They met in Saint George’s in Kollwitzkiez, both reaching for the same book. ‘Sorry,’ they said together, drawing back their arms.
‘Please,’ Robert said.
Leaning back from his laptop ‘After you,’ said the other man.
His speech was slurred. He stank of alcohol. ‘Don’t worry,’ Robert said, turning away. ‘I’ve got it, I just wanted to look at the cover.’ It was an edition he hadn’t seen before. He would wait until the man had gone. He heard a cough behind him, then a gruff, ‘Here.’ He turned and saw the man smiling a little stupidly, angling the cover towards him. He looked at it and nodded. ‘Thanks,’ he said.
The man flipped the book over and studied the back. Robert watched him sway.
‘Any good?’ the man said.
‘Most people like the later stuff better but I think it’s great. I like everything he did, though, so maybe you shouldn’t trust me.’
The man made no response, just stared at the back of the book. He yawned widely and scratched his cheek. Robert wondered if he could even read the words he was looking at.
‘He died?’
‘About ten years ago.’
The man grunted and opened the book. Robert went back to scanning the shelves. He wasn’t really looking for anything, just killing time before the reading started. Saint George’s was a twenty-minute walk from his apartment and over the past couple of years, since moving to Berlin, he had become a regular there. Sometimes he brought his daughters and set them up with colouring books on one of the cracked leather couches in the back room, while he browsed the second-hand books in the front. Tonight they were at home with a babysitter and Karijn was going to meet him for dinner after the reading. She had suggested recently that they make an effort to spend some time with each other away from the children.
‘Would everyone take their seats, please?’ a bookseller said. Robert moved towards the back room, along with a few other browsers. Feeling a hand on his shoulder he turned and saw the drunk, still clutching the same book.
‘What’s the event?’ the man said. They were about the same age, Robert thought, with a shared accent: London, or nearby.
‘Sam Dallow.’
The man looked back at him expressionlessly.
‘He’s a writer? He’s talking about his new novel.’
‘I’m a writer,’ the man said.
‘Great,’ said Robert.
The man’s boozy stench was even stronger now he was sitting beside Robert on one of the folding metal chairs set out for the reading. ‘Is this Dallow any good then?’ he said, loudly enough for the rest of the small audience to hear him.
‘I’ve not read it,’ Robert whispered. ‘It’s had good reviews.’
The interviewer was an English journalist who once chaired a panel Robert had sat on in this bookshop, his first and, as it had turned out, only Berlin event. ‘Thank you everyone for coming,’ the journalist said, ‘to hear from one of the breakout voices of 2014, one of the most exciting young writers at work in Britain, and indeed all of Europe, today.’
Robert studied Dallow, a thin young man with short black hair, pale skin and red-blotched cheeks. He looked at ease, idly flipping the pages of his novel and pretending to grimace while the journalist read out strings of adjectives from book reviews. Robert guessed Dallow was still in his twenties, much younger than Robert was when his first book, a collection of stories, had been published four years earlier. There had been some good reviews, a small prize and negligible sales. Now he was two years late with a novel he had started and abandoned so often as to lose count.
Robert tried to listen to the reading, but the words slid off him. He pinched the bridge of his nose and squeezed his eyes shut to refocus on Dallow’s voice, but was distracted again when the man beside him slipped a vodka miniature from his coat pocket, twisted off the cap and upended it into his mouth. Robert sat forward in his seat. Dallow was talking about columns of light falling to a forest’s floor. He read well, his voice was strong and steady, but he was being too solemn, handling each word as if it were uniquely precious. Robert’s neighbour suddenly stood, his chair squealing against the laminate floor, and almost knocked Robert from his seat as he pushed his way along the narrow row. ‘No time for this bollocks,’ he said, growling the word. People turned in their seats and Dallow, aware of a disturbance, paused for a moment as he peered at the departing man.
Robert felt embarrassed, as though this stranger’s behaviour was somehow his responsibility, but most people had already returned their attention to Dallow. ‘On the bare hillside,’ he read, with deliberate slowness, ‘they stood silently, and apart.’ Robert wanted to leave, too, but he remained and Dallow eventually stopped and the oppressive hush of a listening audience eased. Robert pulled out his phone to check the time. Karijn wouldn’t arrive for another twenty minutes. He didn’t want to stay, but he didn’t want to look at any more books, either. Second-hand books depressed him after a while: all those novels and stories that had been laboured over, had for a brief moment been the centre of someone’s attention, were now like old blood being pumped around a failing circulatory system. ‘Does the family you describe in the novel,’ the journalist was asking Dallow, ‘bear any similarity to your own?’
‘I suppose you could say families are a novelist’s greatest source of material,’ Dallow began, and Robert had to admire the way he made the question seem interesting, even unexpected. Robert had written one story about his family, based on a childhood holiday in Greece. His parents had hated it, but he quickly realised, after a moment of uncertainty about how to proceed, that he didn’t care. ‘You’re supposed to be writing fiction,’ his mother had said to him when she read the story. ‘You can’t write about us.’ She didn’t understand when he tried to explain that sometimes actual events were the only thing that gave a story life. They had barely spoken since. He checked his phone again: 20:26. The journalist asked if anyone in the audience had a question. A few hands went up and as the chosen spectator began to ask her question Robert made his way out as unobtrusively as he could. On the street it was almost dark, the sky purple, the temperature still in the twenties. It had been an unusually hot September. Looking up and down the street he saw diners at pavement tables and drinkers outside the pub on the next corner. A group of younger men, caught up in a story, burst into laughter as they passed Robert. Behind them, smiling as she approached, was Karijn.
