Out of the Line of Fire (27 page)

At the reception desk I asked the night-porter where I could find a place called Vivaldi’s. He bent down and got out a map of the inner city area and spread it out on the counter before him, smoothing its creases.

This is us here…with the red circle, he said slowly. Well not exactly us if you get my drift. He looked up at me and smiled inanely.

I wasn’t sure what he meant.

His finger meaningfully tapped a spot at the base of an arrow pointing to the red circle.

Sie sind hier, it read. [You are here.]

I began to get impatient.

Theater des Westens is here and Vivaldi’s…Let me see, Vivaldi’s…ah yes, Vivaldi’s is here. It’s about four blocks away. You can’t miss it. So from here you go…

Yes, yes, I said. It’s okay, I think I can find it. Thanks.

I turned and headed towards the door. Outside, the reflection of the lights glistened on the pavement. It was raining.

Damn!

I glanced back at the desk. The night-porter was already holding an umbrella towards me in his outstretched arm. He smiled.

Eile mit Weile, he said as he handed it to me.

He was right. More haste, less speed.

Danke. Danke schön, I said.

Bitte schön, he said, inclining his body towards me slightly. I could almost feel the imperceptible click of his heels.

I stepped out into the wet night, raised the umbrella and began walking quickly towards town. Finally, after the disappointment of the last couple of days, Wolfi’s world was becoming a reality.

On Kurfürstendamm, despite the rain, which had begun to ease, the streets were already alive with people. The distorted, inverted shapes of traffic lights, flashing neon signs and illuminated interiors of passing cars shone back up at me, reflected in the glazed surface of the wet pavement. Mushroom-shaped silhouettes moved mysteriously about in twos or threes or congregated at the kerbside briefly before launching themselves collectively towards the other side. The Germans have a word for the sticky swish of tyres on wet pavement—it is ‘zischen’. Its ‘z’ is pronounced ‘ts’. As I walked along I could hear the repeated tsisch-tsisch of the car tyres as they passed, interrupted from time to time by the blast from a car horn. In the brightly lit doorways of the numerous peepshows and strip joints located at this end of Kurfürstendamm sleazily suited men stood repeating a monotonous litany of sordid suggestion to any passer-by who strayed within earshot. A young woman stepped out of the shadows and said something to me. I walked on.

Don’t you like me? I heard her call softly.

I felt as though I was walking on a precariously thin, transparent laminate between the mirror image of two separate worlds. Any minute, if I lost my rhythm and missed meeting the foot which rose to meet mine, I ran the risk of falling through. I began to feel giddy as I concentrated on keeping exactly in step with the unknown person walking beneath me.

About twenty minutes later I walked past the Theater des Westens and turned into the narrow side-street the night-porter had indicated on the map. A little ahead of me and on the opposite side I could see the name ‘Vivaldi’s’ written in large Gothic letters across one of the shop-front windows.

I stood for a moment under its awning shaking the rain off my umbrella and then pushed the door open.

Inside, only half a dozen tables were occupied and all of these by groups. I ordered a drink from the bar and sat at one of the tables by the window and waited.

I had been there less than five minutes when I saw a tall attractive-looking woman in a dark, high-collared coat quickly cross the street. She came in, dropped her umbrella in the stand, unbuttoned her coat and hung it on the rack. She shook her head and ran her hand through her hair a number of times. Although they were completely different, for some reason I was reminded of my night with Andrea in Heidelberg years earlier. The thought passed fleetingly through my mind that perhaps at the end of the night we would end up in bed together. She turned.

Sorry I’m late, she said.

I went to get up.

That’s okay, a male voice beside me answered, we’ve only been here a couple of minutes ourselves.

She smiled at me as she squeezed by to join a group of young people sitting at the next table. She kissed her friend lightly on the cheek. His hand rose to rest on her shoulder. I settled uncomfortably back into my chair.

God, what a night, I heard her say.

I sat looking across at her, wondering what opportunity had been missed, what loss incurred.

