The Boy Who Followed Ripley (11 page)

“Yesterday rain—today like this.”

It was overcast, but not raining. They sped along the Kurfürstendamm, and halted for a red light at Lehninplatz.

“Look how new all these shops are,” Tom said to Frank. “I’m really not mad about the Ku’damm.” He remembered his first trip to Berlin, alone, when he had walked up and down the long straight Kurfürstendamm, vainly trying to sense an atmosphere which one couldn’t get from pretty shopwindows, chrome and glass pavement booths that displayed porcelain and wristwatches and handbags. Kreuzberg, the slummy old section of Berlin, now so full of Turkish workers, had more personality.

The driver made a left turn into Albrecht-Achillesstrasse, past a corner pizzeria which Tom remembered, then past a supermarket, now closed, on the right. The Hotel Franke stood on the left around a little curve in the street. Tom paid the driver with some of his leftover marks, of which he had nearly six hundred.

They filled out little white cards that the receptionist gave them, and both consulted their passports for the correct numbers. Their rooms were on the same floor, but not adjacent. Tom had not wanted to go to the more elegant Hotel Palace near the Gedächtniskirche, because he had stayed there once before, and thought that for some reason they might remember him, and notice that he was with a teenaged boy not related to him. Just what anybody would make of that, even also at the Hotel Franke, Tom didn’t care, but he thought a modest hotel like the Franke less apt to recognize Frank Pierson.

Tom hung up a pair of trousers, pulled the bedcover back, and tossed his pajamas onto the white, button-sheeted, feather-filled top item, which served both as blanket and sheet, a German institution that Tom knew of yore. From his window he had a thoroughly dull view of a grayish court, of another six-story cement building set at an angle, and a couple of distant treetops. Tom felt inexplicably happy suddenly, felt a sense of freedom, maybe illusory. He stuck his passport case with his French francs in it at the bottom of his suitcase, closed the suitcase lid, and went out and locked his door. He had told Frank he would pick him up in five minutes. Tom knocked on Frank’s door.

“Tom?— Come in.”

“Ben!” said Tom, smiling. “How are things?”

“Look at this crazy
bed
!”

They both suddenly laughed out loud. Frank had also pulled the bedcover back and laid his pajamas on the buttoned feather blanket.

“Let’s go out and take a walk. Where’re those two passports?” Tom made sure that the boy’s new passport was out of sight, found Johnny’s passport in the suitcase, and put it in an envelope from the writing table drawer. This he stuck at the bottom of the boy’s suitcase. “You don’t want to whip out the wrong one.” Tom wished they had burned Johnny’s passport at Belle Ombre, since Johnny must have had to acquire a new one anyway.

They went out and could have taken the stairs, but Frank wanted to see the elevator again. He looked as happy as Tom felt. Why, Tom wondered.

“Press E. That’s the Erdgeschoss.”

They left their keys, went out, and turned right toward the Kurfürstendamm. Frank stared at everything, even at a dachshund being aired. Tom proposed a beer at the corner pizzeria. Here they bought chits and queued up at a counter for beer only, then carried their big mugs to the only partly free table, where two girls were eating pizzas. With a nod, they gave permission for Tom and the boy to sit down.

“Tomorrow we’ll go to Charlottenburg,” Tom said. “Museums there and a beautiful park too. Then there’s the Tiergarten.” And there was tonight. Lots of places to go to in Berlin at night. Tom looked at the boy’s cheek and saw that the mole was covered. “Keep up the good work,” Tom said, pointing to his own cheek.

By midnight or a little after, they were at Romy Haag’s, and Frank was a bit drunk on three or four more beers. Frank had won a toy bear at a throwing-game stall outside a beerhall, and Tom was now carrying the little brown bear, the symbol of Berlin. Tom had been to Romy Haag’s on his last visit to Berlin. It was a bar-disco, slightly touristy, and with a late show of transvestites.

