Untitled Books

Night time at the checkpoint, ink spilt through water and clouds scudding the sky above while, to the east, the twin lasers from the festival tunnel into space. "Maybe I can get a stamp for my passport here," the woman says as they approach the conurbation of pale grey cabins and watchtowers. "I'd like a Polish stamp." Her jeans, the expensive ones from Selfridges, are rolled up because of the rain earlier and the mud at the festival; her hooded cardigan shrouds dark hair kinked by the humidity. The man laughs and shakes his head. "All closed now," he says in accented English, squeezing her hand. And sure enough, all is quiet. The woman peers in through the window of one of the cabins but the glass is opaque with dirt and cobwebs. She tries to imagine the guards, the lines of cars, the searches, the tense, nervous atmosphere. Stuff she's seen in films.
            "It was a big crossing once," the man says, leaning against the cabin and lighting a cigarette. He holds a can of beer in his other hand, his eighth of the night; she has been counting. She wishes that the bar at the festival had had wine or vodka; she can't drink beer and she doesn't like to be sober with him. But it was beer only.
            "Did you come here when you were little?" she asks. "To Poland?"
            "Yes, a few times to visit my uncle, but I don't really remember."
            "In the Trabi?"
            He nods and smiles. "Yes. In the Trabi."
            She looks to where the road ahead merges into the spilt ink of the night; smells the wet earth in the fields of sugar beet. What do the sunflowers look like at night, she wonders; do the yellow fringes close like coy fingers around the brown Velcro of their faces like a child playing peekaboo? Earlier, on the way to the festival in the car, they passed field upon field of ragged heads and thick mint green stems.
            She can't see any stars for the rain and lasers; last night they could. Last night it was dry and fair. So was the forecast for tonight.
            "Are you sure we can get a taxi on the other side?"
            "Yes, yes," he insists, ambling onwards, holding out his hand as he waits for her to catch up. "We will get a German taxi, a real taxi, not like these Polish ones."
            The length of red rope holding up his tweed trousers has come loose and he swings it as he walks, like a tail, she thinks, a leopard's tail. Last week they visited the Tiergarten in Berlin where the leopards paced and growled and cuffed each other. His trousers are of a sandy, leopardy colour.
Light from a shop ahead makes a messy halo of his home-cut bob.
            "I think I'll ask if they have a number for a taxi," she says, uneasy with her own decisiveness. He doesn't stop her. More a shack, than a shop, vodka and schnapps bottles crowd the shelves, and tourist nicknacks - beer steins, shot glasses, bears with red satin hearts sewn onto their chests: I ♥Kostrzyn. The light from the bulb above the wooden desk glows yellow. The cashier is Polish; but this is the German side, she puzzles; perhaps it doesn't matter anymore. Does he speak German or English, she asks. He nods and scrolls through the address book on his phone for a taxi number; then shakes his shaven head. No: no number; sorry. He gives a smile with half his mouth. "Dziekuje," she says: like 'five' in Italian with a 'cooey' tacked onto the end. It is a difficult language; she finds German finds easier.