‘How was it?’ she said.
‘Confusing in all sorts of ways. How was your thing?’
‘Great!’ She hugged Robert tightly. ‘Gregor showed us how to stitch squab pads.’
Earlier in the year Karijn had begun inviting other upholsterers from around the city to demonstrate techniques at evening sessions in her workshop. They always seemed to energise her. ‘Good turnout?’ he said.
‘Full up! I had to stand on a table to introduce Gregor. And he’s so pedagogic. He kept that secret.’
‘Maybe he can teach that guy in there something about writing,’ Robert said, jerking his head towards the book-shop. ‘Or me, for that matter.’
Karijn sighed. ‘Another bad day?’
He shook his head. ‘Are you hungry?’
‘Starving. Where are we going?’
‘November.’ Two years before, when they moved to Prenzlauer Berg, it had been the first restaurant they went to alone, their friend Heidi at their apartment with the girls. They had never been since, and earlier that day Robert had hesitated before making the booking. Last time, when they left the restaurant, they had walked into the aftermath of a suicide. The body was in a blue bag, on a stretcher that paramedics were loading into an ambulance. One of the crowd of people standing watching from the pavement said it was a woman, a neighbour of his. He said she had jumped from her apartment window, four storeys up. As Robert and Karijn walked away the ambulance’s lights had made the street flicker blue around them, as if they were walking through a silent electrical storm. ‘Horrible,’ Robert said. ‘That poor woman.’ He could still remember, clear as a photograph, the puzzlement on Karijn’s face when she looked at him.
‘You didn’t know her,’ she said.
Now they walked slowly down the street, Robert’s arm around Karijn and her hand in his back trouser pocket. Outside the bars and restaurants the air was teeming with conversation. Blooms of cigarette smoke ascended. Everyone wanted to be outside for as long as the Indian summer lasted – the Altweibersommer, as Robert had learned to call it.
‘I spoke to Greta on the way over,’ Karijn said. ‘All is well.’
Robert held up a hand. ‘Our children have been erased for the evening. We’re young, sexy lovers in the greatest European capital. No backstory.’
‘Youngish and sexyish,’ Karijn said.
They came to where Wörther Strasse opened into Kollwitzplatz, a diamond-shaped park dense with plane trees, surrounded by grand old apartment buildings. ‘Let’s go through,’ Robert said. It would have been quicker to skirt the park, but they had plenty of time and he wanted to see the statue of Käthe Kollwitz. Walking towards the pedestrian crossing that led to the park, they heard angry shouts coming from a bar. They saw a man run from its doorway, stumble and fall heavily to the ground in front of them, his face striking the pavement slab. Three men came after him. The first of them, short and muscular, in drainpipe jeans and a tight, zipped tracksuit top, crouched over the man collapsed on the ground and hauled him roughly onto his back. Robert recognised him as the drunk from the bookshop. As his attacker pulled back his arm and balled his fist Robert stepped forward. ‘Entschuldigung!’ he shouted and held out his hand to block the punch. ‘Entschuldigung, was ist…’ He didn’t have the German. ‘Tell them I know this man,’ he said to Karijn, who was looking at him in bewilderment.
‘Das geht Sie gar nichts an,’ the short man said. His head was shaved, his skin tanned. Robert saw blurred blue ink tattoos on the knuckles of his raised fist.
‘Bitte,’ Karijn said. ‘Er ist unser Freund. Wir wollen ihn mitnehmen.’
The man looked at her. His mouth was drawn tight. He was breathing hard through his nose. He shook the other man and shouted something in his face, then dropped him to the ground. He took a few steps away then spun around to face Robert and Karijn. ‘Your friend is ass-hole,’ he said. He took a step towards the man where he lay on the pavement. He raised his booted foot above his face. ‘Spast!’ he yelled, stamping his foot down beside the man’s head. He turned away and swept his arms repeatedly, waving his companions back inside the bar.
The man rolled over onto his side. One of his eyes was red, clenched shut, and his lip was bleeding. ‘You really know him?’ Karijn said to Robert as she knelt down beside the man.
‘He was at the reading,’ Robert said. He put one of the man’s arms around his shoulders and heaved him onto his feet. The stench of alcohol enveloped him. Together they staggered to a bench and Robert helped the man sit down.
He spoke, his voice weak; Robert couldn’t understand him. He cleared his throat and spoke again. ‘Thank you,’ he said.
‘I’ll get water,’ Karijn said, and strode quickly towards a Späti.
The man leaned forward and spat blood onto the road. He seemed to be smiling, although it might have been a grimace.
‘What was that about?’ Robert said.
‘Difference of opinion,’ the man said. ‘Not so serious.’
‘I’d hate to see what you call serious. You almost got your head kicked in.’
‘They could have been someone else,’ the man said.
He wasn’t making sense. He might be concussed, Robert thought. ‘We should get you to the hospital, have them take a look at you.’
‘No,’ the man said.
‘I think—’
‘No, don’t bother,’ the man said more loudly, his voice clearer. His good eye focused on Robert. ‘Listen, I appreciate the help.’ He held out his hand. ‘Patrick,’ he said.
Robert took his hand. ‘Robert.’
Karijn returned with water. She twisted off the cap and handed the bottle to Patrick.
‘Karijn, this is Patrick,’ Robert said.
Patrick nodded and swigged the water, wincing as the bottle pressed against his lip.
‘I was saying we should get him to hospital,’ Robert said to Karijn.
‘I think so,’ she said.
‘Really, no. I won’t go so don’t waste your time trying.’