Once she even appeared to look across at me, as if suddenly she had become aware that I was thinking about her. I saw her hand rise as if to say to her companions: Just a second, I can hear something. Can you hear it? It’s like someone talking. She looked down at the table, frowned and then looked back up at me. Perhaps I was imagining it but I am sure that in that instant something had passed between us. The moment was broken, however, by another group of people who came noisily through the door. Shortly after, she and her friends got up and left.

I waited until after eleven. Marianne had rung at ten and still she hadn’t arrived. Finally I went across to the bar and asked the barman if he knew anyone called Marianne who may have been a regular. He didn’t. I waited another fifteen minutes. I guess I already knew she wasn’t going to turn up. I decided to leave a note at the bar asking her to phone me again and then left myself.

Outside it had begun to rain again. I walked slowly back to the hotel.

The next night I phoned to see if anyone had asked after me or if my note had been picked up. No one had. For the remainder of my stay in Berlin I was not to hear from her again.

The following week I caught a flight to Vienna and from there took the train to Klagenfurt. I booked into a little hotel a kilometre or two from the centre of town.

After dinner I went for a walk through some of the older, more romantic streets until I found myself high up on one of the slopes of the hills. In some ways it reminded me of Heidelberg. I sat there for a long time watching the dimming evening settle into the creviced network of streets below.

In the morning I was up early. I had decided that my first plan of action would be to go through the phone book once again and ring every T. Schönborn listed. So at about eight-thirty I began making calls. Of the half dozen or so I made, only two answered. Neither of them knew of any Wolfgang Schönborn. I would have to try again later. On the spur of the moment I decided to walk into town.

I am convinced there are times in everyone’s life in which fate seems to intervene directly in the course of events. There is simply no other explanation that adequately explains why a particular thing happens or why a situation turns out as it does.

My route into town took me past the local cemetery. I had almost gone completely by and was making a mental note of how strange some of the headstones were when it suddenly occurred to me that had Wolfi’s mother died she would probably have been buried right here, and that if she had been I would more than likely be able to find out Wolfi’s address from the cemetery register. I hurried back.

The caretaker’s cottage was located under two large elm trees just to the right of the main gates. I knocked on the door. It was some time before anybody answered, but eventually the door opened and an elderly man with a prominent stoop stood there looking up at me. He had large, watery eyes set in an incongruously cheerful face.

I was wondering, I said, if you could tell me if a Mrs Schönborn is buried here, a Mrs Eva Schönborn. She died in…

1982. Yes, yes. Eva Schönborn. Born 6 June 1939, died 4 September 1982, requiescat in pace. He crossed himself.

Yes, that sounds right, I said. Could you tell me where she’s buried?

He pulled the door to.

Come, he said.

He led me down a number of rows of indescribably grotesque tombstones before stopping in front of a simple plaque in white marble.

I stood looking at it for a while, not knowing what to say.

A tragedy, the old man said finally.

I nodded.

A tragedy, he repeated. First the mother, then the son.

The son!

Yes. A terrible business. Terrible, terrible. Shot himself. And then the father refusing to allow them to be buried together. Terrible.

He led me around to another row of graves and there before me was what I had never expected nor ever wanted to see:

Wolfgang Schönborn
3 March 1958 – 10 September 1982

I stood there numb.

Wolfgang Schönborn
3 March 1958 – 10 September 1982

Wolfgang Schönborn…I couldn’t believe it, wouldn’t believe it. I felt as though the ground had been swept out from under my feet. Utter stillness, invisibly solid seemed to begin to descend upon me, as though it were being poured around me, encasing my feet, my legs, my arms, until it began to suffocate me. I wanted to cry out. Far off in the distance I could see the retreating figure of the old caretaker. I felt myself choking. Shakily I stumbled over to a nearby bench and sat down.

