That day we ended up at the zoo beach. We pushed through two sets of gates to find ourselves inside an enclosure staring down a strip of trucked-in sand. A small mechanical wave washes up the beach every seven seconds. A number of ducks hovered behind the shore break. A stilt stood ornamentally on one leg and stared with heart-breaking faith towards a make-believe horizon. With Ralf we’d end up here towards the end of the day. As soon as he sat down on the stone bench he would slump forward, hands on knees. I would wonder if he was tired. He would never say. I didn’t know what he was used to—or how much walking he could stand, or how much of the passed-on world he could absorb. But I had come to know the signs. The more tired he was the more talkative he became. He talked to delay the moment we would have to get up and walk again.
I thought of him back at the apartment coughing into his bed-sheets. Here at the zoo beach I sat with Ines on the same stone bench. The silence piled up. For a while there it was as though we were waiting for the world to end. I sat forward and began to name the birds down on the sand. And seeing at last I had her interest I made up some species, adding outlandish features and behaviours before she caught on. She laughed and gave my shoulder a playful shove, and in that cold, cold lair we found ourselves smiling at one another, and then quite naturally, well as naturally as it ever feels the first time, I reached behind her and drew her against me. She smiled down to where her gloved hands sat bunched on her lap. I withdrew my arm, again it felt like the most natural thing in the world. She was free to shift back to her former position. Instead she stayed put. On a slight lean towards me. A slight lean. It doesn’t sound much, does it? But I felt happy. I remember the moment actually registering with me. Yes, I thought. This is it. I half expected an official to arrive with a certificate to mark the moment.
A week later we returned to the small zoo beach. But it wasn’t the same. I don’t know why but we couldn’t recover the magic. I’d used up my tricks. The birds had been named, I’d explained away the mechanical wave. It wasn’t that Ines appeared to be bored. She simply wasn’t there, either in the moment or in body.
I thought she was on the brink of telling me something. I’d felt it coming ever since we left the apartment. Along the way, or in the zoo, perhaps, she must have had a change of heart.
Then later in the park I felt it, this lack of resolution between the moment at hand and what she was actually thinking. Perhaps she was preparing to tell me in the nicest possible way about a boyfriend or husband in another part of the city? I needed to distract myself. I thought of Ralf sitting in a shroud of silence, like some object of marble occupying a corner of a museum at midnight. I thought of his mouth dripping with anticipation whenever we went down in the caged lift. I paused to stare at a pair of women’s glossy white panties, snagged on a high branch, exposed by the winter-thin foliage; how wretched they seemed. I looked up to find Ines way ahead. Ines in her blue coat and white boots. Her feet appeared to take separate steps from those taken by her boots, so that at times she seemed to wade. There she was, wading ahead of me.
I had no idea about Ines’ life outside of the one where she looked after Ralf. In fact I found it hard to imagine her pursuing any other life than this one.
Not long after that occasion I came around the end of a dry-goods aisle in the local organics supermarket and there she was—a sight as surprising as the deer I saw in the carriage window at the edge of the forest outside Berlin on my way to lunch with Dr Schreiber. She was frowning at the label of a small jar. She looked puzzled. Now she turned her head in the direction of the checkout where the cashier was packing a brown paper bag and talking with a customer. I thought she needed help. I was about to make my move when Ines slid the hand holding the jar to her pocket. It was preserved garlic which we ate that night with pasta.
Later that same day I saw her holding Ralf’s coat open for him to move into and I could not place this woman with the one I had seen shoplifting earlier in the day. I didn’t tell Ralf what I had seen. I didn’t raise it with Ines either. I didn’t give it another thought until the new year.
As the winter drew longer I spent more time in my little room huddled with my notes and drawings of the lungfish fossils. If it was too cold to go out Ines would knock on my door with an invitation from Ralf to come upstairs for a drink.