Despite the reek of alcohol, Robert thought that Patrick didn’t seem as drunk as he had been in the bookshop. In fact, he suddenly seemed remarkably sober.
‘Let me look at you,’ Karijn said, placing her hands gently on the back of Patrick’s head and tilting his face up towards her. ‘Yes: you look like shit,’ she said. He laughed.
Robert saw now that Patrick had an impressive face. Broad and sharply angled. His nose was crooked, perhaps from an old break.
‘You’ll live, I suppose,’ Karijn said, ‘if you stop provoking the locals.’
‘I’ve learned my lesson,’ Patrick said, putting the water bottle to his cheek. ‘Give me your number, I’d like to buy you a drink sometime to say thanks.’
Robert pulled a pencil from his pocket and looked in his wallet for a scrap of paper.
‘Robert, give him a card,’ Karijn said.
He felt a flash of irritation. His cards, stating ‘Robert Prowe / Writer’, had come to embarrass him, because when people asked him what he wrote the only answer he felt able to give was ‘A few reviews’. But he slipped one from his wallet and handed it to Patrick, who looked at it and said, ‘Me too.’ Robert remembered what he had said in the bookshop.
‘I’m sure you’ll both have plenty to moan about, then,’ Karijn said. She winked at Robert.
Patrick stood and swayed for a moment between them and they both put their arms out to steady him. ‘I’m fine,’ he said, waving them off.
‘Where are you headed?’ Robert asked.
Oddly, Robert thought, Patrick immediately turned the question around. ‘Where do you live?’ he said.
‘We’re round here.’
A moment’s hesitation. ‘I’m in Neukölln,’ Patrick said.
‘You want us to walk you to the train?’ Karijn said.
‘No, I can make it on my own. I’m fine, really.’
They watched him walk away. ‘Should we go with him?’ Karijn said.
‘I think he’ll be all right.’
They crossed into Kollwitzplatz. Sodium lamplight glared off the bronze figure of Käthe Kollwitz, robed and seated, the expression on her face one of mournful acceptance. Although night had fallen Robert saw, across the sandy expanse of the playground, the dim outline of a man pushing a child on the swings. He wondered how many times he had brought Sonja and Nora here.
‘An interesting fellow,’ Karijn said dubiously.
‘If he wanted a fight he should have picked one in the bookshop,’ Robert said. ‘He might have won. He was necking vodka during the reading, you know.’
‘Now that, I kind of like.’
‘Better than listening to it sober, I guess.’
‘Was it really that bad? Or do you just hate this man because he wrote a book?’
‘Probably that. It was shit, though.’ Robert gave a brief, bitter laugh.
‘Rob,’ Karijn said.
‘I know, I know, negativity verboten. I’m very happy to be here with you tonight. Forgive the wallowing.’
‘Wallowing is a lot like masturbation,’ Karijn said. ‘Both should be done in private.’
They left the park and crossed the road, pausing halfway as a cyclist glided by, hands resting on his thighs as they rose and sank. They walked slowly, the night still warm despite the breeze shifting the tall planes that lined the street, drawing a soft hiss from their leaves and making the candle flames on November’s crowded pavement tables dance in the darkness.
Leaning back from his laptop in defeat, Robert noticed the espresso he had made an hour before. He drained the cold, bitter liquid, lifted his hands to his face and briskly rubbed as if the friction might knock something loose: a fragment of an idea to work with. It was months since he had written anything worthwhile. The deadline for his novel lay eighteen months behind him and he had nothing to send his publishers. He no longer wanted to write the book described in the outline they had paid for. Or maybe he didn’t have the ability. When it came to his writing, he didn’t know what he thought any more, except that he didn’t like the solitary line on his laptop screen: He returned ten years later, a changed man. The result of the last hour of labour. The stories in his first book had been written over several years. They had grown gradually, naturally. They had come from episodes in his own life and anecdotes told to him by friends, family, and strangers he had met while travelling. People he had been stranded with; got drunk or high with. Back then he was always running into people who had stories to tell him.
He could see now that the book was filled with the longing and disappointment that, without him realising it at the time, had been the dominant currents in his life. It was Karijn and the girls who had dispelled them. Or, he sometimes thought, rearranged, so that they at least appeared to no longer be there.
He tabbed to his email and saw a message from Liam, a friend he had worked with at an advertising agency in London a few years before. They hadn’t seen each other since Robert came to Berlin, but Liam regularly sent gnomic messages, or unusual clinical papers he dug up in the course of his work as a medical writer. There was one from the Lancet attached to this email, about something called penile allotransplantation. All that the accompanying message said was, I’ll be in Berlin soon. A beer? Robert replied, Definitely a beer, and a couch if you need it. He sent the message. He knew not to ask for more details, such as when this visit might be taking place. Liam seldom answered direct questions.
