The Boy Who Followed Ripley (12 page)

Tom waited.

“You’re the only person I would tell this to,” Frank continued in a lower voice. “I didn’t do very well. I think I was too excited. She was excited too, but nothing happened—really. It was at her family’s apartment in New York. Everybody was out, we had all the doors locked.— And she laughed.” Frank looked at Tom as if he had made a statement of fact, not one that hurt him, even, just a fact.

“Laughed at you?” Tom asked, trying to assume an attitude of only mild interest. He lit a Roth-Händle, the German equivalent of a Gauloise.

“
At
me, I dunno. Maybe. I felt awful. Embarrassed. I was ready to make love to her and then I couldn’t finish. You know?”

Tom could imagine. “Laughed
with
you, maybe.”

“I
tried
to laugh.— Don’t ever tell anybody, will you?”

“No. Who would I tell, anyway?”

“Other guys at school, they’re always boasting. I think half the time they’re lying. I know they are. Pete—one year older—I like him a lot, but I know he doesn’t always tell the truth. About girls, I mean. Sure, it’s easy, I think, if you
don’t
like a girl so much. You know? Maybe. Then you just think about yourself and being tough and making it and everything’s fine. But—I’ve been in love with Teresa for
months
. Seven months now. Since the night I met her.”

Tom was trying to compose a question: had Teresa other boyfriends with whom she might be going to bed? Tom didn’t get the question out before a loud introductory chord rang out over the beerhall’s clatter and chatter.

Something was happening on the far wall opposite them. Tom had seen the show once before. Lights had come on there, and the rumbustious overture to
Der Freischütz
boomed out from a rather rusty gramophone somewhere. From the wall, a flat tableau of spooky houses made of cutout silhouettes projected a few inches—an owl perched in a tree, the moon shone, lightning flashed, and a real rain of water drops slanted down from the right. There was also thunder, which sounded like big pieces of tin being shaken backstage. A few people got up from their tables for a better view.

“That’s
mad
!” Frank said, grinning. “Let’s go look!”

“You go,” said Tom, and the boy went. Tom wanted to stay seated to assess Frank from a distance, to see if anyone paid attention to him.

Frank, in Tom’s blue blazer and his own brown corduroy trousers—a bit short, the trousers, and the boy must have grown since he bought them—watched the tableau-almost-vivant with his hands on his hips. No one that Tom could see paid the boy any attention.

The music ended with crashes of cymbals, the lights went off, the raindrops trickled out, and people returned to their seats.

“What a great idea!” Frank said, ambling back, looking relaxed. “The rain falls in a little gutter in front, you know?— Can I get you another beer?” Frank was eager to be of service.

It was nearly one when Tom asked a taxi driver to take them to a bar called the Glad Hand. Tom didn’t know what street it was on. He had heard of it from someone, maybe even Reeves.

“Maybe you mean the Glad Ass,” said the driver in German, smiling, though the name of the bar remained in English.

“Whatever you say,” said Tom. He knew the Berliners changed the names of their bars when they spoke about them among themselves.

This bar had no sign at all outside it, just a lighted list of beverage and snack prices behind glass on the outside wall by the door, but booming disco was audible from within. Tom pushed the brown door open, and a tall, ghostlike figure pushed Tom back in a playful way.

“No, no, you can’t come in
here
!” said the figure, then grabbed Tom by his sweater front and pulled him in.

“You’re looking
charming
!” Tom shouted at the figure that had pulled him in—over six feet tall in a sloppy muslin gown that swept the floor, his face a mask of pink and white paste.

Tom made sure that Frank was in tow as he forged toward the bar, which looked impossible to get to because of the crowd—entirely men and boys, all yelling at each other. There seemed to be two big rooms for dancing, maybe even three. Frank was much stared at and greeted as he endeavored to follow Tom. “
What the hell?
” Tom said to him, with a cheerful shrug, meaning he didn’t think he would ever make it to the bar to order beer or anything else. There were tables against the walls, but these were taken and more than taken with fellows standing and talking to the ones seated.

“
Hoppla!
” roared another figure in drag into Tom’s ears, and Tom realized, almost with a twinge of shame, that it was perhaps because he looked straight. A miracle they didn’t throw him out, and maybe he had Frank to thank for being in. This led to a happier thought: Tom himself was an object of envy for having a nice-looking boy of sixteen in his company. Tom could in fact see that now, and it made him smile.

