The Darkness of Wallis Simpson (7 page)

McCreedy can't eat the food. It's a good steak, large and juicy. But he can't get it down.

It's partly the drink he's had, but it's something else as well. It's what his life looks like across this table. Hatred. Indifference. Love. All three staring him in the eye, waiting for him to respond, to act, to assert himself, to
be.
And he can't. Not any more. For a long time, he could and did. He fought them and held them close. He wept and screamed and tried to think of all the appropriate words of apology and affection. Right up to yesterday. But that's it, over now. They can't see it yet but he knows it's happened: they've used him up. McCreedy's used up.

He sits in silence while they eat and talk. Katy stares at him under her hat, stuffing chips, one by one. Hilda and Michael blather about Arsenal. Michael snatches Katy's steak and gobbles it down. Hilda sucks the lemon from her gin glass. All McCreedy is doing is waiting for them to finish.

And when they have, he begins gathering up the plates. Dinner plates, knives and forks, side plates, veg dishes. One by one, he piles them into a stack in front of him. It's a neat stack, like Hilda makes at home, with his own uneaten piece of meat transferred to the top plate, and then he sits back and stares at it.

‘McCreedy,' says Hilda. ‘This is a restaurant.'

‘I know it's a restaurant,' he says.

Michael is falling around, giggling, scarlet. ‘Dad,' he splutters, ‘wha' the fuck are you doing?'

‘What does it look like?'

‘Pass the plates around again,' snarls Hilda. ‘You'll make us a laughing stock.'

‘No,' he says. ‘There's nothing on them. Except on mine. Why d'you want them?'

‘Jesus Christ!' says Hilda. ‘Give us back the plates before that woman comes.'

‘No,' he says again. Then he picks up his flab of steak in his fingers and lets it dangle above the stack. He takes a breath.

‘See this?' he says. ‘This is John McCreedy, aged forty-six today. See it? Chewed and left. Stranded. And this is all your stuff, underneath. Cold and hard and messed up. And I'm telling anyone who wants to listen that I want to get down from here, but I don't for the life of me know how.'

They all three stare at him. They don't know what on earth to make of it, except it frightens them, it's so dramatic and Irish and odd. Hilda opens her mouth to say it must be the Guinness talking, but no words come out. She begins scrabbling in her bag for a new pack of cigarettes. Michael swears under his breath and gets up and slouches off to the toilet. Katy puts her thumb in her mouth. She watches her father drop the meat and she knows what's going to happen next: McCreedy is going to sweep the stack on to the floor, where it will break into a thousand pieces.

But then Spiro is there at the table. He's smiling. He smells of his charcoal fire and his face is pink and gleaming. And he laughs good-naturedly at the stack and slaps McCreedy's thin shoulder blades, then snaps his fingers for a waitress to take the pile of plates and dishes away.

He waits until it's safely gone, and then he says: ‘OK. Serious business now. Some champagne on the house for my old friend, John McCreedy. And a beautiful dessert for the princess in the hat.'

The Beauty of the Dawn Shift

When the Berlin Wall came down in November 1989, Hector S. was deprived of his job. He had been one of the armed Border Guards on the Eastern side, responsible for ensuring that no East German citizen crossed the wall and escaped to the West. In the course of seven years of duty, Hector S. had shot and killed five people. This is his story
. . .
.

When Hector S. set out on his journey to Russia, he was wearing his uniform.

It was his winter uniform, made of woollen serge, because this was December in East Berlin. While packing his knapsack, Hector S. had told himself that he would have to travel in his uniform, that he had no choice; he didn't possess any other really warm clothes and where he was going, it would be as cold as death.

He was a man with a narrow frame, not tall, with pale anxious eyes. Women thought him beautiful, but found him frigid. He was twenty-eight and he'd only slept with one girl. This one girl was his sister, Ute.