Robert tabbed back to Word. He returned ten years later, a changed man. Robert didn’t even know who this person was, or what he had changed from and to. He was reaching for something; sometimes it felt distant and sometimes close, but what it was he couldn’t say. He only knew he didn’t have it. He deleted the sentence letter by letter, his index finger striking the key with increasing force. When every word was gone, he looked at the white page until he could no longer tell how far the screen was from his eyes. He slammed the laptop shut. He stood and stretched, then yanked open the heavy door that led to the postage-stamp balcony. He rolled a cigarette – an action that had taken on a furtive aspect since, to Karijn’s disgust, he had restarted smoking after seven years’ abstinence – and stared across the Hinterhof at the peeling wall of the apartment block opposite. Four storeys below him, on the ground floor, there was a gym. He saw a woman in black tights and vest top on a running machine. He watched her, watched the cord of her headphones swing and snap in time with her movements. His gaze roamed across the Hinterhof: weather-stained plastic furniture and children’s toys, mossed stone pathways, stands of long grass and vegetable beds. There was one tree, a birch, almost as tall as the seven-storey blocks that hemmed it in. Its leaves hadn’t turned yet and when the sun shone they made the light on this side of the apartment green, as if the rooms were underwater. Today the sky was grey, the leaves dull, and the tree’s peeling bark mirrored the peeling facade of the block beside it. Their own block had been renovated not long before they moved in; its walls were smooth and painted a soft, stately blue. A lift shaft had been added to the back of the building, which had made life with a buggy easier, although Nora, who was three, had almost grown out of it. Soon she would probably be just like Sonja, who was obsessed with riding her bike. The weekend before, having received permission from their landlady, Robert had put up a hook in the hallway to hang the bike from. They would have kept it on the landing, but in the last few months several neighbours had reported thefts: a pram; a scooter; even a pair of muddy football boots.
Robert rolled another cigarette. Might there be a story in thieves prowling the hallways of apartment blocks? Perhaps the objects they stole gave them a sense of the owners. He remembered the Carver story in which a man’s living-room furniture – couch, coffee table, TV and record player – was set up on the lawn outside his house, and another that described a couple, asked to keep an eye on their neighbours’ apartment, becoming obsessed with spending time there, trying to live a life different from their own. He crushed his cigarette into a small clay ashtray so packed with butts that they stood vertically, like a hedgehog’s quills. He began to go inside, but at the sight of his laptop on the table his hand dropped from the door handle. He rolled a third cigarette. As he licked the paper he looked at the runner in the gym. He liked to watch people. Coils of damp hair clung to her face. Her throat and chest were slick with sweat. Her legs, slim and muscled, pumped as she sprinted in place. Her arms cut through the air. When he sold his book of stories it was as if wide avenues stretched in every direction and all he needed to do was decide which one to proceed along next. But each avenue had narrowed to a track and eventually these had petered out into nothing. Robert realised the woman was looking directly at him as she ran. He quickly looked away, turning his head upwards. It was still warm but the sky had grown darker, the grey purpling. There was supposed to be thunder later. He felt the runner looking at him. He didn’t want to check to see if she really was. He decided to find somewhere else to work for the rest of the day and went inside to pack a bag.
* * *
The nearest coffee shop was just a few doors down from the apartment, but it was too intimate to work in. It was an ascetic space, with only a single blocky pine table facing the counter, and sitting there he always felt he should be talking to the unfailingly happy, long-haired Japanese barista, not staring into a laptop screen. But the barista, who only spoke German and Japanese, made Robert feel he had failed to make Berlin his city, and he thought that would remain true until he learned the language. Sonja was five and her German was better than his, and soon Nora’s would be, too. They were becoming Berliners while he moved through the city like a ghost, solitary and largely silent. He continued on to Schönhauser Allee and the anonymity of Balzac. It was a chain, and sterile, but it was also a place where the only conversation he needed to have was with the beggars who sometimes made the rounds until one of the staff told them to leave.
Instead of writing he went online and read the news: football, then politics. He had stopped looking at the books pages a long time ago. After an hour of idle reading he checked his email. The subject line of a message from his agent read: R U ALIVE? He opened it and found that the message was blank. ‘Cute,’ he murmured. How long was it since he had spoken to her? He entered her name into the search box and saw he hadn’t answered her three most recent messages, the last of which was two weeks old. He returned to her new message and thought about what to reply: I’m done, maybe, or, I wrote 8 words today. Instead he typed, Hey Sally, alive and well! Hope you are too. Got an idea that feels promising but don’t want to jinx it. Should have something to show you in a few weeks. He read it back, deleted weeks and replaced it with months, then deleted months and restored weeks. As he hit send an email came in from an address he didn’t recognise: [email protected].
Hello, it’s Patrick, the one you stopped from getting killed. I was serious about that drink. How about tomorrow night?
Robert began to type a reply:
Hi Patrick, glad you’re alive. Things are pretty hectic at this end right now
He paused, his hands above the keyboard. His instinct was to have nothing more to do with this man, whoever he was, but something made him hesitate. He was always encouraging Karijn to see friends or take evening yoga classes while he stayed home with the kids, preferring to be a hermit because seeing people he knew meant being asked how he was doing and what he was up to, questions he didn’t want to answer. But Patrick didn’t know anything about him, which meant Robert could tell him whatever he wanted. He could get away from everything for a few hours, including himself.
They had agreed to meet at a restaurant in Mitte. Stepping onto the southbound U-Bahn train at Schönhauser Allee, Robert wondered if he was making a mistake. ‘It should be you going,’ he had said to Karijn the night before. ‘You’re the one who talked that guy out of smashing his face in.’
She frowned as she looked up from her laptop. ‘Why would I want anything to do with somebody like that?’ Her eyes went back to the screen, two white bricks in the lenses of her reading glasses. ‘Just don’t get beaten up. Or arrested.’
‘Eberswalder Strasse,’ the recorded announcement said. He had nudged her shoulder as she typed. ‘What if I do? What if I come home with bloody knuckles and a black eye?’
She continued tapping at the keyboard. ‘You don’t want to find out,’ she said.
