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under the bridge,” a voice said.
“You come out.”
“No, under here. I won’t hurt you.”
The voice sounded gentle and educated, which somehow didn’t surprise him. It wouldn’t have been appropriate for a person who wasn’t intelligent to stare at him and beckon to him. He moved under the bridge and made out a human shape by one of the pillars. “Who are you?” he said.
“Nobody,” the ghost said. “An absurdity.”
“Then what do you want? Do I know you?”
“No.”
“Then what do you want?”
“I can’t stay here, but I wanted to see you before I go back.”
“Back to where?”
“Erfurt.”
“Well, here I am. You’re seeing me. Do you mind if I ask why you’re spying on me?”
The bridge above them shook and boomed with the weight of a passing truck.
“What would you say,” the ghost said, “if I told you I’m your father?”
“I’d say you’re a lunatic.”
“Your mother is Katya Wolf, née Eberswald. I was her student and colleague at Humboldt University from 1957 until February 1963, at which time I was arrested, tried, and sentenced to ten years in prison for subversion of the state.”
Andreas involuntarily took a step backward. His fear of political lepers was instinctive. No good could come of contact with them.
“Needless to say,” the ghost added, “I did not subvert the state.”
“Obviously the People thought otherwise.”
“No, interestingly, no one ever thought otherwise. I went to prison for the crime of having relations with your mother before and after she was married. The after in particular was a problem.”
A horrible feeling seized Andreas, part loathing, part pain, part righteous rage.
“Listen to me, dirtbag,” he said. “I don’t know who you are, but you can’t talk about my mother that way. You understand? If I see you again at the football pitch, I’m calling the police. You understand?” He turned and stumbled back toward the light.
“Andreas,” the dirtbag called after him. “I held you when you were a baby.”
“Go fuck yourself, whoever you are.”
“I’m your father.”
“Go fuck yourself. You’re filthy and disgusting.”
“Do one thing for me,” the dirtbag said. “Go home and ask your mother’s husband where he was in October and November of 1959. That’s all. Just ask him and see what he says.”
Andreas’s eyes fell on a scrap of lumber. He could bash the dirtbag’s head in, nobody would miss an enemy of the state, nobody would care. Even if they caught Andreas, he could say it was self-defense and they’d believe him. The idea was giving him a stiffy. There was a murderer in him.
“You don’t have to worry,” the dirtbag said. “You won’t see me again. I’m not allowed to enter Berlin. I’m almost certainly on my way back to prison, just for having disappeared from Erfurt.”
“You think I care?”
“No. Why would you. I’m nobody.”
“What’s your name?”
“It’s safer for you if you don’t know.”
“Then why are you doing this to me? Why did you even come here?”
“Because I sat in prison for ten years imagining it. I spent another year imagining it after I got out. Sometimes you imagine something for so long, you find that you have no choice but to do it. Maybe you’ll have a son of your own someday. You might understand better then.”
“People who tell filthy lies belong in prison.”
“It’s not a lie. I told you the question you need to ask.”
“If you did something bad to my mother, you deserve all the more to be in prison.”
“That’s the way her husband saw it, too. You can understand why I might see things rather differently.”
The dirtbag said this with a note of bitterness, and already Andreas could sense what later became transparent to him: the guy was guilty. Maybe not of the crime for which he’d been imprisoned, but certainly of having taken advantage of something unstable in his mother, and then of coming back to Berlin to make trouble; of caring more about getting even with his former lover than about the feelings of their fourteen-year-old son. He was a sleaze, a nobody, a former graduate student of English studies. At no point did Andreas dream of reestablishing contact with him.
All he said in the moment was “Thanks for ruining my day.”
“I had to see you at least once.”
“Fine. Now go back to Erfurt and fuck yourself.”
Still muttering this phrase, Andreas hurried out from under the bridge and scrambled up the embankment to Rhinstraße. There was no sign of Joachim, so he made his way home, pausing twice in shadowed doorways to rearrange his underpants, because his homicidal stiffy was persisting in his football shorts. He had no intention of asking his father the question the ghost had suggested, but he was suddenly thinking of scenes from the past two or three years which had made so little sense to him that he’d dutifully put them out of his mind.
There was the time he’d gone out to the dacha on a Friday afternoon and found his mother sitting stark naked between two rosebushes, unable or unwilling to utter a word until his father finally arrived, after dark, and slapped her face. That was a weird one. And the time he’d been sent home from school with a fever and found his parents’ bedroom door locked and later seen two workers in blue coveralls hastening out of the bedroom. And the time he’d gone to her office at the university to have a permission slip signed, and again the door was locked, and after some minutes a male student had come out, his hair plastered with sweat, and Andreas had tried to go through the door but his mother had pushed it shut from inside and locked it again.
And what she’d said afterward, the bewitching gaiety of her explanations:
“I was just smelling the roses, and it was such a lovely day I took my clothes off, to be closer to nature, and then when I saw you I was so embarrassed that I couldn’t say a word to you.”
“They were fixing the electricity and they needed me to stand by the light switch and flip it on and off and on and off, and they were so silly with their rules that they wouldn’t even let me open the door. It was like I was their prisoner!”
“We’d had the most horribly excruciating disciplinary meeting, the poor boy is being expelled—you probably heard him crying—and I had to make some notes while it was still fresh in my mind.”
He remembered the determined pressure of her office door, the irresistible force pushing him back. He remembered remembering, when he saw her pussy in the rose garden, that this wasn’t the first time he’d seen it—that something he’d thought was a disturbing dream from his early childhood hadn’t actually been a dream; that she’d shown it to him once before, to answer some precocious question of his. He remembered that although he’d been sprawled with his fever in the living room, in plain sight, the two workmen in coveralls hadn’t said hello to him, hadn’t even glanced at him, as they made their escape.
When he got home, Katya was sitting on their fake-leather fauxDanish sofa—so tacky and yet two cuts above most other sofas in the Republic—reading the ND and drinking her after-work glass of wine. She had an air of knowing that she looked like an advertisement