Ute kept a pet swan in a lean-to hutch on the apartment estate. She'd named it Karl and fed it on sunflower seeds. Morning and evening, she'd let it out to peck the grass and it allowed her to stroke its neck. There were no ponds or rivers in Prenzlauer Berg, the suburb of East Berlin where they lived, and when Hector informed Ute that he was leaving for Russia, she asked him to take her and Karl with him. But he told her firmly that this was impossible, that he had to go alone with almost nothing, just his bicycle and a bag of tinned food and his rifle. He told her he couldn't travel that vast distance – right across Poland, where he knew that hatred of all Germans, West or East, still endured – in the company of a swan.

Ute took this badly. She clutched at Hector's arm. She was already imagining the beautiful Russian lake where Karl would remember the lost art of swimming.

‘Hecti,' she said, ‘don't leave us behind!'

Hector S. disliked emotional scenes. When their mother, Elvira, had died in 1980 Hector had basked in the wonderful quiet that descended suddenly upon the apartment. Now, he told Ute that it was different for her, that she would be able to fit into the new Germany and that she had nothing to be afraid of. She began to cry in exactly the same way Elvira used to cry, grabbing two hunks of her hair and saying she hated being alive. Hector walked away from her. One part of him wanted to say: ‘When I get there, Ute, I promise I will send for you' but another part of him wanted to remain as silent as the tomb, and on this occasion it was the tomb that prevailed.

Hector's father, Erich, on the other hand, didn't try to persuade his son to take him with him; neither did he try to persuade him not to leave. All he said was: ‘A frog in a well says that the sky is no bigger than the mouth of the well, but now you have to become something else, Hector, and see the whole fucking sky. In the old imperial fairy tales, frogs turn into princes, eh?' And he slapped his knee.

Hector replied that he had no intention whatsoever of turning into a prince.

‘So,' said Erich, ‘what are going to become?'

‘I don't know,' said Hector. ‘Don't ask me yet.'

‘All right,' said Erich, ‘but remember, when you walk away from one place, you are inevitably walking towards another.'

‘I know that,' said Hector. ‘That's why I'm going east.'

What should Hector take with him? This question troubled him more than many others. His knapsack wasn't large. It was the bag in which he'd carried his lunch or his supper, depending on which shift of Guard Duty he'd been working. He would make more room in it by attaching his water bottle to the outside of it. Then there were the two saddlebags on his bicycle, but that was all.

He decided, eventually, to line the saddlebags with underwear and socks. Then he put in jars of dill pickles and some plastic cutlery. He tucked these in with maps of Poland and the Brandenburg Marshes. He added a compass made in Dresden and five boxes of matches. The knapsack he filled almost entirely with tinned meat, wrapped in a woollen sweater. There was room for a torch and two spare batteries, a notebook and a pen. He put in a solitary lemon, a precious possession he'd been lucky enough to find in his local grocery store, and he fondled this beautiful lemon for a long time, trying to imagine the tree on which such a perfect thing had grown. He packed no books, only a small photograph album, filled with pictures of Ute, including one of her naked, developed privately by a colleague of Hector's who had dreams of becoming a professional photographer. In the naked photograph, Ute was leaning on a stool with her back to the camera and her bottom was very pale in the bleached light of early morning. Her legs looked skinny and her soft blonde hair parted at the back and hung forward, revealing her narrow white shoulders.

Hector didn't tell Ute or Erich when he was going to leave, because he thought farewells were futile and also because he didn't really know. He had to set off before the lemon went rotten, that was all. He knew he would recognise the moment when it came – and he did. It was the morning of 9 December 1989, one month exactly after the wall had started to come down. He was alone in the apartment. He had exchanged all the money he possessed for D-Marks at the humiliating rate of 10–1. It amounted to DM143 and he laid it out on the kitchen table and looked at the blue and pink notes, then gathered them up, stuffed them into his wallet and put on his greatcoat and his hat. It was a fine morning, cold and clear. He walked to the window and looked out at the blocks of flats and the scuffed grass in between them where a few children played. He remembered being told: ‘At the time of Tsar Nicolas II in Russia, the children of the poor had no toys of any kind. They invented games with knuckle bones.' And now, thought Hector, the parents of these children will save on food and light to buy their kids sophisticated toys from the West. He felt glad he had no children, nor would ever have any because his sperm count was too low. At least he wouldn't have to choose between absolute needs and infantile ones.