At Alexanderplatz he stood, stepped off the train and climbed the steps to the S-Bahn. One drink, he told himself. One drink, then he would make his excuses and leave. He narrowed his eyes against the gust of gritty wind the S5 pushed before it as it pulled into the station. From his seat he watched the city scroll past the window. It had changed so much since his first visit, almost fifteen years before. Berlin then was a nightscape of waste ground he stumbled across, moving between the cavernous dark of Tresor and Berghain, clubs in high rises, in drained swimming pools, in confusing warrens beside the Spree. He remembered bars, squat parties, sunny mornings in parks and a long, strange comedown in a bowling alley. The memories were scrambled; there was a lot he had forgotten, and some he might have invented. He made a couple of German friends that he visited during the World Cup in 2006. He stayed in Berlin for almost three weeks, and that was when he started exploring the daytime city and fell in love for a second time.
The train pulled into Hackescher Markt and Robert stood and waited for the doors to roll open. Amid the crowd of people getting off he went down the stairs from the platform and through the dark underpass to the station exit. On his right was the terrible club, open twenty-four hours a day, where he had gone dancing with his German friends and some Mexicans they had met when Mexico lost to Portugal in the group stage. It had been maybe eight in the morning when they got there, all high and eager to make the night last a few hours more. In the end it had been him and one of the Mexicans, a guy called Alejandro, drinking beers beside the Spree as the sun beat down, surrounded by office workers on their lunch breaks. He had never known when to stop.
He didn’t know the restaurant Patrick had suggested, a place called Sophien 11 that turned out to be solidly traditional: a tile floor, wooden tables, whitewashed walls cluttered with paintings and framed photographs. The air was sharp with the tang of fried onions and vinegar. A large woman dressed in a black skirt and shirt approached Robert. ‘Guten Abend,’ she said, smiling politely but without warmth.
‘Guten Abend,’ said Robert, looking around for Patrick. ‘I’m meeting a friend. Ich … suche meinen Freund?’ He spoke the words with the hesitancy that always afflicted his German. Karijn, who had become almost fluent over the last two years, rolled her eyes when she heard it.
The woman waved her arm, inviting Robert to look. ‘There is also outside,’ she said in accented English, nodding towards a door through which Robert saw a courtyard and tables.
When Robert stepped through the door he heard someone shout his name. Patrick was sitting at a table in the corner, the thick, overlapping leaves of a vine covering the wall behind him. A book lay on the table, a glass pinning it open on one side.
Patrick stood and shook Robert’s hand. One of his eyes was black, his bottom lip cut and swollen. ‘I haven’t ordered yet,’ he said as they sat down. ‘I was waiting for you. You hungry?’
One drink, Robert had thought, but the smell of frying meat had triggered his appetite. ‘I’m starving,’ he said.
‘Good, it’s on me.’ Patrick handed Robert a thick black leather menu. ‘Any man who stops me getting my head kicked in deserves dinner.’
‘There’s no need,’ Robert said, but Patrick held up his hand in refusal.
‘Nice watch,’ Robert said, looking at Patrick’s wrist.
‘It’s a Breguet,’ Patrick said, angling it towards Robert so he could take a better look: a thin gold watch on a leather strap, an intricately patterned face with several smaller dials set into it. ‘Those dials are engine-turned,’ he said.
‘I have no idea what that means, but it looks expensive.’
‘It was a gift. From someone I used to work for.’
‘Good boss. You’re a Londoner?’
‘No, I grew up in Bracknell.’
‘No way! I used to go and see films there when I was a teenager. The Point.’
‘That was a nasty fucking place. How old are you?’
‘Forty,’ Robert said.
‘I’m forty-two. We might have been there at the same time. Where did you grow up?’
‘Farnborough. No reason you should have been there.’
‘I was, a couple of years ago.’
‘Really?’ Robert felt a childish kind of happiness at the coincidence. ‘What for?’
Patrick hesitated for a moment, then shook the watch on his wrist. ‘This guy used the airport there. We got in a car and straight on the motorway. I didn’t see much.’
‘There’s not much to see. Where were you coming from?’
Patrick shook his head. ‘It’s a long story.’
Robert smiled. ‘Bracknell, Farnborough, now Berlin. You live here?’
‘Yeah,’ Patrick said. ‘Well … sort of. I’m seeing if it suits me.’
A waitress came to the table. She was tall and thin, with bottle-black hair and a pale, deeply lined face. She wore a tie-dye crop top and drainpipe jeans tucked into knee-high platform boots. ‘Möchten Sie schon bestellen?’ she said.
Patrick looked questioningly at Robert. ‘You understand?’ he said.
‘She’s asking what you want.’
‘Have you got meatballs?’ Patrick asked.
‘We have Bremsklotz,’ the waitress said. ‘Big meatball.’
Patrick nodded. ‘A big meatball, great. Danke.’
The waitress looked at Robert and arched a thin, painted eyebrow.
‘Ich möchte…’ Robert began, scanning the menu, ‘Putengeschnetzeltes, bitte.’
‘Gerne,’ she said.
‘And a beer, please,’ Patrick said.
‘Zwei,’ said Robert.
‘Vielen Dank,’ the waitress said, taking the menus and striding away.
They sat in silence for a moment. An elderly man and woman took the table beside them. Patrick looked them up and down as they sat. ‘Whereabouts were you in London?’ he said, still looking at the couple.
‘Hackney. You?’
‘I moved around.’
‘Where?’
‘Hammersmith, Tottenham. Other places.’
‘So why the move? Work?’
Instead of answering, Patrick picked up the book that was lying in front of him. ‘I read this,’ he said.
Robert laughed when he saw it was Antwerp, the book they had both reached for in the bookshop. ‘What did you think?’
Patrick flipped a few of the book’s pages. ‘It was,’ he said slowly, as if still deciding, ‘interesting. It’s more of a mood than a story, isn’t it?’
