Therefore Choose (4 page)

“But you didn't?”

“I was already a student when it was introduced. I had to do ten weeks at a labour camp.”

“They're keener on the physical than the mental.”

George felt he had annoyed his friend.

“They want graduates to know what work is,” Werner said.

“Was it worthwhile?”

He became yet more irritated.

“A few students in a contingent of labourers, building a road. The road will be useful.” Werner grimaced. “The foreman was unspeakable: ignorant and coarse.”

In Cologne, that imposing city, prominent since medieval times, they visited, of course, the great cathedral. Next morning, in the newer but also handsome railway station, not far from the cathedral, they stood on the platform and waited. The train arrived: huge, noisy, bullying its way into the station, unstoppable, thrilling. Inside the carriage, the noise became irrelevant. George felt himself contained, insulated, purposefully borne along.

In Berlin, they stayed in a pension in Kantstrasse that was convenient, though a little rundown. Werner would spend a few days with George before he travelled to Konstanz to visit his family. After that he would come back and they would go to some of the Olympic Games that were to be held in the first two weeks of August. Then George and Werner would spend some more time together before George went back to London for the clinical part of his medical training, and Werner would go to Freiburg, to do graduate work at the university there.

“Tomorrow,” said Werner, “I shall introduce you to Anna. She's an old friend. I think you'll like her. She lives in Berlin, and knows it very well, so she will know where you can find a room, or a flat, for a few weeks.”

“That will be good.”

“She's very intense,” said Werner. “The moment you meet her, she'll want to discuss Thomas Mann or something.”

“What's wrong with that?”

“I said you would like her.”

Along the pavement
a woman approached. She was tall, with shortish black hair that bobbed slightly as she walked. Her face was sharp. She wore a white shirt, recently ironed, and men's flannel trousers that did not look out of place on her. George imagined a Roman patrician striding across the forum.

George stood with Werner, outside a café that had tables on the pavement.

As the woman drew close, Werner smiled at her. She smiled back at him, a friendly smile.

Werner said, “Fräulein, may I present Mr. George Smith? Soon to be Dr. George Smith. Mr. Smith, this is Fräulein Anna von Kleist, editor-in-chief of Berlin's most distinguished literary magazine.”

The woman tilted her head slightly to one side and, in a little ceremony that seemed both natural and contrived, lowered her eyelids and nodded gently towards George. He did not quite know what to do. He bowed slightly, and felt embarrassed.

They shook hands.

“How do you do,” they both said in English at the same time.

Everyone laughed.

“It is nice to meet you,” said Anna. “Werner has said many good things about you.”

“He has said many good things about you too,” said George. “But in my case, I shall not be able to live up to them.”

“There you have it,” said Werner. “English modesty and understatement.”

“Our magazine is literary,” said Anna. “It is probably Berlin's smallest and most … how do you say, without money?”

“Impecunious,” said George.

“Exactly.”

“That does not mean it is not the most distinguished,” said Werner. “The editor also is very distinguished.”

“Distinguished for what?” she said. “For struggling against absurd obstacles?”

George was impressed that they could joke in a foreign language.

“Let's sit down,” said Werner.

There was a table free, and the three sat down. A waiter approached.

“Heil Hitler,” he said.

This greeting had replaced “good morning” and “good afternoon.” Hard to think of an English equivalent, thought George. “God save the King?” Scarcely. “Long live Baldwin.” Yet more implausible.

Werner glanced at George. Had he been on his own, perhaps he would have returned the waiter's greeting. Instead Werner nodded.

“Do you have a Mosel?” he said.

“I'll bring the wine list, sir.”

“Are you related to the nineteenth-century writer von Kleist?” George said.

“I am,” said Anna. “Half the family knows nothing about him. The other half worries that they are afflicted with his madness.”

Does that mean you are in the other half? thought George.

Although her face was thin, Anna's lips were mobile. George found himself trying not to stare at them. Sometimes she would pout a little and then, a moment later, as he continued to watch, her lips would form into the most exquisite smile.

“George needs to find a room for two or three weeks,” said Werner. “While I go to Konstanz. I told him you might know where to look.”

“I've no idea,” Anna said and made a face of perplexity. “I know Berlin. I am happy to help you look … if you would permit me.”

Before Werner left Berlin
for Konstanz, he took George and Anna out to dinner, at a place where they could sit outside in the evening air. They drank white wine, talked about literature, and laughed a lot.

The evening after Werner left, George and Anna went out. As they ate and talked together, George experienced a current between them, something distinct: something he had not previously known with anyone. He did not know if it was only he who felt it. He thought he should not say anything. Anna invited him back to her flat.

“There is something,” said Anna. “Something between us. You felt it too. I could see you did.”

George stayed the night.

Next evening, Anna had plans so George didn't see her. She'd said they would meet the next day, that she'd come round to his pension, that she'd help him find somewhere to live.

After a night of sleeplessness and strange dreams, George lay in bed, in his pension, thinking: Anna … Anna. Making love. Who could have predicted it? An era at an end. Cambridge finished. Now this. He had a bodily memory of Anna, her soft skin. He pulled his pillow to his chest and hugged it. Now this.

There was a sharp knocking at the door.

“Herr Schmidt!” It was a woman's voice. “Es ist dringend.”

