Stein found the house in the winter. He phoned me sometime early in December and said, ‘Hello,’ then nothing. I didn’t say anything either. He said, ‘This is Stein.’ I said, ‘I know.’ He said, ‘So, how’s it going?’ I said, ‘Why are you calling?’ He said, ‘I’ve found it.’ Not understanding, I asked him, ‘What did you find?’ and he answered irritably, ‘The house! I found the house.’
The house. I remembered. Stein and his talk about the house, away from Berlin, a country house, a manor house, an estate house, linden trees in front, chestnuts at the back, sky above, a Brandenburg lake, at least two and a half acres of land, maps spread out, marked up, driving around for weeks in the area, searching. Then when he came back he looked peculiar, and the others said, ‘What’s he talking about? Nothing’s ever going to come of this.’ I forgot about it when I no longer saw Stein. Just as I forgot about him.
As always when Stein somehow surfaced and I couldn’t think of much to say, I automatically lit a cigarette. I said hesitantly, ‘Stein? Did you buy it?’ and he shouted, ‘Yes!’ and then he dropped the telephone. I had never heard him shout before. And then he was back on the line, and kept shouting, shouted, ‘You have to see it, it’s incredible, it’s great, it’s terrific!’ I didn’t ask why I, of all people, ought to see it. I kept listening, even though for a long while he said nothing more.
‘What are you doing right now?’ he finally asked. It sounded downright obscene, and his voice trembled slightly. ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I’m just sitting around reading the paper.’ ‘I’ll pick you up. In ten minutes,’ Stein said and hung up.
Five minutes later he was here. He didn’t take his thumb off the bell even after I had opened the door. I said, ‘Stein, this is getting on my nerves. Stop ringing.’ I wanted to say, Stein, it’s freezing outside, I don’t feel like driving out there with you, get lost. Stein stopped ringing the bell, tilted his head, wanted to say something, said nothing. I got dressed. We drove off. His taxi smelled of cigarettes. I rolled down the window and turned my face toward the cold air.
At that time my relationship with Stein, as the others referred to it, had already been over for two years. It hadn’t lasted long and consisted mainly of trips we took together in his taxi. I had met him in his taxi. He’d driven me to a party, and on the autobahn expressway he had pushed a Trans Am cassette into the tape player; when we arrived I told him the party must be somewhere else, and we drove on, and at some point he switched off the meter. He came home with me, put his plastic bags down in my hall and stayed for three weeks. Stein had never had an apartment of his own, but moved around the city with these plastic bags, sleeping now here and now there, and when he couldn’t find anything he slept in his taxi. He wasn’t what one thinks of as a homeless person. He was clean, well dressed, never seedy, and he had money because he was working. He just didn’t have his own apartment. Maybe he didn’t want one.
During the three weeks Stein lived at my place we drove around the city in his taxi. The first time we went down Frankfurter Allee to where it ends and back again, listening to Massive Attack and smoking. We drove up and down Frankfurter Allee for probably an hour, till Stein said, ‘Do you understand?’
My head was completely empty. I felt hollowed out and in a strange state of suspended animation. The street ahead of us was broad and wet from the rain, the wipers moved across the windshield, back and forth. The Stalin-era buildings on both sides of the street were huge and strange and beautiful. The city was no longer the city I knew, but was autarkical and deserted. Stein said, ‘Like a giant prehistoric animal.’ I said I understood, I had stopped thinking.
After that we nearly always spent our time driving around in his taxi. For every route Stein had a different kind of music, Ween for country roads, David Bowie for downtown, Bach for the avenues, Trans Am only for the autobahn. We almost always drove on the autobahn. When the first snow fell, Stein would get out of the car at every rest stop, run to a snow-covered field and perform slow and concentrated Tae Kwon Do movements until, laughing and furious, I shouted for him to come back I wanted to drive on, I was cold.
At some point I had had enough. I packed his three plastic bags and said it was time for him to find a new place to stay. He thanked me and left. He moved in with Christiane, who lived on the floor below me, then with Anna, then Henrietta, then Falk, then with the others. He screwed them all, that was unavoidable; he was pretty good-looking. Fassbinder would have been delighted with him. He was there with us, and yet also not there. He didn’t belong, but for one reason or another he stayed. He posed as a model in Falk’s studio, laid cable for Anna’s concerts, listened to Heinze’s readings at the Red Salon. He applauded when we applauded in the theatre, drank when we drank, did drugs when we did. He was there at our parties, and in the summer he came along when we drove out to the shabby, lopsided little country houses, which everyone had before long, and on whose rotting fences someone had scrawled ‘Berliner raus!’ And now and then one of us would take him to bed with us, and now and then one of us watched.
