The Pages Page 16

  Without taking his leather jacket off.

  He is terribly generous to his children. He loves them. No doubt about that. He buys them massive Disney dolls, the house is covered with stuffed toys and plastic products – that’s where the earth’s resources are all heading, the previously missing page says. And his wife. Anna. She has more jewellery than she has days to wear the stuff. He’s just got her a TV the size of a farm gate and he keeps saying it’s too small – I’ll bring it back and get you a proper one.

  He is moved by a deep range of feelings. His favourite songs are those describing male humility, such as the big hit about angels. Angels spreading their wings to shield him from harm. He cannot help singing along to the words – protection – love and affection. When he’s drunk he sings that song at family gatherings, raising his voice to an emotional pitch on the word waterfall. It brings him to tears and his wife Anna consoles him like a baby, stroking his head.

  Once or twice, the newly freed page says, you can see the other side of him coming from nowhere. An irrational piece of cruelty breaks out with no warning. Some crime carried out long before his time, something his Russian grandfather did during the war, coming back in some delayed form of trauma. The violence committed in war is brought home by the perpetrators and continues loitering in the kitchens, in the bedrooms, in the uneasy dreams of children, only to resurface a generation or two later like a dormant virus.

  Without explanation, he just flips, punishing somebody at random for an atrocity that was never atoned.

  He is in a position of power over the people in his care. He can be generous and he can also withdraw favours, like divine justice. I’ve seen him taking it out on an old woman who is unable to retaliate, the eyewitness page says. She wants her wheelchair to be placed next to her husband in the sunshine when they are brought out into the garden every afternoon. They’re all lined up, wrapped in blankets. And just because she asked to be placed beside her husband, he says – no. Bitch. He places her in the shadow of the buildings, as far away as possible from her husband. They only have a few days or weeks or months at most left in this world, but he refuses to grant her that request. He has them sitting apart and she’s getting cold, unable to say a word, looking over at her husband at the far end of the universe. She waves but he can’t see her with his back turned.

  My defiled page describes him as a talented hater. He understands exactly what will hurt this old woman most. He leaves her out there until the rest of them have all been brought back inside again for supper, she’s the last, and one of the nurses then says her hands are frozen, they’ve gone blue, her skin is like thin wax paper. The nurse blows on her hands and rubs them back to life, saying it might be better that she doesn’t go outside in the afternoons any more until next summer. Where, in fact, the old woman doesn’t care about the cold, there is nothing she wants more than being out there beside her husband, they don’t have to speak, just sitting side by side is all she wants.

  The following day, Bogdanov makes an about-turn. He is so kind to her she can hardly believe it. He treats her like the most favoured person and she cannot trust him. He tucks the chequered blanket in around her back and even asks which side of her husband she would like to sit on.

  Then he goes home to spend hours at night on his laptop looking up right-wing sites. While his wife and children are asleep, he’s in touch with his friends, discussing ways to create chaos and destabilize democracy. They want to fight the system from inside, infiltrating peace movements and climate activist sites, spreading their message of unrest in the most unlikely places. He followed every word in the epic trial of Beate Zschäpe, the woman whose two lovers went around Germany murdering kebab vendors and greengrocers mostly of Turkish origin. He has online friends in Poland, in the USA and New Zealand. He unfurls a swastika and hangs it up behind him on the wall, then takes it down again before going to sleep, folding it up neatly and putting it away on top of the wardrobe, inside plastic packaging that came with a set of pillows.

  Armin arrives at the gallery with his jacket soaked and his hair down on his forehead. One eye is still discoloured by the blow he received from Bogdanov.

  The windows have steamed up.

  They sit together over coffee and wonder how to react to this piece of hate mail. Is it a sign of something worse to come, or is it simply the action of a jilted lover?

  It’s not fair that you two have been dragged into this, Armin says.

  Armin, you can’t do this alone, Lena says.

  We can’t let this happen, Julia says.

  It has been decided, after Armin helped Lena and Julia to map out each possible scenario like a series of alternative plots, that it might be best to contact the police.

  This is serious, Julia says. Let’s keep it all above board. I don’t want those fuckers coming in here and I certainly don’t want them getting either of you on the street some night. I know this city. They shot a Chechen separatist in the head, right here in the Small Tiergarten. His assassin fled on a bike. Then they put out a whole lot of misinformation about the victim being a brutal terrorist. All you do nowadays is reverse the accusation, say the man they killed was a killer, then his killing becomes a good deed.

  It has been decided, by Armin himself, that he will give up his job measuring car park spaces and go on tour with his sister instead. He has been offered the job of roadie – that will get him out of Berlin for a while.