A leather figure was asking Frank to dance.

“
Go ahead!
” Tom shouted to Frank.

Frank looked for an instant bewildered, scared, then seemed to collect himself, and he went off with the leather chap.

“. . . my cousin in
Dallas
!” an American voice was shouting to someone on Tom’s left, and Tom moved away from that.

“Dallas-Fort
Vort
!” said his German companion.

“Naw, that’s the fuckin’
airport
! I mean Dallas!
Friday
the bar’s called. Gay bar! Boys and girls!”

Tom turned his back to them, somehow got a hand on the bar edge, and managed to order two beers. The three barmen or barmaids wore beaten up blue jeans but also wigs, rouge, ruffled blouses, and very gay lipsticky smiles. No one looked drunk, but everyone seemed wildly happy. Tom clung with one hand to the bar, and stood on tiptoe to look for Frank. He saw the boy dancing with even more abandon than with the girl in Romy Haag’s. Another fellow seemed to be joining them, though Tom couldn’t be certain. Now an Adonis-like statue, bigger than life and painted gold, descended from the ceiling and rotated horizontally over the dance floor, while from above colored balloons floated down, twisting, rising, stirred by the activity below. One of the balloons said motherfucker in Gothic black letters, others sported drawings and words Tom couldn’t make out from where he was.

Frank was coming back, pressing his way through to Tom. “Look! Lost a button, sorry. Couldn’t find it on the dance floor and I got knocked down trying to look for it.” He meant the middle button on the blazer.

“No importance! Your beer!” Tom said, handing the boy a tall, tapering glass.

Frank drank through the foam. “They’re having such a good time—” he yelled, “
and no girls
!”

“Why’d you come
back
?”

“The other two got in an argument—a little bit! The first guy—he said something I didn’t understand.”

“Never mind,” said Tom, quite able to imagine. “You should’ve asked him to say it in
English
!”

“He did and I
still
didn’t understand!”

Frank was being eyed by a couple of men behind Tom. Frank was trying to tell Tom it was a very special night, somebody’s birthday, hence the balloons. The loudness of the music almost prevented talking. Talking of course was unnecessary, as customers could see one another’s wares, and either walk out together or exchange addresses. Frank said he didn’t feel like dancing again, so they left after their one beer.

S
UNDAY MORNING
T
OM AWAKENED
just after ten, and rang down to ask if breakfast was still available. It was. Then he rang the boy’s room. No answer. Was Frank taking a morning walk? Tom shrugged. Had he made himself shrug? Had it been involuntary? What if the boy ran into trouble on the street, got spoken to by some alert policeman? “May I ask your name? May I see your passport or identification?” Was there an umbilical cord between him and Frank? No. Or if so, cut it, Tom thought. It was going to be cut tomorrow, anyway, when the boy took the plane for New York. Tom hurled a wadded cigarette package at the wastebasket, missed, and had to go and pick it up.

Tom heard a gentle tapping on his door, with fingertips, the way he himself knocked.

“Frank.”

Tom opened the door.

Frank had a transparent green plastic bag of fruit. “Went for a walk. They said you’d ordered breakfast, so I knew you were up. I asked them in German. How about that?”

Just before noon, they were standing at a Schnell-Imbiss wagon in Kreuzberg, both with tinned beers, Frank with a
Bulette
or bunless hamburger, cold but cooked meat that one could hold in one’s fingers and dip into mustard. A Turk standing with beer and a frankfurter next to them wore the last word in casual summer gear: no top at all, hairy abdomen bulging over short green shorts not only worn out but eaten nearly to pieces perhaps by a dog. His dirty feet were in sandals. Frank looked this chap up and down with an unfazed eye, and said:

“I think Berlin is quite big. Not cramped at all.”

That gave Tom an idea for the afternoon’s activities: Grunewald, the big forest. But first perhaps the Glienicker-Brücke.

“I’ll never forget this day—my last day with you,” Frank said. “And I don’t know when I’ll see you again.”

