Back in Berlin, Lena went straight from the train station to the music venue. She managed a quick bite to eat, but there was no time to go back to the apartment and drop off her case. Julia was in Hamburg, getting Matt settled in with his other mother.
Lena sent her a message – here with Madina.
She attached a photo of herself standing beside Madina, the Chechen-born folk-rock artist. It showed them on stage with a set of drums in the background and a man behind them on the right with his back turned. The singer has her arm around Lena, both smiling, standing in such a way that it appears as though Lena has the prosthetic leg. The illusion works perfectly. Lena seems to be lifting her knee up to show her prosthesis with an illuminated design along the shin, wearing light-blue footwear. It’s a trademark image of the singer. She has been photographed like this with her fans, also with some prominent artists like Nils Frahm.
Madina’s head is shaved on one side. She has a wave of red hair coming down along the other side of her face which gets tossed around during the performance. Her arms are bare and there is a tattoo that looks like a shadow along her neck. Lena wears a black jacket and a russet dress, from which the thigh with the prosthesis seems to be emerging. Her hair is shorter than before, with a green streak running across the top that could be mistaken for foliage.
A message back from Julia – sounds like a great night. What happened to your leg?
Lena’s reply – if only I had her voice.
Followed by a quick chain of messages. Hope all going well in Hamburg. Doing a lot of swimming. Lots of walking in forest with the dog.
Lena sent the same photo to Mike in New York with these words – amazing Chechen singer. Plays the accordion, totally mind-blowing.
Mike’s reply – you cut your hair.
Lena – you like it?
Mike – love the leg.
She sent him a link to a track on YouTube. A recording of the band in which the trumpet and accordion appear to chase each other in a circle, while the singer’s striking voice comes striding across the top with the chorus in English – ‘No Time for Bones’.
Just imagine how the ex-barrel organ player feels right now, in his prison cell, hearing that somewhere in the future, at a well-known Berlin music venue, a young Chechen-German singer with a titanium leg plays the accordion like an absolute demon. Her dancing is inhuman. He would give a raucous cheer and start dancing around his cell himself, stamping his good foot. He would dance to his memory of marching tunes, and children’s rhymes, ancient love songs that my author grew up with in the East. A beat of horses’ hoofs. The smack of splitting wood. The rhythm of carpet-beating. He would jump on his bunk and celebrate this living female artist a hundred years younger than himself with a brilliant roar through his prison window at the night sky. The guard would come running to see what was going on and bang on the door. If only Andreas could start over again. He would take the courtyards by storm. Bring the mothers and children of the city out dancing. Men whistling his melodies coming home late from the bars.
Madina Schneider – just like my author. Endless flight. Endless hotels. Carrying her identity around in a suitcase. Her memory in her songs. Her selection of prosthetic legs in an extra suitcase along with the band’s equipment. Always beginning again. Always unpacking. Getting up on stage every time with the performance of her life.
She had the audience banging on the tables.
And then a moment of drama that nobody was expecting. At the end of a song, when she was removing the accordion, like taking a jacket off her shoulders, there was an interruption from the crowd. The band were taking a breather before the next song and the audience had broken out in a wave of conversation, when Bogdanov, her ex-partner, showed up right in front of the stage with a bottle in his hand.
Madina – I love you, he shouted.
At first he looked like an over-devoted fan.
I can’t get enough of you. I want you. I need you, Madina. You’re killing me.
It was the type of situation where nobody knew what to do. How can you complain about a man who loves her music so much that he is willing to make a show of himself?
Madina leaned down towards him and said – stop this, Uli. There’s no point.
Kill me, go on, he said.
Go away, Uli.
Please, he said, going down on one knee. You’re the only one, Maddy.
Uli. You’re wasting your time.
The band got ready to start up again. The drummer gave the initial tap of the drumsticks. He set up the beat for the next song, but it lost energy and dropped off. The unfolding disruption was getting in the way.
Bogdanov managed to haul himself up on stage. He stood in front of the microphone and tapped to see if it was working, then he said – one, two. His voice was so loud he jumped back. He began pointing at Madina with the bottle as he declared to the audience –
I started her off. I got her singing. Me – Uli Bogdanov. She loves me. She offers me protection.
Nobody wanted to tackle him. Perhaps they assumed he was her manager, making an official announcement. Maybe they thought this was some big Johnny Cash declaration on stage. The audience finally became irritated because he was not making a lot of sense.
Get him off.
He became aggressive. He threatened the audience with his bottle. You’re all wankers, he said, you have no idea how much we love each other.
Asshole.
He turned back to her and pleaded – Maddy, please, please, I’m yours.
He dropped the bottle and made a lunge for her. She pushed his face away with her hand.
Uli, fuck off.
His sense of balance failed. He began to rock on his feet. He slowly tilted backwards, knocking over the microphone with his elbow. His weight gathered momentum as he reversed across the stage, tripping over the accordion, getting his foot caught in the straps. He continued staggering into an electric guitar and finally collapsed against the drums. His hand reached out like a drowning man for something to hold on to, pulling down a stand with cymbals on top of himself with a clanging finish.
