Once seated he orders champagne, then looks around. “Movie stars come here. And politicians.” He shrugs.
“Do you live in Berlin?” I ask.
“I live in Croatia.”
“But you’re often here. For business.”
“Yes.”
He holds my gaze for a moment. His eyes are opaque and lackluster, like someone who has been watching too much TV. I have the sense that I shouldn’t probe too deeply into his life. At the same time it’s my job to keep him entertained.
“This is my first time in Berlin,” I say. “I live in Rome.”
He looks up from the menu. “You’re Italian?”
“No, English. I was born in London.”
“An English girl,” he says slowly and sips his champagne.
The waiter arrives. I ask for the roasted gilthead. Raul orders breast of musk duck with glass noodles.
It occurs to me that I can trust Raul with anything, even the truth, because he doesn’t know me and he never will. He’s even more of a stranger than Oswald or Klaus Frings or Cheadle. He sits at the table like something built to hold a secret. Like a safe. It also occurs to me that I will have to do most of the talking. Despite his command of the language he’s not a man who is profligate with words. For him, words are tools. Words fix things. Get things done.
“I’m nineteen,” I tell him, “but I’m also twenty-seven.” I reach for my champagne.
He stares at me and his face doesn’t change. He has a small scar near the edge of his mouth. His eyes are like wet wood.
“I was born twice,” I say.
He’s still watching me.
I tell him about my conception in a London hospital. I was an IVF baby. Does he know what that means? He nods. I tell him I was frozen. I was stored for eight years before I was finally implanted in my mother. I was put together — formed — but then I had to wait in the cold, with no knowledge of how long that wait was likely to be, or whether it would ever end.
“Like a hostage,” he says.
The analogy catches me off guard and though Raul remains quite still and solid the room appears to liquefy behind him.
“Yes,” I say. “Exactly.”
“But you don’t remember that. It isn’t possible.”
“How can you be so sure?”
He doesn’t answer.
Although I imagine him to be a man who has no patience with hypotheses and speculation, although his mind is almost certainly practical or even prosaic, he seems prepared to hear me out, and if I can find the right combination of words I might be able to convince him.
“Somewhere inside me,” I say, “there is a memory of that time. I carry it. Not in my brain necessarily — not consciously — but in my bones. My marrow.”
“Marrow?”
“It’s the fatty substance in our bones. But we also use the word metaphorically, to describe the very center of our being.”
He nods slowly.
I tear off a piece of bread. Since English isn’t his first language I’m having to alter the way I speak and it’s giving me an unexpected freedom. I can come at things from a different angle. Make discoveries.
“It’s not that I remember it,” I go on. “It’s more as if I have a sense of it.” I sip my champagne and the bubbles fizzle against my upper lip. “You know what it’s like to be caught in a thunderstorm? Well, the time I’m talking about is like the quiet before a storm arrives. It’s like uneasiness or apprehension. You feel the air begin to change. You feel something electrical —
“Or imagine you’re in a foreign city and you go to a movie and you get lost in it. At the end, when you walk out of the cinema, it’s not the city from the movie, and it’s not the city you’re used to either, not the city you know, it’s somewhere else —”
Raul is frowning. “This is how you feel,” he says, “when you think about this time?”
“Those frozen years, they’re still with me. They’re imprinted on my cells. On my DNA.” I pause. “I’m actually made out of those years.”
I finish my champagne. A waiter appears and pours me another. Sometimes I suspect I haven’t quite thawed out yet. My emotions are still frozen, my nerve endings numb. Sometimes I imagine I have been carved out of ice, like a swan in a medieval banquet, and that my heart is visible inside, a gorgeous scarlet, but motionless, trapped, incapable of beating or feeling.
“I’m living in a different way now,” I say. “I’m trying a new approach. I think it’s working.”
Our food arrives.
Head lowered, Raul inspects his duck.
“I’ve gone out on a limb.” I watch him as he picks up his knife and fork and starts to eat. “Do you know that phrase?”
Perhaps I’m talking too much. How much champagne have I drunk? Two glasses? Three? It can be exhausting, having to listen to someone. But I’m supposed to entertain him, aren’t I.
“It’s when you step onto the branch of a tree,” I say. “You begin to walk along the branch, cautiously, because you’re not sure it will take your weight. But you keep going. At any moment the branch might break. At any moment you might fall. That’s going out on a limb.”
“I understand.”
“I thought you would.” I’m smiling. “Your English is very good.”
He looks at me. “No. Not really.”
I eat a mouthful of gilthead, which is so soft that it seems to melt on my tongue. A bottle of wine arrives in a large silver bucket. The waiter pours us both a glass.
“How is the fish?” Raul asks.
“Delicious.” I reach for my wine. “There’s something I forgot to say. It’s exciting, going out on a limb. No, exciting isn’t the right word. It’s too small. Too weak. When you go out on a limb you feel alive — in every part of your being. Your whole being sings.” I look at Raul and see him as a man who has taken more risks than I can possibly imagine, and so I say, half to myself, “But perhaps you know that already.”
He pushes his fork into a slice of duck but doesn’t lift it towards his mouth. He hasn’t touched the noodles.
“You’re beautiful,” he says.
His voice is so grave that it makes me laugh. Once again I wonder if I’ve had too much to drink.
“Thank you,” I say. “Are you married?”
“Of course.”
“Do you have children?”
“One child. A boy.”
“He’s in Zagreb?”
“In the country. Outside.”
I tell Raul about my childhood, and how I associate the grayness and rain of London with stability and contentment, and how the sunlit years that followed were years of illness, frailty, and sorrow.
“We moved to Rome because my mother was diagnosed with cancer,” I say. “We went because she wanted to. All her life she wanted to live in Italy.”
“Your mother’s dead?” Raul says.
“She died six years ago. I scattered her ashes myself. I did it secretly.”
“And your father?”
“He’s a journalist.”
Raul pours us both another glass of wine. Black hairs bristle on the backs of his fingers. The symbol on his signet ring is an animal. I can’t tell what sort.
“You’re not eating,” he says.
“I’ve been talking too much. Am I boring you?”
“I like to hear you talk. It’s relaxing.”
“Relaxing?” I laugh again.
“Did I say something strange?” For the first time I sense that he might be vulnerable, and that the balance of power has shifted in my favor. But it doesn’t last. Aware of the lapse, he makes immediate internal adjustments.
“You make it sound as if I’m playing an instrument,” I say. “As if you’re listening to music.”