  And finally, it has been decided, by Lena, that Armin should leave his current place of residence and come to stay in her studio instead. It has a bed and a small kitchen, she says, and lots of light. It’s at the top of the building, overlooking the river. He’ll never find you there.

  38

  To be honest, I quite liked the attention. It was my first time inside a police station, apart from the fictional arrest of Andreas Pum, that is. Though I have to say it fell short of what I would have imagined. It was a normal police station. A room with desks and computer screens. A police officer’s hat left on one of the desks. A coffee machine and a water dispenser. Some posters on the wall to do with drug crime and missing persons. If anything, the familiarity of these interiors made it all seem staged. It’s hard to believe things that make no effort to be true. A writer might have made it look more interesting.

  There was a squeak in one of the swivel chairs.

  A female officer held me in her hands, wearing protective gloves, examining the defaced page from both sides.

  Understandably she didn’t have time to sit down and read, but I was hoping she might have glanced over the contents of the eyewitness page at least. But the text was irrelevant to their investigation. What mattered was the Nazi insignia. She uttered a tiny hiss each time she turned the page, making sure that she was looking at it the right way around.

  Not nice, she said.

  She spoke good English. She switched back into German with her colleagues, two male officers, one of whom was busy scrolling through a series of screen images with the faces of known extremists for Armin to identify. The other man was documenting the evidence, downloading a thread of abusive images Armin had received on his phone.

  It was impossible to say which one of the swivel chairs was making the squeak.

  The officer continued leafing through the pages. She seemed drawn to the unseen. The subtext. A book is like any human mind – it has a story to tell that is not always revealed at first reading. Underneath the printed text there is a complex pattern of subconscious associations. Secrets, suspicions, hints, reflections. It communicates on all those highly intuitive levels that are so crucial to the hunch science of police work.

  The past is no longer safe, I wanted to say to her. My time is coming back. Listen to what my author wrote to his friend Stefan Zweig a hundred years ago – the barbarians have taken over.

  Don’t deceive yourself. All hell is coming.

  It was not what any
body wanted to hear.

  The police officer calmly went over the details with Armin. The backstory with Madina. The loan repayment on the purchase of a guitar. The scene at the music venue followed by the assault outside. Lena showed them a video of Bogdanov pointing his finger. Unfortunately there was no clear view of his face.

  The police officer flicked through the pages and came across the map at the back.

  Is this part of it? she asked. This map here?

  Lena said – no. That was drawn by the original owner, years ago, before any of this. She then explained how the book had been saved from the book-burning. How it came into her possession, how it was lost, or stolen, then recovered by Armin. How the page had been cut out by Bogdanov and then returned with the red swastika intended as some kind of death threat, that’s what had to be assumed.

  The officer carried me over to her colleague to have the swastika page scanned in.

  Technically, she said, there is not a lot we can do with this kind of hate crime without more evidence. I know the threat can be frightening. But look – I’ll tell you what we will do. We will track down this man Bogdanov and ask him a few questions. How does that sound? Let him know this is now in the hands of the police, just in case he has any ideas.

  Thanks, Armin said.

  We need to remain calm, she said. We don’t want to switch on the blue light yet.

  At that point the defaced page began to make itself heard. Maybe not to the police or to anyone else in the room, but to me at least. After spending all that time undercover inside Bogdanov’s squeaky leather jacket, the newly liberated page felt emboldened to outline exactly who they were dealing with. This Bogdanov guy has become a problem, it said. This is no empty threat. A few polite questions on his doorstep is not going to do it, I’m afraid. He’s been hurt. He feels aggrieved. He’s full of resentment now.

  Take it from me, Bogdanov’s unauthorized biographer said, he means business. He’s managed to purchase a gun. It’s all above board. Fully licensed. I’ve been out there with him on the firing range. It was deafening. He doesn’t go hunting. He’s only interested in fixed targets, he’s a very good shot, he’s entered a competition.

  The liberated page went on to reveal that Bogdanov keeps the gun in a small box on top of the wardrobe, along with his hidden flag. He has taken it out once or twice to show his online friends late at night. Other than that, he seems to have no particular use for the weapon. I’ve only seen him threaten his own family with that gun, the mutilated page said. One evening when his wife disagreed with him over something one of the children did. They spilled yogurt on the map of Germany, which he had spread out on the table to give them a history lesson. When he got upset and slammed his fist down on the table, she said – for God’s sake, Uli, don’t get so uptight, they’re kids, a bit of yogurt will do the country no harm. Afterwards, while she was giving them a bath, pretending not to hear him talk about respect for nationhood, he walked in and pointed the weapon at the children’s heads.