Silence.
It was like the end of a song. Somebody in the audience applauded.
They laughed. They whistled.
Bury him deep.
Two men rushed onto the stage and pulled Bogdanov away, still protesting, turning around to see Madina, blowing her kisses with both hands as he was dragged outside.
The band started up again with renewed energy. The night was a great success, the Bogdanov display of admiration seemed like part of a singer’s gathering fame, the audience loved her even more.
Everyone sat around with the band at the bar after the performance. It felt good being part of the inner circle, hearing them joking about the earlier disruption. One of them remarked that Madina would need a security detail in future. She was getting mobbed. What she needed was a couple of heavies with big necks to stand in front of the stage with their legs apart and their arms folded, looking out for signs of restlessness in the audience. This could be Altamont. Madina laughed and said she could do her own self-defence, thank you.
They were talking about their touring schedule. Armin put his arm around his sister and said to Lena – she’s impossible to catch up with now. Madina and her band were starting a ten-day tour of Scandinavia. She had then been meant to do a tour of Britain but that had been cancelled because one of the band members might have had difficulty getting a visa. Instead they were filling in with a tour of France and Italy. Then it would be back to Holland to record an album.
Madina stood behind Armin and put her hands on his shoulders – our new roadie.
She kissed each one of the band members, then she gave Lena a warm embrace, thanking her for coming to the gig. Armin said he would see his sister out the door to the taxi and come back in a moment.
The rest of the band was packing up. Lena was getting ready to leave. She went to the bathroom and then she looked around for Armin, asking the band members if they had seen him come back in. She went outside, thinking he was still with Madina, that they might have been talking before she got into the taxi. Eventually Lena found him a little distance down the street. There was a man holding him by the throat against the wall. It was Bogdanov. Lena recognized him. She shouted at him. He pointed his finger at her like a warning not to come any closer. She had the presence of mind to take a video of him walking away, but it was too dark to make out his face. She was more concerned about Armin. He was spitting blood.
It’s nothing, Armin said.
It’s not nothing, Armin.
I’m OK, seriously.
You’re covered in blood.
She pointed to the cluster of drops on the ground, then took some Kleenex out of her bag and wiped his face. He held an entire packet of tissues up to his nose.
She brought him to a restaurant nearby so he could get himself cleaned up and they could have a drink to recover. The waiter seemed a little uneasy at first. The sight of blood made him back off initially – it’s the colour of violence. Armin returned from the bathroom like a new man, concealing the bloodstains on his shirt with his arm held across his chest. They sat for a while at a table by the window and had a bottle of Beck’s Gold each.
It came from nowhere. As soon as they were back out on the street again, it seemed inevitable. That moment she used to describe, as a child, as ‘cut between’. Whenever she watched a movie on TV with her father as a ten-year-old girl and a couple began to kiss on screen, she would shout the words and bury her face in a pillow. Here she was, leaning into that movie scene without a thought.
As they moved on again, Armin insisted on pulling her case, that rolling sound of somebody returning late from a holiday in some warm place. They could not find a taxi, so they took the U-Bahn. The smell of the U-Bahn in Berlin, Lena said, was unlike any other underground network in the world. Some unique identity of its own, as distinct as woodsmoke or candle wax. Or was it the inside of a rubber ball? A combination of coffee and chewing gum and hair products and everything else worn by the people who travel on those yellow trains each day.
Back in Julia’s apartment, Lena dropped her bag at the door. She began removing Armin’s bloodstained shirt. As they stood in her bedroom, she asked about the shrapnel fragments inside his body and began tracing her finger over the scars where the metal pieces had entered when he was a child. They had stretched a little as he became older. She wanted to know if they bothered him, did it ever hurt? He said he couldn’t feel a thing, no more than he could feel his own liver.
I wonder what they look like, she said.
They’re like any normal body piercings, he said. I’ve made them safe. They can’t hurt anyone else now.
You were lucky with this one, she said. That’s close. A few millimetres further over and it might have gone straight through your heart.
Wait, he said.
Armin walked out to the kitchen. His bare feet could be heard slapping across the wooden floor. There was a brightness coming in from the street and no need to turn on the lights. He went to the fridge and took down a couple of magnets, leaving the notes they were holding up – theatre tickets, gallery flyers, laundry receipts – on the table. He came walking back through the wide living room and stood in front of Lena.
Here, he said. Why don’t you put them on?
Attach them, you mean?
See if they work.
She took the fridge magnets from his hand and began placing them one by one onto those scars that corresponded with the shrapnel inside his body. On his hip, she placed one in the shape of a hamburger. Another on his thigh with the name of a restaurant called Max and Moritz. The one close to his heart was a bottle of Russian vodka. They remained attached. He was magnetized. She threw her arms around him and they fell back on the bed laughing.