“Why don’t you dance?” Tom said to Frank. “Ask one of these to dance.” Tom meant the two girls seated on stools at the bar with their drinks in front of them, but with their eyes on the dance floor over which a gray sphere kept turning. Spotted lights, shadows and white, played slowly over the walls. The rotating gray object, no bigger than a beachball and quite ugly
per se
, looked like a relic of the Thirties, evocative of pre-Hitler Berlin, and strangely fascinating to the eye.

Frank squirmed as if he hadn’t the courage to approach the girls. He and Tom were standing at the bar.

“Not prostitutes,” Tom added over the noise of the music.

Frank went off to the toilet near the door. When the boy came back, he walked past Tom and went on to the dance floor where Tom for a few minutes lost sight of him, and then saw him dancing with a blonde girl under the revolving sphere, along with a dozen other couples and maybe a few singles. Tom smiled. Frank was jumping up and down, having fun. The music was nonstop, but Frank came back after a couple of minutes, triumphant.

“I thought you’d think I was a coward if I didn’t ask a girl to dance!” Frank said.

“Nice girls?”

“Oh, very! Pretty! Except that she was chewing gum. I said ‘
Guten Abend
’ and I even said ‘
Ich liebe dich
’ but I only know that from songs. I think she thought I was pissed. She laughed, anyway!”

He certainly was pissed, and Tom steadied him by one arm so he could slide a leg over a stool. “Don’t drink the rest of that beer, if you don’t want it.”

A roll of drums heralded the floorshow. Three sturdy men pranced out in floor-length, ruffled dresses of pink, yellow, and white, in broad-brimmed flowered hats, and with huge plastic breasts entirely exposed and sporting red nipples. Enthusiastic applause! They sang something from
Madame Butterfly
, and then came several skits of which Tom understood barely half, but which the spectators seemed to appreciate.

“They
are
funny to look at!” Frank roared into Tom’s ear.

The muscular trio wound up with “
Das ist die Berliner Luft
,” flouncing their skirts and kicking high, as posies from the audience showered upon them.

Frank clapped and shouted “Bravo!—
Bravi!
” and nearly fell off his stool.

A few minutes later, Tom was walking arm in arm with the boy—mainly to keep Frank upright—along a darkish pavement, which however at half past two in the morning still had several pedestrians.

“What’s
that
?” Frank asked, seeing a pair in strange costume approaching.

They seemed to be a man and woman, the man in harlequin tights and a hat with pointed brim fore and aft, while the woman resembled a walking playing card, and on closer inspection Tom saw that she was the ace of clubs. “Probably just come from a party,” Tom said, “or going to one.” Tom had noticed before in Berlin that people liked to change their clothing from one extreme to another, even disguise themselves. “It’s a who-am-I game,” Tom said. “The whole city’s like this.” Tom could have gone on. The city of Berlin was bizarre enough, artificial enough—at least in its political status—and so maybe its citizens attempted to outdo it sometimes in their dress and behavior. It was also a way for Berliners to say, “
We exist!
” But Tom was in no mood to get his thoughts together. He said only, “To think it’s surrounded by these boring
Russians
with no sense of humor at all!”

“Hey, Tom, can we take a look at East Berlin? I’d love to see that!”

Tom clutched the little Berlin bear, and tried to think of any peril there for Frank, and couldn’t. “Sure. They’re more interested in taking a few DM off their visitors than in knowing who the visitors are.— There’s a taxi! Let’s get it!”

10

T
om telephoned Frank from his room the next morning at nine. How was Ben feeling?

“All right, thank you. I woke up just two minutes ago.”

“I’ll order breakfast for us in my room, so come over. Four fourteen. And lock your door when you go out.”

Tom had checked around 3 a.m., when they had returned to the hotel, to see if his passports were still in his suitcase, and they had been.

Over breakfast, Tom suggested Charlottenburg, followed by East Berlin, and then the West Berlin zoo, if they had energy left. He gave the boy an item from the London
Sunday Times
by Frank Giles, which Tom had cut out and carefully kept, because it told a lot about Berlin in few words. “Is Berlin Split Forever?” was its title. Frank read it as he ate toast and marmalade, and Tom said it didn’t matter if he got butter on the cutting, because he had had it so long.

