For a moment I thought she was going to throw me a jelly bean in the way that circus trainers throw treats to their performing animals after they have jumped through a flaming hoop.
‘I’ll get the Abbey Road photos to you before you leave. I’m sorry about your father. Hope you feel better soon, and don’t forget the tinned pineapple for your translator.’
Abbey Road was a twelve-minute walk from Hamilton Terrace. Something compelled me to return to the site of the near accident. I would have to take it slowly because I noticed I was limping and that my white jacket was torn at the shoulder. Jennifer Moreau was ruthless and she seemed to know a lot about my life. How did she know that Walter Müller had requested I bring a tin of pineapple with me to the GDR? I couldn’t remember if it was because I had told her or she’d asked. It was true that she had accompanied me to my father’s funeral three weeks ago, so she knew about his death. Her own father had died when she was twelve, as had my mother. We often talked about losing a parent at the same age. It was a bond between us, though she thought she was freed by her father’s death because he would never have allowed her to go to art school. I’m not sure that I was freed by my mother’s death. No, I couldn’t see anything good about it, except that I never doubted her love for me, which made her absence even more of a catastrophe. All the same, my father’s funeral was a reminder of Jennifer’s own early loss and I had felt protective of her. My callous brother, Matthew, also known as Fat Matt (a full English breakfast seven days a week – three English eggs, three English sausages), had arranged the funeral service without consulting me.
I had been proud to have glamorous Jennifer Moreau on my arm, what with her exotic French surname, vintage powder-blue trouser suit and matching suede platform boots. I had watched Fat Matt and his shabby wife and their two young sons sitting in the front pew like they were the royals of the family, and wondered what it was that I had done so wrong in their eyes, apart from wearing a pearl necklace.
I was minor family, it seemed: unmarried, no children, relegated to the second row. It was a reminder of the crashing loneliness of my teenage years when Matt, who was not yet fat, and a Bolshevik hero in my father’s eyes, started working as an electrician, earning good money while I was trying out the tester eyeliner pencils in the local chemist. By the time I got to Cambridge University he knew how to rewire a whole house while I was perfecting ways to disguise my ignorance (intense blue eyes help this endeavour) and make the most of being the raven-haired working-class cat (no claws, high cheekbones) amongst the posh pigeons.
Matt gave a loving tribute to our father. When it was my turn all I could say, as the most educated person in the family, was ‘Goodbye, Dad.’
My brother did agree, though, to my idea of taking a portion of our communist father’s ashes with me to be buried in the GDR. After all, he believed in it.
I glanced at the tall Edwardian villas that lined either side of Hamilton Terrace as I limped down the long, wide road, still trying to remember how Jennifer knew about the tin of pineapple I had been instructed to purchase by Walter Müller. Had she read his letter to me? Stasi informers were known as ears and eyes, Horch und Guck. It would seem that when it came to Jennifer’s art my eyes were closed, my ears were deaf, but actually I was frantically preparing to leave for East Germany, making administrative arrangements to access the archives I would need for my research. The reason I had been given permission to do so was that I had promised to engage sensitively in a paper I would write about the realities of everyday life in the GDR. Instead of the usual cold-war stereotypes, I would focus on education, health care and housing for all its citizens, all of which I had discussed with my father before he died.
‘If you had ever had to fight a fascist you would put up a wall to keep them out, too.’
When I reminded him the Wall was put up to keep people in, not out, he told me I was the Marie Antoinette of the family and the pearls did not help.
‘Take them off, son.’
In his view, freedom of speech and movement were not as important as eliminating inequalities and working for the collective good, but then he could catch the ferry to France any time he liked and no one was going to shoot him from a watchtower in Dover. He turned a blind eye to the Soviet tanks rolling through Prague in 1968 because he obviously thought we were related to Stalin.
‘The Soviet Union is the GDR’s godfather. Family must look after each other and protect their kin from reactionary adversaries.’
Yeah yeah yeah.
Like Matt looked after his brother when the boys tried to hang me with my tie from the upper deck of the bus. My father disliked what Jennifer described as my ‘sublime beauty’; for some reason it offended him. To make it worse, I was physically weaker than my brother and sometimes wore an orange silk tie when I kept our father company in the pub. I once heard him order a pint of bitter for himself and a ‘glass of red for the nancy boy’. The barman asked my father if he was okay with Merlot, and handed me the pint of bitter. As a compromise, I laid off the mascara when I attended his talks at Communist Party meetings and replaced the orange silk with a green flat cap made from faux snakeskin. Whenever he was in a bad mood (often) during my early teens, he would shout to Matt, Stalin-style, ‘Beat him, beat him,’ and Matt, as his accomplice, would punch me down to the floor. Matt was a serious puncher after our mother died. He once split my lip and gave me two intense black eyes, which apparently were more acceptable than my intense blue eyes. It was as if my father’s tanks were always parked in the living room of our house in Bethnal Green, ready to roll over my unworthy thirteen-year-old body with their guns raised.
Goodbye, Dad. What else could I say at his funeral?
A lot.
The difference between my father and myself, apart from my education and high cheekbones, was that I believed that people had to be convinced and not coerced. But now that he was dead and couldn’t answer back, I missed his certainty.
I was about seven minutes away from the zebra crossing.
Now and then I had to stop to get my breath back. Jennifer’s voice kept returning to me. Can you tell me what actually happened, Saul?
I resolved to make a note about not forgetting the tin of pineapple. I would write it in capital letters and stick it on the fridge with my ‘Zeus the God of the Gods’ magnet as soon as I arrived home. In return, Walter Müller had written, he would give me a jar of pickled cucumber, the Emerald of the East, made with fennel and thyme, sugar and vinegar. I wondered if he was aware that the Stasi would be reading his letters? If Stasi informers were known as eyes and ears, it would seem that Jennifer had dumped me because my ears weren’t listening and my eyes were closed when it came to her art, and come to think of it, and I did think of it as I picked up speed, I could not recall anything she had told me about her current project, except that I was her muse. Also, I realized that after all the effort to pick up the condoms after the accident, I had not actually used them. They were unopened in the pocket of my torn white jacket.
It was strangely comforting to return to the zebra crossing on Abbey Road. There was no traffic, so it was likely that it had been closed after all.
It occurred to me that when I had first stepped on to that crossing, I had a girlfriend and I was not limping. What came to mind as I sat on the wall outside the EMI studios was the way in which the man who had nearly run me over had touched my hair, as if he were touching a statue or something without a heartbeat.