I wondered about the food she served. Ralf sometimes wondered aloud about the amount of housekeeping money Ines went through. I might have said something then but I didn’t.
Two days before Christmas the three of us went ice-skating. A temporary rink had been dropped onto Bebelplatz on Unter den Linden. The cold rose up through the soles of our feet and passed out through our glassy eyes. At the markt Ralf merrily urged more Glühwein down our throats and bullied us onto the ice. Despite all the time I have spent down at the Ross Sea I have no talent for ice-skating. At least it’s not the foreign substance for me that it was for Ines. She didn’t often seem afraid but she did when she looked out across the ice. Ralf turned out to be surprisingly able. For purposes of instruction the creature reassembled. Ralf went to the front. In order to guide him about the rink I stood nervously off his shoulder. Best of all, Ines slapped her hands on my hips. Through layers of coat and gloves I could feel her touch, and once when she laughed with nervous delight at us moving across the ice I felt the trembling of her pass through her fingers. I felt her warm excited breath against my neck, and her slight weight transmitted through her fingers.
The excitement lasted only while we were on the ice. For the trip home I went back to hanging off Ralf’s shoulder, my eyes rolling after the white leather boots of Ines as they waded ahead in the dark up Strasse des 17. Juni past the troubled souls gripping the steering wheels of their parked cars. Their eyes rose from dark pits and turned to follow us, or, at least, Ines in her white boots. Behind us we heard doors opening and closing. Voices from the trees. Shadows. Ralf’s frozen face and the plodding motion of his shoulders as we passed through a world he could not see.
sixteen
For months on end it was hard to believe in spring, in the very idea of its existence, but then it came without warning. The winter-shaded branches were in sunlight now, and their green was the scum kind, the bog green of the unlit world. There was a preternatural glow about the apartment buildings. Pale faces that had come through the long winter squinted in the white and lime glare. On our way across the city we passed old bodies stuffed into wheelchairs and buried beneath blankets. The big rusting gates of a nearby beach bar were thrown open and a man raked up leaves from last autumn. Across Tiergarten crocuses began to unfurl. On the street more people than ever were out and about, their thin white limbs poking out of T-shirts and summer dresses. Cafe staff rushed to get tables and chairs out to the pavements to catch the passing trade. We stepped around the feet of corpses with tight little smiles leaning back in chairs. Ines had shed her coat. Now she wore her own clothes instead of the housemaid’s uniform—a light blue cotton slip and a dark skirt that accentuated her hips and curves—and a new idea of her emerged.
When things started going missing from the apartment…No, let me begin that again. When the blank spaces began to appear on Ralf’s apartment walls, although I could spot the absence of something I was at a complete loss to remember what it had been. It was the absence of the thing that caught my eye and, in a way, that had completely eluded the woodcuts and to a lesser degree the painting. I could not recall a single detail of the woodcuts. They’d left a general impression, a line of them like a line of geese. The change of season had had a similar impact. From late April, overnight as it seemed, my coat stayed on the hook by the door. Those bitter afternoons when I wished I’d bought a longer and thicker coat from Strauss were a thing of the past. The line of white spaces along Ralf’s walls produced a similar amnesia. I could remember their flat oak frames and a squiggle, the suggestion of something, but nothing else.
I could have asked Ralf. It should have been the most natural thing in the world to as
k after the painting and the woodcuts, but I didn’t, because of a vague disquiet. Very little happened in that apartment without Ines knowing about it. I could have asked her. Again I felt uncomfortable. I would be lifting a scab on the flesh of another. So I didn’t do or say anything.
For a while this seemed to work, and then those telltale blank spaces came between us. I found it impossible to ignore them. The longer I sat on my silence, the more those spaces appeared to glower back at me. And when Ines brought in the tea or schnapps or arrived at my door with Ralf’s old flowers I could hardly look at her for thinking she would almost certainly see those spaces reflected in my eyes. Out and about, our creaturely silence had a more distinctive and unpleasant quality. I told myself over and over, I have to tell Ralf even if it means, as I suspected it would, implicating Ines.
