I let the silence linger, not daring to rush the moment, waiting for her response. A good thirty seconds must have passed before she finally spoke.
“All right,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. “Let’s meet for coffee.”
TWO
W
E AGREED TO
meet in a café on the other side of Kreuzberg—“my side,” as she informed me when I mentioned I wasn’t far away from Heinrich Heine Strasse.
“Can you come over to the wrong side of the tracks?” she asked, an amused dryness underscoring the delivery of that question.
“Always.”
“I was, of course, referring to geographical matters. You live in the more chic part of Kreuzberg.”
“Now that’s news to me, as my corner of this district isn’t exactly the Rue Saint-Honoré.”
“Never been to Paris. Never been in any cities except Berlin and Leipzig and Dresden and Halle.”
“The latter of which I never even heard of.”
“Nor have most people outside the German Democratic Republic. Even most people in the GDR have never been to Halle, for good reasons.”
“But you
have
been to Halle.”
“Worse than that. I was born and raised there.”
“And it’s worse than even the wrong side of the tracks in Kreuzberg?”
“What is the worst city you’ve ever been to in the United States?”
“There’s quite a competition for that prize, but I would have to say Lewiston, Maine—a depressing mill town with ugly architecture, a flatlined economy, and a general air of decay.”
“Sounds like Halle, though being the GDR, it was always promoted as a great triumph of proletariat-industrial productivity.”
“In Lewiston there were just French Canadian Catholics who drank.”
“Oh, everyone drank in Halle, which was the only antidote against the toxic chemical fumes that were exhaled by all the factories there.”
“In Lewiston there were just smelly paper mills.”
“But you didn’t grow up in Lewiston.”
“I never said that I did. In fact, I only know the place because, when I was at college, I ran cross-country against a college that happened to be in Lewiston.”
“A Manhattan long-distance runner who ends up living in Kreuzberg. Is that what’s known in English as ‘slumming it’?”
“Except I’m not that sort of Manhattan boy.”
“And you can tell me what sort of Manhattan boy you are later, as I am on deadline for a translation and have spent far too long on the phone with you.”
“Is that a complaint?”
“Just an observation.”
Then she gave me the address of a café called the Ankara.
“I presume you don’t mind exchanging Istanbul for Ankara?” she asked.
“Well, Istanbul to Ankara really is crossing over to the wrong side of the tracks.”
“Don’t forget to bring your passport then. Does eight o’clock tomorrow evening work?”
“Absolutely.”
“Enjoy your Dvorak tonight.”
She rang off. Of course I felt elated, especially as she had lost a little of the distance that characterized our brief earlier contacts, and I was intrigued and delighted to discover that she could be smart and ever-so-acerbic. Most of all, she had agreed to meet me for more than just a professional chat, and I found myself now thinking that the wait until tomorrow would be a damn long one. Impatience is such a curious emotion. We want the next day to arrive now in the hope that we will get what we are seeking, even though we privately know that there is no guarantee that things will ever turn out the way we desire. Impatience is about wanting validation long before you have any idea whether it will be granted. By showing your hand too quickly—by letting it be known you are already so smitten—you risk rejection. You have to demonstrate interest, but not zealotry. You have to exercise patience.
I had another small problem on my hands. When I suggested going to hear the Berlin Phil, I had no idea whether I would be able to score a pair of standing-room places for the concert—and now I felt obliged to somehow find a ticket for tonight, so if (and, more like, when) she asked me how was the concert, I could talk about it. Also: Kubelik conducting Dvorak was something of an event. So I immediately planned to leave the apartment at six, take the U-Bahn up to Potsdamer Platz, and hope to find somebody selling a spare ticket out front.
But during the course of the afternoon a loud, authoritarian knock came on the door. Opening it I found myself staring at the police officer who had interrogated me after the assault on Alaistair.
“May I come in?” he asked.
“Of course,” I said, opening the door fully. “Any news?”
He stepped inside.
“Your friend had a lucky escape. The medics managed to stop the bleeding just in time. He proved to be rather robust for a drug addict. He responded well to the transfusions. As one of the doctors at the hospital told me, he seemed to resist the temptation to surrender to death. He’s still in a serious condition, but he is expected to make a full recovery. Of course, he is now in the throes of withdrawal due to the absence of his ‘substance,’ but you wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”
“You and your colleagues tore the place up, in search of that substance. And what did you find?”
“This is no longer an interrogation, Herr Nesbitt. I just came by to return you your passport. I was able to interview Herr Fitzsimons-Ross this morning, and he not only exonerated you, he was also able to give me an address of the gentleman who assaulted him. It seems that they’d had ‘dealings’ with each other before, though not of such a violent nature. Your friend had the bad luck of running into him in some bar two nights ago. But, again, you’ve never been to this bar, or any place like that?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“Of course, of course. You are the innocent abroad. You know nothing, you see nothing. And fortunately for you, we found nothing.”
He reached into his jacket pocket and withdrew my American passport, along with that hefty notebook he had the last time.
“I need you to sign a document, confirming that the passport has been returned.”
I signed where requested.
“Can you now tell me at which hospital I can find my friend?”
He mentioned a hospital not far from the Zoologischer Garten. Trust Alaistair to end up in a hospital near the zoo.
“And he said he would appreciate a visit from you this evening.”
“Thank you for that.”
