Out of the Line of Fire (5 page)

When she slips into bed we start making love almost immediately. She obviously enjoys making love because she is very energetic and quite vocal. But when she begins to come she falls silent. I feel her body grow tense. She stretches out under me as I imagine she does when she stretches out for the first time in the morning, her skin tight against the thin fingers of her ribs. She remains suspended for a moment, catches her breath, then surrenders to the short percussive rebuttals of her body.

After we have rested for a few minutes she turns to me and says: Noch einmal, Sam.

Wolfi is at the till. I watch him hand his meal ticket to the cashier. He picks up his tray of food and I see him looking around the room for an empty seat. I catch his eye and point to the seat beside me. He comes and sits down and I introduce him to Andrea. There is a slight pause as Andrea looks at him and then at me. Wolfi, who hasn’t begun to eat his food, is smiling idiotically.

Hey Du, last night I nearly got arrested, he says. I glance at Andrea. Fortunately she has gone back to her book. I remain silent but despite this Wolfi continues.

You know, it was on the bus. There’s something desperate about waiting for a bus, don’t you think? This is addressed less to me than to Andrea who has looked up and is now staring at Wolfi impassively. He explains to her how he hates catching empty buses, especially late at night.

I’d rather walk, he says. But last night I got on the bus, you know, to come home. I sat next to an old woman who was sitting towards the back. There were only the two of us, her and me. I had been
glad
she was there, wisst Ihr. Suddenly, for no reason, she starts yelling, screaming that I’m trying to rape her. I stood up to get away from her but she got up too and began following me down the aisle, hitting me with her umbrella. For no reason at all, she just starts hitting me. Then the driver sees what’s happening in the rear-vision mirror and stops the bus so suddenly that we both nearly topple over into one of the seats in front of us while a car travelling close behind runs into the back of the bus. The bus driver gets up out of his seat and hurries down to find out what is going on and this mad woman, you know, is still hitting me. Well he tries to intervene, but whether accidentally or not I don’t know, she ends up striking him on the forehead. Immediately blood starts issuing from the wound [die Wunde fängt an zu bluten] and this, thank God, brings her to her senses. A few minutes later, with their sirens sounding and their lights flashing, the police arrive. And you know, they end up taking
me
in for questioning. Me, who had nothing to do with it!

As Wolfi is telling his story I become more and more uneasy. When he finishes Andrea gets up without comment. She puts her book in her bag and slips the strap over her shoulder. She picks up the tray with her now empty plates. Before she leaves she turns to me and says: Thank you for last night.

Nothing in the tone of what she says allows me to gauge whether this is meant positively or negatively. It is, in fact, goodbye.

I fail to see the connection between these two incidents.

Forster’s exhortation to the novelist was that he must ‘connect’. ‘Only connect’ he said. Forster did not say ‘he or she’. This is significant. It tells us a lot about Forster, the fact that he used the word ‘he’.

‘Only connect’.

In my effort to find the connection between Wolfi’s retelling of the incident on the bus and Andrea’s enigmatic farewell, I missed, at least initially, the connection between Andrea’s
presence
and the conversation with Wolfi that followed.

Retrospectively then, it is not Andrea’s disappearance which is significant but the fact that she was there in the first place. And yet I’m sure the two events, Andrea’s presence and Wolfi’s subsequent conversation are, in reality, totally
disconnected
. Their connection is only illusory, due to something Wolfi calls ‘die Elision proximatischer Zufälligkeit’ [the elision of proximate coincidence].

But I resent the fact that for apparent reasons of narrative logic a real person seems to have been dropped out of my life, has, as it were, been dispensed with now that she has fulfilled the fictional role assigned to her. The thing is, I still miss her. I try to imagine her at some stage walking into a bookstore, browsing through the books on the shelves, selecting one, this one. She buys it, takes it home. As she reads it she comes to the section which begins: ‘I am sitting in the university dining room with a friend. Her name is Andrea Staiger.’

Komisch, she says, ich heisse Andrea Staiger. That’s my name.

