Oswald leans over, hands braced on his knees, and spits into the grass. “Do you think he saw us?”
I tell him I don’t know.
The siren fades. I can’t hear any voices, only the low hoarse barking of a dog.
“I can’t believe you did that,” I say.
“I was angry.”
“But your piece of concrete — your special piece of concrete …”
He nods, then looks as if he might be sick.
“Maybe you had it for long enough.” I’m trying to make him feel better.
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“In any case, it was a great throw.”
Smiling bleakly, he glances at his watch and then stares off down the track. “I think that was the last train.”
/
We have no choice but to walk. Near Wannsee, the hard shoulder almost disappears and trucks slam past, dangerously close. After that, we opt for smaller, more residential streets. Wind in the trees, the far-off rattle of a train. The flicker of a TV in an otherwise lightless house. Once, I hear a couple making love, the woman’s cries louder than the man’s. Oswald speeds up, careful to avoid my eyes.
On a street in Steglitz a new noise seems to detach itself from the silence — a high ethereal humming.
“What’s that?” I say.
Oswald stops and listens.
The sound is coming from behind us. We turn slowly, apprehensively. High above the treetops, at the end of the street, is a spaceship. Lit from the inside, it emits a steady whirring as if powered by a single engine. It has a rounded top and a skirt around the base, like a saucer. A flying saucer.
“It can’t be,” I say, “can it?”
Oswald says no.
But we both keep staring, and the spaceship goes on being a spaceship. What should we do?
Then, by small degrees, its shape begins to alter. I realize it must be turning. As it swings round, it becomes more elongated, and the word SIEMENS appears on the side. This gradual transformation happens with such complacency and confidence that it’s like the punch line to some convoluted joke. I look at Oswald, and we both begin to laugh.
“I thought it was a spaceship,” I say. “I mean, it really looked like one — for a while.”
Oswald’s nodding. “I thought it was aliens. I thought they might transport us to another planet. Do experiments on us.”
“You should have taken photographs —”
“I didn’t think of it. I was too busy being amazed.”
Suddenly we have more energy. We walk faster, keeping to the middle of the street. We seem to know each other better. We talk nonstop. Fifteen minutes later an U-Bahn station appears. Next to the ticket machine is a photo booth, and I suggest we have our picture taken, to mark the occasion.
When the photos drop into the slot, Oswald makes to pocket them, but I grab hold of his arm. I should have them, I tell him. As a souvenir. After all, I’m the tourist. What’s more, it was my idea.
“I paid for them,” he says.
“All right.” I let go of him. “They’re yours.”
My sudden indifference unnerves him. He folds the strip, then tears it in half. “Two for you,” he says, “and two for me.”
Towards dawn we collapse onto a park bench in Wilmersdorf. The sky is a marbled gray, like the endpapers in an old rare book. My legs ache and my stomach feels hollow. I haven’t eaten anything for eighteen hours. Oswald leans over, studying his pictures. Our faces have a radiance that makes us both look famous.
“When I first saw you,” he says, “my heart felt really strange.” He darts a look at me. “Like it was too big for my body.”
When I first saw you … I let out a sigh. It’s not that it’s not nice to hear, not that I’m spoiled, or arrogant, or vain. It’s just that people keep saying things and then expecting something in return, as if their compliments are a password or a payment, as if they are themselves ingenious and brave and deserve to be rewarded, and maybe they are, maybe they do, but I’m tired of it. I’m beginning to think that what I might be looking for is a place where things are no longer being said, where people don’t talk at all — or if they do, not in a language I understand. My body twitches, as it often does when I’m on the brink of sleep.
“What is it?” Oswald asks.
“Nothing,” I say.
He has just given me an idea.
/
By the time I let myself into the apartment on Walter-Benjamin-Platz, Klaus has already left for work. I find a note propped on the breakfast bar — Are you all right? Call me. Klaus — but there’s another call I have to make first, a call that is more pressing. I open my wallet and lift Cheadle’s card towards my nose. The earthy mushroom odor of an old man’s trouser pocket. I dial his number.
“Who’s this?” Behind Cheadle’s voice is a rushing sound, like taps running. His German accent is dreadful.
“It’s the girl from the Konzerthaus,” I say in English.
“How are you doing, Misty?”
Misty? I’m about to correct him when I realize that being called something different might be useful. Misty isn’t a name I would have chosen, or even thought of, but at least it has no personal associations for me.
“Misty?” he says.
“I’m still here.” That watery sound again. “Are you in the bath?”
“I’m under a flyover, in Spandau.”
I picture him with a mobile clamped to the side of his boxer’s head, the gray plastic raincoat flapping round his knees. On the margins — that’s where he belongs. He’s like a character from a painting by Edward Hopper. Or George Grosz.
“So what can I do for you?” he says.
“I’d like to meet some Russians.”
“That could be arranged.” His voice swirls, breaks up, and then returns. “Call me tomorrow.”
I turn his card on the black granite surface of the breakfast bar. “What’s the J stand for?”
“The J?”
“In your name.”
“Jeremiah.”
“Sounds kind of biblical.”
“The prophet Jeremiah. Much maligned.” Cheadle clears his throat. “We’ll talk tomorrow.”
I end the call.
Misty. Now I think about it I’m surprised I didn’t choose an alias myself, before I landed in Berlin. It’s not just the way it rubberstamps my break with the past. It’s the sense of release that comes with it. In The Passenger Jack Nicholson is David Locke, a reporter, but his real journey begins when he appropriates a dead man’s identity, an arms dealer known as Robertson. A new name will force me to re-create myself. It might also make me harder to follow, harder to find.
I google “Jeremiah” on Klaus’s home computer. Jeremiah was a prophet, just as Cheadle said. He warned the Israelites that unless they changed their ways they would face destruction and exile. They didn’t listen. Driven to extremes, Jeremiah walked the street with a yoke around his neck. He was thrown into a pit to die. In the end he was proved right.
Jeremiah, I think. Then I think, Misty.
I erase the history of my searches and click Sleep.
/
That evening, while exploring Klaus’s shelves, I come across a book called Farewell to an Idea. The title speaks to me directly, as songs often do. The book is about modernism — Cézanne, Picasso, Jackson Pollock — and its title is taken from a poem by Wallace Stevens. Farewell to an idea … The cancellings / The negations are never final. The father sits / In space, wherever he sits, of bleak regard … My throat constricts. Like the title, the poem seems to exist especially for me.