“No, no.” He laughs, then motions to me, and we walk to the nearest S-Bahn station, at Savignyplatz.
Once we’re on the train, I ask him where he’s from. He grew up in the south, he tells me. Near Stuttgart. His parents are still there. They’re really old. His father’s eighty-one. Even his mother’s seventy. I ask how old he is. Twenty-eight, he says, then nods firmly, as if he just split into two different people, one who reveals information, another who confirms its authenticity. It’s an irritating habit. I ask if he has any brothers and sisters. Three brothers, he says. They’re much older — more like uncles. His parents weren’t expecting him. He was an accident. His mouth twists awkwardly. He’s attempting a grin, but his feelings are too complex and it comes out wrong.
Rush hour is over and we’re alone in the carriage. Every time the train slows for a station, the brakes squeal and grate. Sometimes the overhead power lines give off a bright mauve-silver flash. I put my face close to the window. There are no buildings anymore, only mile after mile of scrubby heath or parkland.
“They didn’t know what to do with me,” Oswald says. “I always felt guilty — you know, for turning up like that.”
“I was a miracle,” I say, startling myself.
“How do you mean?”
As we rattle through the darkness I tell him I was conceived by IVF, then frozen as an embryo.
Oswald is silent for a moment, looking at his hands. “At least your parents wanted you.”
“That’s true,” I say. “Up to a point.”
He doesn’t understand, and I choose not to explain. Just then there’s a whiplash crackle from the power lines and he peers through the window. “This is our stop.”
The sign on the platform says GREIBNITZSEE.
We hurry down a flight of stairs, then through a damp drafty tunnel. Outside the station is a parked truck with a bottle of Pilsner on the side.
Oswald beckons and we begin to walk. We pass a row of silver birches, metallic in the moonlight, and mansions with locked gates and darkened windows. The air is pungent with turned soil and fallen leaves.
“It smells like the country,” I say.
“There are lakes out here,” he tells me. “There are beaches. In the summer you can swim —”
A cock crows in the distance. So far, I have gone along with his idea, despite the fact that it has involved a journey to the very limits of the city. But now, finally, I’m growing impatient. This whole thing feels like a waste of time.
“Where are you taking me?”
“Don’t worry. We’re almost there.”
The houses become more modest — cut logs stacked against a garage wall, a rowboat covered with a moldy tarpaulin. We pass a gate, its upright metal staves shaped like feathers. The wind lifts. I can smell pine resin and something makes me think of winter. A tingle goes through me, behind my pubic bone.
“Will it snow soon?” I ask.
“Not yet,” he says. “Not until November.”
I doubt I can wait that long.
He stops at last on a stretch of road that seems utterly unremarkable. This was the only way into an enclave of houses known as Steinstücken, he tells me. The Berlin Wall ran down both sides of the road. He walks to the grass verge and begins to poke about. No trace of the wall remains, but he shows me where it used to be. Here, he says, and here. We move on. Before the wall came down, Steinstücken was a magical place, he says. Though it belonged to West Berlin it was completely surrounded by the DDR. It was like an island, with just one strip of tarmac — a causeway, really — to link it to the rest of the world. His brother, Friedl, rented a house in Steinstücken, and he — Oswald — would often visit. Friedl was twenty years older, more like an uncle than a brother.
“You already told me that,” I say. “So why are we here?”
Once, Oswald says, when he was staying at the house, he was suddenly hoisted onto Friedl’s shoulders and carried outside into the dark. He remembers cheering, and the tilting beams of flashlights, and people wielding sledgehammers, pickaxes, and bits of pipe. That night he found a piece of concrete lying on the ground, among the grown-ups’ feet. He plunges a hand into his pocket and takes out a chunk of gray stuff about the size of a tennis ball. He stares down at it, his eyes distant, dreamy. It seemed really heavy at the time, he says. He was only four.
“That’s it?” I say. “That’s part of the Berlin Wall?”
He nods.
“And this is where it came from?”
“Yes.”
“So you brought me all this way to show me something that isn’t here?”
He hesitates.
“OK,” I say. “That’s great. Can we go now?”
His face widens in disbelief.
“Look, I’m sure this is important to you,” I go on, “but none of it’s much use to me.”
“This isn’t about what’s important to me,” he says. “It’s the past. It’s history. I’m trying to show you something.”
“I don’t care. I’m not interested.”
“You’re not interested?” He’s staring at me, horrified.
“No, not really.” I look around. “You’re just someone I happened to run into in a supermarket. You talked to me. I did you a favor. That’s it. That’s all.”
“A department store,” he says.
“Sorry?”
“I work in a department store.”
“Whatever.”
“You’re harsh, you know that?”
“Oswald, you’re not listening to me. I don’t have time for this. I’ve got stuff of my own to deal with.”
“How do you know this isn’t part of it?”
This is clever of him and it brings me up short, but only for a second. “I just know.”
“You’re lost, you are. You’re —”
“Fuck you.”
He flinches, then moves away from me, into the road. When he speaks again his voice is so subdued that he could be talking to himself. “If you’re not careful you’ll get hurt.”
Light explodes inside my head, as if I’ve tapped into the S-Bahn’s power lines, and suddenly I’m so close to Oswald that I can’t even take in his whole face. Just a chin, half a mouth. The meager iron filings of his stubble. My eyes feel white hot. It’s a wonder he doesn’t start to smolder.
“You’re an idiot,” I shout, switching to English for the first time all evening. “You’re a fucking fool. Don’t you see anything?”
A figure looms in a nearby driveway.
“Get lost,” a man’s voice says, “or I’m calling the police.”
Oswald steps in front of me.
“My brother used to live here,” he says. “He used to live in your house.”
A security light clicks on. The man’s face is in shadow.
“Piss off, both of you.”
Oswald glances at the piece of concrete he is holding. His hand tightens round it, then his arm unwinds into the air. There’s a bright jangling noise, and a black star appears in a downstairs window. The man lets out a string of curses and lurches towards us, light from the house silvering one raised fist.
Oswald says, “Run.”
We turn and race along the road, back the way we came. I glance at Oswald but he doesn’t look at me.
“Keep going,” he says.
Somewhere behind us a car starts up.
We run for perhaps a kilometer. My throat burns and I taste blood. Near the station we scale a wall and scramble down a railway embankment. A siren wails. We hide under a bridge, among Gourmet salami wrappers and empty yogurt cartons.
“I think we lost him,” Oswald gasps.
A train flashes past. I feel as if someone stabbed me in the ribs.