At first she is prepared to accept it as pure coincidence. But what if she had read ‘Unterestrasse’, what then?

[Ich glaub’ das nicht.] I don’t believe it, she says. That was my address. I see her racking her brains, trying to remember what may have been one of many chance encounters in her past. She rereads the passage describing our love-making. Perhaps she really can’t remember. And yet there is a vague memory, a memory of a conversation one sunny morning in the market place, sitting on the window sill of the Town Hall. A photograph.

Yes, now I remember…How strange to come across oneself in a work of fiction!

Is she your girlfriend? Wolfi asks.

I’m not sure, I say.

But you sleep with her?

No. Yes, once.

How many women have you slept with?

God, Wolfi, what sort of question is that?

How do you mean?

It’s a little blunt, isn’t it?

Blunt?

Grob, direkt, was weiss ich.

Oh—unverblümt.

Yes, unverblümt—blunt. How many times do I have to ask you? Talk to me in German, not English.

He is offended.

I didn’t mean to pry, he says in German [Ich wollte meine Nase nicht in deine Angelegenheiten stecken]. I was just curious about whether you had slept with many women.

What’s many? I say. More than ten, more than a hundred?

I am still annoyed by Andrea’s sudden departure.

Georges Simenon, you know, the French author, claims to have slept with over five thousand.

I don’t believe it. And besides, he’s Belgian.

But it’s true. Admittedly most of them were prostitutes. What’s more, he didn’t care what they looked like, whether they were fat or thin, tall or short. Sometimes he had several a day. He said somewhere that if he couldn’t have a woman he felt he had lost something, that you only really know a woman when you have slept with her. He paused for a moment, then said: Have
you
ever slept with a prostitute?

No, I said irritably. Have you?

Yes, once. In fact it was my first time. I was eighteen. She was twenty-two and you know, she was very attractive, very sensual [sehr sinnlich], not what I had expected at all. My grandmother gave me the money for her.

I looked at him incredulously.

Your grandmother gave you the money? Did she know what it was for?

Yes. In fact, she arranged everything. Later I found out she was my grandmother’s lover’s mistress [die Mätresse des Liebhabers meiner Omi].

Your grandmother’s lover’s mistress!

Yes, my grandmother’s lover’s mistress. Her name also was Andrea.

Oh for God’s sake, Wolfi. Did you have to tell me that?

As an adolescent Wolfi wanted to be tall. He admits that he is above average height and even then was tall for his age.

But I wanted to be really tall, over two metres. I wanted to took like someone you wouldn’t want to mess with. So I bought myself a pair of knee-length motor-cycle boots, stuffed them with newspaper and then strapped my feet into them. Then I used to go to one of the cafés in the nearby shopping centre before the lunch-time crowd arrived. I would sit there slouched, wearing my dark glasses, sipping a cup of coffee. You know, sullen—like Marlon Brando in
The Wild One
(He pronounces it ‘Der Vild Vun’.) I would wait until the place was full and people were busy eating. Then I would get noisily up, all two metres of me. It always created a sensation. Kids stopped eating, babies started to cry and people would say: ‘Jesus, will you take a look at that guy.’

I don’t think this was very normal, he says.

Wolfi frequently disappears. Sometimes he is gone for periods of up to a week or more. One minute he is there, the next he is gone. When this happens I find myself knocking on his door to no response. Then, a couple of days later, he’ll turn up with some bizarre tale about where he’s been. Once he claimed to have gone to Agrigento in Sicily to visit Pirandello’s grave just because Pirandello had studied in Heidelberg when he was a student. (Wolfi is mistaken. In reality, Pirandello studied at Bonn.)

It was here, Wolfi said, in Heidelberg, that Pirandello met and fell in love with Jenny Schulz-Lander. But in the end he married his home-town sweetheart Antonietta Portulano. She later went insane because she thought he was having an affair with their daughter Lietta.