‘That’s a good way of putting it. It’s definitely not conventional, but that’s one of the things I love about him. He wanted to break the forms, you know?’
‘How?’
‘In all kinds of ways,’ Robert said. ‘He took what he read, and things he did, and other things he made up, and’ – he clapped his hands – ‘mashed them together.’
‘Isn’t that what all writers do?’
Robert shrugged. ‘I guess, but all his books talk to each other – the more you read, the more connections you can make.’
‘What, so I’ve got to read all of them to get it?’ Patrick sounded unimpressed.
‘Not necessarily. But, well, yeah. If you really want to get it.’
Patrick dropped the book onto the table. He looked unconvinced. ‘Isn’t it a bit, I don’t know, juvenile? Poets and femmes fatales.’ He pulled a pack of cigarettes from the jacket that hung on his chair. He offered one to Robert and lit it for him. ‘Did he live the kind of life he writes about in here?’ he said, narrowing his eyes as he lit his own cigarette. ‘Crime, rough sex, all that?’
The waitress threw two beermats down on the table, each emblazoned with a black bear, and set the beers down on top of them.
‘Danke schön,’ Robert said.
‘Bitte schön,’ the waitress said over her shoulder. Patrick leaned over in his seat to watch her go. The woman at the neighbouring table coughed, lightly but distinctly, and waved her hand at the smoke from their cigarettes.
‘There were stories about him when he was younger,’ Robert said, holding his cigarette as far away from the woman as he could, on the opposite side of the table. ‘Heroin, things like that.’
‘These seem like silly fantasies to me,’ Patrick said. ‘Teenage stuff. I bet he was into knives when he was a kid. Throwing stars. You know those kids?’
Robert wasn’t sure what Patrick meant but he nodded anyway.
Patrick turned his cigarette in the ashtray, shaping the tip, oblivious to the smoke snaking towards the couple beside them. ‘I did like the setting, though. Those campgrounds by the sea. It was eerie.’
‘I went there,’ Robert said.
‘Where?’
‘To Blanes.’
‘Where is it?’
‘Catalonia. Up the coast from Barcelona. It’s where he lived.’
‘You met him?’
‘No,’ Robert smiled. ‘This was a few years after he died. Just before I met Karijn. I took a train all the way down there and stayed for a few days. It was a kind of pilgrimage.’
‘Pilgrimage?’ Patrick said. ‘He’s only a writer, you know. Not a fucking saint.’ He shook his head in amused contempt: ‘Pilgrimage,’ he said again.
‘I’m glad I went,’ Robert said. He wasn’t going to be embarrassed by Patrick. He didn’t care what he thought.
Patrick’s smile seeped away as he crushed out his cigarette. ‘What’s it like?’
‘Quiet. Small. There’s a harbour, big beaches. It must get busy in the summer, but I was there in February. It was grey and wet and cold. It felt like somewhere you could disappear to, which I suppose is what he wanted. He got a lot of work done there, anyway.’
‘Did you go to his house?’ Patrick was smiling again.
‘I stood outside it,’ Robert said and laughed, feeling foolish despite his determination not to.
‘What’s it like?’
‘It’s just a building. Not old, not new. It’s in this narrow little passageway.’
Something smashed and Robert saw Patrick start, his eyes panicked as he looked around the courtyard. Robert turned and saw, at a table on its opposite side, a man looking down at the shattered remains of a bottle of water on the flagstones. The waitress, who had just appeared at their table again, slid their plates in front of them and hurried over, waving her hand and speaking sharply to the man as he leaned down, telling him not to touch the glass.
Patrick looked at the grapefruit-sized sphere on his plate. ‘No shit,’ he said, ‘that is a very big ball of meat.’ Taking up his knife and fork he eagerly cut into it. ‘Listen,’ he said around a mouthful, ‘I do seriously want to say thank you for saving me the other night.’
Robert waved Patrick’s words away. ‘It was nothing, forget about it.’
‘It’s not nothing. I was being a cunt and I deserved to get spread all over that pavement, but I didn’t, and that was down to you.’
‘Karijn more than me, I think.’
Patrick looked blank.
‘My wife. The one who talked down the guy you were fighting with?’
‘Right, of course. Sorry,’ Patrick said. ‘And thanks for saying “fighting”. I think it was a bit more one-sided than that.’
‘What was it about, anyway?’
‘Stupid crap, you spilled my beer, fuck you et cetera.’ Patrick lifted his glass. ‘Anyway, cheers.’
‘Cheers,’ Robert said. They clashed glasses and took deep draughts of beer.
Putting his glass down, Patrick winced and brought his hand to his mouth.
‘Sore?’ Robert said.
‘I’m making it seem worse than it is. I just forget and then…’
Robert leaned back in his chair. The evening was warm and the courtyard was bathed in candlelight. He took a long sip of beer and enjoyed the blur of conversation filling the air around him. He was relieved that Patrick was less of a liability than he had expected. He also realised with some surprise that he was enjoying himself. They spoke about London, an article Patrick had read about a Mexican drug lord, and what Patrick made of Berlin, a city that he said could feel overpoweringly bleak. ‘I get like that sometimes,’ Robert said. ‘You should go to the lakes. Wannsee, Müggelsee. They’re good places to let some light in. Get your head straight.’
They drank more beer with their food and when the waitress cleared their plates and Patrick suggested a nightcap, Robert found he wanted to stay.
‘Two whiskeys,’ Patrick said. ‘Any preference?’
