The Berlin Crossing (7 page)

‘That’s for him to say.’ I turned to Pastor Bruck.

Tiredness in the old face, the tiredness of centuries.

‘Go now, Herr Ritter,’ the pastor said.

‘Please—’

‘You heard my father,’ Thomas said. There was menace in his voice, in his expression, but it was his father’s face that stilled
me – I could read in that haunted face a loss that echoed my own.

‘OK.’ I tried to keep the sullenness out of my voice as I turned away. ‘OK. Thank you anyway.’

I was rounding the corner of the church on the footpath when I heard the pastor’s voice again.

‘We’ll talk another time, Herr Ritter.’

I turned eagerly. ‘When, Pastor Bruck, when?’

He was leaning against his son; I thought of a tall old tree, dying, being held up by a shorter, sturdier neighbour in the
forest. He opened his mouth to speak but no words came.

‘When my father decides, Herr Ritter.’ Thomas drew his father closer to him as he spoke.

‘I’ll leave you my phone number.’

I felt their eyes upon me as I scribbled my name and number on a scrap of paper and handed it to Thomas. I walked back to
the Trabi in a deepening silence. The cawing crow was gone, the trees were still in a windless day. I could hear my own heart
pounding and an odd voice in my head, a strange and unbidden voice, asking an unfamiliar question: what must it feel like
to have a father to put your arm around?

‘No,’ Frau Mertens said. ‘Your mother never mentioned anything to me about your father.’ Standing beside me in the small kitchen
area, she smelled of carbolic soap mixed with baking and cooking. ‘I suppose it’s losing your mother has made you think of
– of such a thing.’

I wouldn’t – couldn’t – tell her about my visit to Pastor Bruck’s church in Bad Saarow. Frau Mertens’ day turned upon the
routines and rituals of morning Mass and regularly cooked meals – the plate of freshly baked apple strudel on the kitchen
worktop was what had brought her across the corridor – but her daily excursions to the Catholic church would not, I felt,
make her any more sympathetic to my church visit earlier that day. For all her piety, I was pretty sure that my neighbour’s
god was a god of the practical, a down-to-earth deity who traded in certainties, not doubts or fantasies.

‘You’re on your own too much, Michael.’ The small eyes in the round, doughy face narrowed in concern. ‘It’s all right for
a woman like me but a young man like yourself – maybe you should go to the West like the rest of them – they all say there’re
plenty of jobs in Frankfurt and Dusseldorf and . . . and . . .’ Her chins wobbled as she paused for breath. ‘You know what I mean,
Michael, there’s nothing for you here. And you’re a good-looking man too, Michael . . .’ The round face lit up in a smile, her
pudgy
fingers briefly touched mine. ‘You’ll meet nobody in this place, Michael, but over there those
Wessie
girls will be queuing up to get a look at you.’

I muttered something non-committal and thanked her again for the strudel.

‘A dish of
apfelstrudel
won’t give you back your life, Michael. Think about what I said.’ She turned away and I walked with her to the door of her
flat. ‘It’s not easy being alone, Michael, nobody knows that better than me, but you’re young enough to do something about
it.’ She smiled, another crumpling of the round face. ‘You’re an orphan now, Michael, and you have to be your own father and
mother.’

The door closed behind her and I wondered at her words, wondered why I had never noticed her wisdom before.

From beyond the flat came the railway noises. An engine shunting. A whistle blowing. Trains shunting and whistling their way
to the cities and jobs Frau Mertens had spoken of.

And the girls, the women. Driving the streets of the town, my eyes would be drawn to some shapely figure, swinging in tight
jeans along the pavement, and I’d take a look in the rear-view mirror as I passed, but nothing stirred in me, not in my head,
not in my groin. Not since the day the Director had fired me. And not much before that either, when Steffi had ordered me
out. There had been a hurried encounter with a checkout lady from the supermarket a few weeks after Steffi, a brisk opening
of buttons and zips, the rasping sound of Velcro parting and an equally brisk fuck in the checkout lady’s marital bed before
she told me to go, her postman husband could arrive any minute.

Standing at the window, looking out at the station across the road, I shut my eyes and tried to remember something – anything
– of the checkout girl. Young, in her twenties. Dark red hair. Her black lacy knickers on the floor beside the bed.

