got to sleep,’ he said. ‘I can’t take these late nights any more. If you’re going to hang on here, to type it all out, I’d rather go home now.’
It was the drink that had got to him, of course. The ebullience of intoxication didn’t last very long with Werner. Alcohol is a depressant and Werner’s metabolic rate had slowed enough to render him unfit to drive. ‘I’ll drive,’ I said. ‘And I’ll make the transcription on your typewriter.’
‘Sure,’ said Werner. I was staying with him in his apartment at Dahlem. And now, in his melancholy mood, he was anticipating his wife’s reaction to us waking her up by arriving in the small hours of the morning. Werner’s typewriter was a very noisy machine and he knew I’d want to finish the job before going to sleep. ‘Is there much of it?’ he asked.
‘It’s short and sweet, Werner. But she’s given us a few things that might make London Central scratch their heads and wonder.’
‘Such as?’
‘Read it in the morning, Werner. We’ll talk about it over breakfast.’
It was a beautiful Berlin morning. The sky was blue despite all those East German generating plants that burn brown coal so that pale smog sits over the city for so much of the year. Today the fumes of the Braunkohle were drifting elsewhere, and outside the birds were singing to celebrate it. Inside, a big wasp, a last survivor from the summer, buzzed around angrily.
Werner’s Dahlem apartment was like a second home to me. I’d known it when it was a gathering place for an endless stream of Werner’s oddball friends. In those days the furniture was old and Werner played jazz on a piano decorated with cigarette burns, and Werner’s beautifully constructed model planes were hanging from the ceiling because that was the only place where they would not be sat upon.
Now it was all different. The old things had all been removed by Zena, his very young wife. Now the flat was done to her taste: expensive modern furniture and a big rubber plant, and a rug that hung on the wall and bore the name of the ‘artist’ who’d woven it. The only thing that remained from the old days was the lumpy sofa that converted to the lumpy bed on which I’d slept.
The three of us were sitting in the ‘breakfast room’, a counter at the end of the kitchen. It was arranged like a lunch counter with Zena playing the role of bartender. From here there was a view through the window, and we were high enough to see the sun-edged treetops of the Grunewald just a block or two away. Zena was squeezing oranges in an electric juicer, and in the automatic coffee-maker the coffee was dripping, its rich aroma floating through the room.
We were talking about marriage. I said, ‘The tragedy of marriage is that while all women marry thinking that their man will change, all men marry believing their wife will never change. Both are invariably disappointed.’
‘What rot,’ said Zena as she poured the juice into three glasses. ‘Men do change.’
She bent down to see better the level of the juice and ensure that we all got precisely the same amount. It was a legacy of the Prussian family background of which she was so proud, despite the fact that she’d never even seen the old family homeland. For Prussians like to think of themselves not only as the conscience of the world, but also its final judge and jury.
‘Don’t encourage him, Zena darling,’ said Werner. ‘That contrived Oscar Wilde-ish assertion is just Bernard’s way of annoying wives.’
Zena didn’t let it go; she liked to argue with me. ‘Men change. It’s men who usually leave home and break up the marriage. And it’s because they change.’
‘Good juice,’ I said, sipping some.
‘Men go out to work. Men want promotion in their jobs and they aspire to the higher social class of their superiors. Then they feel their wives are inadequate and start looking for a wife who knows the manners and vocabulary of that class they want to join.’
‘You’re right,’ I admitted. ‘I meant that men don’t change in the way that their women want them to change.’
She smiled. She knew that I was commenting on the way she had changed poor Werner from being an easygoing and somewhat bohemian character into a devoted and obedient husband. It was Zena who had stopped him smoking and made him diet enough to reduce his waistline. And it was Zena who approved everything he bought to wear, from swimming trunks to tuxedo. In this respect Zena regarded me as her opponent. I was the bad influence who could undo all her good work, and that was something Zena was determined to prevent.
She climbed up onto the stool. She was so well proportioned that you only noticed how tiny she was when she did such things. She had long, dark hair and this morning she’d clipped it back into a ponytail that reached down to her shoulder blades. She was wearing a red cotton kimono with a wide black sash around her middle. She’d not missed any sleep that night and her eyes were bright and clear; she’d even found time enough to put on a touch of makeup. She didn’t need makeup – she was only twenty-two years old and there was no disputing her beauty – but the makeup was something from behind which she preferred to face the world.
The coffee was very dark and strong. She liked it like that, but I poured a lot of milk into mine. The buzzer on the oven sounded and Zena went to get the warm rolls. She put them into a small basket with a red-checked cloth before offering them to us. ‘Brötchen,’ she said. Zena was born and brought up in Berlin, but she didn’t call the bread rolls Schrippe the way the rest of the population of Berlin did. Zena didn’t want to be identified with Berlin; she preferred keeping her options open.
‘Any butter?’ I said, breaking open the bread roll.
‘We don’t eat it,’ said Zena. ‘It’s bad for you.’
‘Give Bernie some of that new margarine,’ said Werner.
‘You should lose some weight,’ Zena told me. ‘I wouldn’t even be eating bread if I were you.’
‘There are all kinds of other things I do that you wouldn’t do if you were me,’ I said. The wasp settled in my hair and I brushed it away.
She decided not to get into that one. She rolled up a newspaper and aimed some blows at the wasp. Then with unconcealed ill-humour she went to the refrigerator and brought me a plastic tub of margarine. ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘I’m catching the morning flight. I’ll get out of your way as soon as I’m shaved.’
‘No hurry,’ said Werner to smooth things over. He had already shaved, of course; Zena wouldn’t have let him have breakfast if he’d turned up unshaven. ‘So you got all your typing done last night,’ he said. ‘I should have stayed up and helped.’
‘It wasn’t necessary. I’ll have the translation done in London. I appreciate you and Zena giving me a place to sleep, to say nothing of the coffee last night and Zena’s great breakfast this morning.’
I overdid the appreciation I suppose. I’m prone to do this when I’m nervous, and Zena was a great expert at making me nervous.
‘I was damned tired,’ said Werner.
Zena shot me a glance, but when she spoke it was to Werner. ‘You were drunk,’ she said. ‘I thought you were supposed to be working last night.’
‘We were, darling,’ said Werner.
‘There wasn’t much drinking, Zena,’ I said.
‘Werner gets drunk on the smell of a barmaid’s apron,’ said Zena.
Werner opened his mouth to object to this put-down. Then he realized that he could only challenge it by claiming to have drunk a great deal. He sipped some coffee instead.
‘I’ve seen her before,’ said Werner.
‘The woman?’
‘What’s her name?’
‘She says it’s Müller, but she was married to a man named Johnson at one time. Here? You’ve