He was a man who had always known what was important in life and what was not. His chosen profession had been a difficult one, which many people would have found impossible, but Hector had never faltered in his dedication to it. In fact, he had enjoyed it and he knew that he'd mourn the loss of it. Since childhood, he'd admired the stern ways of his country, and he hoped to find these still prevailing in Russia.

He turned away from the window and picked up his knapsack. He looked at the room he was in, the room where the family ate and played cards and watched TV, and wondered if, when he arrived at his destination, he would think about this room and feel homesick for the black plastic chairs and the painted sideboard and the wall-mounted electric fire. He knew that memory was as uncertain in its behaviour as the sea; it could wash you ashore on any old forgotten beach; it could try to drown you in remorse. But he decided, no, it wouldn't be the apartment he would miss, only certain moments in it, certain moments at dawn, just after Erich left for work at the cement works on the Landwehr Kanal, when he walked from his own room into Ute's and got into her bed.

It's best to leave now, Hector told himself. Don't dwell on Ute.

So he walked out of the apartment without looking at anything more and went down the six flights of concrete stairs to the lobby where the post boxes had been installed. These he stared at. Neighbours passed him and said ‘Good morning, Hector', and still he contemplated the metal post boxes, imagining news of his future life arriving one day inside them.

He took small roads out of Prenzlauer Berg and the streets were mainly deserted. These days, East Berliners trekked into the West to see what their few D-Marks would buy. He saw what they came back with: coloured shoelaces and luminous condoms. A lot of what they chose seemed to be a bright, fearful pink or a harsh lime green, and these objects reminded Hector of the day when he'd been stopped by a group of ‘Wessies', dressed in pink and green shell suits, who had asked him the way to Alexanderplatz.

‘What have you come to see?' he'd asked them, more out of habit than out of interest, and they had laughed and swigged expensive beer and said: ‘Oh, we've come to the East German closing-down sale! Many bargains. Everything must go.' And it had been at this moment and not at any other that Hector S. had decided to leave his country and leave Ute and cycle to Russia. He said to himself, I'm not going only because I'm afraid – afraid of what punishments may be meted out to men like me, who have followed orders and done their duty – I'm also going because these people make me feel sick.

He joined the Leninallee and pedalled towards Lichtenberg. His back ached with the heaviness of the knapsack and the awkwardness of his rifle. Elvira was buried in the Socialists' Cemetery at Lichtenberg and it now occurred to Hector to make a small detour to look one last time at his mother's grave. He thought that he would confide to her his passion for Ute and in this way try to leave it behind. In her life, Elvira had relished confidences, licking her sensual lips . . . ‘Oh, so delicious, Hecti! Tell me more!'

When he reached the cemetery, he couldn't remember where Elvira's grave was. There were so many hundreds of people buried here and he hadn't visited the place in five years. He knew he could spend hours looking for Elvira and then it would get dark and he'd still only be on the outskirts of Berlin. This would be a stupid way to waste the first day of his long journey.

Then he found her:
Elvira S. 1931
–
1980
. A small polished stone. Hector parked his bicycle and took off his knapsack and rifle, flexing his shoulders. He removed his hat and stood, measuring the stone in his mind. The stone looked smaller than her. Did the state stone cutters cheat on everyone by a few centimetres? And if they did, was this a thing of importance? Probably not. There were so many hundreds of millions of dead under the earth, it was amazing there was any earth left on which to grow cabbages or build kindergarten schools.

Before he could form any thoughts or words on the subject of Ute, Hector was disturbed by movement quite near him. He turned and looked, and saw that a young man, poorly dressed, was going from grave to grave with a trowel, brazenly digging up the bulbs planted on them and putting them into a plastic carrier bag. The youth didn't seem to have noticed Hector – a figure of authority in a winter uniform – or else
had
noticed him and was now deliberately taunting him with his distasteful little crime.