Nothing more. Not even a name.

A miracle I could even recall Steffi’s name. And yet in the not-so-long-ago she and I had seemed almost to share a single
soul.

I opened my eyes. The railway station was still there, hulking in the darkening light. Maybe Frau Mertens had the right idea.
A ticket to the West. To the bright lights that my sometime fellow citizens had dreamed of. The freedom of bananas and shiny
automobiles. And girls who would breathe life into your listless limbs and make you forget about Bad Saarow and the country
you had lost.

The knock on the door brought me back to the flat, the thin brown carpet, the lumpy sofa.

I thought it must be Frau Mertens, maybe she’d left something more than her words behind.

It wasn’t Frau Mertens.

It was Steffi. Steffi in ankle-high boots and a tailored denim coat that hung open to her knees. Steffi in a tightly fitting
lemon top and short navy skirt. Her blond hair cropped like a choirboy’s, the fringe almost reaching to her ice-blue eyes.

‘I came to see if you were OK.’

The red bee-stung lips shiny with lipstick, the mouth pouting as it always did.

I drew her to me, bending over her mouth.

‘Wait.’ She closed the door, reached behind her to switch off the light.

She didn’t resist when I drew her to me again. Under the short skirt her buttocks were firm in my hands. My fingers reached
inside the soft stuff of her knickers. She gasped.

‘Not here.’

She pushed me away, then led me through the open doorway of the bedroom. She laid the denim coat neatly across the back of
the chair beside my bed and pulled the lemon-coloured top over her head.

It was a quick coupling. It could have been the checkout lady. Maybe, for Steffi, it was the same, maybe I could have been
anybody too. She and I had made love to each other a hundred times but, as we fucked each other in the narrow bed that I had
slept in for most of my life, there was no sense of belonging, no sense of being home or coming home, and afterwards we lay
in each other’s arms like uneasy strangers. No longer a single soul, just two separate strangers.

‘I’ll have to go.’ In the unlit room her voice sounded lost.

‘Wait a while.’

‘Frank will be back soon. He was in Berlin today.’ Frank had taken my place in Steffi’s flat and Steffi’s life. He travelled
for some software outfit.

‘He doesn’t like it if I’m not there when he gets back.’

She got dressed without turning on the light. A slither of silk and lace on skin. I watched her bend over the small mirror
on top of the chest of drawers and fix her mouth with the red lipstick. A flick of her fingers through the cropped hair and
she was ready.

‘I just wanted to make sure you were OK, Michael.’

The words whispered, the door closing behind her. The bedroom heavy with the scent of her perfume. Why had Steffi come? Why
had she come to bed with me?

Nothing made sense any more. Nothing except this childhood flat, these pathetic sticks of furniture I had lived with all my
life. The rhythmic noises of the railway station, the whistling of the trains.

And even that had changed: now shiny new trains in sparkling new livery sped west to once-forbidden destinations.

I breathed in the woman smell of Steffi. The small alarm clock beside the bed said 5.45. Frank would probably be home soon:
maybe Steffi would shower before he got home. Maybe Frank didn’t give a damn if Steffi took it into her head to fuck her ex-husband.
Maybe that was the way you needed to think in our brave, new, democratic world. Anyway, who was I to talk?

I fell asleep.

The telephone woke me. The darkness was deeper when I opened my eyes. I could taste and smell Steffi on my breath. I made
no move to get out of the crumpled bed but the phone didn’t stop ringing.

It went on ringing as I swung my legs out of the bed and walked, barefoot and naked, to the living room. When I picked up
the phone, the dark, bulky furniture seemed to relax back into the shadows.

‘Ritter.’ My own voice sounded strange to me, as though Steffi’s tongue were still trawling inside my mouth.

‘Herr Ritter.’ The voice deep and hard: it was like listening to his relentless malleting of the wooden stakes inside the
church gate. ‘This is Thomas.’ A pause between the blows. ‘Pastor Bruck’s son.’

‘Good evening, Herr Bruck.’

My greeting was not returned.

‘I am phoning only because my father asked me to.’ Another pause, then the mallet raised for another blow. ‘My father will
meet you tomorrow evening, after the evening prayer service. Come to the church about six thirty.’