‘Jameson, bitte, and an espresso,’ Robert said, hoping the coffee would help straighten him out a bit. He felt drunk.
‘Two espressos, two large Jameson,’ Patrick said. ‘Cheers. Danke.’ They sat in silence for a few moments.
‘What made you choose Berlin?’ Robert said.
‘I don’t know. Heard good things, I guess.’
‘Have you got friends here?’
‘Do you like football?’ Patrick said.
‘Yeah. Don’t get to watch much since the kids, though.’
‘Who’s your team?’
‘Chelsea.’
Patrick smiled. ‘Another coincidence,’ he said as the waitress leaned over and moved their drinks from her tray to the table.
Robert raised his glass. ‘To unnerving parallels,’ he said. Patrick raised his in reply and they both sipped, exhaled and settled back in their chairs with a synchronicity that made Robert laugh.
‘What?’ Patrick said with a puzzled smile.
‘Nothing. You were telling me why you moved over here.’
Patrick’s smile fell away. ‘I don’t think I was.’
‘What happened?’
‘What do you mean, what happened?’
Robert had noticed Patrick’s evasiveness, but he could also sense there was something he wanted to say, something that had remained just out of sight all evening. He shrugged. ‘You tell me. I feel like you ending up here wasn’t, maybe, entirely planned.’
Patrick looked away and looked back at Robert. He laughed and dipped his head, as if impressed. He shifted in his chair and swirled the whiskey in his glass. This time the hesitation gave Robert the sense Patrick was deciding which version of a story to tell. He made himself remain still and silent. At a party a therapist had once told him that if he really wanted to get someone to speak, he should keep his mouth shut.
‘I was working for this guy called Sergei,’ Patrick said. ‘Sergei Vanyashin. Heard of him?’
‘The name’s kind of familiar,’ Robert said.
‘He was a guy who made a lot of money when the Soviet Union collapsed. Hundreds of millions, maybe billions.’ He sipped his whiskey. ‘Somewhere along the way he pissed off Putin, so he had to get out of Russia.’
‘Like Berezovsky?’ Robert said.
‘Yeah, a lot like him. Sergei fled, went to Spain for a bit, then turned up in London. He got good advice, so he knew which politicians to pay off, which donations to make. He claimed asylum, bought some houses, put his kids in school. He’d already been here – there – quite a few years by the time I met him.’
‘How did you meet him?’
‘He wanted someone to ghost his memoirs.’
‘And that’s what you do?’
‘I’ve done it a couple of times. I wrote Albie Cooper’s book.’
‘No way! I’ve heard great things.’ The book had been a big seller a few years earlier, Robert remembered. It had a reputation for being unusually insightful and skilfully written for a footballer’s autobiography.
‘I had a lot of offers after that – other footballers, an Olympic rower, some TV presenters. Then one of Vanyashin’s people got in touch and said he wanted to meet me.’
‘They’d read your book?’
‘No idea. I suppose so.’
Robert didn’t know if it was the alcohol or the aftereffects of the beating, but Patrick had become somnolent. He was gazing into his whiskey, apparently unaware of his surroundings. ‘What made you say yes?’ Robert said more loudly than he needed to, hoping to rouse the other man.
‘I almost didn’t,’ Patrick said, refocusing on Robert. ‘I’d never heard of him, but I did some googling – and fuck me,’ he laughed. ‘I’d never met anyone who lived like that. I mean, Cooper was on two hundred grand a week, more, but this was something else: houses around the world, yachts, helicopters, jets. It was unreal.’
‘I imagine it paid well,’ Robert said, thinking of the advance he got for his story collection.
‘Extremely well,’ Patrick said. He tipped his head back to swallow the last of his whiskey. ‘Another?’
Robert placed a hand over his glass.
‘For fuck’s sake, Robert, I’m thanking you, remember?’ Patrick put his hand up and looked around for the waitress. ‘Have one more drink with me, then I’ll let you’ – he flicked his fingers towards the door leading back into the restaurant – ‘escape.’
Robert saw something in Patrick’s eyes that suggested it would be more complicated to say no, and he still wanted an answer to why Patrick had ended up in Berlin. ‘OK,’ he said, ‘one for the road.’
‘Waitress!’ Patrick shouted, so loudly that the man and woman at the neighbouring table both jumped, the man’s dessert fork clattering onto his plate.
The waitress, taking an order on the other side of the courtyard, flipped her notebook closed and stalked over. Robert wanted to apologise to her but remained silent. ‘Was?’ she said, looking down at them with disdain.
Patrick tapped the rim of his glass. ‘Zwei, danke.’ She turned on her heel and went back inside. ‘What were we talking about?’ Patrick said.
‘You were telling me how you made your fortune writing this oligarch’s memoirs.’
‘My fortune, yeah. Well, it fell apart.’
‘Why?’
‘Vanyashin died. Last year.’
‘How?’
‘The inquest said suicide,’ Patrick said. ‘Just announced it, in fact. The coroner gave his verdict last week.’
‘You’re … what, you don’t think that’s what happened?’
The waitress slammed the whiskey glasses down on the table with a crack; both men flinched. She pulled a leather folder from her apron pocket and tossed that down beside the glasses. Patrick laughed as she walked away. ‘I guess these really are nightcaps, then,’ he said, tipping his glass towards Robert.
Robert sipped his drink. He hadn’t drunk so much in a long time. ‘So, no book then?’ he said.
‘No book.’ Patrick rubbed his face. He looked tired. ‘Just a lot of trouble.’
‘What trouble?’