Not me. I didn’t repeat. Frankly – it wasn’t my kind of thing. Nor could I remember what it was like – that is, what sex with Stein had been like.
We sat around with him, there in the gardens and houses of people we had nothing to do with. Workers had lived there, small farmers, and amateur gardeners who hated us and whom we hated. We avoided the locals; just thinking about them ruined everything. It wasn’t right. We robbed them of this feeling they had of being among themselves, and we disfigured the villages, the fields, and even the sky; they picked that up from the way we strode around in our Easy Rider gait, flicked our burnt-down roaches into the flower beds in their front yards, the way we nudged each other excitedly. But we wanted to be there regardless. Inside the houses we tore down wallpaper, removed rubber and plastic; Stein did that. We sat in the garden, drank wine, gazed idiotically at Tree Clump Circled by Swarm of Gnats, and talked about Castorf and Heiner Müller and Wawerzinek’s latest flop at the Volksbühne Theatre. When Stein had finished he sat down with us. He had nothing to say. We did LSD, and so did Stein. Toddi staggered into the evening light, drivelling something about ‘blue’ every time he touched anything. Stein smiled with exaggerated cheerfulness and said nothing. He couldn’t get the knack of our sophisticated, neurasthenic, fucked-up look, even though he tried; mostly he watched us as though we were actors performing on a stage. Once, I was alone with him, I think it was in the garden of Heinze’s house in Lunow, the others having set off for the sunset on speed. Stein was putting away glasses, ashtrays, bottles, and chairs. Soon he was done and there was nothing left to remind us of the others. ‘Do you want some wine?’ he asked. I said, ‘Yes.’ We drank and smoked in silence, and he smiled every time our eyes met. And that was it.
I thought, ‘And that was it,’ as I now sat next to Stein in the taxi, on Frankfurter Allee heading toward Prenzlau in the afternoon traffic. The day was hazy and cold, with dust in the air, goggle-eyed, stupid, tired drivers next to us giving us the finger. I smoked a cigarette and wondered why I of all people had to be sitting next to Stein now. Why of all people he had called me – was it because I had been a beginning for him? Because he couldn’t reach Anna or Christiane or Toddi? Because none of them would have driven out there with him? And why was I driving out there with him? I couldn’t come close to an answer. I threw the cigarette end out of the window, ignoring the comments of the driver next to us; it was awfully cold in the taxi. ‘Is something wrong with the heater, Stein?’ Stein didn’t answer. It was the first time just the two of us sat in his car since back then. Indulgently I said, ‘Stein, what kind of house is it? What did you pay for it?’ Stein looked absent-mindedly into the rear-view mirror, drove through red lights, changed lanes incessantly, drawing on his cigarette until the glowing end reached his lips. He said, ‘Eighty thousand. I paid eighty thousand marks for it. It’s beautiful. I took one look and I knew – this is it.’ He had red spots on his face and kept pounding on the horn with the flat of his hand as he pulled ahead of a bus that had the right of way. I said, ‘Where did you get eighty thousand marks?’ He glanced at me briefly and answered, ‘You’re asking the wrong questions.’ I decided not to say any more.
We left Berlin. Stein drove off the autobahn and onto a country road. It began to snow. I felt tired, as I always do riding in cars. I stared at the windshield wipers, into the whirling snow coming toward us in concentric circles, and thought about driving with Stein two years ago, about the odd euphoria, about the indifference, about the strangeness. He was driving more calmly, glancing at me every now and then. I asked, ‘Doesn’t the tape deck work anymore?’ He smiled, said, ‘Oh sure. I didn’t know … whether you’d still like it.’ I rolled my eyes. ‘Of course I do,’ and pushed the Callas cassette – the one on which Stein had recorded a montage of a Donizetti aria repeated twenty times in succession – into the tape deck. He laughed. ‘You still remember.’ Callas sang, her voice rising and falling, and Stein sped up and slowed down. I had to laugh, too, and I briefly touched his cheek. His skin was unusually bristly. I wondered, ‘What’s usual?’ Stein said, ‘See.’ I saw that he immediately regretted it.