Outside, the man sits on the kerb, feet together, knees sagging towards the pavement. His toes, protruding from his sandals, are big and strong without hairs. Funny to think what an important crossing this once was. The smile on his face is benign, Buddha-like, peaceful. She sits and lays her head against his shoulder, then hands her phone to him. Fatigue has wrung the muscles in her legs like sodden rags, but they can't sleep here where the ground is wet and it is thirteen miles to his uncle's house. She used to run that distance, just last year, in one hour forty, but here she hasn't done any exercise for a month and her legs are much thinner.
            "Call the information service," she says. He takes the phone and presses in two digits, then pauses and laughs. "I can't remember," - and hands the phone back. She looks at the square of metal, at the internet icon on it that won't work here, then drops it into her bag along with her unstamped passport.
            Her toes are cold; the nails must be rimed with dirt beneath the dark red paint. She is glad of the cardigan. Perhaps she will have to sleep in a ditch or a barn or one of those boarded up brambled houses they saw by daylight.
            Army surplus boots strike tarmac: out of the dark, a man appears, tall and wearing a trilby; from his shoulders slouches a grey steel-framed rucksack. He walks with purpose, a little hunched, with long bouncing strides. It looks as if his intention is to keep walking but the blond man stands and holds out his hand. "Hey." He sways a little, and the red rope with him. "Do you have the number for the German information service?"
            The man in the trilby shakes his head; accepts a cigarette, a Chesterfield. The woman wonders if it's only abroad that Chesterfields are popular; such an English name, though everyone she knows in England smokes American cigarettes.
            "Or a taxi?"
            The man shakes his head again.
            "Where are you going?" asks the blond man. The other questions were for the woman; this is a question for him.
            "To Berlin," says the other. "I hitchhike."
            But there are no cars, the woman wants to say, and no taxis either. You're both mad.
            The two men talk for a while about Berlin and the man recommends a cheap hostel and a good, homely place to eat: tell them my name, he says, and make sure you order the herring and potato dish - then the man in the trilby walks on into where the road and darkness meet, the noise of his boots growing gradually fainter.
            Last night they heard cicadas; tonight they do not, because of the rain.
            "Come," the blond man says. "Let's go. Let's follow him. He knows the way." A cheerful leopard, ready to play.
            She is not. "There are no taxis," she says.
            "Come!"
            She stands, unwilling to leave the lights at the border. Why are there still lights, she wonders, if the border is open?
            She is the guest; she is used to letting him make the decisions. She wavers.
            "There will be a taxi," he says, his voice confident, "on the German side." That is what he's said all the three miles to the border; now she realizes she has been foolish to believe; she should have followed her own instincts eighty minutes ago and haggled down the Polish driver who stopped for them, back when they could still hear the music from the festival, the Swedish heavy metal band.
            "There's a petrol station back there," she says. "We can get them to call us a taxi." Can he hear the pleading in her voice, she wonders. Does she want him to?
            "Not for a German taxi."
            "The German taxis go there for petrol." She reminds him of what he himself told her earlier,          "Because it's cheaper. If we wait, one will turn up."
            The man walks towards the dark road tunnelling into the fields. He holds up a finger: "Never go back. Always forwards; never back."
            She stands irresolute.
            He turns, holds his hands aloft: "Come on, Eva: trust me! Please! Come on!"
            She wants to, but doesn't obey. It beggars belief that there will be a line of German taxis waiting for them amidst the fields and wind turbines. This can't be a lucrative place to find fares. Surely, if they want to make money, they'll be on the Polish side, at the exit from the festival, where they saw taxis earlier, albeit taxis that were all taken save the one that tried to overcharge them. She tries to tell him, but he waves his hand and keeps walking.
            "Well, I'm going back to the petrol station," she says. How English she sounds. It is the only sensible option. Perhaps he will follow.
            He pauses, turns back. "Come on!" he repeats, flicking the length of red rope towards her as if she's drowning and he's rescuing her. He mimes dragging her along the ground, staggering a little, face screwed up with imagined effort.
            But Eva shakes her head and retreats back the way they came. She folds her arms against his levity and trudges. They saw a prostitute earlier in the day standing on this road in a little black dress with red high heels. Eva was surprised at how pretty she was with a heart-shaped face and dimpled smile; she didn't realize the girl's profession immediately; she thought perhaps she was waiting for a friend peeing in the bushes. Eva glances back but cannot see the man. His jacket is black and her eyes, looking from the light of the petrol station back into the dark, fail to pick him out.
            At the petrol station, which has a coffee shop and chatter and bright lights and the smell of muffins and feels like home in London, she finds a cab dropping off other people at the motel behind the station. Her relief forces her to forgive him. She doesn't know where exactly his uncle's house is, but instructs the driver to go back towards the border. She has a friend, she says, whom she has lost somewhere out there. Soon the white arcs of the headlights pick out the blond halo and his shambling steps. So he followed her, in the end.
            Still holding his beer, he ducks into the passenger seat; he does not seem surprised to see the taxi or her. Everything he says, he repeats a few moments later. The driver, who is Polish, laughs and nods and takes them the long way home.

Back at the house, the rain starts; lightning forces the sky apart and the Alsatian chained to the kennel outside howls. In bed, in the attic, they lie staring up at the inverted v of the ceiling. For three nights they have not made love. The ceiling is wooden and smells of varnish. She wonders if he forgot to bring any condoms from Berlin but is too shy to ask.
            "Süsse Träume," he whispers. He thinks she might already be asleep.
            "You too," she says after a pause.
            He says something in German. The way he pronounces his language makes it soft, lulling. She'd always thought of it as a harsh language till she met him.
            "Hmmm?"
            "I'm sorry," he says, translating, his voice drowsy, "for making you wait all night."
            She rolls onto her elbow, looks down at him, his eyes shut, his hair falling back from his face, his neat Roman nose, the sandpaper stubble on his cheeks, the constellation of moles along his jaw line. Still smiling, always smiling: that is him. That is why she likes him. She is glad now she forbore from mentioning that she was right about the taxis. Not one did they see on the journey home along the delta, not a single yellow light; not a single light even; all darkness in the fields of sunflowers and sugar beet. Yes, the flowers definitely had their faces covered.
            "It's graceful of you to say so."
            "It's raining outside. How do you call it when you have the flashes and the noise? Lightning and thunder? Yes, you made the right decision, Eva."
            She kisses him on the lips; suddenly he is on top of her, kissing her back, hard, harder than ever before, pulling her jeans off, one hand on her bare stomach, the other fumbling in his pocket; the noise of ripping metallic paper, and then he is inside her while outside the storm shreds the night sky, and the rain deluges the fields of sunflowers and sugar beet and wheat, and the plantations of pines creak in the wind, and the thunder tumbles down through all the cracks and holes and spaces between the bricks and beams in all the empty shelled houses overgrown with weeds, and somewhere the hitchhiker trudges on towards the morn that has yet to dawn in Berlin.