“I do hope and trust our paths will not cross professionally again.”
“I’m planning to stay out of trouble, sir.”
“Of course you are—being such a trouble-free person.”
After the officer left, I had to resist the temptation to track down Mehmet and tell him the splendid news that Alaistair had pulled through. Realizing that my evening out at the Berlin Phil was now not going to happen, I instead made my way up at six that night to the Zoologischer Garten. Then I walked the five minutes to a drab 1950s building, with the hospital sign, “Krankenhaus,” at the head of the driveway that led to the front entrance.
I was in luck. Evening visitor hours had just started. In the gift shop off the lobby I bought a box of chocolates to go with the assorted magazines and books I had gathered up from my rooms before leaving. The woman at the reception desk checked the Rolodex in front of her and—after I showed her the required ID—confirmed that Herr Fitzsimons-Ross was in Ward K, Block B, giving me directions on how to find it.
Ward K, Block B was a public ward on the fourth floor of the hospital. En route I passed a pair of exhausted, sallow-looking parents pushing a young emaciated boy—he couldn’t have been more than seven—in a wheelchair, his skin the color of faded parchment, his head bald from evident chemotherapy treatments. Then there was a hugely overweight man in his forties, standing in a hallway, his face pressed up against one of the institutional green walls, crying uncontrollably. Just beyond him was a woman, around thirty, hunched over a walking frame on wheels, trying to negotiate her way slowly down a corridor.
The writer in me wanted to take everything in, focusing my eyes on all the infirmity and despair and sadness around me, making mental notes, knowing I would, one day, use it all. But the other part of me—the man without the icicle in his heart—also had to lower his eyes at times (especially the sight of that child in the throes of cancer treatment) when it was just too damn hard to bear. When I finally reached Ward K, Block B, I kept my vision trained on the linoleum, only looking up occasionally to see if I was approaching Bed No. 232, which, as the reception clerk informed me, was the bed occupied by one Alaistair Fitzsimons-Ross.
“Don’t you know I hate fucking chocolate?”
His first words to me as I approached his bedside. He had shrunken in the days since the attack: his cheeks hollow, concave, his complexion beyond pale. There were two large intravenous blood bags hoisted above him, dripping slowly into his two arms. There were assorted monitors and screens surrounding him, metronomically registering the beep-beep of his heart. He looked so cadaverous. Yet, as always, his eyes shone bright.
“And I don’t want to read any fucking novels,” he said as I unpacked the reading material I brought him. “I hate novels. Imitations of life, written by wankers. Almost as bad as travel books.”
“I’m delighted to see you’re in the process of making a full recovery.”
“I think I might turn vampire after all this, given how I have been feeding on other people’s blood for days.”
“At least you’re alive.”
“And the police informed me that I owe my life to you, for which I will never forgive you.”
“The police say they know who the attacker is.”
“Correction: I know who the attacker is, as I was foolish enough to make his acquaintance previously. Mind you, as he didn’t stab me on the previous occasion we spent the night together, I thought it was safe to hook up with him for another little dalliance. The problem is, Horst paints.”
“I wondered.”
“What do you mean, you wondered?”
I paused for a moment, knowing that there was no way around what I had to tell him and that it was best to get it out and done with.
“The man who attacked you also attacked the three canvases you were working on.”
Alaistair’s lips tightened and he shut his eyes. I felt terrible for him.
“How bad is the damage?”
“Very bad.”
“Define ‘very bad.’”
“Irreparable.”
He shut his eyes tighter, his head sinking deeper into the pillow. We fell silent. I could hear him working hard at muffling a sob.
“I’m so sorry,” I finally said.
“Why the fuck should you be sorry?” he asked, suddenly angry. “You’re not the talentless little shit who did this to me.”
He fell silent again.
“You should have let me die.”
Another silence.
“Thank you,” he said.
“For what?”
“For letting me know now. Had you waited until I was on the mend I would have despised you.”
“I saw Mehmet the other day.”
“Did you tell him?”
“He came by the apartment and saw what happened.”
“Oh Christ. Did you tell him the circumstances?”
“I said that a thief broke into the place while you were asleep. You woke up. There was a struggle . . .”
“I’m sure he didn’t believe a word you said.”
“He’s currently helping me redecorate your apartment. In fact, it was Mehmet who organized all the paint stuff, the sanders, the . . .”
“Why the fuck are you repainting the place?”
“Because your blood is everywhere. But it will be all gone by the time you’re released. And by the way, I really am pleased you’re still with us.”
“I’m not. Those paintings . . . don’t you
ever
fucking call them canvases again . . . those paintings, they were good.”
“I know a writer who once lost an entire manuscript of a novel he’d been working on for over a year. A fire in his apartment in Manhattan. He’d fallen asleep in bed with a cigarette and was lucky to escape with his life. But his two copies—the original and the carbon—were burnt to a crisp. And what did he do?”
“Let me ask you something: in your spare time do you give those ghastly motivational speeches that your country so adores?”
“Sorry for trying to cheer you up.”
“Nothing will cheer me up now. I am beyond cheerless.”
“And you will start those paintings again, and they will be good. Maybe not as good as you will always think the destroyed ones were. But . . .”
“You’re far too fucking nice. How is Mehmet?”
“Very concerned about you. So concerned that he’s there every morning, painting away. Any idea when they might release you?”