CAROLINE, MY WIFE, is feeling unwell. It seems that the city is not agreeing with her. We are sitting on a bench in the Lustgarten, looking across the road to the Palace of the Republic. I had hoped we would be able to go in but the building is closed, a rusting, derelict hulk deemed unsafe due to structural flaws, asbestos, or – it seems possible – more symbolic dangers.
The palace was the nerve centre of the German Democratic Republic, a paranoid state obsessed with the duplicity of its own people. It presents four walls of oily, bronzed glass intended, it seems, to conceal everything that went on inside it but which now conceal nothing, I imagine, except gutted offices, dim and draughty corridors. Instead, reflected in the glass is a corrupted, cubist vision of the city around it – shards of the cathedral’s copper-green dome, Karl-Liebknecht-Strasse, the Spree River and roiling sky. Now some want it knocked down, while others would have it preserved as a reminder of the crimes committed inside.
I have been explaining this to my wife but now she is lying down on the grass with her eyes closed. Her face is flushed. She says she feels dizzy.
‘It’s so depressing here,’ says Caroline, not opening her eyes. ‘So grey, so much concrete, so many terrible things. I feel like I can’t breathe.’
The city is much as I had imagined it: cold and grand, claustrophobic with history. The architecture is monumental, designed to intimidate. In the great plazas and boulevards I find it hard not to think of grainy black-and-white film, thousands marching, crowds raked with searchlights. As we have criss-crossed the city under my direction, my wife has proved a reluctant tourist. She seems oppressed by everything – the run-down buildings near our hotel in the old East of the city, the incomprehensible graffiti that covers them, the surprising quietness of the streets. She complains frequently of tiredness. We have argued. She has decided that my interest in the city is unsavoury, voyeuristic.
‘A strange thing,’ I say, shutting the guidebook and sitting down next to her on the damp grass. ‘Something that strikes you when you read about it is that throughout the war, even very late on when many Germans must have known it was lost, life just seemed to go on as usual. People had dinner parties. They saw friends, went to parks, bars, the theatre. They even went on holiday. Everything was heading towards this disaster, this catastrophe really. Thousands were dying all over Europe but, amid the chaos, in some ways life just went on as usual.’
Caroline does not speak. She opens her eyes briefly to check my expression. Lately she has become suspicious of everything I say. She believes that everything is innuendo, an accusation or a trap.
It is spotting with rain.
‘Ready to go on?’ I say.
‘Please,’ she says. ‘I have to go back to the hotel.’
Two months ago I discovered that my wife was having an affair. She was so careless in her deceptions, so reckless in her choice of lover – a friend of ours – that I believe she wanted me to catch her, that she wished to punish me and make me suffer. There were plenty of clues, and anyway I was not so surprised.
I let the affair continue for several weeks – keeping track of her movements, imagining their meetings. In the end it played out like melodrama: the husband arriving home unexpectedly from work, the opening of the bedroom door, the wife and her lover momentarily oblivious to their discovery. Perhaps it sounds strange but this is what I had wanted to see – for her to know I had seen – so that there could be no excusing or reducing it, no pretending it was something other than this, no softening with words or regret.
I insisted on knowing everything: the wheres, hows and how oftens. I made her relive it in every detail. I put her through that; I felt I was entitled. This went on for days and eventually she told me all of it. When I revealed that I had known for some time, she raged at me, as if I were somehow responsible. There were scenes, dreadful scenes, in which everything seemed to be at an end, but in time we both relented. She was remorseful. I took some of the blame – I had been inattentive, absorbed in work.
It was then that I proposed the trip away. I remember it clearly. We were sitting in the kitchen. Soft autumn light fell in a band across the table between us. Outside in the garden the leaves on the trees were yellow gold and for a moment it seemed that it had all been nothing more than a bad dream. I had bought a guidebook and Caroline sat, turning the pages. Of course she had visions of somewhere exotic – Brazil, Mexico, the Caribbean. That was what she was used to after all.
‘Germany?’ she said. ‘In November?’
I am reminded of this as we sit in the restaurant at the top of the Fernsehturm in Alexanderplatz, eating the tasteless and expensive food common to all such places. I have the lobster, Caroline the steak. We are sharing a bottle of white wine, although Caroline has barely touched her glass. Outside the clouds are turning pink in a wintry sky.