‘Thank you—’

‘Don’t thank
me
, Herr Ritter. If I had my way, my father would have nothing to do with people like you.’

‘Even so, I’m grateful.’

The silence was so long that I thought he’d hung up.

‘Twenty or thirty years ago they broke my father’s back, Herr
Ritter. Now he wears a steel brace so he can walk but he still feels pain every day of his life. If you cause my father any
grief, Herr Ritter, believe me,
you
are the one who will feel the pain.’

‘All I want from your father is some personal information.’

‘That’s what they told him when they broke his back, Herr Ritter.’

‘Please, this is just a personal matter.’

Pastor Bruck’s son didn’t hear me: this time he
had
hung up.

Tall rectangles of light spilled out of the windows of the church into the dark, wintry evening. The yellow light looked warm
and inviting, but I had never been to a church service in my life and I wasn’t about to start now. I turned the ignition key
and pushed the accelerator pedal to the floor as the engine spluttered into life, and there was a momentary burst of smelly
heat in the interior of the car. I clapped my gloved hands together, glanced at my watch. It was after six thirty: Pastor
Bruck must be reciting extra prayers tonight. Maybe he was praying for an increase in his congregation. Two cars, a Volkswagen
Beetle and an old Citroen station wagon, were parked on the roadway between me and the church gate. And, in the light of the
lamp above the church door, I could see an old-fashioned bicycle leaning against the wall, its saddle covered by a navy blue
beret. The cars and the bicycle had been there when I’d pulled in just after six. Two cars and a bike: it hardly seemed enough
to warrant a prayer service.

I turned off the engine. The heat was fading as the smell of petrol intensified. I could pick up an old Beetle like the one
beside me for a few hundred Deutschmarks but somebody had to keep the faith. Like Pastor Bruck and his handful of fellow worshippers.
Maybe, after all, we had something in common.

The church door swung slowly open. An elderly couple
emerged; silver hair peeking out from under her dark hat, her hand holding firmly to her husband’s arm as they made their
way carefully to the station wagon. He helped her into the car; the soft thud of the door sounded loud in the darkness. Then
car lights sweeping the road and the church wall, the crunch of tyres as the old man laboriously turned the car in a series
of stop-start manoeuvres. When he was ready for departure, he halted, window down, to speak to the other two who had come
out of the church: a schoolmistressy type fixing herself and her bicycle, a stooped farmer type standing at the door of the
mud-caked Beetle. Voices in the darkness, safe home, see you on Sunday. The Beetle door closed, opened, slammed firmly shut
the second time. Headlights briefly filling my car; I blinked against the passing light. The middle-aged lady on the bicycle
examined me carefully as she slowly pedalled past.

Silence settled back on itself. The church waited in the darkness. The church door swung open again and Pastor Bruck stood
there in the falling light, peering into the darkness. I got out of the car and went to meet him. Above the black cassock
the bony face seemed paler than before.

‘Thank you for seeing me, Pastor Bruck,’ I said.

‘I prayed about it – I didn’t know what to do. Sometimes it’s better to leave the past alone.’ For a moment the sunken eyes
met mine, then he looked away. ‘Maybe you won’t thank me later, Herr Ritter.’

He didn’t wait for an answer but set about locking up the church. He pushed home the heavy bolt on the inside of the main
door and closed the padlock on it.

‘Unfortunately we’ve had some visitors who are not very fond of what we do here.’ A wintry smile, a shrug. ‘It’s the way of
the world.’

He walked ahead of me up the aisle. A slow walk but ramrod
straight. I thought of the words his son had spat down the phone.
Who
had broken his back? And
why
?

I almost stumbled into him at the low railing in front of the altar. For a moment or two the priest stood there, head bowed,
hands joined. A page from a picture book of superstitious practices, a shaman in his temple. Yet mine was the faith that was
mocked and discarded. He led me across the polished wooden floor and into a small room just off the altar. I watched him press
switches on a board inside the door. Darkness marched towards us from the back of the church until the only light was the
lamp burning in a hanging bowl above the altar. It was spooky, looking out at that space, full of gloom.

‘I’ve asked my son to wait in the house,’ Pastor Bruck said. ‘We can talk here in the sacristy.’