“Only fifty miles from the Polish border!” said Frank in a tone of wonder. “And—ninety-three thousand Soviet troops within twenty miles of—the suburbs of Berlin.” Then Frank looked at Tom and said, “Why’re they so worried about Berlin? All this Wall stuff.”

Tom was enjoying his coffee and did not want to embark upon a lecture. Maybe the reality would sink into Frank today. “The Wall goes all the way up and down Germany, not just Berlin. The Berlin Wall is talked about the most because it surrounds West Berlin, but the Wall goes down to Poland and Romania too. You’ll see it—today. And maybe tomorrow we’ll take a taxi out to the Glienicker-Brücke, where they exchange prisoners sometimes, West and East. I mean spies, really. They even divide the river there, you can see a wire above the surface dividing the river down the middle.” At least some of it was sinking in. Tom thought, because the boy perused the article thoroughly. It explained the triple military occupation or control of Berlin by English, French, and American troops, which helped to explain (but not really to Tom, who always felt that something was just out of his grasp in regard to Berlin) why the German airline Lufthansa could not land at Berlin-Tegel airport. Berlin was artificial, something special, not even a part of West Germany, and perhaps it didn’t even wish to be, since Berliners had always taken a pride in being Berliners.

“I’ll get dressed and knock on your door in about ten minutes,” Tom said, standing up. “Bring your passport, Ben. That’s for the Wall.” The boy was dressed, but Tom was still in pajamas.

They caught an old-fashioned streetcar from the Kurfürstendamm to Charlottenburg, and spent more than an hour in the museums of archaeology and paintings. Frank lingered over the models of activities of long ago in the Berlin area, copper mining by men in animal-pelt garments three thousand years before Christ. As at Beaubourg, Tom found himself watching out for anyone who might show an interest in Frank, but Tom saw only parents with chattering and curious children peering into cases. Berlin, so far, presented a mild and harmless scene.

Then another streetcar back to the Charlottenburg S-Bahn stop for the ride to the Friedrichstrasse stop and the Wall. Tom had his map. They were aboveground all the way, though this was now an underground or subway type of train, and Frank stared out the window at the passing apartment houses, mostly rather old and drab, which meant that they had not been bombed. Then the Wall, gray and ten feet high as promised, topped with barbed wire, sprayed with covering paint in spots by East German soldiers, Tom remembered, before President Carter’s visit a couple of months ago, so that West German television could not send the anti-Soviet slogans painted on the Wall into the homes of East Berliners and of many East Germans who could get West German television programs on their sets. Tom and Frank waited in a room with some fifty other tourists and West Berliners, many laden with shopping bags, baskets of fruit, tinned hams, and what looked like boxes from clothing stores. These were mostly elderly people, probably visiting for the umpteenth time their siblings and cousins cut off by the Wall since 1961. Tom and Frank’s seven-digit numbers were finally called out by a girl behind a grilled window, which meant that they could file through to another room with a long table manned by East German soldiers in gray-green uniforms. A girl returned their passports, and a few yards on they had to buy from a soldier six DM fifty pfennigs’ worth of East German money, which came to more in East German marks. Tom had an aversion to touching it, and stuck it in an empty back pocket.

Now they were “free.” Tom smiled at the thought as they began walking along the Friedrichstrasse, which continued here, beyond the Wall. Tom pointed out the still uncleaned palaces of the Prussian royal family. Why the hell didn’t they clean them, Tom wondered, or plant some hedge boxes around them, if they wanted to make a good impression on the rest of the world?

Frank looked all around him, speechless for several minutes.

“Unter den Linden,” Tom said, not in a merry tone. A sense of self-preservation made him try, however, for something cheering, so he took Frank by the arm and swung him into a street on the right. “Let’s go this way.”

They were back on a street—yes, Friedrichstrasse again now—where long stand-up counters projected from snack cafés halfway across the pavement, patrons stood spooning soup, eating sandwiches, drinking beer. Some of them looked like construction workers in plaster-dusty overalls, some were women and girls who might have been office workers.

