‘That is very bad mismanagement of your country’s transport system.’
He steered me out of Friedrichstraße and asked if I wished to walk to his mother’s apartment or would prefer to take a tram. I agreed that we should walk. His English was formal, slightly uptight, unlike the confidence and zip in his body.
‘This is our city on the Spree,’ he said, waving his hands in the direction of the river. We walked along the grey waters of the Spree as we made our way past the Berliner Ensemble theatre, founded by Brecht, who had spent the Nazi years in exile. He had lived in at least four countries. I named them for Walter.
‘Sweden, Finland, Denmark, eventually America.’
‘Oh yes, Brecht,’ Walter said. ‘Did you know that Bruce Springsteen gave a concert here in July? He played for three hours.’ He corrected himself. ‘No. Four hours.’
I knew that Brecht had been regarded with suspicion by the authorities because he had chosen to live in America and not the Soviet Union. All the same, he had returned to East Germany to write his plays, hoping to play a part in building a new socialist state. It seemed that I was more interested in Brecht than my translator, so I did not tell him that I knew all the words to The Threepenny Opera (‘an opera for beggars’) and often sang ‘Surabaya Johnny’ in the bath. I looked down at two white swans swimming side by side on the Spree.
‘Swans like to live together,’ I said. ‘They establish strong bonds with each other.’
Walter tried to look interested. ‘Thank you for the information.’ His voice was serious but his eyes were laughing.
Walter told me he had just returned from Prague, where he had been translating from Czech into German for comrades who had signed up for an engineering course. When I thanked him for meeting me at the station, given that he had just returned from his own travelling, he laughed. ‘This walk with you is my good fortune. I can do something purposeful, like taking you for a beer.’ A fly was buzzing around his lips. He waved it away and then stamped his boot on the cobblestones to elicit extra fear.
‘Magic.’ He laughed, stamping his boot again.
‘Magic,’ I repeated. I wasn’t sure what was going on or why he was laughing.
‘Whatever you do,’ he said, ‘when you write your report on our republic, don’t say everything was grey and crumbling except for the colourful interruption of red flags positioned on buildings.’
‘Absolutely not.’ I looked into his pale blue eyes with my intense blue eyes. ‘I will note there are flies. And that many of the tram drivers are female.’ I did not yet know him well enough to tell him I had become used to being censored because Jennifer had forbidden me from describing her in my own old words.
We continued our convivial conversation. Walter walked briskly in his heavy winter coat while I tried to keep up in my light jacket. He told me how much he liked the name of a certain cake in Prague. It was called a ‘little coffin’ and was mostly made from cream. I reckoned he was talking about an eclair.
He asked if I knew the work of the Czech artist Eva Švankmajerová. I did not. He admired a sentence she had written; he would try and translate it for me now. He shut his eyes – ‘Here goes’ – and frowned for a long time as he tried to gather the words across three languages, Czech, German, English, then he opened his eyes, punched my arm and shook back his hair. ‘It’s not possible to translate.’ What he really liked to do in Prague was to knock back a shot of slivovitz, ‘a very old one, from Moravia’. Soon he would introduce me to the university director, who was likely to offer me a good-quality schnapps.
After a while he asked why I was limping. I told him in German about the near accident on Abbey Road and he said in English, ‘So are we speaking German or English to each other?’
‘Well, maybe we can do fifty–fifty,’ I said in German.
‘How come you speak fluent German?’ he asked in English.
‘My mother was born in Heidelberg.’
‘So you are half German?’
‘She came to Britain when she was eight.’
‘Did she speak German at home?’
‘Never.’
This time he did not thank me for the information.
When I continued to limp, he bluntly asked if I was lame.
‘I am not lame. I’ve just got a bruised hip.’
I said this loudly and with feeling. I did not want to seem pathetic to Walter Müller. No. Not at all. I wanted to seem something else, but the truth was that I had a pain in my stomach. It felt as if something were being removed from my guts with a knife.
He offered to carry my bag. I refused but he took it anyway, slinging it over his shoulder as we walked down a cobblestoned road called Marienstraße. After a while he pointed to the hospital where his sister worked as a nurse. ‘The doctors are very good,’ he said, ‘but it’s best not to have to stay the night there. She could arrange an X-ray for you if you like?’
‘No!’ I thumped his shoulder so hard he began to laugh.
‘You’re stronger than you look.’
I don’t think he meant it because he pushed me away when I tried to get my bag back from him.
A tram was clanking by in the distance.
‘Sit down, Saul.’ Walter pointed to a stone step at the entrance of one of the apartment blocks.
I sat down on the step as instructed. He sat next to me, my bag shoved between his knees. Everything was peaceful and calm. I noticed that Walter had now put on a pair of spectacles and was reading his newspaper. The sky had darkened and his left arm was resting across my shoulders. I felt happy. Inexplicably happy. It was like the moment I’d sat on Mrs Stechler’s sofa with the illegal poodle on my lap. We sat like that for a long time.
After a while, he folded his newspaper and patted my shoulder.
‘Tell me about your accident.’
I began to speak. I heard myself say things I did not know I thought. I told Walter that what really worried me on Abbey Road was that my mother had died in a car crash when I was twelve. Somehow, irrationally, I thought Wolfgang – that was the name of the driver, I told him – might have been the same person who had killed her.
‘That is an understandable fear,’ Walter said.
I told him how my hands had started to shake when I returned to the site of the accident and how I sat on the wall with the woman who had asked me to light her cigarette. The shaking, I told him, was to do with the memory of the first seconds of hearing the news that my mother had died and would never be coming home. And then a second memory of realizing that this meant I was to live with my father and brother without my mother, who had used her body like a human wall to protect me from them.
‘You needed protecting from your father and brother?’
‘Yes. They were big men. They would have liked you.’
He shook his head and laughed. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘Walter,’ I said, ‘where is the Wall? I can’t see it.’
‘It is everywhere.’
I told him that my mother’s fatal accident and my minor accident had become blurred in my mind and how I was still insatiably angry with the driver who had run her over. I regarded him as her assassin. Time passing had not made my mother’s death less vivid. All the same, I had not really been paying attention when I crossed the road.