After Angermünde he turned off the road, stopping in front of a driveway that led to a low building from the sixties; he braked so hard that I hit my head against the windshield. Disappointed and alarmed I asked, ‘Is this it?’ This seemed to please Stein. With exaggerated movements he slithered over the icy concrete towards a woman in a house dress who had just stepped out of the front door. A pale, puny child clung to the house dress. I rolled down the car window, heard him call out with jovial warmth, ‘Mrs Andersson!’ – I had always hated the way he dealt with people of this type – saw how he offered her his hand and how she did not take it but dropped a huge bunch of keys into it. ‘There’s no water when it’s freezing,’ she said. ‘Supply line’s broken. But they’re going to turn the electricity on next week.’ The child hanging on to her house dress began to bawl. ‘Doesn’t matter,’ Stein said, slithering back to the car, stopping at my rolled-down window to rotate his pelvis elegantly and obscenely. He said, ‘Come on baby, let the good times roll.’ I said, ‘Stein, stop that.’ I felt myself blushing. The child let go of the woman’s dress and took an amazed step towards us.
‘They used to live in it,’ Stein said as he restarted the engine; he went in reverse back onto the road. The snow was falling more heavily now. I turned around and saw the woman and the child standing in the illuminated rectangle of the doorway until the house disappeared behind a curve. ‘They’re mad because they had to get out a year ago. It wasn’t me who kicked them out, it was the owner from Dortmund. I only bought it. As far as I’m concerned they could have stayed on.’ I said, uncomprehending, ‘But they’re disgusting,’ and Stein said, ‘What is disgusting?’ and threw the bunch of keys into my lap. I counted the keys, there were twenty-three, really small ones and very large ones, all old and with beautifully curved handles. I sang under my breath, ‘The key to the stable, the key to the attic, the one for the gate, for the barn, for the parlour, for the dairy, mailbox, cellar, garden gate,’ and suddenly – without really wanting to – I understood Stein, his enthusiasm, his anticipation, his excitement. I said, ‘It’s nice that we’re driving there together, Stein.’ He refused to look at me and said, ‘In any case, from the veranda you can see the sun going down behind the church tower. We’ll be there soon. After Angermünde comes Canitz, and Canitz is where the house is.’
Canitz was worse than Lunow, worse than Templin, worse than Schönwalde. Grey, cowering houses on both sides of the curving country road, many windows boarded up, no store, no bakery, no inn. The snow flurries were getting heavier. ‘A lot of snow here, Stein,’ I said, and he replied, ‘Of course,’ as though he had bought the snow along with the house. When the village church appeared on the left side of the street, really beautiful and red with a round bell tower, Stein started to make an odd humming sound, like a fly bumping against closed windows in the summer. He drove into a small cross street, brought the car to a stop, and at the same time took his hands off the steering wheel with an emphatic gesture, saying, ‘That’s it.’
I looked out of the car window and thought, ‘That’s it for another five minutes.’ The house looked as though it would cave in suddenly and soundlessly. I climbed out and shut the car door carefully as though the next jolt might be too much. Stein and I walked towards the house on tiptoe. The house was a ship. It sat at the edge of this Canitz village street like a proud vessel beached in times long gone by. It was a large, two-storey country manor house of red brick; its skeletonized gable roof had two wooden horses’ heads, one at each end. Most of the windows had lost their glass panes, the crooked veranda was held together only by dense ivy, and cracks as wide as your thumb ran through the brickwork. The house was beautiful. It was the house. And it was a ruin.
The gate from which Stein was trying to remove a sign saying ‘For Sale’ collapsed with a plaintive sound. We climbed over it, then I stood still, startled by the expression on Stein’s face. I saw him disappear behind the ivy on the veranda. Soon afterwards a window frame fell off the house, Stein’s excited face appeared amidst the jagged glass of one pane, lit up by the light from a kerosene lamp.
‘Stein!’ I shouted. ‘Get out of there! It’s going to collapse!’
‘Come in!’ he yelled back. ‘It’s my housel’
I briefly asked myself why that should be reassuring, then stumbled over garbage bags and trash onto the veranda. Its boards groaned, and the ivy immediately swallowed up all the light; in disgust I pushed the vines aside, then Stein’s ice-cold hand pulled me into the hall. I grabbed it. I grabbed for his hand; suddenly I didn’t want to lose his touch again, and especially not the glow of his wretched little kerosene lamp. Stein was humming. I followed him.