I sat there for a long time just thinking about Wolfi, thinking about the things he had written, about conversations I had had with him. I remember thinking that discovering his death in this way seemed so malevolently capricious. Relocating Wolfi had been something I had been indulging myself in, innocently savouring its sense of mystery, of real-life adventure. Then—bang. Suddenly I had collided with something which seemed to send my life crashing wildly off course. A thousand questions clamoured for answers against the numbness in my head. Why had he done it? Nothing in what he had written had given the least indication that he had intended taking his own life. Had this been what he had meant by his note: ‘Perhaps
you
can make something of this?’

I sat there thinking of all the life he had breathed into the recounting of his experiences. And now—nothing, absolutely nothing.

Eventually I got up and walked slowly back to the caretaker’s cottage. He was sitting outside filling his pipe. I sat down near him.

You a friend of the family? he asked.

No. I knew Wolfi, the son, a couple of years ago. This has come as a great shock to me.

He nodded.

Do you know any more about what happened?

No. Just that. One week the mother died. The next week, the son. He had to be flown back from Berlin.

Berlin? So he didn’t die here then?

Nope. They found his body by the river. Shot through the head like I said.

I winced.

Although, now I come to think of it, there
was
some doubt about whether it was suicide or not. Something about the angle the bullet entered the brain…

He held a match to his pipe, sucked the flame into it, then expelled a couple of small bursts of smoke.

There was talk about some trouble with the police, about the son being mixed up with drugs, something like that…If you ask me, he was bumped off [abgemurkst]. Yep, he was bumped off alright if you ask me.

He sat looking out over the cemetery, his watery eyes squinting.

Look, I said, I’d like to get in contact with his father. Would you have his address by any chance?

Yep, but it won’t help you none.

Why not?

Round the twist, that’s why. Completely barmy [total bekloppt].

He tapped the side of his head. They’ve put him away. There’s a daughter though who comes here every week to put flowers on the son’s grave. Good-looker. I think I’ve got her address someplace.

He got up and went inside. A few minutes later he came back with a slip of paper.

Here we are, 40 Schröderstrasse. It’s on the far side of town.

I thanked him. I stood there for a moment debating whether to go back to Wolfi’s grave. When I turned back to him the old man had already disappeared inside.

Still a little dazed I decided to leave the cemetery and I wandered into town. I sat under one of the chestnut trees in the park. Had I been blind to some hidden message in what Wolfi had written? Had he foreshadowed his death in some subtle way that I had not perceived? And if I now went back over what he had written would I be able to read a single sentence of it without his death staring me in the face? Is this what Wolfi was talking about when he referred to the teleology of memory? Already I could feel an insidious sense of logic seeping up between the interstices of apparently arbitrary and unrelated events, morticing them together.

As I sat there, images of Wolfi kept floating up through my mind: watching him the first day through the doorway; me, standing on a chair, examining his head for imagined but non-existent baldness; watching him queue for food at the mensa. I saw him at the beach with Elena; saw him make his announcement ‘Ich bin ein Mann’ to his stunned family; watched him watching Karl flip things into his stomach; saw the look of horror on his face at the sight of the old guy slumped back against the toilet. My own experience of him through his writings had become amalgamated in my head. I could no longer distinguish between the two, so perfect the sense of continuity between them now appeared.

I walked back to the hotel and sat on the side of my bed going through the bound volume of Wolfi’s material I had brought with me. I stood looking at the photo of Elena and Anya again. Anya, his child.

As I sat looking at the photograph I recalled what the old fellow at the cemetery had said: ‘Now I come to think of it, there
was
some doubt about whether it was suicide or not. Something about the…’ I imagined Wolfi confronting his father, telling him Anya was
his
daughter. I tried to envision in the moments that followed his father’s reactions to the discovery that he and Elena had been lovers.

What, I wondered, had actually taken place in the time between that conversation and his death?

When I decided to go and see Elena I was not blind to the significance of a meeting with her. It would be the first time that the world which Wolfi had created in my mind and my own world would actually coalesce in fact.

The next day as I walked up the shaded path to 40 Schröderstrasse and knocked on the door I felt a strange mixture of nervous elation and residual depression.