“I might buy a ballpoint pen,” said Frank. “It’d be fun to buy
something
here.”

They approached a stationer’s shop which had an empty newsstand in front, only to be greeted by a sign on the front door saying:
CLOSED BECAUSE I FEEL LIKE CLOSING
. Tom laughed, translating it for Frank.

“Bound to be another shop along here,” said Tom as they walked on.

There was another, but it was also closed, and another handwritten sign said:
CLOSED BECAUSE OF HANGOVER
. Frank thought this hilarious.

“Maybe they do have a sense of humor, but otherwise it’s just like what I read about it, sort of—drab, maybe.”

Tom also felt a creeping depression that he remembered from his first trip to East Berlin. The people’s clothes looked limp. This was Tom’s second visit, and he would not have come if the boy hadn’t wanted to see it. “Let’s have some lunch, cheer ourselves up,” Tom said, gesturing toward a restaurant.

This was a big, modest, efficient-looking restaurant, and some of the long tables bore white tablecloths. If they hadn’t enough money on them, Tom thought, the cashier would be delighted to take DM. They sat down, and Frank studied the clientèle thoughtfully—a man in a dark suit with spectacles, eating by himself, and two plumpish girls chattering away over their coffee at a nearby table—as if he watched animals of a new species in a zoo. Tom was amused. These were “Russians” to Frank, he supposed, tinged with Communism.

“They’re not all Communists, really,” Tom said. “They’re Germans.”

“I know. But it’s just the idea that they can’t go and live in West Germany if they want to—can they?”

“That is correct,” Tom said, “they can’t.”

Their food was arriving, and Tom waited until the blonde waitress, who had a friendly smile, had departed. “But the Russians say they built the Wall to keep the capitalists
out
. That’s their pitch, anyway.”

They went up to the top of the Alexanderplatz tower, pride of East Berlin, to take coffee and admire the view. Then both were seized by a desire to leave.

West Berlin, surrounded as it was, felt like the wide open spaces once they had quit the district of the Wall and were rattling along on the elevated train toward the Tiergarten. They had changed a few more ten-DM notes, and Frank was now pouring over his East Berlin coins.

“I might keep these as souvenirs—or send a couple to Teresa for fun.”

“Not from here, please,” Tom said. “Keep them till you get back home.”

It was refreshing to see the lions strolling in apparent freedom in the Tiergarten, tigers lounging by their swimming pool, yawning in the faces of the public, though there was a moat between them and the visitors. The trumpeter swan, just as Tom and Frank walked by, lifted his long neck and trumpeted. They made their way slowly toward the aquarium. Here Frank fell in love with the Druckfisch.

“Unbelievable!” Frank’s lips parted in astonishment, and he looked suddenly like a child of twelve. “Those eyelashes! Just like
makeup
!”

Tom laughed and stared at the little fish of brilliant blue, hardly six inches long, cruising at what could be called moderate speed, apparently in quest of nothing, except that its little round mouth kept opening and closing as if it were asking something. The lids of its oversized eyes were outlined in black, and above and below were what looked like long black lashes, gracefully curved, as if a cartoonist had drawn them on its blue scales with a grease pencil. It was one of the wonders of nature, Tom thought. He had seen the fish before. It astounded him again, and it pleased Tom that the Druckfisch evoked more admiration from Frank than the celebrated Picassofisch. The Picassofisch, equally smallish, bore a black zigzag on its yellow body, suggesting a Picasso brushstroke of his Cubist period, and a blue band across its head with several raised antennae—odd enough, surely, but somehow no match for the Druckfisch’s eyelashes. Tom turned his eyes away from their watery world, and felt like a clumsy lump as he walked on, breathing air.

The crocodiles, in their heated and glass-enclosed quarters with a pedestrian bridge through, had a few slightly bleeding wounds on them, no doubt inflicted by their fellows. But just now they were all dozing, with fearful grins.

“Had enough?” Tom asked. “I wouldn’t mind going to the Bahnhof.”

