Yeah yeah yeah. What could that possibly mean? What was it that was being said yes to?
It had been Jennifer’s idea to take a photograph of myself crossing the zebra on Abbey Road to give to Luna. The week before she had asked me to explain the whole concept of the GDR to her but I had become distracted. We were caramelizing peanuts in the kitchen of her flat at the time and I was burning the sugar. It was quite a complicated recipe in which we were instructed to add the peanuts to the boiling sugar syrup and then bake them in the oven. Jennifer did not understand how the people of a whole country could be locked up behind a wall and not be allowed to leave. While I was banging on about how Germany came to be ideologically and physically separated into two countries divided by a wall, communist in the East, capitalist in the West, and how the communist authorities called the Wall the ‘anti-fascist protection rampart’, her fingers had slipped under the waistband of my jeans. I was burning the sugar and Jennifer was not exactly taking notes. We had both lost interest in the German Democratic Republic.
I saw her walking towards me carrying a small aluminium stepladder on her arm. She was wearing the Soviet pilot’s cap I had bought her at a flea market on the Portobello Road. I kissed her and told her briefly what had happened. Jennifer was preparing for an exhibition of her photographs at art school, but had taken the afternoon off to do the ‘photo shoot’, as she called it. Some sort of camera was strapped to her leather belt; another hung around her neck. I did not disclose the details of the near crash, but she noticed the cut on my knuckle. ‘You’ve got thin skin,’ she said. I asked her why she was carrying a stepladder. She told me that was how the original photo of the Beatles on the Abbey Road zebra crossing was taken in August 1969 at 11.30 a.m. The photographer, Iain MacMillan, had placed the ladder at the side of the zebra while a policeman was paid to direct the traffic. MacMillan was given ten minutes to take the photo. But as I was not actually famous in any way, we couldn’t ask the police for five minutes so we had to work quickly.
‘I think there’s been a diversion and Abbey Road is closed today.’
As I was speaking three cars sped by, followed by a black taxi for hire, a motorbike, two bicycles, and a lorry loaded with wooden planks.
‘Yeah, Saul, it’s definitely closed,’ she said, fiddling with her camera.
‘I reckon you look more like Mick Ronson than any of the Beatles, even though your hair is black and Mick’s is blond.’
It was true that my hair, which was shoulder-length, had been cut by Jennifer two days ago in the style of Bowie’s lead guitarist. She was secretly proud of what she called my rock-star looks, and she loved my body more than I loved my body, which made me love her.
When the road was clear she set up the ladder in the same place that Wolfgang was supposed to have stopped his car. As she clambered up and sorted out her camera, she yelled instructions: ‘Put your hands in your jacket pockets! Look down! Look straight ahead! Okay, walk now! Bigger strides! Go!’ There were two cars waiting but she held up her hand to keep them there as she put a new roll of film into her camera. When the cars started to hoot, she flamboyantly bowed to them from the top of the ladder.
2
To thank Jennifer for her time, I bought six oysters from the fishmonger and a bottle of dry white. We spent the next couple of hours in her bed while her two flatmates, Saanvi and Claudia, were out. It was a poky, dark basement flat, but they all enjoyed living there and seemed to get along. Claudia was a vegan who was always soaking some sort of seaweed in a bowl of water in the kitchen.
When we kissed fully clothed on the bed, her pilot cap kept falling over her eyes, which really turned me on. Now and again blue lights flashed in my head, but I didn’t tell Jennifer, who was playing with the string of pearls I always wore around my neck. When I finally took off my white trousers, she noticed that I had a large bruise on my right thigh and both my knees were grazed and bleeding.
‘Can you tell me what actually happened, Saul?’
I told her more about how I had nearly been run over just before she arrived and how I was embarrassed about picking up the packet of condoms. She laughed and then slurped an oyster and threw the shell on the floor.
‘We should look for pearls inside those oysters,’ she said. ‘Maybe we could make you another necklace?’
She wanted to know why I was so keen to go to East Germany, what with its citizens stuck behind that wall and the Stasi spying on everyone. Perhaps it wasn’t a safe place to visit. Why didn’t I do my research in West Berlin so she could visit me and we could go to concerts and drink cheap beer?
I’m not sure Jennifer truly believed I was a scholar and not a rock star.
‘Your eyes are so blue,’ she said, climbing on top of me and sitting astride my hips. ‘It’s quite unusual to have intense black hair and even more intense blue eyes. You are much prettier than I am. I want your cock inside me all the time. Everyone is frightened in the GDR aren’t they? I still don’t understand how the people of a whole country can be locked up behind a wall and not be allowed to leave.’
I could smell the sweet ylang-ylang oil she always combed through her hair before she walked into the tiny sauna that had come with the basement flat in Hamilton Terrace. Some nights I would arrive there from work in the evening and listen to her talking with Claudia and Saanvi in the sauna, while I marked my students’ essays at the kitchen table. When Jennifer finally emerged from the sauna, sometimes an hour later, naked and oiled with her homemade ylang-ylang potion, she often tormented me by withholding her affection, making camomile tea, buttering a crispbread, then she pounced. I couldn’t have wished for a more ravishing predator to pull me away from an essay in which my worst male student had ended by attributing some of the most famous lines in the world to the wrong author.
‘The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a whole world to win.’
I crossed out Leon Trotsky and wrote Karl Marx.
I knew that Jennifer was turned on by my body, but I got the impression (as she guided my fingers to touch her in the places that most thrilled her) that she was not that interested in my mind. She started to tell me how artists like Claude Cahun and Cindy Sherman meant more to her than Stalin and Erich Honecker (‘No,’ she said, ‘here, here,’ and I could feel her coming), after which she lay by my side (as I guided her fingers to the places that most pleased me) while she explained that she preferred Sylvia Plath to Karl Marx, though she liked the line in The Communist Manifesto about a spectre haunting Europe. ‘I mean’ – she was whispering now – ‘usually a ghost just haunts a house or a castle, but Marx’s ghost was haunting a whole continent. Maybe the spectre was standing under the Trevi Fountain in Rome to cool off from the slog of being a haunter, or buying some bling in the Versace stores in Milan, or watching a Nico concert?’ Did I know that Nico’s real name was Christa (I did not want to know that right now) and that Nico/Christa, who was born in Cologne, was haunted all her life by the sound of the bombing in the war? Nor did I want to know (and Jennifer stopped touching me at an erotically fierce moment to reach this thought) that a spectre was inside every photograph she developed in the dark room, and I did not recall the scene she liked in the film Wings of Desire (which we had recently seen together) where one of the angels says he wants ‘to enter the history of the world’, but now, she said, she wanted me to be the spectre inside her.