The words of a lover, Tom thought, and would Frank’s family—his mother in particular—be overjoyed if Tom looked up Frank on his next trip to America in October of this year? Tom doubted that. Did his mother know anything about the suspicion of forgery in regard to Derwatt paintings? Very likely, since Frank’s father had talked about it, maybe at the dinner table. Would his name ring a sour bell with Frank’s mother? Tom did not want to ask.

They had a late lunch at an outdoor table on a height overlooking the Pflauen-Insel in the Wannsee, a blue lake below. Pebbles and earth underfoot now, leaves shading them, a portly and friendly waiter. Sauerbraten with potato dumplings, red cabbage, and beers. They were in the southwest area of West Berlin.

“Gosh, it’s marvelous, isn’t it? Germany,” Frank said.

“Really? Nicer than France?”

“The people seem friendlier here.”

Tom felt the same way about Germany, but Berlin seemed a funny place to say it in. That morning they had driven past a long section of the Wall, unguarded by visible soldiers, but of the same ten-foot height as at Friedrichstrasse, and the attack dogs on sliding leashes behind the Wall had barked at the mere sound of their taxi. The driver had been delighted to make the tour, and had talked a blue streak. Beyond the Wall, out of sight and behind the dogs even, lay a strip of minefield “Fifty meters wide!” their driver had said in German, and beyond that a nine-foot-deep anti-vehicle trench, and yet beyond that a strip of land plowed so as to reveal footprints. “Such trouble they take!” Frank had said. And Tom, inspired, had replied, “They call themselves revolutionaries, but they happen to be the most backward just now. They say every country needs a revolution, but why some groups still ally themselves with
Moscow—
” He had tried to say it in German to the driver. “Oh, Moscow just has the military now, to show force here and there. Ideas, no,” the driver had said, resigned, or with an air of resignation. At the Glienicker-Brücke, Tom had translated for Frank the statement written in German on a big placard:

Those who gave this bridge the name Bridge of Unity built the Wall also, laid barbed wire, created death-strips, and so hinder unity.

Tom translated it thus, but the boy wanted it in the German original, and Tom copied it out for him. The driver, Hermann, had been so friendly, Tom had asked him if he would like some lunch, and then he could take them on somewhere else. Hermann had agreed to the lunch, but politely suggested that he eat by himself at another table.

“Grunewald,” Tom said to Hermann after he had settled their bills. “Can you do that? Then you can get rid of us, because we want to walk around a little.”

“Absolutely! Okay!” said Hermann, hauling himself up from his chair, looking as if he had taken on a couple of kilos with his lunch. It was a warmish day, and he wore a short-sleeved white shirt.

Now it was nearly a four-mile drive generally northward. Tom had his map of Berlin on his lap to show Frank where they were. They crossed the Wannsee bridge and turned north, went through a lot of wooded areas that held clusters of small houses. At last Grunewald where, Tom had told Frank, the troops of France, England, and America often did their tank exercises and fired guns for practice. War Games.

“Can you let us off at the Trümmerberg, Hermann?” Tom asked.

“
Trümmerberg, ja, neben dem Teufelsberg
,” he replied.

Hermann did this, his taxi climbed a slope, then the Trümmerberg, a mountain made from the rubble of war ruins, covered with earth, rose still higher. Tom gave Hermann his tariff and an extra twenty DM.

“
Danke schön und schönen Tag!
”

A small boy stood a little way up the mountain, maneuvering a toy airplane by electronic control. There was a curving groove down the side of the Trümmerberg for skiing and tobogganing.

“They ski here in winter,” Tom said to Frank. “Fun, isn’t it?” Tom didn’t know really what was fun about it just now—with no snow—but he felt euphoric. It was fantastic to see vast woods on one side and the city of Berlin, low and remote in the distance, on the other. Unpaved lanes led into Grunewald, a wild-looking forest, something like twelve miles square, Tom judged from his map, and that this forest could lie within the city limits of Berlin struck Tom as amazing, or as a kind of blessing, since the whole of West Berlin was hemmed in, including, of course, Grunewald itself.

“Let’s go this way,” Tom said.

They took one of the lanes into the woods, and after a couple of minutes the trees closed over them, shutting out much of the sunlight. A boy and girl picnicked a few yards away on a blanket spread on pine needles. Frank looked at them dreamily, maybe with envy. Tom picked up a small pinecone, blew on it, and stuck it into his trousers pocket.