8
Käthe Hiller walked out onto the roof terrace and for ten minutes looked down to the city below, trying to spot her guest walking along the street. She arranged a chair on the left side where the view over the city was best. She put two cushions beneath her and a footstool nearby, drank coffee in the sun and opened a notebook on her knee.
She had been waiting for him to come all morning, tidying the rooms, expectant but also trying to subdue a nagging nervousness. Was she excited to see him or puzzled by a different kind of doubt? Just as that moment, it was hard to say precisely which.
Bells rang out across Potsdam. Above the rooftops toward the Breite Strasse, the Nikolaikirche played a chorale peal every half-hour. The church of Peter and Paul at the Bassinplatz chimed a pitch higher, a melody in two parts at the beginning of every hour. From the Dutch quarter, chimes came frequently and washed over the terrace at intervals through the morning and afternoon.
Käthe didn’t own the apartment herself. It belonged to her aunt Erika. Aunt Erika had big dark eyes crowded by wrinkles, and a large wart on her chin that, somehow, made her seem more beautiful.
She loved her aunt, all the more because she hardly ever saw her. Wasn’t there something generous in the way aunt Erika never came around except when she knew Käthe would be out? It made her feel the apartment was all her own. It gave her the liberty to come and go by her own schedule, to hang her own pictures (banging nails into the walls), decorate the rooms with indoor plants and bake her own bread laced with imported black olives.
And when she looked out from the terrace, it was her view over Potsdam. With its chest-high iron balustrade, combined with its exceptional loftiness, the terrace had the feeling of some cathedral rooftop, teetering on the very fulcrum of the wind and sky. Then, when the orchestra of bells fell silent, a new set of sounds gradually took their place; the rumble of horse carts and motorcars seven floors below.
The morning was the liveliest time of all. She leaned forward and peered down, watching the shopkeepers mop their steps and lift their shuttered blinds. She liked to look out for the young delivery boys from the butchers and bakers who weaved along the street with wicker baskets over their shoulders, and the servants from the big households rushing to do their daily errands. Then there was the postman with his leather satchel, who rubbed shoulders with the bankers and clerks under narrow-rimmed hats, and the white-socked school children garnished with yellow neckerchiefs. Later came the shoe-shiners, tobacconists, policemen, students and soldiers on day-release. The whole world was here.
Then, at the end of the day, when the last wisp of yellow sunlight threaded through the sky and the red-tiles of the rooftops blushed peach, the city between the low hills, punctuated by the spires and domes of Protestant Germany, was cast in shadow, and Potsdam town, the second Versailles of Europe, prepared for sleep.
A few miles to the northeast lay the great metropolis of Berlin. It was so close now, she could almost touch it. Here was a town that smouldered all through the night. Soot-encrusted, charged by electricity, Berlin was a place of music cafés, bars and theatres, where the streets purred with pleasure-seeking, where young women were watched by their admirers, where rakes, tarts, actors, composers and journalists – the whole awful menagerie – emerged, restless and newly eager.
Potsdam’s shadowed ornaments were like faded pearls compared to Berlin’s neon advertisements. The manicured gardens of the royal parks with their greenhouses of tropical fruit, trellised gazebos, a Chinese teahouse and a Turkish mosque, these all fell quiet. Only the church bells kept watch over the hours, mournful now in the mysteries of the night. At the same time, Berlin’s pulse began beating harder and faster. Nightclubs opened, jazz music murmured and wailed, lovers found each other in the shadows.
Käthe had long felt destined for Berlin’s restless streets. It fascinated her, this almost mythical place that had gained such notoriety elsewhere in Germany. Originally from a village outside of Düsseldorf, she came to Berlin to seek out a liveliness her hometown scarcely knew of. She came for the bars and coffeehouses, for the restaurants and cinemas, the shops and fashions – a treasury so inexhaustibly various she hardly wanted to spend another day without setting foot there.
Come morning in Potsdam, as the tallest church pinnacles caught the first streams of dawn light, the terrace began to light up again. Here Käthe sat with her coffee and a notepad on her knee, its pages filled-up with her unspoken dreams.
Standing up now, she peered over the railings again. She remembered a dream she used to have as a child, a happy dream full of sunlight and wide-open spaces. She remembered doing cartwheels over blades of grass, her head tumbling under her body, arms outstretched.
She put her hands on the railings and leaned over, letting the breeze pass through her hair. She enjoyed the feeling as the sensation of vertigo took hold. It felt daring to do that, as if she was misbehaving, and she imagined being a child again and her parents telling her not to get so close to the edge. In her mind she imagined how long it would take to fall such a distance, counting the numbers in her head, 1, 2, 3… Then she imagined what it would be like to be the object falling, tumbling through the air, uncontrollably towards the ground.
She stepped back from the railings and took a breath. She felt alive with so many dangerous possibilities.