They left the aquarium and walked a few streets to the railway station, where Tom got some more German money with his French francs. Frank changed some also.

“You know, Ben,” Tom said as he pocketed his marks, “one more day here, and you have to think about—home, maybe?” Tom had cast an eye about the Bahnhof interior, meeting place for hustlers, fences, gays, pimps, drug addicts, and God knew what. He walked as he spoke, wanting to get out of the place, in case one of the loitering people, for some reason, might be interested in him and the boy.

“I might go to Rome,” Frank said as they walked toward the Ku’damm.

“Don’t go to Rome. Save it for another time. You’ve been to Rome, didn’t you say?”

“Only twice when I was a little kid.”

“Go home first. Get things straightened out. Also with Teresa. You could still go to Rome this summer. It’s only the twenty-sixth of August.”

Some thirty minutes later, when Tom was relaxing in his room with the
Morgenpost
and
Der Abend
, Frank rang him from his room.

“I reserved a ticket to New York for Monday,” Frank said. “Takeoff eleven-forty-five Air France, then I switch to Lufthansa in Düsseldorf.”

“Very good—Ben.” Tom felt relief.

“You might have to lend me a little money. I can buy the ticket, but it’ll leave me maybe a little short.”

“No problem,” Tom said patiently. Five thousand francs was over a thousand dollars, and why should the boy need more if he was going straight home? Was he so in the habit of carrying big sums, he felt uncomfortable without a lot? Or had money, from him, become a symbol of love to Frank?

That evening they went to a cinema, walked out before the end, and since it was after eleven and they had had no dinner, Tom steered them toward the Rheinische Winzerstuben, which was just a few steps away. Half-drawn glasses of beer, at least eight, stood lined up beside the beer taps, awaiting customers. The Germans took several minutes to draw a beer properly, a fact which Tom appreciated. Tom and Frank chose their food from a counter offering homemade soups, ham, roast beef and lamb, cabbage, fried or boiled potatoes, and half a dozen kinds of bread.

“It’s true what you said about Teresa,” Frank said when they had found a table. “I should get things clearer with her.” Frank gulped, though he had not yet eaten a bite. “Maybe she likes me, maybe she doesn’t. And I realize I’m not
old
enough. Five more years of school if I finish college. Good Christ!”

Frank seemed furious with the school system suddenly, but Tom knew his problem was uncertainty about the girl.

“She’s different from other girls,” the boy went on. “I can’t describe it—in words. She’s not silly. She’s very sure of herself—that’s what scares me sometimes, because I don’t look as self-confident as she does. Maybe I’m
not
.— Maybe one day you’ll meet her. I hope so.”

“I hope so too.— Eat your meal while it’s hot.” Tom felt that he never would meet Teresa, but illusion, hope such as the boy was trying to hang onto now—what else kept people going? Ego, morale, energy, and what people so vaguely called the future— wasn’t it for most people based on another person? So very few people could make it alone. And himself? Tom tried for a few seconds to imagine himself in Belle Ombre without Heloise. No one to talk to in the house except Mme. Annette, no one to switch on the gramophone and fill the house suddenly with rock music or sometimes Ralph Kirkpatrick on the harpsichord. Even though Tom kept from Heloise so much of his life, his illegal and potentially dangerous activities which could put an end to Belle Ombre if discovered, she had become a part of his existence, almost of his flesh, as they said in the marriage vows. They didn’t often make love, didn’t always when Tom shared her bed, which was hardly half the time, but when they did, Heloise was warm and passionate. The infrequency of their making love didn’t seem to bother her at all. Curious, since she was only twenty-seven, or was it twenty-eight? But convenient too, for him. He couldn’t have borne a woman who made demands several times a week: that really would have turned him off, maybe at once and permanently.

Tom summoned his courage and asked in a tone both light and polite, “May I ask if you’ve been to bed with Teresa?”

Frank glanced up from his plate with a quick and shaky smile. “Once. I— Well, of course it was wonderful. Maybe too wonderful.”