Then, at the weekends, Trevor wasn’t interested in any area of the arts. He didn’t want to know about theatre, or art galleries or concerts, except for those of Def Leppard — great music if you like that kind of thing, which she didn’t — but they were not art, at least not in her view. He just wanted to watch football, then either go to the pub, or more preferably to a particular S&M club he had discovered in London, where they had become regulars. He liked, most of all, to hurt and humiliate her in front of other people.
Ahead of her and to her left, across the railings on the elevated road, she could see the start of a town. It lay in a valley, surrounded by low, rounded, wintry hills. Everything she could see was mostly grey or brown, the colours bleached out by the gloomy, overcast sky. But to her, it was all intensely beautiful.
Hagen. A place where no one knew her, and she knew no one. Except just one man. And she barely knew him. A place where a stranger she was going to have sex with tonight, for just the second time, lived and worked. She tried to remember what his voice sounded like. What he smelled like. A man so crude he could send her a photo of himself naked and semi-erect, but a man so tender he could send her poetry by Aparna Chatterjee.
Trevor had never read a poem in his life.
The road dipped down suddenly beneath a flyover that seemed, from this angle, as if it went straight through the middle of a row of grimy, pastel-blue townhouses. She halted at a traffic light in the dark shadow beneath the flyover, checked in her mirror for an instant — just checking — then saw a yellow road sign. There was an arrow pointing straight ahead, with the word ‘Zentrum’. Another arrow pointed left, and bore the word ‘Theater’.
She liked that. Liked the fact that the second word she saw on arriving in the town was Theater. This was going to be a good place — she felt it in her bones, in her heart, in her soul. Hagen. She said the word to herself and smiled.
Behind her a car hooted. The lights were green. She drove on past a road sign that read ‘Bergischer Ring’, and realized from the directions she had memorized that she was close to her hotel. But anxious as she was to see Hans, she wanted to get her bearings. She wanted to arrive slowly, absorbing it all, understanding the geography. She had all the time in the world, and she wanted to get it right, from the very beginning. It seemed too sudden that one moment she was on the autobahn, the next she was slap in the centre of the town. She wanted to feel it, explore it slowly, breathe it in, absorb it.
She turned right at the next road she came to, and drove up a steep, curving hill, lined with tall, terraced townhouses on both sides, then past a grimy church. She made a left turn at random, up an even steeper road, and then suddenly she was in scrubby, tree-lined countryside, winding up a hill, with the town below her.
She pulled over to the curb, parking in front of a butane gas cylinder that was partially concealed by a threadbare hedge, stopped and climbed out. The central locking had packed up a long time ago, so she went around the car, making sure the doors and the boot were locked. Then she walked over to the hedge and looked down, across the valley, at her new home.
Hagen. A place that boasted, among its tourist attractions, Germany’s first crematorium. Which had a certain convenient ring to it.
The town lay spread out and sprawling in the bowl beneath her. Her eyes swept the grey, urban landscape beyond the gas cylinder, below the murky, sleeting sky. She saw a cluster of industrial buildings, with a white chimney stack rising higher than the distant hills. A small nucleus of utilitarian apartment buildings. A church spire. A Ferris wheel brightly lit, although it was only three o’clock in the afternoon, reminding her that darkness would start to fall soon. She saw a narrow river bordered by grimy industrial buildings. Houses, some with red roofs, some grey. She wondered who lived in them all, how many of their inhabitants she would get to meet.
It is neither fish nor meat, Hans had said, telling her about Hagen. But she didn’t mind what it was, or was not. It looked huge, vast, far bigger than a town of two hundred thousand. It looked like a vast city. A place where she could get lost, and hide, forever.
She loved it more every second.
She noticed a strange, cylindrical building, all glass, lit in blue, above what looked like an old water tower, and she wondered what it was. Hans would tell her. She would explore every inch of this place with him, in between the times they lay in bed, naked, together. If they could spare any time to explore anything other than each other’s bodies, that was!
She turned away from the view and walked on up the hill, hands dug into the pockets of her black suede jacket, the sleet tickling her face, her scarf tickling her neck, breathing in the scents of the trees and the grass. She followed the road up into a wooded glade, until it became a track, which after a few minutes came out into a knoll of unkempt grass, with a row of trees on the far side and a rectangular stone monument at the highest point.
She climbed up to it, and stopped at a partially collapsed metal fence that was screening it off for some kind of repair work. She knew it was the Bismarck monument, because she recognized it from various websites as one of Hagen’s landmarks. She stared at it silently, then took her little digital camera from her bag and photographed it. Her first photograph of Hagen. Then she stood still, licking the sleet off the air, feeling a moment of intense happiness, and freedom.
I’m here. I made it. I did it!
Her heart was burning for Hans, and yet, strangely, she still felt in no hurry. She wanted to savour these moments of anticipation. To appreciate her freedom. To relish not having to hurry home to make Trevor his evening meal (always a variation on meat and potatoes as he would eat nothing else). To be able to stand for as long as she wanted beneath the statue of Otto Eduard Leopold von Bismarck, a man partly responsible for shaping the country that was about to become her adopted home, for however many days of freedom she had remaining. And she did not know how many that might be.
Better to live one day as a lion than one thousand years as a lamb, Trevor was fond of saying, strutting around in his studded leathers and peaked cap.
Of course, he would not have approved of her being here. And particularly not of her standing like an acolyte worshipping at the statue of Bismarck. Trevor had a thing about Germany. It wasn’t the war or anything like that. He said the Germans had no humour — well, Hans had proved him wrong.
He also said the Germans were efficient, as if that were a fault!
Trevor had a thing about all kinds of stuff. He had a particularly big thing about crematoriums. They gave him the creeps, he said. Whereas she found them fascinating. Yet another thing on which they disagreed. And she always found his dislike of crematoriums particularly strange, since he worked in the funeral business.
In fact, thinking back on fifteen years of marriage, what exactly had they agreed on? Rubber underwear? Handcuffs? Masks? Inflicting modest pain on each other? Bringing each other to brutal climaxes that were snatched moments of release, escape from their mutual loathing? Escape from the realities they did not want to face? Such as the fact — thank God for it now — that they could not have children?