He pushed all the shutters out into the garden. We could see the last of the daylight through the red splinters of glass in the doors. The bunch of keys that felt heavy in my jacket pocket was totally unnecessary, as all the doors either stood open or were no longer there. Stein held up the lamp, pointed, described, stood breathless before me, wanted to say something, said nothing, pulled me along. He stroked the banisters and door handles, tapped on walls, picked at the wallpaper and marvelled at the dusty plaster underneath. He said, ‘You see?’ and, ‘Feel this,’ and, ‘How do you like this?’ I didn’t have to answer; he was talking to himself. He knelt on the kitchen floor and wiped the filth off the tiles, muttering; I clung to him all this time, yet I no longer existed. On the walls, somebody had scrawled I shot the moon tonight. I was here, Mattis. No risk, no fun. I said, ‘I shot the moon tonight,’ Stein turned towards me, suddenly confused, and said, ‘What?’ I said, ‘Nothing.’ He grabbed my arm and pushed me along in front of him, kicking the back door out into the garden and dragging me down a few stairs. ‘Here.’
I said, ‘What do you mean – here?’
‘Well, everything!’ said Stein. I had never seen him so unrestrained and brash. ‘A Brandenburg lake, chestnut trees in the yard, one and a half acres of land, you can plant your goddamn grass here, and mushrooms and hemp and shit. Plenty of room, you understand? Plenty of room. I’ll build you a salon here, and a billiard room, and a smoking room, and separate rooms for everyone and a big table in back of the house for your shitty meals and crap, and then you can get up and walk over to the Oder and snort coke there till your skull splits.’ He twisted my head roughly in the direction of the garden and the land beyond. It was too dark, and I could scarcely make out anything, I began to shiver.
I said, ‘Stein. Please. Stop.’
He stopped. He was silent. We looked at each other, we were breathing hard and almost in the same rhythm. Slowly he put his hand on my face. I flinched, and he said, ‘All right. All right, all right. Okay.’
I stood still. I didn’t understand any of this, though remotely I did understand something but it was still much too far away. I was exhausted and weary. I thought of the others and felt a passing anger that they had left me here alone, that no one else was here to protect me from Stein, not Christiane, nor Anna, nor Heinze. Stein shuffled his feet and said, ‘I’m sorry.’
I said, ‘It doesn’t matter. Never mind.’
He took my hand, his hand was warm now and soft, he said, ‘So then, the sun behind the church tower.’
On the veranda he wiped the snow off the stair treads and invited me to sit down. I did. I felt incredibly cold. I took the lit cigarette he held out to me. I smoked, and stared at the church tower behind which the sun had already set. I had the guilty feeling that I should be saying something forward-looking, something optimistic. I felt confused. I said, ‘In the summer, I’d take the ivy off the veranda. Otherwise we can’t see anything if we want to sit here and drink wine.’
Stein said, ‘Will do.’
I was sure he hadn’t been listening at all. Sitting next to me he seemed tired. He looked out at the cold, empty, snowy street; I thought of summer, of that hour in Heinze’s garden in Lunow, I wished that Stein would look at me once more the way he had looked at me then, and I hated myself for thinking it. I said, ‘Stein, would you please tell me something? Could you please explain something to me?’
Stein flicked his cigarette into the snow and looked at me. ‘What should I tell you? This, here, is one possibility, one of many. You can go with it, or you can forget it. I can go with it, or I can forget it and go somewhere else. We could do it together, or pretend that we never knew each other. It doesn’t matter. I only wanted to show it to you, that’s all.’
I said, ‘You paid eighty thousand marks to show me one possibility, one of many? Did I understand that correctly? Stein? What’s the point?’
Stein didn’t react. He leaned forward and looked hard at the street, I followed his gaze; it was dim on the street, but the last light reflected by the snow made it hard to see. Someone was standing on the other side of the street. I squinted and sat up. The figure was about fifteen feet away, then it turned and walked into the shadows between two houses. A garden gate banged, I was convinced I had recognized the child from Angermünde, the pale, dumb child that had clung to the woman’s house dress.
Stein got up and said, ‘Let’s go.’
