When I return to the table, the bill is already paid. Anna tells me she needs my passport. I hesitate. She can’t get me a visa, she says patiently, if she doesn’t have my passport. I reach into my bag and hand it over. She will also need a scan of my credit card, front and back. She’ll be in touch, she says. Through Cheadle.
Out on the street Oleg hails a taxi, and the two Russians climb in. I wait until the car has turned the corner, then I thank Cheadle for the dinner and kiss him on the cheek.
“I don’t think you should go,” he says.
“That’s what you’re supposed to say,” I tell him. “That’s what everybody says.”
He’s shaking his head.
“I mean, I can’t stay here.” I look up Schlüterstrasse, towards Savignyplatz, then swing round and look the other way. The Ku’damm with its clogged traffic, its splashy neon. “This isn’t what I had in mind, not even remotely.”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“You don’t understand. You never will.” I open my arms wide and spin slowly on the pavement, my face on a level with the murky sky. “This is only the beginning.”
“Maybe,” Cheadle says, “just maybe, you’re the one who doesn’t understand.”
/
It’s two days later, and I’m drinking beer and vodka with Oswald in his two-room apartment in Neukölln. He lives alone, with his dog Josef. We’re sitting in the kitchen, which is a bright, sickly green, like the algae on canals. The heating has broken down, and we have kept our coats on. Our breath shows as we talk.
Oswald faces me across the table, his left hand flat on the zinc surface, his fingers spread, as if he’s about to do that trick where you pick up a knife and stab the gaps as fast as you can. He has drunk more than I have and his eyes look fierce, bleached.
I ask to see his tattoo. He pushes his sleeve back to the elbow. Running up the inside of his forearm in Gothic script are the words Religion ist eine Lüge. Religion is a lie.
“Umstritten,” I say. Controversial.
He pushes the sleeve down. “I’m going to tell you something — something no one knows.”
I steady myself. We have reached a certain point in the night. He’s going to try and impress me or confide in me and then I’m supposed to sleep with him. I’ve no intention of sleeping with him, though. If I imagine him naked, his body looks raw and urgent, like an animal that has just been skinned. I shudder, then feel guilty.
“Jesus wasn’t really Jesus.” He sits back, pleased with himself.
“You know something?” I say. “That would make a good tattoo. You could put it on your other arm.”
“I’m serious.” Without taking his eyes off me, he adjusts his position on his chair, staying within the frame of my gaze but moving inside it, as though testing its limits.
I finish my vodka. “Who was he then?”
“You remember the Slaughter of the Innocents, right?” Oswald leans forwards. “Everyone thinks Jesus escaped — but he didn’t. He got put to death, along with all the rest. He died.”
“So who did all the miracles?”
“That’s what I’m saying. That’s the thing no one knows.”
“Except you.”
My words have a sarcastic edge, but he doesn’t waver, or even seem to notice. “Except me,” he says, as if it’s true, and obvious, and can’t be disproved.
I finally ask the question he has been longing for me to ask. “If Jesus wasn’t really Jesus, who was he?”
“Herod’s baby.” He nods slowly, agreeing with himself, a habit of his that still annoys me, then he reaches for his cigarette papers and his Ziploc bag of grass. “Herod had Jesus killed and had his own son placed in the manger and Joseph and Mary were sworn to secrecy, under pain of death, and then the Wise Men came with all their gifts — ‘the Wise Men.’ ” He lets out a derisive snort.
“Joseph and Mary fled into Egypt,” he goes on, “pretending they had got away with the Messiah, but actually —”
What Oswald is telling me is giving me a glassy feeling, and I’m worried I might black out on his sticky lino floor. I wish he would shut up, but he’s on a roll with his Jesus-wasn’t-Jesus theory. I light one of his cigarettes, hoping it might straighten me out.
“— everything people believe in,” he’s saying, “everything that comforts them when they feel alone, or when they’re in trouble, or when they’re dying, it’s all a fabrication, all a lie —”
The cigarette is making me feel even dizzier.
“Let’s go for a walk,” I say.
Josef hears the word and jumps to his feet, eyes eager, tail whacking the fridge door.
Outside, on the pavement, the night smells of ash and salt. The sky looks brown. We hurry across Karl-Marx-Allee, which is wide and bleak, like some urban prairie. There are almost no cars. I wonder what Cheadle’s up to. He’s still determined to adopt me but I keep postponing it. I have discarded one father. Why would I want another?
When I was sixteen I got top grades in all my GCSEs, and shortly after the results came through, my father and I flew to London. One night he took me to a restaurant in South Kensington to celebrate. I wore an elegant black dress and pinned my hair up. I was trying to look sophisticated — I wanted him to be proud of me — but the evening proved awkward from the outset. When the waiter took my coat he gave me a sly look, and I knew he thought I was my father’s mistress. I couldn’t believe my father hadn’t noticed. He was a journalist, after all. An observer. It would have been so easy to clarify the situation — My daughter just did brilliantly in her exams — but he didn’t, and my discomfort led me to broach a subject that had always been taboo — for us, at least.
We had nearly finished our starters when I told him that something was bothering me. It had been bothering me for a long time, I said. As long as I could remember. My father chewed slowly, watching me. What I felt, in general terms, I said, was an absence of something, a sense of deprivation. A loneliness. But I had never been able to put it into words. How could I have done? I was too young — only a child. And then my mother died, and the feeling of having been neglected or forgotten became harder to make out, even harder to bring up. My mother’s death was so immediate, so shocking. So recent. My mother’s death had buried it. I looked at my father across the table, hoping he would understand, but we had never talked about the difficult things — there was no history, no precedent — and nothing was coming back. He just seemed puzzled, and slightly apprehensive.
“I’m not describing it very well,” I said.
My father told me to try again.
“OK.” I took a breath and decided to go straight to the heart of it. “When I was an embryo, why wasn’t I injected into my mother right away?”
The waiter, who had been hovering nearby, refilled our water glasses and then withdrew.
“I’m not sure injected is the right word,” I said, “but you know what I mean.”
My father leaned forwards, over the table. “Kit, for heaven’s sake. We’re in a restaurant.”
“You had me frozen and then you left me in the hospital —” My voice was trembling, despite my efforts to control it. “You left me there for eight years.”
My father put down his fork. His face had stiffened. It was obvious he had never expected — or even imagined — anything like this. Also obvious was his fear that I might make a spectacle of myself, and ruin the evening.