I need to preface my account of that evening, that night, by saying that Boris, who always spoke of himself as my oldest friend, is no longer alive. I don’t mention this here because Boris is dead. I would think of him no differently were he still alive, nor do I have to reproach myself for not having told him how much that evening, that night, means to me — quite apart from our confusion and embarrassment when we all finally went home.
It was truly the most extraordinary party I’ve ever been to, even if I did play only a marginal role.
“You can always get new stuff, except for an old friend,” Boris often said. And Susanne said: “Better no friends than one like him.” In her opinion Boris and I were friends purely out of habit.
What’s more, Boris never used to be my friend at all. He was one year ahead of me in school, and our morning route led us there from opposite directions. Our paths crossed during our army stint, we even spent a couple of leaves together — and immediately lost sight of each other upon discharge. It wasn’t until 1994, when Susanne and I moved in together in Berlin, that I saw Boris again. He was living on the fourth floor of the run-down building directly opposite ours on Esmarch Strasse. We had morning sun, his balcony — its balustrade, both summer and winter, topped by a tall, folded-up laundry rack — would catch a bit of evening sun from March or April on.
We ran into each other shortly after Christmas as we stood in line at the Extra supermarket waiting to use what turned out to be a defective bottle-return machine. Boris’s response was, or so I thought, a bit over-the-top, but he invited me to dinner — he’d cook. It was an odd situation when afterward we kept bumping into each other among the rows of shelving, not quite knowing what to say and mutely mustering each other’s shopping carts. At the time I thought that the bottle-return machine might well have contributed to his reaction too, since it smells just like our old neighborhood junk shop used to.
Once I had disclosed to Boris that we could see directly into his window, I sometimes saw him peering from his balcony over at us. If he spotted us, or thought he had — in winter the blinds move in the warm air coming from the radiators — he would start waving and calling across until I opened the window. Boris even claimed he and I had gone to the same kindergarten, Käthe Kollwitz kindergarten in Dresden-Klotzsche.
In flight before a plethora of construction sites and baseball caps, Susanne and I moved to the west side of the city in 1997. We made regular appearances, however, at Boris’s birthday parties. He would call months ahead and ask us to leave that special evening open for him.
There were, of course, a few things that didn’t speak in Boris’s favor. Injunctions such as: “Look me in the eye when we toast, or you’ll have seven years of bad sex!” or stupid clichés (“What I don’t know can’t hurt me”) earned Boris failing grades with Susanne. But above all it was her mistrust of a man who always has a new woman on his arm. I said that was a reason to be grateful to Boris, otherwise we’d never know that sort of life doesn’t make you any happier. But Susanne doesn’t see anything funny in things like that.
In the middle of May last year, three weeks before his forty-fourth birthday, Boris died of a stroke while swimming in Schwielow Lake. In the early nineties he had become a badminton instructor (“Shuttlecock coach,” Susanne called it) and “business was good.” He had leased an old glider hangar in Pankow, formerly East Berlin, which he later bought, and he knew all sorts of people. You seldom met the same person twice at his place. This was also true of his girlfriends, all of them terribly young and thin. He visited us only once or twice. The thing was, he loved to cook.
The last time we visited Boris was not for a birthday party but for what he called his “housewarming.”
Sacrificing two evenings for him inside of three months — it was now early September — was way too much for Susanne. Even though it was she who accepted the invitation on the phone — according to her, she’d had no choice. Boris had sounded so proud of his apartment that she couldn’t bring herself to do it.… The sole topic at his birthday party had been his new condo. He sent me an e-mail asking for my expert opinion of the girl who would be at his side — the judgments of an old friend counted a lot for him. He had often asked me for my “expert opinion,” so often that I read right past the word “girl,” instead of taking it as a warning or, at the least, an attempt to set the tone.
Boris had requested wine from the Saale-Unstrut region as a housewarming gift, and so Susanne and I carried one case each of Müller-Thurgau and Sylvaner up four flights of stairs. The elevator goes directly to the penthouse, which is now home to the people who used to own the entire building.
As Boris came down a few steps to greet us, his legs looked longer than usual and his silly pointy shoes much too big for the stairs.
Two other couples had already arrived. They were still holding packages and bouquets, plus wadded-up wrapping paper. Needless to say, we didn’t know them.
Boris told us to put the stuff on the coffee table and strode on ahead through the room, his heels rapping against the hardwood floor.
Except for a few new pieces of furniture — we made a point of admiring a long dining table and two large sand-colored “four-seaters”—the rooms were empty, in some even the baseboards were missing. Boris showed us what were to be his office and a guest room, and emphasized the southern exposure. The bath, kitchen, and bedroom — with boxes from the move still piled high — looked out onto the rear courtyard.
Boris railed at the ambulances that for no earthly reason, but with sirens howling just that much louder, raced up and down Greifswalder Strasse, but Marienburger Strasse was relatively quiet. Susanne had especially liked the big bathroom with its black-and-white tile floor. She said in her next life she’d play shuttlecock too — that way at least she’d make a go of things.
“It’s called badminton, bad-min-ton!” Boris barked and led the way back. Suddenly there she stood right before us, on the broad threshold between the entryway and the living room, her shoulders hunched forward, a stack of large white plates in her hands.
“This is Elvira,” Boris said, laying an arm around the girl’s shoulders. Elvira cast us all a fleeting glance, the corners of her mouth twitched. Susanne came to her assistance and carried almost the entire stack of plates to the table. Of all the women that Boris had introduced us to over the years, Elvira was the most diaphanous and the youngest.
As if trying to explain the dark rings under her eyes — he evidently noticed our uneasiness — he said that Elvira had spent the night on the train. Her mother had in fact recently moved south, to the Allgäu region. Elvira shook hands all around and vanished again into the kitchen without our having heard her utter one word.
As Boris filled our glasses, I was afraid Susanne would make some remark within his earshot about the age difference. But she just accepted her glass with a smile and nodded graciously when Boris excused himself to follow Elvira into the kitchen.
As always at the beginning of evenings at Boris’s we were now left to ourselves, which I found rather strenuous. With each successive year I had less and less interest in getting to know total strangers I would never see again.
The black-haired couple were Lore and Fred — she was a carpenter, he a structural design engineer with the plodding gait of a farmer. Pavel made his living giving piano lessons at the music school in Spandau and played keyboard with a band called the Wonderers, or something like that. The only reason Pavel played badminton was to please his redheaded girlfriend Ines, whom Boris had introduced to us as a colleague of mine — her latest plan being to actually write a book.