The Girl Behind The Curtain (Hidden Women) (24 page)

And then Gianni upped the stakes. He announced in front of the table. ‘A thousand Deutschmarks says you can’t persuade her to go to bed with you.’

If I hadn’t accepted this dare I would never have heard the last of it. I decided I would take Gianni’s money and bring Silke in on the joke. She didn’t have to sleep with me, but if she pretended to, she could take half the money. And it was an excuse to talk to her again.

Chapter 31

Berlin, last October

How did I feel when I read about Marco’s dare? I wasn’t thrilled, I can tell you. But I wasn’t entirely shocked. Back in 1999, Marco was a young guy. I had done some pretty cruel things at the same age; my girl friends and I had flirted outrageously with people we had no intention of ever seeing again. With that in mind, I tried not to judge him. But why was this young girl significant? Where was the story going? Was she the passenger who had died in Marco’s car?

There was also the fact that Marco had been in Berlin. The moment I read those words, I felt my perspective on the city shift ever so slightly. Until I read those words, Berlin had been my place. Everything I discovered was new and original. It was mine alone. Now I knew that Marco had been here too, I would have to wonder if he had seen what I’d seen. Of course he must have walked under the Brandenburg Gate. He must have seen the Reichstag. He probably had his photograph taken at Checkpoint Charlie. To think of him in Berlin with those friends I had never met made me sad. And he was at the Boom Boom. I thought of Anna and Silke singing the same song. When Marco described Silke, I could see Anna’s face in my head.

I wanted to talk about it, but the only person who knew I had Marco’s diary was Silvio. I hadn’t even admitted the truth to Bea. I’d told her Silvio was returning an old notebook of mine.

That’s the problem with lies. They leave you isolated.

The following evening, I saw my landlord. He climbed the stairs to bring me a parcel that had been delivered earlier in the day, while I was at the university. It was a package of books I had asked my mother to send to me. It was heavy and I felt terrible that Herr Schmidt had tackled the stairs to bring it to me rather than leave it in the hall. I invited him in.

‘I don’t want to disturb you,’ he said.

‘I’d appreciate the company,’ I told him. That was the truth. Plus, I was intrigued to know more about him. As a young girl, I’d heard plenty about the Second World War from my grandparents, but I had never heard the story from the German perspective. I hoped that I might be able to draw Herr Schmidt on his experiences. I also wanted to thank him for having given me those old diaries; they were exactly what I needed to kick-start my project.

But Herr Schmidt did not seem to want to know about Kitty Hazleton. When I told him that she had fallen in love with a man who shared his surname, Herr Schmidt merely said, as had Clare, ‘It is Germany’s most common name.’

Herr Schmidt did not stay to talk.

It was strange the way that Herr Schmidt did not want to discuss the contents of the diaries even though he had pressed them into my hands but I decided that perhaps he just felt guilty for having hung on to them for so long. With every year that passed, the chances of getting them and the items he’d found with them back to their owner faded. I’d calculated that if Kitty Hazleton were still alive, she would be ninety-seven.

My search for her had not got far. It was complicated by the small but important detail that she was a woman and, unlike a man, had almost certainly changed her name after marriage. But I had sent messages to some Surrey-based Hazletons via Facebook, in the hope that one of them was a relative. It would be a wonderful thing to reunite her with her diaries if I could.

Would I reunite Marco with his? How could I do it without drawing his attention to the fact that Silvio had betrayed his trust? The diary seemed to accuse me from its place on my desk. But I think I already knew I would not do it before reading the rest. Marco’s diary had become my constant companion; every moment I had, I read a little more. It was slow work, almost as hard as translating Luciana’s diaries had been. He used a lot of slang. His handwriting was recognisably his but it was erratic and untidy in places as though even to pick up a pen caused him pain. Sometimes he wrote in a kind of shorthand. The story wasn’t always chronological. Parts of it didn’t quite make sense. He frequently broke off from telling his story to rant at his supposed reader – the psychiatrist – for wasting his time making him write the story out when it was so clear where the guilt lay. The possible scenarios ran through my mind. I thought I knew what I was going to discover. The punchline would be the car accident, of course and his culpability in it. Driving a powerful car way too fast. Had he also been drunk? I hoped not. I wasn’t sure what I would think about that.

I read on, staying up late to finish another page. It caused me especial pain that he was writing about Berlin. About the Boom Boom Club of all places. Because I had been there so recently, I could picture the moment Marco met this Silke all too clearly. She was too real. When I read that he had found her beautiful while she sang, I felt a bubble of jealousy even though I’d sworn to myself that I didn’t want him any more. It shouldn’t have mattered what had happened in his past. Who he’d cared for. It was none of my business. Why had Silvio thought I should read it at all?

And yet, when Marco talked, I wanted to listen. Even if the story was for someone else. I remembered an email he had sent me many months earlier, in which he joked that I was his confessor. In that case, however, he had been telling me about stealing something from a shop as a seven-year-old. His nanny had discovered the theft and marched him back to return the sweets and apologise.

This was different. There was no marching back from a death.

Berlin, 1999

So, I took Gianni up on his second dare. I’m sure he thought I would get slapped down. He didn’t know I had a plan. This time I went up to Silke and told her I was secretly gay and my friends suspected. Would she be kind enough to leave the club with me to put them off the scent? There was five hundred Deutschmarks in it.

‘Five hundred? And I just have to leave the club with you?’

‘You’d be doing me an enormous favour.’

‘Sounds like easy money.’

We left the club arm in arm. As we walked past my friends, they had the decency not to clap us out. When it looked as though Gianni might say something distasteful, I drew my finger across my throat. It was bad enough that I had taken them up on the bet; I wasn’t such an arsehole that I wanted her to know about it.