The Fernsehturm provides the best views of the city. Over Caroline’s shoulder are the Soviet housing blocks and great revolutionary boulevards of East Berlin. Behind me is the vast green space of the Tiergarten, once the private hunting ground of Prussian kings. I have pointed out the landmarks we have visited in the past three days and traced the line of the now-absent Wall through the city. Now she says that she is not hungry, that her steak is overcooked, and the sight of the city far below us is making her nauseous. At the next table a young couple whisper excitedly to one another, honeymooners perhaps. On the other side, two children are jabbing at each other with their cutlery while their parents pick at their food and ignore them. One of the children begins to cry and the manager comes over and speaks quietly to their father.
‘I was reading about the Stasi this afternoon,’ I say. ‘Apparently they used to keep samples of the body odour of anyone they thought was a criminal or a danger to the Republic. They arrested the person on some pretext and then swabbed their crotch with a cloth or broke into their apartment and stole some of their underwear. Then they kept the cloth or underwear in a glass jar. Specially trained dogs were used to recognise the presence of a particular person’s odour at an illegal meeting or whatever. Smell-differentiation dogs they called them. Unpleasant, but very effective.’
My wife does not seem to have been listening. She stands to go to the toilet and I see people at other tables turn to look at her. I am one of those men who want a woman in relation to how much other men want her. My wife is not beautiful. Her face is too angular, her expression too uncompromising for that. But she has a self-assurance, a physicality in her manner and her movements that causes men to imagine her in a particular way. I know this because I once imagined her in this way myself.
On our very first holiday together we walked through a market in Morocco. Caroline was inappropriately dressed, her arms and legs bare, and stallholders stared at her and muttered to each other. One man pushed past us and, it seemed to me, rubbed himself provocatively against Caroline’s body. I turned on him and began to shout and threaten him absurdly. Other people intervened and I was pulled away. Caroline brushed the incident off – ‘Men,’ she said – but I could not be calmed down and insisted we return to the hotel. There she lay on the bed, baffled and amused, while I urgently and repeatedly made love to her.
‘I’ve been sick,’ says my wife when she returns to the table. She is pale, angry, a little unsteady on her feet. To her left, in the distance, are the glassy new towers of Potsdamer Platz, sign of Berlin’s modern rebirth.
When I wake up in the night my wife is sitting on the edge of the bed in the hotel room, crying. This is very unlike her. I have only seen her cry two or three times before; she did not even cry when I told her I knew about her affair. She does it awkwardly, wretchedly, her body bent over itself, as if she is in physical pain. I notice that one of her legs is shaking. White light coming through the blinds – street light or moonlight, I cannot tell – lies in bars across her body.
‘What’s the matter?’ I ask.
‘Nothing,’ she says. ‘A bad dream. Go back to sleep.’
A bad dream. Perhaps. But I look at her and I wonder if it is something else.
I have always been a jealous man. When my wife began her affair she believed she was hurting me. She did not realise that the deepest desire of the jealous man is to have his jealousy vindicated. She believed she was acting independently, in her own interests. Now she sees that she was manipulated – I made her feel unwanted, I put temptation in her way – that I had already fantasised this role for her. She feels as if it were me who had been unfaithful, as if she were the one who had been betrayed.
Caroline’s face is wet, her eyes red from crying, and as I look at her I see that thing that other men see in her. I reach out and put my hand on her shoulder. Her body tenses but she does not move away. I move my hand to her breast and begin to kiss her throat. Abruptly she stands and crosses the room to the toilet. I hear the click of the lock. The bars of light lie flat across the bed where she has been sitting.
I wanted my wife to have an affair so that I could resent her and punish her for it. I wanted to suffer and to make her suffer to prove that we were still in love. If it is a game then it is one I am winning.
On our last day in Berlin we get to the Jewish Museum around midday. I am keen to see all that we can before our flight leaves this evening and already we have visited two of the remaining sites on my list – Checkpoint Charlie and the Wall Museum. Caroline is tired and wants to stop for lunch.
‘It’s awful,’ she says, looking up at the museum. ‘So – I don’t know – unnecessary.’
‘Tell that to the Jews,’ I say.
‘I mean the architecture,’ she says wearily. ‘I don’t feel so good. I don’t think I want to go in.’
After a while she gives in, unwilling to argue, but inside she trails behind and we become separated. The museum is a labyrinth of zigzagging corridors and odd-shaped rooms, walls leaning in or out at an angle and floors that slope abruptly up or down. Dim light comes through narrow windows slashed diagonally in the walls. I wander from room to room, pausing only briefly over the exhibits – on religious life, domestic tradition, the middle class – which are somehow not what I had expected, or hoped for. After half an hour or so I realise that I am coming to the same rooms over and over again. I sense that this is deliberate, that there is some conceptual scheme at work, but the meaning of it is obscure. I find it only frustrating, claustrophobic, and begin to look for a way out.
