Out of the Line of Fire (25 page)

Fuck Karl, I think you’ve killed him.

Fucking hero. Some people just…

The outside door opened.

Come on.

Karl was past me in a flash and had scooped up the old man’s walking stick.

Get the coat, he hissed.

As the door began to open he reached through the gap and brought the knurled end of the cane sharply down on the back of the skull of a man dressed in overalls. He slumped to the floor.

Jesus, Karl!

For Christ’s sake, will you shut up!

He pushed me hard through the doorway into the washroom and towards the outer door.

Give me the coat.

He bundled it under his arm.

Walk
, don’t run.

As we stepped into the corridor two men turned the corner and started coming towards us.

Just keep your head down and keep walking.

They passed. I heard one of them laugh.

Karl began speaking quickly.

Okay Wolfi, there’s a train about to leave. Get on it a few cars up and get off at the next station. Ditch your jacket before you do.

What about you?

I’ll take the south exit.

At the end of the corridor I glanced back. The men we had passed were just about to go through the door. We separated and I walked quickly across the platform and got onto the train. I watched Karl weaving his way through the people on the platform, keeping close to the wall. Then he disappeared from view behind the pillar of the window. As the door hissed to I looked back to the entrance of the corridor. To my horror one of the men we had passed was already standing there, looking wildly up and down the platform. Suddenly he turned and broke into a run. The train began to move. For a short distance he kept pace with us as the train picked up speed. Out of the corner of my eye I could see the strain on his face as he brushed past people. Some of the other passengers had noticed him too and had begun to point. A few of them started to cheer. We began to leave him behind. I waited for the bright arch of the south entrance to come into view. As it flashed by I had just enough time to see that it was empty, except for a group of schoolgirls and, halfway up the stairs, a stooped little old lady in a dark coat. One hand rested on the banister while the other leant on her walking stick. Around her head she was wearing a red scarf. I smiled to myself. The train hurtled into the underground darkness.

I pushed my way past a number of other passengers swaying in the aisle and into one of the less crowded front cars where I found an empty seat and sat down. I now felt strangely exhilarated. It was as though what had happened represented some sort of breakthrough for me. I realized I had thought of Karl as being virtually invincible. He had been right. I
had
created a hero out of him. Yet things had gone horribly wrong.
He
had been wrong. How we managed to escape was a miracle. I resolved never to trust Karl to quite the same extent again.

I got off at the next stop. To my dismay there were two railway cops on the platform. One of them got onto the train. To get out I had to pass the other. It was impossible for me to reboard the train. That would have been just as dangerous. I caught up with a small group of people who had disembarked from the car in front of me and, walking as normally as my pounding heart would allow, I made my way towards the exit. His eyes quickly scanned our group and then moved on to the next. He was less than a couple of metres away when we passed but it was obvious he was no longer interested in us. I breathed a sigh of relief. I reached the turnstile and was just about to go through when I felt a large hand circle my upper arm and clamp tightly shut around it. I was brought instantly to a stop. I knew immediately all was lost and as I looked up I found myself staring into the face of one of the two men we had passed in the corridor.

*

While I waited for my father to arrive my life seemed to achieve a strange sense of serenity. All of the events that followed that catastrophic moment on the U-bahn platform seemed not to matter any more. What under normal circumstances would have been a harrowing couple of days now appeared in some way to be external, innocuous, unimportant. Things still happened of course, but it was as if I were cut off from them, separated, as though a wall of glass had been interposed between the external world and myself.

I watched myself being processed by the law: arrested, interrogated, searched, locked away and so on. Instead of being frightened or intimidated I suddenly became aware that something far more important was happening to me, something almost transcendent. I felt that if I concentrated hard enough I would be able to decipher the metaphysical static which surrounded my life, which in fact, surrounds all our lives but about which we are normally oblivious. To have this strange, background random noise, this celestial conceit of existence, suddenly become comprehensible made me feel wonderfully euphoric.

Perhaps it was this sense of euphoria which led to my initial lack of cooperation with the police. I simply did not care what happened to me. Initially I had told them my name was Wohlmann, a pretty common name really. When they asked me where I lived I told them that they should know.

What do you mean? they had asked.

Don’t you read the papers, I said.

Wohlmann was a prominent government minister who was then under attack by the opposition for alleged misconduct: he’d been photographed consorting with a prostitute and the papers were full of it. Karl would have been proud of me and for an hour or two the police treated me with a certain nervous respect. However this soon gave way to outright anger once they had checked up on my story. I told them I had never said that I was
Gustave
Wohlmann’s son,
they
had jumped to that conclusion.

Then they started asking me about Karl. I mean, they actually used his name. I must admit that this gave me quite a shock. I had forgotten about the kid locked in the cubicle and I could not recall having said Karl’s name. In fact, I was sure I hadn’t. Then they showed me a jacket and asked me if it was mine. There was no denying it so I said that it was. They showed me a letter. That really surprised me. I looked at it, turned it over. It was one Elena had sent me while I was in Heidelberg. I must have left it in one of the jacket’s pockets. I told them it was from an old girlfriend, but of course they had checked up on this as well. As a result my father was on his way.

And it was actually my father’s impending arrival which gave me my sense of serenity. Not because he would be able to rescue me from my situation but because I knew that, finally, we would have the showdown [Machtprobe] that had been written into our lives years before. Instead of my life being an unbroken stumbling from one unknown to the next, I could see a pattern beginning to crystallize. Something transcendentally deterministic had been set in motion and instead of feeling trapped by this I felt suddenly released. My whole trip to Berlin, which even to me had seemed a strange aberration, now emerged as having some underlying purpose and that purpose was to act as the catalyst for the final confrontation between my father and myself.

