t have the right quality, that stale coolness it usually had if I arrived home before anyone else. I looked about the hall for signs of intrusion, my eyes dancing over the many remnants of the building’s former grandeur: the plaster ceilings; the gently undulating parquet floor in the central hall; the gloss-painted double windows with their brass handles; the high wooden doors.

  I moved silently to the kitchen. My father had put it in in the Seventies, my parents’ first purchase with the money he’d made from his first job. The cupboards were varnished pine, the tiles brown-speckled cream, intermittently enclosing a sunflower in golden yellow, brown and orange. There was a large table permanently covered with a wipe-clean plastic tablecloth studded with sunflowers. There were benches either side of the table, and in the corner of the room a ceiling-high cheese plant, its bulk supported with greying twine nailed to the wall.

  The large coffee-coloured fridge with long chrome handles, bought second-hand from an American family in Dahlem, was plastered with photographs and childish drawings that spilled out onto the cream walls, above which a profusion of coloured brushstrokes, red, green and blue, betrayed a plan, never enacted, to introduce a less autumnal hue into the kitchen.

  I heard a sleepy knocking and realised that the adjoining door into Mum’s practice was unlocked and being bounced by the breeze against the jamb. I stepped through into the alternate universe of her waiting room, with its smoked-glass coffee table piled with battered copies of Stern, Geo and Bunte and said:

  ‘Mum?’

  ‘Here,’ she replied.

  I found her at her desk reading from a stack of files, the first sheet held high in her hand, the others beneath her fingers on the desk. The light from the high double windows lit her cropped red hair from behind, turning it the colour of gingerbread. Her small freckled face, with its wide olive eyes, was a parody of concentration, her eyebrows pulled together and her mouth an open O.

  She was still in her work clothes, an ankle-length grey skirt high on her waist and a smooth silk top with globular pearlescent buttons. The buttons were undone to the top of her bra, exposing the heavily freckled skin below her straight clavicle, and she had kicked off her leather pixie boots. It looked as if she had been distracted by her notes in the middle of undressing. She was only half sitting on the chair; one leg was stretched out beside her, her slim ankle and foot resting dramatically on the smooth parquet like a dancer’s.

  ‘The door was open,’ I said. She usually had patients until seven and it wasn’t even six.

  Mum looked up at me and her face broke into a smile. She said in English, ‘My five o’clock had to move his appointment to seven-thirty.’

  ‘Isn’t that when we’re eating?’

  ‘He’s having a crisis, apparently. I’ll just nip off for half an hour. I’ve told him I can only do thirty minutes.’

  Such crises were rare among her patients. Her clientele largely consisted of expats with marriage problems, which meant that they were rarely suicidal or acutely unwell.

  ‘I thought you were going to be at Maike’s for dinner,’ she said.

  ‘No. She wanted to finish her book.’

  Mum’s forehead folded into a wry frown and, as if joking, she said, ‘She picked a book over you? That’s a bit much.’

  I smiled weakly. Maike and my mother had got off to a bad start when Maike, aged thirteen, had picked me up from the flat and not said hello. She stood shyly in the hallway and was found by my mother, who, once she’d pressed Maike into telling her who she was, shouted out, ‘Good Lord! Ralf – it’s a ghost. There’s a ghost here to see you.’ Maike didn’t understand this sort of humour and hadn’t laughed. Petra and Stefan, on the other hand, laughed like drains at my mother’s jokes, so she adored them.

  She straightened her papers and dropped them into one of her filing cabinets and put the key high up on the shelf by an African mask with nails for teeth and dry coconut-husk hair.

  She cupped my face in her hands and kissed my forehead. ‘You smell lovely. I love that you’re always out. You always smell of wood smoke or swimming pools. I spent my youth lying on the carpet eating custard creams and watching Bonanza.’

  ‘I don’t know what any of that means,’ I said, following her through to our apartment and then my parents’ bedroom.

  ‘TV show and biscuits,’ she said, stripping off her shirt and hanging it over the back of the chair. I collapsed onto my parents’ bed and the water-filled mattress undulated beneath me.

  ‘Did I hear Frau von Hildendorf’s dulcet tones?’ she said.

  ‘Yup. Is Eve Harris a real person?’

  ‘Of course. She was quite famous in the Sixties. She made a few
films with that French director. Like Truffaut, but with a D.’

  ‘Druffaut?’

  Mum laughed. ‘Sounds like a shampoo.’

  ‘Do you think she’s really friends with her?’

  ‘Of course not. She’s been prophesying her visit for the last two decades.’

  I thought about the man at the pool, about his skin, his hair and the water, which had grown impossibly sparkly in my memory. Oz, a shimmering shadow amid blinding, glittering light. I tried to picture him in some dusty shop on Eisenacher Straße in a cardigan and horn-rimmed glasses, but couldn’t capture it.

  ‘Can Turkish people be gay?’ I said. Part of the ease of my divided existence was that it was so successfully segregated that I wasn’t worried that such questions might arouse suspicion.

  Mum laughed and said, ‘Of course, Ralf. What are you talking about?’

  ‘Some guy at the pool today – it just made me think … I don’t know, because he was—’

  ‘… flirting with you?’

  ‘He wasn’t flirting with me. And he definitely wasn’t gay, now that I think about it. But it just made me wonder about it. I mean, have you ever heard of a gay Turkish person?’

  ‘Well, he doesn’t have to be gay to find you attractive, Ralf. I had a very physically expressive relationship with a girl when we were posted in Cyprus. Almost failed my O levels, I was so wild about her.’

  I rolled over and pushed my face into my mother’s cool pillow. ‘I don’t want to hear about you lezzing it up at school. That’s not the same thing.’

  Mum giggled. This was a common trick of hers, which added to her popularity with Stefan and Petra: playing the educated English psychologist, all charm and good manners, then dropping in a risqué remark to make everyone roar.

  I uncovered my face and watched her strip off her tights. In her bra and pants, I marvelled at how lean she was. I wondered if it wasn’t her manic energy that burnt up all the fat.