One afternoon at the zoo I had started to broach the subject, broadly, in a roundabout fashion, when Ralf was diverted by the crowd building outside the pen of the stone-eating trampeltiers and so mid-flight, as it were, I was forced to break from the transcendent whiteness of the Antarctic plains to describe a long camel-like jaw thoughtfully rolling a stone around in its mouth before spitting it out and licking up another stone from the pile.
We made our way to the zoo beach. We were the only ones there. It was very hot. Ralf was in his yellow Pierre Cardin, which helped to lift him out of his usual undertaker’s austerity. The top button on his shirt was left undone as a concession to the heat. The small eyes of the carapace of netting over that beach that had shone with ice crystals all winter now showered his talcum-white face with sunshine. His eyes were closed. He was basking, which is what every other animal in the zoo was doing. His head rested on his shoulders, his mouth open to old caps of mercury and spidery lines of saliva. I urged my gaze back into that intimate space we normally reserve for those asleep, lovers, small children absorbed in play, pets and babies and the dead. I was about bring up the woodcuts when he said, ‘God, this feels good, doesn’t it, Defoe? I haven’t felt this good in a very long time.’
Well, after that, all I could do was mutter agreement and sit on my hands.
I considered the options. It’s possible Ralf had sold the woodcuts. He never spoke about them with any affection. The painting was different. Years ago, he had told me, he and Hannah had come across the seascape in a Hamburg gallery. They weren’t buyers or particularly interested in art but as soon as Ralf saw it he exclaimed to Hannah, ‘That’s Rügen!’ He had spent the war years there in an orphanage. He said his father was killed in the war and his mother was officially registered as ‘missing’ after the heavy bombing of Berlin. He said he and the other boys used to listen in bed at night to the hail off the Ostsee striking against the wooden shutters and pretend they were under attack. Anyway, in the Hamburg gallery while Ralf had been unable to move away from the green and black sea battling its way ashore to the white cliffs of Rügen it had been Hannah who insisted they buy it. They went away and returned a few times until, exasperated by Ralf’s indecision, she bought it. They brought it back to Berlin on the train. Each time they had moved in Berlin—three times in all—the new apartment was inspected with a view to a likely wall for the painting of the Rügen shore. I could not imagine Ralf casually selling it.
It was late May. The skies were lighter, especially from the roof garden of Wertheim, where I liked to go to read one of the English-language newspapers.
One afternoon I am on the escalators heading down to ground level when I see Ines through the large front department store windows. She is waiting at the lights to cross the road. This was one of those rare moments—Ines, by herself, and outside of the apartment. The lights changed and she bent down to pick up something. When I saw the large bag I knew I was going to follow her. It seemed as obvious and as inevitable as discreetly leaving the supermarket had been the other time. Yet outside Wertheim I found myself stalling again and the crowd broke around me. I suppose the thing was to walk up alongside her and tap her on the shoulder. A store detective would feel within his rights to do so. But then a store detective has a refined language with which to disarm a shoplifter and win the offender’s cooperation.
The lights changed again and I felt the pull of the crowd setting off across the road. And when I saw her disappear around the corner of the building I set off after her. I still hadn’t arrived at a plan. It was more a case of wanting to prolong the option of following her. The important thing was to keep her in view.