As soon as we were outside, Silke turned to me and said, ‘OK. I’m going back inside. If you’d just like to hand over the money. It’s been very nice working with you, Herr Marco Donato.’

‘What? Wait,’ I said. ‘You can’t go back inside yet. What will my friends think?’

‘You really are bothered what your friends think?’ Her eyes flashed mischief. ‘Well, if your reputation is so important to you, I suppose I can spare you a little more time for your five hundred marks. It was getting rather hot in there anyway. You can walk me home.’

‘Is it far?’ I asked.

‘Why? Do your shiny shoes hurt?’ Silke asked me.

I was expecting only to walk Silke back to her apartment – almost like a gentleman – and leave her there. I would make something up for the benefit of the boys. I didn’t expect her to invite me in. Why would she? I was a stranger.

But if we were strangers when we left the Boom Boom together, the sensation didn’t seem to last for long. In the noise and hustle of the club, it had been difficult to have a conversation. Outside, on the quiet street, it was much easier.

We spoke in English because I didn’t know any German and, while Silke knew some Italian, she knew English better. Her ambition was to study in London but that was expensive and would probably never happen. The idea that money might be an object in any scenario was completely alien to me.

She was cultured and funny. She wasn’t just a singer. She told me she played cello as well as piano.

‘Cellos aren’t that portable,’ she said.

In the daytime, while she was waiting for someone to notice her and make her a star, she told me she worked at an old people’s home. It wasn’t high on her list of dream jobs, but she told me that she quite enjoyed it. ‘There are some good people in there. They make me laugh. They have a good perspective on what really matters in life. Which is useful if you intend to be a megastar, as I do. They’ll help me keep my feet on the ground. And what about you? What do you do when you’re not splashing money on bad champagne?’

I was embarrassed. I could hardly tell her I didn’t have to earn a living. In theory, I worked alongside my father, but in practice, I spent most of my time on vacation. I’d dropped out of university because it interfered with my partying. I told Silke that I worked for a shipping company. I didn’t tell her the company bore my family name.

‘That must be interesting,’ she said. ‘Gives you a chance to travel the world.’

I had seen so much of the world I was rather blasé about it. Silke had never been outside her country.

We got to her apartment building. It was one of those huge, ugly square buildings that had sprung up during the Soviet era. I had never seen such a hideous building in my life. Growing up in Venice, perhaps, had left me with an aversion to bad architecture. I looked up at it.

‘Are you coming in?’ she asked.

I hesitated.

‘If you come in, I will let you leave,’ Silke laughed. ‘I promise. It’s just that we were having such a nice conversation, I thought we might carry on for a while.’

She was right. We’d been having a great conversation and I was in no hurry to cut it short. I followed her into the building. She told me she shared the flat with a girl friend who was away for the weekend. Though the building was grim, Silke and her friend had made their apartment very cosy. Glamorous, even. Beautiful silk curtains hung at the windows. The lighting was rather romantic.

‘What can I get you?’ Silke asked. She opened a cabinet to show me an array of drinks. There was even a bottle of tequila with a lizard in it. I remember that because, some hours later, we opened the bottle and she dared me to take a slug.

That’s the last thing I can really remember about that night.

I slept on the sofa. I had drunk so much that I could barely move. There was no chance I was going to jump on Silke. She didn’t seem to mind. She untied my shoelaces and slipped off my shoes. Then she lifted my legs, so that I was lying flat out on the cushions. She covered me with a quilt that smelled faintly of her perfume. Then she kissed me lightly on the forehead and went into her bedroom.

It was the following morning that it happened. She woke me with a cup of coffee. It was horrible coffee. But then any coffee except Italian coffee is pretty vile to me.

Silke was even prettier without her make-up on. She had beautiful skin, luminous and fine as porcelain. Her eyelashes were long and dark. Though her scar was more prominent when her face was bare, it had a beauty and a bravery to it. I had the sudden urge to kiss it.

She sat down on the arm of the sofa, cradling her own coffee in her hand, and watched me, with her head tipped to one side, as though she wasn’t quite sure what had washed up in her living room.

‘You’re still here,’ she said. ‘Whatever will your friends think about that?’

I was supposed to leave Berlin on the Monday morning, but I found I didn’t want to. Instead, I cancelled my flight and told my friends I would be staying. I wanted to see Silke again. I stayed for another seven days. During that time, I monopolised every spare moment she had.

Silke’s flatmate was back in the apartment during the week, so nights were spent at the hotel. During the day, Silke had to work. I hung around aimlessly, drinking bad coffee in dingy cafés, just waiting for her to finish her shift and appear in my room, still dressed in her old people’s home uniform. She would bring tapes of her favourite music with her. She was determined to educate me. It’s thanks to her that I heard of Jeff Buckley, son of the man who wrote ‘Song to the Siren’. His is the only voice I can stand to listen to now. It suits my mood. Especially since I know he died by drowning. I feel I might follow him into the water.

But you won’t let that happen, will you, so I suppose I have to carry on.

Silke was so unlike anyone I had ever met before. She said I was unlike anyone she’d ever met either. She really didn’t know anything much about me. I suppose she had guessed that I came from a family with money – I was staying at the Adlon, after all. Silke gave me a different kind of access to Berlin. We went to the kind of places I never would have found on my own or with Gianni and his bunch of monied drifters.

I felt at home in the city when I was with her. Perhaps it’s just that I felt at home with Silke. I liked that she came to me with no preconceptions. With my friends gone back to Italy, I could be the Marco I wanted to be. The Marco she made me want to be.

Those words: ‘The Marco she made me want to be.’ Having translated that telling line, I closed Marco’s diary. I wasn’t sure that I could bear to read on. I put it back inside the envelope and into the shoebox, where it nestled alongside Kitty’s diaries and her teddy bear.