‘Beer and a shot, right?’ she said and smiled and looked at my bag and curved her scrawny back so far forwards I started worrying about her spine.
‘Coffee,’ I said, and she turned round and got to work on the coffee machine. I went through my pockets and put a tenner down on the bar. ‘Can you change this for me?’
Traudi put my coffee down next to the note. ‘No problem,’ she said and took it. She held the tenner between her forefinger and thumb and fanned it in front of her face and smiled at me as if she’d been in another kind of business, back when she was fat. I unwrapped the sugar cube, dipped it in the coffee and watched it slowly dissolve. Traudi was still grinning at me and now she stroked her lips with the note. I drank a mouthful of my coffee, then I poured in some milk and stirred it around a couple of times with the spoon. ‘How d’you want it?’ asked Traudi and looked at me over the note.
‘For the machine,’ I said. She screwed up the tenner in her fist and bent over to the till. She fingered through the coins and slapped three twos and four ones down on the counter. I nodded and went over to the cigarette machine. The old bloke looked up for a moment, still clinging onto the beer bottle, empty now. He really did look pretty far gone, like the alkies and dossers inside when they couldn’t get hold of any home brew. Some of them tried to make their own, and collected every crust of bread and every rotten apple they could get, but most of them had the DTs and messed it up.
‘A beer,’ said the old man, ‘a nice cold beer. And a shot, you know. You’ll think of me, won’t you, drink one for me?’
‘Yeah, right,’ I said, ‘a double just for you. Soon as I get to the station.’ The old guy smiled, and for a second his head stopped wavering and even his eyes were still. The coins jangled through the machine and I selected my old brand. I had to put more money in; the prices had gone up. I leant over and picked up the packet. I looked around. Traudi had poured herself a beer and was drinking and flicking through a thick catalogue in front of her on the counter. Looked like underwear and clothes.
‘Mate, got one for me?’ The old man looked at me, lowered his head slightly and let go of his empty bottle. I put the new packet in the inside pocket of my jacket and gave the old man four of the roll-ups the Boxer had given me that morning, ‘For the journey, son.’ He smoked the cheapest stuff, we called it ‘pubes’, but some evenings, when we were sitting at the window and waiting for the night and swapping cigarettes, his roll-ups tasted better than Davidoff Filter. I paid for my coffee and left.
I saw four chemist shops by the time I got to the station, three of them on the same road. Maybe people in Torgau were really run-down and got ill easily, or they beat each other up all the time and needed loads of bandages.
There were a couple of people in the ticket office so I got my ticket from a machine. The station pub didn’t open till the evening, and I stood in front of the timetable and smoked and read the names of the towns, until they announced my train and I noticed I was cold and felt a bit sick. On the platform was a girl with a dog. Fairly pretty even, maybe a bit too young, seventeen or eighteen, dark hair and nearly black and down over her shoulders, and her eyes …
The little grey dog danced around her, and she took a couple of steps so the lead didn’t get tangled around her legs. I dropped my bag and squatted down as the little grey dog danced in my direction and stopped a couple of yards in front of me; maybe the lead wasn’t long enough or she was pulling him back. But I didn’t even see her any more, although she was really quite pretty; there was only the little grey dog in front of me, in the middle of the platform. He raised his head and sniffed, his nose was shiny. I held out my palm to him, my fingers slightly apart, the dog danced to and fro a bit and howled quietly. I heard the train pulling in and straightened up.
And then night. In fact it was still evening, but it had been dark since four, and I saw all the bright lights of the city. I stood outside the door, looked at the cars driving by, looked at the luminous signs and windows of the shops and bars opposite. The Turks and the Arabs had taken the area over years ago, and the Russians had a hand in things too, and back then before I went inside I’d had a couple of run-ins on this street, when we crawled from one bar to the next, but that was all over now. I opened the door and went inside. I took the money out of my bag, counted it out, rolled it up and put it in my inside pocket. The money smelled of fish, and the two queers in their little snack bar had stunk of fish as well.
‘The Boxer sent you, did he? Shacked up with him, are you?’
The guy winked at me and leaned over the little counter. ‘Used to look out for me, always looked out for me back then.’ He talked about their great friendship, about the Boxer’s honour, ‘Never lets anyone down, never leaves you in the lurch, you better believe it,’ and he talked about how the Boxer nearly made it to the Olympics, back then. He put a can of beer down in front of me and opened one for himself. ‘Have a drink. Out on leave, are you? Let’s drink to the Boxer.’ We said cheers, and he started talking again, about the Boxer and about the jail and about their golden days. The other queer didn’t say a word the whole time and just cut rolls and herrings, and when he started on the onions and queer number one was still going on and on, I flicked my half-smoked roll-up across the counter at him and said: ‘Time’s up.’ He grinned and nodded and took me to a little caravan he called ‘my office’, and it stank of fish and beer and cigarettes in there too.
I walked slowly up the stairs. The house was silent, and when the light went off I stood still and lit up. I walked on slowly in the dark. Light shone through the pane in the door. I stood still and put my hand on the bars. ‘Close it, I wanna show you something.’ I closed the window, turned around and still felt the bars cold on my hand. The Boxer was standing naked to the waist in front of his bed. ‘Hey, what’s this all about, pal?’
‘Just wanna show you something, son, come over here, come closer.’ He’d put his big hand on his chest, and I walked over to him slowly. He had the usual words and pictures on his arms and a big eye in the middle of his belly, but I’d seen all that often enough in the two years we’d been sharing. The Boxer wasn’t quite as inked up as the billboards I used to see in the showers, who carried their whole lives around with them on their skin, but he went to one of our in-house tattooists every couple of months. ‘It’s a new one, you haven’t seen it yet, it’s still fresh. Don’t need no photo any more. Never. Chucked them all away. She’ll always be with me now.’ He took his hand off his chest. There was the face of a young woman, she had shoulder-length black hair and was smiling. Her eyes were much too big, almost like in Japanese comics. She must really have been pretty fresh; her face was swollen up, especially her forehead and below her mouth — there weren’t any tattoo care sets in Fort Zinna. ‘Looks really beautiful,’ I said, and the Boxer nodded and went a bit red. I looked at his daughter, smiling at me with her big eyes. ‘Come in,’ she said. I looked at her nose, then her hair, which was quite short, and then her eyes … now they were sparkling and squinting at me. ‘Come in,’ she said again, ‘come on in if you’re going to.’ She turned around and I followed her along the hall. Maybe the Boxer had told her I was coming, maybe the herring boys. ‘The door,’ she said, and I went back again and closed it.
She sat down on the sofa. I stayed standing up in front of her, and she squinted up at me so that I took a couple of steps back. I held onto my bag with both hands and looked around. It all looked pretty cheap, but the Boxer had told me she was doing some training course, as a hotel clerk or something. ‘Like a drink?’ I nodded. She went past me to the sideboard, and behind me I heard her clinking glasses. She took a couple of steps, and then I felt her breath on the back of my neck. I held onto my bag and looked at the wall above the sofa. There was some reproduction modern picture up there, all just blobs of colour. She walked slowly back to the sofa and put two glasses of brown liquor on the table. ‘Why don’t you sit down,’ she said. She stroked the sofa cushions and tilted her head and smiled; she must have learnt that on her course.