Up ahead of me now—floating away like a brightly coloured lure spinning and drifting through the late afternoon crowd. I hurried after, running in front of a bus, then chastened by that near miss I decide to wait at the next lights, where some months earlier I had been told off by a woman, a complete stranger, who dressed me down for setting a bad example to children by jay walking. Under such circumstances my natural instinct is always to yell back some abuse, get my own back, because above all what is more important than one’s own dignity, and then it sank in. Yes, the woman was right—she was right, I was wrong—I had set a poor example regarding road safety, and good on her as well for speaking her mind and not looking the other way or holding her tongue but for saying what needed to be said. Oh, for an ounce of her courage. What could be worse than the risk of causing offence—a bundle of smiles without a stitch of courage to hold them together? So as I wait at the lights the world slows down. Tourists, hustlers on skateboards. Beggars. A young mother pushed on the pedals of her bike, a tiny boy with a crash helmet behind her in a cart. A man lit a cigarette and inhaled with a tilt of a head that paid homage to the skies and all the days lived so far—marriage, children, affairs, social soccer games, hernia and appendix operations, crowns and stitches—and then that was that, I couldn’t wait any longer. I sprang across the road. I thought I heard a mother cry out. No. I heard all the young mothers in Berlin howling at my back. Of course I imagined that part. Nonetheless my cheeks were burning.
This is how I came to follow her up the station escalators onto the S-Bahn and across the city to Warschauer. Here was a part of Berlin I didn’t know at all. Broken down, graffiti everywhere, broken glass and hungry ground-sniffing dogs, gypsy men drinking beer at the platform kiosk, drunks sprawled everywhere rattling cans at the legs of passing commuters. As the crowd came off the bridge the neighbourhood softened to glimpses of cobbled side-streets and balconies with hanging flower pots. Traffic noise gave an impression of congestion but there wasn’t any. The noise is deposited here from the distant boulevards of Karl Marx and Frankfurter Allee. I mention it because it encouraged me to think of myself as lost in a big city crowd in the event of Ines turning around to find me. But she never did. She didn’t once look back.
She turned off the main road with the tramlines into a narrow street of apartment buildings with ground-floor businesses, cafes, bäckereien and newsagents, and as she crossed the road I noted the shop where she disappeared and I popped into a laundrette, where I waited with the washing thumping inside the driers. In the filthy window I saw a reflection I hardly recognised. The long winter had done something to me. Blurred some essential lines to do with self.
I didn’t have long to wait, ten minutes or so, before she reappeared, this time with the bag folded under her arm. I moved to the door of the laundrette. She seemed to take forever to reach the end of the street. It occurred to me it was deliberate, that she was waiting for me to catch her—a crazy idea then and now, and yet look at the way she walked, more erect and more measured than normal as though straining against a leash that neither held her back nor would let her get too far ahead.
I crossed the road and entered the shop. It was jammed with junk of every kind: book cases, accordions, teapots, a very old dentist chair, hammered tin pots, old furniture, card tables, photographs, paintings. Within a minute I saw two beautifully hand-painted vases that I recognised. The funny thing is I hadn’t noticed them gone from the apartment. But as soon as I set eyes on them I was able to place them on the long narro
w table behind the sofa on which I usually sat. I glanced up at a crowded wall, and there was Ralf’s beloved shoreline at Rügen. How she managed to get it out of the apartment and across town I’ll never know. The shopkeeper arrived silently at my side. For the moment we both stood there gazing up at the painting. He spoke in German, then, as I opened my mouth, switched to English. It was a fine work, I agreed. However, there in the pile-up of the second-hand shop I could see what was wrong with it. I suppose it’s neither here nor there given the more important discovery of Ines’ pilfering. But the persistent presence of the shopkeeper forced my eye back into that seascape. The sea was a blue-green stew with chop and spray and yet as far as I could tell the wind had no telling effect elsewhere in the painting. The clouds are too sedate, almost stationary. Most of the painting is given over to sky. One of those skies you see tilting back from a plane window—sea, sky and land all coming at one another. In a more admiring tone this time the shopkeeper said, ‘A very fine painting. One hundred euros.’ The quickness with which I accepted seemed to surprise him. Already I was planning ahead. I would need a taxi to ferry it across town. I could remount it and Ralf would be none the wiser. Of course there would be Ines to deal with—as soon as she saw the painting there would be the double shock of realising she had been followed. She would feel betrayed. We would have to sit down and find a way through that.