“Of course not,” I said.
We skipped the small talk and jumped right into the horrific week at the clinic. Karl said that he was relieved our MERS caseload had been moved to Charité. “We just weren’t equipped for it,” he said.
We had reached the edge of the park by then, and Karl asked me to lunch. I found that I wasn’t ready to be alone, either.
Chapter 51
A TAXICAB took us to Patio Restaurantschiff, a glass-enclosed restaurant on a boat moored on the Spree River.
I’d been complaining about life; then, in pretty much the next moment, a chair was pulled out for me, and a napkin dropped into my lap in one of the prettiest little restaurants in all of Berlin.
I do have restaurant German but was happy to turn the ordering of lunch over to Karl. He chose a fish soup, venison goulash with chanterelles, and a Künstler Riesling. I couldn’t help but look him over as he spoke with the waiter.
Karl looked to be in his mid to late fifties. He had good-uncle features-glasses and longish, gray-streaked dark hair. He also looked fit, and I loved that he had such expressive hands.
When the wine had been poured and the waiter was gone, Karl let me know that he was aware of my life-over-death battle with MERS. That I had almost died.
“How are you feeling now?” he asked me.
I said, “I’m not running laps around the Tiergarten, but I can tie my shoes without falling over. With my eyes closed. Pretty good, right?”
“I have to say this, Brigid. Doctors like you are why I support BZFO. Dr. Maillet told me a little about your background. I don’t want to embarrass you, but for a young woman with so many opportunities to make money and live well, to risk your life in South Sudan-well, it’s pretty impressive. Ach. I’ve embarrassed you now.”
“It’s fine,” I said. “But tell me about yourself. You’re a writer?”
“A playwright, yes,” he told me. “For me, writing plays is about the most perfect work imaginable.”
Karl told me about his play in progress, a political satire, and from there, we talked about geopolitics along the world’s worst fault lines. He was fully aware of the bloody civil war in South Sudan, and even after the dishes had been cleared away, we were still discussing the senseless conflict that was destroying the country.
“Greed and corruption are the root cause of this,” he said.
I saw it in his face: he actually felt the pain of the war. And after two and a half glasses of wine, I found myself telling Karl about my epic clash with Dage Zuberi.
It was a hard story to tell, but I felt as if I’d known Karl well and for a long time. And as I talked about that day in Magwi, I could see that Karl felt my pain, too.
We were politely thrown out of the restaurant so that it could be set up for dinner, and Karl did give me a ride the few blocks to my apartment.
Once home, I kicked off my shoes and emailed Sabeena. She was living in Mumbai with Albert, and they had adopted Jemilla and Aziza.
I wrote, Sabeena, guess what? I’ve made a new friend in Berlin.
Chapter 52
I HAD hardly hung my bag up behind the exam-room door when Dr. Maillet waved me into her office.
She pushed her green-framed glasses back into her hair and said, “Brigid, as much as you like the overnight shift, I’m putting you on days only. Get your strength back. Eat. Sleep. We need you to be in top form so we can exploit your youth and stamina later on.”
“Done,” I said.
She laughed. She had been expecting a fight. “Good,” she said. “Now take the night off.”
Since we’d closed our infectious-disease wing, I was attached to BZFO’s day clinic, and it was almost a vacation.
I didn’t miss the violence of South Sudan. I didn’t miss the upside-down days of breakfast at midnight, tinned ham at dawn. I practiced everyday medicine on refugee patients who had never had a routine doctor’s appointment before coming to Berlin.
I cleaned wounds. I set bones. I prescribed medication, and I sat in sunlit rooms with patients who, over paper cups of sugary tea, told me stories of savagery that I both understood and would never understand. I made friends with my coworkers, and I went on dates-nothing serious, but I was happy and enjoying every day, and in this way, two years passed.
Sometimes Karl stopped by the clinic at day’s end, gathered up everyone who was heading out, and took us to dinner in a local tavern, a wirtschaft, up the street.
He was the best kind of patron: supportive and a great listener, and he was a hilarious storyteller, too. One evening as I was leaving work, Karl invited me to see the rehearsal of his play Der Zug.
He had told me that the one-act play took place entirely on a train platform. Characters representing people from all over Europe waited for a train that does not come, a send-up of the unmet expectations of the eurozone.
Karl met me at the stage door to the Kleines Theater, on the Südwestkorso. He showed me around backstage and introduced me to the actors and the crew.
Clearly, Karl had told them about me.
They hugged me. Told me how they admired the work I was doing. And Karl stood by nervously, looking as if he was pacing inside his head as he waited for the curtain to go up on the train that would not come.
We sat together in the front row, and when the rehearsal began, I was completely drawn in. The set was so real-with the rumbles coming over the sound system, the intermittent dimming of overhead lights-that I felt that I was sitting on the platform right across the track.
The characters were a Greek leftist, an Italian economist, a Spanish millionaire, a Belgian bureaucrat, and a Polish plumber. They were first shown at ease, and then under increasing pressure, reacting in idiosyncratic ways.
There was a beautifully comic moment when the expectation of the coming train peaked. The actors leaned forward, air whooshed up from under their feet, and they turned their heads to see der zug rush by. Their quizzical expressions as they stared at one another were priceless.
I laughed out loud, that two-part giggle followed by a belly laugh that Zach had pinned on me, and Karl, sitting next to me, wrapped me in a spontaneous hug. Then he kissed me.
Karl Lenz kissed me.
Chapter 53
KARL’S KISS surprised the hell out of me.
First, there was the fact of that kiss, and even more unsettling was the electricity that came along with it that kind of lit me up.
Karl was my friend. And now?
He took my hand, and as the play went on in front of us, I stared at him. I was not cool. Karl smiled, squeezed my hand, and when the action on the stage broke for a discussion with the lighting man, Karl leaned toward me and whispered, “Don’t be shocked. I love you, Brigid.”
“What? No, you don’t.”
“I do. I fell for you the moment I saw Mary congratulate you on getting the job. It was just that instantaneous. And now that I know you, I want to be with you. I want to make you happy. I want to give to you. I want to marry you.”
“Karl,” I whispered fiercely back. “That’s crazy. We’ve only known each other…”
“As friends?”
I nodded.
“I had to tell you or explode,” he said. “Okay, Brigid. Maybe I see us as more than friends, eh? Or maybe this gives us an opportunity to see what we might have. No rush. We can spend as much time together as we want. Why not?”
I thought of several reasons why not, and all of them surfaced in my mind as the rehearsal commenced and I stared ahead at the stage.
Karl was crazy. He didn’t know me or my moods and habits or what had made me the person I am. And I knew only one side of his story.