I said, ‘Stein – the child. From Angermünde. Why is it standing around here on the street, watching us?’
I knew he wouldn’t answer. He held the car door open for me, I stood in front of him, waiting for something, for a touch, a gesture. I thought, ‘But you always wanted to be with us.’
Stein said coolly, ‘Thanks for coming with me.’
I got into the car.
I no longer remember what kind of music we listened to on the way back. In the weeks that followed I saw Stein only rarely. The lakes froze over, we bought ice skates, and at night we roamed through the woods and out over the ice carrying torches. We listened to Paolo Conte on Heinze’s boombox, swallowed ecstasy, and read aloud the best parts from Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho. Falk kissed Anna, and Anna kissed me, and I kissed Christiane. Sometimes Stein was there too. He kissed Henrietta, and whenever he did I looked away. We avoided each other. He hadn’t told anybody that he had finally bought the house, nor did he tell them that he had driven out there with me. I didn’t either. I didn’t think about the house, but sometimes, when we threw our ice skates and torches into the trunk of his cab before driving back to the city I saw it contained roofing paper, wallpaper and paint.
In February Toddi fell through the ice on Lake Griebnitz. Heinze was skating wildly across the ice, holding up his torch and shouting, ‘This is such fun, what a great time we’re having, I can’t believe it!’ He was totally drunk, and Toddi was skating along behind him. We called out, ‘Say, Blue, Toddi! Say it!’ and then there was a crack, and Toddi disappeared.
We stood still. Heinze, his mouth open, skated a terrific loop, the ice hummed, wax dripped hissing from our torches. Falk sped off on his skates, tripping, Anna tore off her scarf, Christiane stupidly covered her face with her hands and screamed weakly. Falk crept along on his belly, Heinze was out of sight. Falk yelled for Toddi, and Toddi yelled back. Anna threw out her scarf, Henrietta clung to Falk’s feet. I came to a stop. Stein also stopped. I took the lighted cigarette he held out to me. He said, ‘Blue,’ I said, ‘Cold,’ and then we began to laugh. We laughed, doubling over, and lay down on the ice, and the tears ran down our cheeks; we laughed and couldn’t stop, not even when they brought Toddi back, wet and shivering, and Henrietta said, ‘Are you crazy or something?’
In March Stein disappeared. He didn’t turn up for Heinze’s thirtieth birthday, or for Christiane’s premiere or Anna’s concert either. He was gone, and when Henrietta, foolishly discreet, asked where he was, they shrugged their shoulders. I didn’t shrug, but I didn’t say anything. A week later his first postcard arrived. It was a photo of the village church in Canitz, and on the back it said:
The roof is waterproof. The child is blowing its nose, doesn’t speak, is always here. The sun is dependable, I smoke when it’s setting. I’ve planted something, you can eat it. I’ll cut the ivy when you come. Remember, you still have the keys.
After that postcards came regularly. I waited for them; when they failed to come, I was disappointed. They always had photos of the church and always four or five sentences like little riddles, sometimes nice, sometimes incomprehensible. Stein often wrote – ‘when you come’. He didn’t write ‘Come’. I decided to wait for ‘Come’ and then I would go there. In May there was no card, but instead a letter. I looked at Stein’s clumsy, large handwriting on the envelope, crawled back into bed with Falk, and tore open the envelope. Falk was still asleep and snoring. Inside there was a newspaper clipping from the Angermünder Anzeiger. Stein had scribbled the date on the back. I pushed Falk’s sleep-warmed body aside, unfolded the article, and read:
REGIONAL NEWS
Friday night the former manor house in Canitz burned down to its foundation. The owner, a Berliner who bought the eighteenth-century house six months ago and restored it, has been reported missing since the fire. The cause of the fire has not yet been established. So far the police are not ruling out arson.
I read it three times. Falk moved. I stared at the article, then at Stein’s handwriting on the envelope, then back again. The postmark said Stralsund. Falk woke up and looked at me apathetically for a moment, then reached for my wrist and, with the nasty cunning of a fool, asked: ‘What’s that?’
I drew my hand away, climbed out of bed, and said, ‘Nothing.’
I went to the kitchen and for ten minutes stood around stupidly in front of the stove. The clock above the stove ticked. I ran into the back room, pulled out the desk drawer and added the envelope to the other cards and the bunch of keys. I thought, ‘Later.’