11

For the rest of the week, Thomas went in pursuit of Erich. He travelled on the U-Bahn and paced along the wide boulevards, dipping into bars and cafés, the places he knew Erich enjoyed to go. Across the city, which seemed so huge and indifferent to his concerns, he searched and searched. On two occasions, he telephoned Erich’s parents. He went to the clubs where Erich was a member and he visited Erich’s favourite bars. But there was no sign of his old friend. By time the weekend arrived, a new quandary was beginning to show itself.

The question of where he might take Käthe for a night out in Berlin had occupied him all day through. He had one idea, but dare he act on it?

He’d first been introduced to The Cabaret of the Nameless by a friend from work. It was a smoky studio not far from Potsdamer Platz. Far from being a showcase for rising Berlin talent, the purpose of The Cabaret of the Nameless was to encourage the most inept performers on stage where their routine might be ridiculed at the pleasure of the paying customer. As entertainment went, it was a vicious sport, where genuinely talented performers were barred from the stage, and the hopelessly incompetent cheered, jeered and glowered over.

Thoughts of The Cabaret of the Nameless turned his stomach. These ambiguous places reminded him of a certain toxin that ran through all of Berlin. More than just the faint smell of stale beer, here was a seasoning of real malice. And shame too. It celebrated mistrust and failure, since with every windfall there was the echo of a life ruined too.

Places like this were a reminder of the darker truth. Entertainment, spontaneity, theatre – yes, but there were other faces that represented Berlin just as well. Every so often a man with grotesque shrapnel-wounds would appear on the other side of the street, his face skewed pink by injury, or another veteran in a make-shift wheelchair; these images served to remind the rest of city how inglorious their foundations were. One’s heart would skip a beat and worried looks would flash between young friends, and what was once digested would become nauseous, and what was once true would become suspicious.

Thomas went to his window. Malik had gone out for the night and he was alone. He drew back the drapes and peered down to the street below. There he stayed for two or three minutes, a princely eyewitness to the antics of the busiest street in all of Berlin. He might have been watching from the shadowed hideaway of a private box in a theatre, his view over the street deliberately periphery. City noises rose up; car horns, tram bells, horses’ hooves, high-heels. Substances of manufacture and industry, stone and steel, colluding with the colourful enterprises of commerce and fashion. The heritage of the previous century had not turned antique but had grown and blossomed, had become symphonic. Berlin! In the evenings, the wide boulevards simmered with candelabras – it was warm enough to enjoy a leisurely walk at this time of the year. Lighted shop fronts waylaid strollers on their way to and from nightspots. Every week a new neon light was added to the skyline – ‘Kino’, ‘Parfüm’, ‘Schokolade’ – promising yet more distraction. After the chastity of winter, it seemed that pleasure-seeking had been rediscovered. The springtime had given the city a fine prospect, animated and gregarious, as if the great energies stored up over the previous season could finally be let loose again. Thomas felt the changes too. He usually loved this time of year, the sparkle in the water, light reflected in the glass.

He waited at the window for another minute or two, taking in the blather and rush of the street scene. ‘But evening comes,’ he might have said. ‘The witching hour, the uncertain light.’ Lines from the poet Baudelaire lodged in his imagination.

Retreating like the daylight, he drew his curtains and turned on the lights. He had already cleaned from top to bottom the day before, and following that had arranged his few belongings into something that resembled a civilised existence. Carefully he chose a number of books from his shelf and made a small pile of them on the table with the Baudelaire on top. From the same shelf he removed a row of decaying china mugs and in their place he propped up a framed reproduction of a painting by Renoir. It wasn’t much to his taste, but it did add a dash of much-needed colour to the walls. He found a box of white candles in the building’s storeroom and arranged three of them in candleholders around the room. The day before, he’d bought a fresh bar of soap, and earlier in the present day he fixed a broken floorboard with two well-positioned nails. Finally, he borrowed a Persian-style rug from a neighbour and laid it in the centre of the room. It was a musty rectangle of fabric, yet to his surprise when the evening light caught the turquoise and yellow patterns, the room lit up in a way it never had before.

He went to wash his hands, checked his fingernails, pulled down his shirt-sleeves, buttoned up the cuffs. He put on a brown tie, then after that a brown jacket. His shoes were already polished.

The noisy city rumbled through the walls. Had he been wrong? In his derision was he not in fact paying tribute to the city? Was not Berlin’s instability part of its charm? After all, it was really much too large and too intricate to be summed up in a single derogatory thought.

A wave of nerves made him feel erratic. He went to check himself in the mirror, listening out for a woman’s footstep as if no event, before or since, had carried more significance. He looked every bit his thirty-four years. His eyes were shallow and carried an anxious look, and his complexion was pinched red as if chilled by a delayed winter illness. How could she fail to fall in love with him? (He fooled himself!) His head was long, with a broad wave of dark brown hair tamed from left to right with wax – like a flag flying across his brow. He was clean-shaven. His skin was smooth and tight across his bony face and his sharp protrusive nose seemed especially elegant. In all, he felt very happy with his looks, and moreover he had the strange, almost illogical feeling that things would go the way he wished that evening. Whatever that meant!

He looked around his apartment once more, momentarily glancing towards the door, thinking he heard something. He was feeling clumsy and excited, giddy and powerful all at the same time. The wait was too excruciating to bear. He left his apartment and went down the staircase. As he did, his nostrils filled with the scents of the large bakery on the street below, as the smell of warm bread seeped through the floorboards, Kümmelbrot, sonnenblumkernbrot, the dark pumpernickel cooked in steam chambers for a whole day. ‘I hope she likes bread,’ he said to himself as he emerged onto the evening street, ready to fall in love.