So I was hardly surprised one morning to find Wolfi waiting outside in the corridor for me after one of my regular seminars. He suggested we go to Waldheims for coffee. I looked at him dubiously. It had been an unusually cold morning and he was wearing his now familiar lumber jacket, a brightly coloured scarf and sandshoes. His jeans were tucked into his socks and on his head he was wearing a truly ridiculous cap. He looked like a Turkish Gastarbeiter and Turks were not very popular in this part of Germany. Normally this wouldn’t have mattered, but Waldheims is one of Heidelberg’s supposedly sophisticated but very pretentious little coffee houses situated in the ritzy part of Hauptstrasse. Here they serve enormous slabs of those rich cakes the Schwarzwald is famous for.

They won’t let us in, I said.

Sure they will. You look fine. Don’t worry.

From Heugasse we turned into Hauptstrasse and made our way towards Waldheims. Wolfi was being particularly evasive about what he had been up to for the last couple of days. He insisted I wait until we were having coffee. When we arrived a rather stiff and condescending young waitress dressed in black showed us reluctantly to the empty table Wolfi had pointed to by the spotlessly clean (French) windows.

Would we be having the Weintraubenschnitten, the Sachertorte or the Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte, the waitress asked.

What? You have Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte? Wolfi cried in mock surprise.

Yes, of course, the waitress replied haughtily but then, almost instantly, she broke into a grin. She looked around quickly.

Please Wolfi, not again. You’ll get me fired.

Okay, okay. Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte for two it is then.

She hurried away. Two datedly elegant women, one in a waist-length fur coat, were sitting at the next table. They were observing us with obvious disdain.

Have you been reading the papers the last couple of days? Wolfi asked.

No, I haven’t had time, I said.

He looked disappointed.

So you haven’t been following the trial then?

What trial?

The Bessermann trial. It’s been in all the papers. I went there, to Munich. I’ve been in the actual courtroom for the last three days. It’s been sensational. All of Germany’s talking about it. In Munich, nobody’s been talking about anything else.

He stopped for a moment while the waitress placed our coffee and cakes on the table.

And you haven’t heard about it?

No Wolfi, I haven’t. Now stop playing games and tell me about it.

Well first of all I’ll have to fill you in on some of the details. In 1965 a young woman from Daemling, a small town outside Munich, disappeared without trace. I was pretty young at the time and don’t remember much about it, and in any case, in itself such disappearances are by no means unusual. But I can remember my mother talking about it years later.

The parents of the young woman, who was an only child, were obviously and naturally distressed. They were well-to-do [wohlhabend] and according to all indications their relationship with their daughter was a source of as much happiness to her as it was to them. There was no reason then for her suddenly to desert the parents who loved her or for her not to contact them had she been able to do so. Nor was it likely that she had run off with someone since she was engaged to be married to a young man with whom she was, apparently, very much in love and who was well liked by her parents. From all reports, she was quite striking to look at and for this reason was well known in the town.

At first the police thought that in fact she
had
run away for reasons unknown to her parents. Even the most idyllic family appearances sometimes conceal hidden passions [Sogar Familien die ganz idyllisch scheinen, haben manchmal ihre eigenen heimlichen Leidenschaften]. But as the weeks went by even they began to assume that something dreadful had happened to her. For months the whole town mourned her disappearance.

Then one day, over a year later, she was found wandering the streets of Munich, totally disoriented and in a state of extreme agitation. She was taken to hospital and heavily sedated. In her bag they found a large sum of money.

Her parents were overjoyed to hear that she had been found. They had begun to think that they would never see their daughter again. In the hospital the doctor who examined her discovered that she had recently given birth. Both her parents and her fiancé were shocked by this news and waited anxiously for the effect of the sedative to wear off. Even as they waited beside her hospital bed she suddenly sat up wide-eyed and cried: ‘My baby, my baby’—and then fell back onto the bed in a state of complete unconsciousness.

Finally she awoke. At first she thought she was dreaming, but gradually her parents were able to convince her that they were real, that the nightmare she had been living through for the past year was over. As you can imagine it was a tearful reunion. But despite her obvious happiness at having been delivered into the arms of her loving parents she became distraught when she realized her baby was not with her. She clung to her mother’s breast. ‘He took my baby, he took my baby,’ she sobbed.