Patrick looked around the courtyard, which made Robert look around in turn. Their elderly neighbours had left. Only a few people remained at the other tables. Couples mostly, although in the far corner a man sat alone, a beer and a bowl of fries on the table and his phone held up in front of his face. Patrick leaned forward. ‘The sort of trouble,’ he said, whispering now, ‘that it’s best for me not to talk about, and for you not to know about.’ He brought his index finger to his lips.
Perhaps it was the outlandishness of what he was saying, but Patrick seemed far drunker than he had a few minutes before. ‘You sound a bit paranoid, mate,’ Robert said, and smiled to make it clear he was teasing.
Patrick nodded, as if he had been expecting Robert to say that. ‘It’s real,’ he said.
‘What’s real?’
‘I know,’ he said, stabbing the table and lowering his voice so much that Robert had to lean in to hear what he was saying. Again Patrick stabbed the table with his finger. ‘I know Sergei Vanyashin didn’t fucking kill himself, and I know that whoever killed him’ – he moved his finger left to right, as if the killer might be sitting at one of the neighbouring tables – ’is looking for me, too.’ His eyes, fixed on Robert’s, were held widely open, as if he were amazed at his own words.
‘Did you tell the police that?’ Robert said.
Patrick sat back and looked down at the tablecloth. He brushed some crumbs onto the ground. ‘They interviewed me. I told them I hadn’t ever heard Sergei talk about suicide, or act like someone who was suicidal, but I wouldn’t say anything more than that.’
‘Why not?’
‘Why not? What about Badri Patarkatsishvili? Or Perepilichnyy? Or Berezovsky? All dead in the space of a few years; all connected. They all knew each other. With Litvinenko the government might actually point a finger at the Kremlin, because how can you ignore a river of polonium running through London? But even then, it’s taken the home secretary eight years to agree to an inquiry. Eight years. And most of the evidence is classified, and it’ll stay that way.’
Robert recognised Berezovsky and Litvinenko’s names, but not the others. He wanted to ask who they were, but Patrick wasn’t stopping. His voice was louder now, his previous caution seemingly forgotten.
‘They don’t want Russia in the dock,’ he said, ‘there’s too much money to be made. Even after Putin went into Crimea nothing happened. It took a missile bringing down a fucking airliner for Cameron to start talking about sanctions that actually mean anything. It’s a fucking embarrassment. Sergei didn’t get protection, and I won’t either.’
Was Patrick a hunted man? This sounded like bullshit to Robert. ‘So where—’ he began, but Patrick motioned for him to lower his voice, his caution restored as suddenly as it had been abandoned. It seemed ludicrous, but Robert decided to play along. ‘So,’ he said quietly. ‘Where does this leave you?’
‘Right now, here. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know where to go. But I wasn’t going to stay at home waiting for a social call from the SVR.’
‘Is that like the FSB?’
‘FSB’s internal. SVR’s overseas,’ Patrick said. ‘Like MI5 and MI6. And there’s the GRU as well. Military. Fuck knows which ones caught up with Sergei. I hope I never know.’ He swallowed the last of his whiskey. His eyes flickered from the table to Robert to the courtyard beyond, never settling.
‘Why would they come looking for you?’ Robert said, trying to sound more curious than disbelieving.
‘The fucking book,’ Patrick hissed. ‘We were nearly two years into the book. He told me –’ he lowered his voice further still and hunched closer to the table’s surface – ‘he told me things you don’t want to hear about people it’s wiser not to piss off.’
Robert smiled.
‘What’s so fucking funny?’ Patrick said, his eyes narrowing in anger, making Robert wonder if the night they first met was every night for Patrick. He didn’t want to be his next opponent.
‘I’m on your side, OK?’ Robert said, lifting his hands as if surrendering. ‘I helped you out, remember?’
Patrick grimaced and rubbed his hand across his face. ‘Sorry, I’m sorry. I don’t know how to talk about this stuff. I know it sounds mental. I should shut up.’
‘No. If you want someone to talk to, I’m here.’ Robert surprised himself with these words, but he wasn’t sure Patrick had heard him; he nodded but seemed distracted.
‘I’ve kept you here long enough,’ Patrick said. ‘We should get going.’ He pulled out his wallet and Robert did the same. ‘Put that away,’ Patrick said. ‘No arguing.’
‘Thank you,’ Robert said. Standing reminded him how much he had drunk. He weaved a little as they walked to the top of Sophienstrasse. ‘Which way are you?’ he said. Patrick pointed up the street. ‘That’s me,’ Robert said, pointing in the opposite direction.
Patrick held out his hand. ‘Thank you again, Robert.’
‘You’re welcome. Thanks for dinner. And all the booze.’
Patrick smiled. ‘We’ll sleep well tonight.’
Robert began to turn away then paused. ‘How did he do it?’ he said. ‘How did he die?’
‘It appears he went for a run and hanged himself from an old English oak. Poetic, isn’t it?’ Patrick gave a small, grim smile and raised a hand in farewell.
Robert watched him walk away. It hadn’t been the evening he expected. He passed a shoe shop with a single pair of men’s loafers in the window, set on a plinth with a spotlight trained on them. It wasn’t impossible that Patrick’s story was true, he supposed, but it seemed so unlikely. He felt as if he were being played, like he had spent the evening walking into some kind of trap. But Patrick hadn’t asked him for anything. He was nearly at Hackescher Markt station when he realised that if Patrick lived in Neukölln he had gone in completely the wrong direction. Slumped on a train seat, his head beginning to throb, Robert supposed it didn’t really matter whether Patrick was telling the truth or not, because he was never going to see him again.
Copyright © 2021 by Chris Power
