‘Ah, yes.’ Walter folded his newspaper, first in half, and then again. As I watched his fingers smooth out the corners, I noticed they were covered with grey ink from the newspaper. Random words were smudged like ash on his fingertips. I could hear the sound of typing in my head. The keys hammering a page. It was as if I were informing on myself. Herr Adler is a careless man. But those were not the words Walter was saying to me now.
‘Perhaps you needed to repeat it or something?’
‘Repeat what?’
‘History.’
He leaned forward and asked if he could help tie my left shoelace. It had come undone on our walk. My humiliation was unending. He was kind and unjudging, as strangers sometimes can be, usually because history has not got in the way. I stood up and began to walk on without him. I had no idea where I was heading but I did not want him to see my tears. I had just arrived and here he was, carrying my bag, tying my shoelaces, and now I was weeping. When he caught up with me he had taken off his spectacles. There was a welt on the bridge of his nose where the plastic had pressed into his skin.
‘Hey, Saul, wait for me.’
He was standing next to a woman carrying a wooden box. It turned out to be full of small cauliflowers. Walter spoke to her in a dialect I did not understand. I think he was giving me time to discreetly wipe my eyes. The problem was that my eyes would not dry up. I’d wipe them and then more tears would pelt down. I was embarrassed beyond measure to have brought such a large portion of my own sorrow to the GDR. Yes, it was such a big helping. I needed my friend Jack, who finished off everyone’s food, to take some of it from me. Jack’s ungenerous nature was the opposite of Walter’s, though Walter was no less sophisticated. He was certainly less stylish and less aggressive. I began to understand more of what he was saying to the woman holding the box. He was talking about cherries. Something about the cherry tree on the allotment of his family’s dacha. He had also planted cauliflowers but they had not taken. All of them were blighted. She looked into the middle distance, somewhere just above my head, but I knew she was looking at me.
I waved to her. She did not respond, her face a façade of stone. I suddenly understood that it might be dangerous for her to make contact with Westerners. Someone would report her for waving back at me. I could see no beggars or junkies or pimps or thieves or anyone sleeping on the streets. Yet the expression in her eyes stayed with me, as did her red lips. Would I prefer to have my wallet stolen if it meant I felt free to greet a stranger without fear? She and Walter seemed to know each other because he kissed her cheek and she gave him a cauliflower. Walter reached into his pocket and took out a red string bag. He dropped the cauliflower into the bag and slung it over his shoulder.
‘Quite good luck,’ he shouted to me.
We continued walking. It was easier now that the pain in my stomach had faded. I asked him about his allotment. He told me he was looking into keeping bees and invited me to spend a weekend in the dacha on the outskirts of the city so I could see it for myself.
‘I would like that very much, thank you.’ Apparently, we were still a long way from his mother’s apartment. I asked him why his sister was called Luna.
‘The moon is a source of light. And Luna is my mother’s source of light. Her first daughter did not survive.’
To hear those words touched a pain that was deep inside me, along with all the other pains. Like a pond of black water. Lit by the moon.
When I wasn’t limping, I was crying. It was a terrible start.
‘Not long to the pub,’ Walter said, ‘but first I must drop off the cauliflower.’ He led me through the inner courtyard of an old stone building and told me to wait by the stairwell.
Once again, I sat on the steps. This time I tied my own shoelaces.
The walls of the apartment block were gouged with bullet holes from the last war. My father would have got straight to work on plastering the walls of the GDR. I found myself preoccupied with Walter’s description of the blighted cherry tree that grew in the garden of his dacha. Although I was sitting on a stone step in East Berlin, I was receiving images from somewhere else. They were all in black and white, like Jennifer’s photographs. A clapboard house on Cape Cod, America. The house was built from pine and cedar. Inside it was a large fireplace. The windows were hung with wooden shutters. Jennifer was somewhere in that house and her hair had turned white.
I could hear the cries of gulls from the Cape Cod seashore and the banks of the Spree in East Berlin.
When Walter came down the stairs he was holding a tiny toy train carved from wood.
‘I have to mend it.’ He slipped the train into the pocket of his coat. ‘The glue is at my mother’s place.’
He was trying to explain something complicated to me in German. It seemed to be about how he did not live with his mother and sister. I didn’t understand and asked if we could speak seventy per cent English instead of fifty until I found my feet.
I placed the palm of my hand on his chest, leaning into him while I got my breath back from the shock of glimpsing that wooden train. One of its wheels, painted red, poked out of Walter’s coat pocket. I had seen that train before, or dreamed it, or even buried it, and here it was, returning like a spectre to torment me.
‘You all right, Saul?’
‘Most definitely,’ I replied.
Walter suggested we take a tram to the pub.
7
The flat that I was to share with Walter’s mother and his sister Luna was surprisingly spacious. Three of the walls in the living room were covered in orange swirling wallpaper. Walter told me that in winter this room was heated with brown coal. He showed me the ceramic-tiled coal oven. It smelled acrid, nothing like sooty black coal, but that was apparently because the brown coal came in briquettes. It was one of the few national resources in the GDR and was heavily mined, so whole regions had been stripped bare. The coal man arrived early in the morning carrying bags of these heavy briquettes to the courtyard. It was Luna’s job to clean out the ashes and she always complained like a spoilt czarina, but it was not a big job. Right now, his sister would be queuing for a very rare delivery of bananas after work. She was crazy for fruit. Any sort of fruit except apples.
‘I never get stressed about bananas.’ Walter sounded quite stressed. ‘I don’t need to eat bananas when they became available. But I do like the oranges when they arrive from Cuba.’
I looked around the living room while he spoke. We were getting nearer the subject of pineapple and I suppose I was searching for somewhere to hide. The telephone that was placed in the middle of the table looked like Mrs Stechler’s phone in London. A tray positioned near it was set with a tall white teapot, two china cups and saucers stacked next to it. A mirror framed in heavy dark wood hung on the wall, and oddly, next to it, a calendar from 1977, a pin-up of a woman posing in a gold leopard-spotted bikini with matching gold fingernails. A fake yellow rose was pinned to the left side of her hair. After talking about fruit for a while, Walter showed me my bedroom. A chaste single bed was pushed against the wall. It was made up with two blankets and one small pillow, a blue towel folded neatly on the covers. He told me his mother would be home soon to cook something, but usually he did all the cooking in the family. Someone was knocking on the front door. First a loud knock, then three light taps.