George got out of bed and opened the bedroom door. There stood Anna, with raised eyebrows and a smile.

“I said it was urgent,” she said. “I was told to come up.”

“Sorry,” George said. “It's a bit of a mess, but come in. I'd better put some clothes on.”

“A piece of good luck. I've a friend, Dagmar. She goes away for six weeks and her cats are to be fed. A few other chores to be done. She has a very excellent flat, near the Tiergarten S-Bahn station. I told her we would do it.”

“We would?”

“You said you need somewhere to stay.”

“Well, yes …”

“Put on your clothes. I'll take you to breakfast and we'll go to make an inspection.”

The flat was on the top floor of a nineteenth-century building in a small street that ran between the S-Bahn and the river. Anna and George climbed a large staircase and knocked at the front door of the flat. Dagmar appeared and welcomed them. She was a smiley woman, not very tall, so that she had to stretch up a bit to kiss Anna on the cheek. She led them down the hallway, which seemed very long, with rooms off to either side. As they walked along the hallway and glanced into every room, they saw Turkish and Persian carpets on varnished wooden floors. It would have been rude to look too closely. They weren't going to rent it, only take care of it. There was a study, a sitting room, four bedrooms, as well as a kitchen and a bathroom. There were lithographs and prints everywhere. The long, sprawling hallway had nooks, and walls full of books in many categories. The sitting room was large, with upholstered sofas, and the kitchen had a circular wooden table surrounded by six spoke-back chairs. And there were two cats, neither of which looked troublesome.

After they had made arrangements with Dagmar about how to look after her cats and her flat, George and Anna walked beside the River Spree.

“So we should live together?” said George. “We hardly know each other.”

“You can sleep in a separate room if you wish, like a student. Or do you want to stay in that squalid pension?”

“What about you? What about your flat?”

“It is very good at taking care of itself. I can go two or three times a week to pick up the post.”

“And you will have more space.”

Anna took George's arm and gave it a squeeze.

Dagmar left next day, and they moved into her flat. Anna's magazine was not published in the summer months, so she needed to go to her office only in the mornings.

Two stairs at a time
, George ran up the big circular staircase towards the flat. In one hand he held a bag of groceries and, as part of each upward movement, he pulled with his other hand on the polished mahogany banister. As he reached the first landing, still moving quickly, he looked up into the octagonal skylight. In the morning the sun shone on the wall that was behind him. At midday, it reached far down the stairwell. At this time, in the afternoon, it cast bright illumination on the embossed beige wallpaper of the upper wall in front of him. The building with this stairwell was not quite exotic, but it was hard to think of it as familiar. When he reached the top, George took the key from his pocket, let himself into the flat, and peered down the corridor of carpets and bookshelves. The feeling of foreignness intensified. It was inviting. But it was unknown.

Somewhat out of breath, he walked through the flat, looking for Anna.

“I'm back.”

He looked into the grand bedroom that they occupied. Anna's voice called from outside its open front window.

“You've been away so long. Whatever have you been doing?”

She had taken cushions from a sofa and put them on the strip of flat roof between the window and a low balustrade. She lay naked in the sun, on her back with one ankle crossed over the other, her right hand behind her head and her left resting, as in a famous painting, on a certain part of her body.

“Remove, please, your clothes,” she said. “Come out here.”

Anna was not coquettish, but she had a sense of ease with her body that George found astonishing. He took off his clothes, climbed through the window hoping he wouldn't be seen, sat on a cushion, and peeped over the balustrade towards the houses opposite.

“The perfect place,” she said. “Here's another perfect place. I've been preparing it a bit, to be ready when you returned. Here, put on this thing.”

She uncrossed her ankles and he kneeled between her knees. She reached out, pulled him gently towards the place, and enveloped him.

“There,” she said. “Just as well you didn't spend too much time out there, at the shops. I don't know whether I could have waited much longer.”

“I'm not sure I can wait much longer.”

“You don't have to. I want to feel you inside me. I want to feel you when you come. I'm studying a new kind of natural history. The sexual life of the Englishman. I want to see your face. Then I want to hold your head on my neck, and look into the infinite sky.”

And so it was.

“And you,” George said. “Usually …”

“This is not usual. I want you to kneel beside me. If people at the top of the house opposite look out they can see just the top of your head. They wonder whatever you could be doing. You can think of us as characters in one of those very improper French short stories that circulate anonymously.”

“I'm not in the literary world, so they don't circulate to me.”

“Slowly,” she said.

Afterwards, they lay there for some minutes. George was infused with a sense of well-being he had never before experienced. He closed his eyes, his mind floated with angel wings, his eyelids were filled with a dappled light, as if inside a gentle waterfall, he became that waterfall …

“I told you I could scarcely wait,” Anna said. “I think you've got to me.”

George was totally taken up in Anna's affection
. Sometimes he found himself peering at her face, wondering what he would see if he could look inside her mind. He sensed a small centre of privacy, and felt unnerved by it. For all her assurance, this centre was a kind of reserve, as if she feared the world might suddenly tip into some crevasse, or as if she thought she must be prepared, instantly, to leave. Was that the sense of her that disturbed him? What if he gave himself up to her too completely, came to depend on her, and then suddenly she was not there? He sensed a danger, that he could lose too much. Or, he thought, were these thoughts more to do with him than with her?

“Breakfast!”