I have only been reading for a few minutes when I hear a key turn in the lock. I have been living with Klaus for nearly a week and he always comes home at roughly the same time — certainly never later than seven-thirty. I glance at my watch. It’s five past ten.
Removing his coat, he throws it over the back of his chrome-and-leather Barcelona chair, then walks into the kitchen and opens the fridge. He has been to a vernissage, he says. In Prenzlauerberg.
“Perhaps I should have invited you. I wasn’t thinking. I’m sorry.” He waves a bottle in my direction. “Some wine?”
“No, thank you.”
“You’re sure?” He pours himself a glass and takes a gulp. “Not even to keep me company?” Shoulders hunched, arms held away from his sides as if his armpits are wet, it’s obvious that he has been drinking.
I ask him if he has eaten.
He looks at the floor, ruffling his hair. “Only crisps.”
We decide on a take-away.
He rings a Thai restaurant and orders. When the call is over he asks me whether I have ever been to Thailand. “I know nothing about you,” he says, not waiting for the answer. “Nothing.” His face opens in wonder. He seems to find his ignorance exhilarating.
“I’m nineteen,” I tell him. “There isn’t much to know.”
“Nineteen? I forgot. I was thinking you were older.” He drinks more wine, emptying his glass. “All the same. I’m sure things have happened.”
It’s Adefemi who I see just then, on a wet night in May. We’re sitting on his faded pink sofa, my hands in his. I’m telling him how much I love him. But he’s my first, and I’m still young, and so I have to leave. I was seventeen when we met — he was four years older — and though I adored him from the first I always knew he couldn’t be the only person I ever loved. It’s the timing that’s all wrong, I tell him, not the feeling. He looks down at my hands. Nods slowly. Rain falling in the courtyard, both of us in tears.
“I’ve changed my mind about that drink,” I say.
“Good. I’m glad.” Klaus fetches the bottle and a fresh glass. “How was your day?”
“I slept for most of it. I was tired.”
Klaus fills my glass almost to the brim. “Were you out all night?”
“Yes. I had to meet someone. I didn’t know it would take so long. I thought I’d be home much earlier.”
He notices that I said “home,” and his face glows briefly, but he doesn’t realize how little the word means to me. It can be earned in a matter of moments.
I walk to the window with my drink, stopping when I’m close enough to feel the cold coming off the glass. I can see my own reflection; I’m made of shadows. The living room floats behind me, areas of bright gold suspended in the darkness, like a ghost ship or a distant galaxy. I see Klaus approach. He thinks I haven’t noticed. He thinks I’m looking at the view.
“When we met in the café,” he says, “on Giesebrechtstrasse, you told me that no one knows you’re here …”
“That’s right,” I say, but I don’t turn round.
“Is that really true? No one?”
“Yes.”
He moves into the space directly behind me, a second presence, inked in, opaque. He’s so close that I can feel the outer edges of his force field. I imagine tentacles or stamens. They are clammy, pulpy — the color of polenta.
“Have you any idea,” he murmurs, “how seductive that is?”
Wie verführerisch das ist.
At that moment I experience a sudden craving for Adefemi, like someone running a finger up the middle of me, but on the inside. I’m sure things have happened. I face back into the room.
“On that morning in the café,” I say, “you talked about privacy …”
“Did I? Yes, I suppose I did.” He sighs, then turns heavily away and slumps down on the sofa. Switching the TV on, he stares at the screen with a sullen intensity.
“What’s seductive,” I say, “is not the fact that no one knows I’m here. It’s the fact that I’m living the way I want to live — or rather, I’m getting closer to the way I want to live.”
“I’ve no idea what that means.”
“You’re part of it. In a way, you’re the most important part. You’re where it all began.”
He looks up at me. Though he still doesn’t understand, he senses the veiled compliment.
The doorbell rings. The take-away.
“I’ll get it,” I say.
Returning, I unpack the cartons.
“More wine?” Klaus appears to have sobered up.
“No, not yet.”
I fetch plates, forks, and paper napkins from the kitchen. Even rejected, Klaus remains polite, and I’m not sure I don’t despise him for it. I’d almost rather he tore my shirt off and pushed me down onto the sofa. At least that would be honest. I picture my buttons skittering across the floor like chips of ice.
He’s ignoring me again. He’s trying to punish me. It’s not easy for him, though. Deep down he’s hoping I will change my mind. He keeps channel-hopping, settling at last on a crime drama.
“I love crime,” he says.
I watch with him and find myself enjoying it more than I expected to. Down-at-heel tower blocks, rainswept motorways. Characters with stringy hair and bad complexions. Kitchens, ashtrays. Guns.
Even before the end Klaus is asleep, one arm laid across his upper body, a half-finished green chicken curry next to him. I tidy things away, then stand by the sofa, looking down at him. His chest rises, falls. The air rumbles in and out of him. Without waking, he reaches up and brushes at his face. What’s supposed to happen here?
/
For the rest of that week Klaus is on his best behavior, as if he knows he went too far and is trying to make amends. On Friday he asks me out to dinner. He takes me to a restaurant on Schlüterstrasse, a few minutes’ walk from his apartment. The girl at the next table has skin that is pale and luminous, and her long neck rises out of a clingy gray wool dress. With her is a man who has rolled up the sleeves of his jacket like an eighties pop star.
I ask Klaus if he finds the girl attractive.
“Not particularly.” He signals to the waiter. “The man looks Russian,” he says. “You often get Russians in here.”
I smile. When I called Cheadle on Thursday, as arranged, he told me he was meeting some Russian friends in a Vietnamese restaurant on Saturday, and that I was welcome to come along.
“I have to go out tomorrow evening,” I tell Klaus.
“Is it the same person you saw before,” he says, “when you were out all night?”
“No. This is a different person.”
“For someone who doesn’t know anyone, you know a lot of people.”
I laugh at that.
During the meal I hardly take my eyes off Klaus’s face, not because I’m becoming interested in him, but because I’m trying to determine whether or not he has outlived his purpose. A word I noticed in Farewell to an Idea shimmers in my head like a neon sign. EXITLESSNESS. In the book it’s attributed to the Russian artist Kasimir Malevich, who wrote about “the exitlessness of life.” This is what I have to guard against. This is the danger. Is it enough, for instance, that in taking me to the Konzerthaus Klaus has inadvertently introduced me to J. Halderman Cheadle? Is that where my future lies, with a shabby, fifty-something American expatriate? Or should I be focusing on Oswald Überkopf? One thing is certain: as comfortable as it is in the penthouse on Walter-Benjamin-Platz, I should think about moving on. It’s September 20, and my father will soon be flying back to Rome. Though he has never heard the name Klaus Frings, I don’t feel I can afford to stay in one place for too long. I need to muddy the scent. And the fact that I have acquired a new name, an identity Klaus knows nothing about, suggests I have already left him behind, and that he is having dinner with a previous incarnation, a discarded chrysalis, a cipher.