The next day he arrived. I had expected him to be tired and gaunt. But in a way I had also expected him to be relieved. I had, after all, not seen my father in over a year. I thought that perhaps in the intervening time he might have mellowed a little. Instead, when I was taken from my cell to the waiting-room he was standing at the far end by the window looking out. We both stood there for a few moments, me looking at him and he appearing to look out the window. I waited for him to select the move which would determine the direction our little game would take. But as he made no attempt to make this move I went to the chair by the table and sat down. I watched him standing there with his hands behind his back just as I had seen him do hundreds of times before. I watched a faint ripple pass along his cheek. He turned to face me, but still said nothing. I watched his eyes staring inwards as he decided what course to take. It was strange. He looked younger than I remembered him to be and I found it difficult to believe that this still young, still handsome man was my father. Again I caught a rare glimpse of that something which was almost dandyish about him, something which surfaced fleetingly from time to time from beneath his impeccably presanitized self-assurance. I could see the illusory hint of sensuality that had attracted my mother as a young girl twenty-five years before. I waited for the suspended cycle to break.

When he did finally look at me I knew immediately what direction the game had taken. I could see from his set mouth and his cool aloof eyes that any notion of the joyful embrace of a prodigal son was entirely mistaken. And yet I wished he could break out of his inhuman paralysis. Just for once I wished he could overcome his denial of something fundamental, something human, something which would have allowed our final reconciliation.

Whenever my father felt under threat he was inclined to become melodramatic or, alternatively, he would callously select his opponent’s weakest spot, lunge, retreat and lunge again. There was always a sense of overkill, as though he were overcompensating for some perceived weakness in himself. In an intellectual argument this could be devastatingly effective. Now, as we stared impassively at each other, I waited for the first thrust.

It may interest you to know, he said, that your mother is in hospital.

Then came the calculated follow through.

She has cancer…She’s dying. While you’ve been here indulging yourself in God knows what…

His voice became choked with rage. He raised his clenched fist.

And now this!

I felt numbed by the impact of what he had said. How was it that a few simple words, meaningless sounds in themselves, could suddenly make one feel so ill? How was it that they could suddenly crash unannounced and unwanted into your consciousness, instantaneously devastating the existing order of your life, leaving it irrevocably altered? I hated my father for doing this to me. I wanted him to take back the words he had uttered, not to have heard them. I wanted to step out of this instant and go back to a point which led in some completely different direction. This was not the moment of inevitability I had meant. This was not the release I had sought.

Haven’t you…

Shut up, I said. Shut up, shut up,
shut up
. I don’t want to hear.

I was shouting. The guard had risen to his feet and stood nervously watching us.

Take me back, I said. I’ve had enough.

Two days later I was released on bail on the condition that I didn’t leave Berlin, that I stay at the hotel where my father was staying and that I report to the police once every two days. They still had not found Karl and my own attempts to find out what had happened to the old man were greeted with an evasive silence. Because of my mother’s illness a preliminary hearing had been set down for the following week.

The final confrontation did come two nights later. Against my father’s wishes I had disappeared for the afternoon. He thought I had taken off altogether. Instead I had gone back to Kreuzberg, taking care that I was not followed, not that it mattered. When I got there the door to Karl’s room was open and his personal belongings were gone. So was much of what else had been in his room. He had obviously gone. I went to my own room and packed up my papers and some other bits and pieces and put them into a bag. I knew I wouldn’t be back. I called by to see Marianne but there was no one at her place either. Then I went to the theatre. Nobody had seen either of them for days. They had simply disappeared.

When I got back to the hotel around seven my father was waiting for me in my room. He was furious.

What are you doing here? I said.

Where have you been?

How’d you get in?

I asked you where you’d been.

What did you do, bribe the management?

Are you going to answer me?

Are you going to answer me?

Well?

Well?

We had reached a stalemate pretty quickly. But what he said then was completely uncalled for.

If it wasn’t for you, he said, your mother wouldn’t be in hospital at this very moment.

Are you accusing me of causing mother’s illness? I shouted.
Me
! After years of your indifference. All you ever cared about was your bloody career. You never gave a damn about any of us. You were so caught up with yourself and what you were doing that you wouldn’t have even known what was going on in your own home—what went on for years under your very nose.

What do you mean?

Want to know who Anya’s real father is?

He looked at me suspiciously.

What do you mean? Who Anya’s
real
father is.

Just that, I said.

Even then I knew by the frightened look on his face that he still had not guessed.

Who?

Me, I said. Me, me, me. Anya is
my
child. She’s
my
daughter.

What does eternity matter to me? To lose the touch of flowers or a woman’s hands is the supreme separation.

Camus

After I received Wolfi’s package I heard nothing more from him. Nor was I able to contact him. All I knew of his address in Berlin was that he lived in a condemned tenement somewhere in Kreuzberg. I had no idea what Karl’s theatre group was called or where they met. I didn’t even know Wolfi’s address in Klagenfurt. Through the Austrian Embassy I was able to get hold of a Klagenfurt telephone directory. There were half a dozen entries under Schönborn, T. I wrote letters to Wolfi at each of these addresses. Two of these were eventually returned unopened months later. I have no idea what happened to the others. I also wrote to Wolfi’s father at Graz University, but again there was no reply.

It wasn’t until June 1986, when I was invited by the Verein Deutscher Schriftsteller to attend a conference in Berlin, that I had the opportunity to try to relocate him. I would, I decided, stay on a couple of weeks to see what I could turn up.