I arrive in a bare, high-ceilinged room without exhibits which I feel certain I have entered earlier from another direction. It is immediately clear that in the few moments before I walked in some sort of disturbance has occurred. Voices are raised above the usual hush of the museum. There is some kind of disruption in the usual movement of people, a small but perceptible sense of alarm. Then I see that everyone is looking in the same direction – towards a knot of crouching people, and a woman sitting on the floor among them.
At first I do not recognise my wife. Her skirt is rucked up above her knees and her hair has escaped from its clips and hangs in tangles around her face. One of her legs is twisted under her and the other sticks out in front. Her face is red and a livid bruise is coming up around her eye, and for a moment I think she must have been attacked. Two of the museum staff are kneeling down next to her. One has his arm around her shoulders to support her and the other is holding a glass of water and fanning her face with a museum leaflet. The top two buttons of her shirt have been undone. Another man, a doctor perhaps, takes her pulse and speaks to her steadily. Altogether there is a strange intimacy to the scene. The contents of my wife’s bag have spilled out onto the floor: her purse, sunglasses, phone, a packet of tissues and a small notebook. A lipstick has rolled into a far corner. Another member of staff walks around collecting them up and for some reason it is the sight of all these familiar things scattered across the room that is the most startling thing.
Other visitors to the museum, perhaps ten or fifteen of them, stand around, unwilling to move on. The atmosphere is strange, heightened, and I have the odd sensation that something profound has occurred, something that because of my late arrival I am barred from understanding. I cannot think how I should act or what I should be doing and for a moment I imagine myself to be just another passer-by, on my way through the museum, to whom the scene is a riddle, a mystery to be unravelled. What has happened to this woman? Where are her friends? She has a ring on her finger – where is her husband? I imagine myself as someone with a different afternoon ahead, a different life, to whom this will soon seem like only a minor incident in a busy day.
Someone has brought Caroline a chair and the museum staff are helping her onto it. All these people, all so solicitous – but then it is easy to take care of strangers. I am thinking this when suddenly my wife looks up and sees me. At first I do not speak or move. Then I hurry forward.
When we finally check in at the airport, hours later, there are no adjacent seats available on the plane. I watch from two rows back as the man next to Caroline offers her his window seat and then helps put her bag in the compartment above. She is a different woman from the one sprawled on the floor of the museum. She has changed her clothes, put her hair up and applied lipstick. Only the purpling bruise around her eye, incongruous with rest of her appearance, is a reminder of the events of the day.
Once we are in the air Caroline begins to talk to the man next to her. He is smartly dressed, professional-looking, Germanic. Anyone might think they were together. Caroline’s manner is light, animated, as if a weight has been lifted from her. She points out of the window, perhaps showing him some of the things she has seen on our trip. Now that the city is receding below us, she finally seems able to appreciate it. Perhaps she is reimagining it in her mind already, a list of places visited and meals eaten, a holiday like any other.
The man laughs and I wonder what she has said that is funny. Perhaps she is explaining how she came to have the bruise around her eye. Maybe she tells him the usual story: I walked into a door, I fell down the stairs. Or maybe she tells him how she fainted in the Jewish Museum, making it comic, absurd, full of melodramatic detail, a story at her own expense. I wonder if, in explanation, she tells him about our trip to the hospital, how the doctor turned to me – not to her, to me – and said, in perfect English, ‘Perhaps you did not realise? Congratulations, everyone is perfectly healthy.’ Perhaps the man next to her congratulates her too.
I look past the person sitting next to me and out of the window. I can see the Fernsehturm, the Reichstag and the green rectangle of the Tiergarten, and I trace the line of the Wall through the city. From the air Berlin seems innocuous, like any other city, a greying sprawl gradually giving way to fields. They say that former Stasi men still meet secretly in dingy bars to exchange information and plot surveillance. They use the old code words and signals and act as if the Wall had never come down. They cannot let go of their old habits and do not seem to notice that they are an irrelevance, that everyone else has moved on.
Half an hour into the flight Caroline stands to go the toilet, smiling and apologising. It seems to me that there is something different about her, something indefinable, a subtle confidence or a new awareness in the way she holds herself or the way she moves. I wonder if any of the other passengers who are watching her notice it, if they understand what it means, and, if they do, whether they could appreciate the terrible completeness of my victory. When Caroline passes me I reach out and touch her. Startled, she cries out. People turn in their seats. She looks down and sees me. ‘It’s OK,’ she says, ‘it’s my husband,’ and walks on down the aisle.