  What are you doing, Uli?

  The children thought he was joking.

  I can’t believe it, his wife shouted. You bring a gun into this family to, what – threaten your own children. I hope to God it’s not loaded.

  We need to be ready, he said.

  I want that thing out of the house, Uli. Right now. Never let me see it again.

  All these migrants, Anna. Europe is getting flooded. We need to draw the line. Our daughters are no longer safe. They need protection. Don’t tell me you haven’t seen all those attacks, those murders.

  You’ve lost it, Uli.

  She tried to take the gun off him, the defaced page said. There was a moment where it might have gone off right there in the bathroom.

  Give me that bloody thing, she said.

  Let go, he shouted.

  His voice echoed around the tiles. The children started crying as if they had soap in their eyes. Their mother and father fighting over a toy. She had to let go when he held her face in his hand, pointing the gun directly at her head. She looked at him with fear in her eyes and said nothing more. He then pulled the gun away slowly and blew across the muzzle.

  I’m their father, he said.

  Once he was back in the living room switching on the TV, she could be heard vomiting in the toilet bowl.

  Nobody in the police station heard any of this. We were just talking among ourselves.

  The officer closed the pages with a slap.

  Good, she said. We’re going to pass the file on to our bureau with special focus in this area. They may very well get back to you with more questions.

  As they were wrapping up, she introduced Armin to one of her colleagues and said – this is Lothar. You know what he does in his spare time? He’s in a rock band. Your sister might be interested in meeting him. You should hear him doing ‘Johnny B. Goode’. He plays all around Germany, and you know what he does during the day when he’s off duty? He talks to kids in schools about racial hatred and integration.

  She winked at Armin, to make him feel better.

  She spoke to them as a couple. She advised them against giving in to any further demands. It was essential to take all necessary precautions without curtailing day-to-day activities. She thanked them for supplying the information – if anything else comes up, please get in touch right away.

  Life is full of things that never happen, the officer said. Let’s hope it stays that way.

  The meeting ended on that encouraging note. They even strayed into a light-hearted moment, spinning off into a spontaneous conversation about facial recognition technology. One of the male officers remarked that it might be a handy police tool if it wasn’t met with such public opposition from human rights organizations. Lothar, the ‘Johnny B. Goode’ officer, made the point that facial recognition was a natural faculty possessed by crows. If only you could train crows to work for the police, they could keep an eye on everyone around the city. It was probably something the Stasi would have thought of, the female officer added.

  Everyone felt reassured. The greatest fear at that point for me was the possibility of being sent away for fingerprinting. Ten days in a queue at the forensics lab while the more urgent cases were being cleared ahead of me. It would have meant missing out on Julia’s book club. I was glad when the female officer gave me back to Lena and shook hands, telling them not to worry, just lead a normal life.

  39

  They walk through the city. They stop to buy a pineapple. They stop again outside a café bar that has not opened yet. The shutters are down. There is a father and a small girl outside. The child is sitting on the wooden bench holding on to a scooter, swinging her legs. Behind her there is a large image spray-painted onto the grey shutters, of a female astronaut in a space suit. The child is wearing a helmet and the astronaut is wearing a helmet. The astronaut has cartoon features and bandages on her face, a criss-cross of plasters on her left cheekbone, another single beige strip on the visor of her helmet and a further one on her right cheek. She looks slightly bashed up, as though she’s been through a rough journey and has returned to earth with a cigarette hanging from her mouth and the upper lip curled in an expression of ironic resilience. Beautiful and absurd, a character from a graphic novel, with large eyes and drooping lids. She is indestructible, as though she’s been out all night in the clubs, ready and up for more. She could take a lot worse and still come out alive. A white speech bubble emerging in a zigzag from her mouth says – it’s my cosmos bitch!

  The day is bright and sunny, but also a little cold. Autumn has begun to grip the streets and the air is motionless. Lena tells Armin that she loves nothing more than a good crunchy leaf to step on. It’s just the most satisfying thing on earth, she says, don’t you think?

  As they continue walking, it seems to me that a curfew is about to fall across the city. Time is running out and it will soon be winter in the
se streets. Soon they will be taking in the outdoor furniture. We will feel it in our pages, that flinching against time. The words will stiffen and retreat into a big sleep from which we might never wake up. As though we’re about to be overwhelmed by some great weather event, some world phenomenon, some part of history rising in the streets like something that has never happened before. We come to a place where workers have dug up the street and left a pile of sand at the side of a pit. The pit has been fenced off with planks of wood. The sand makes it look like the workers are at the seaside. Somewhere in the distant past the city must have been underwater. Like a city on loan from the sea. A place where people carry subliminal thoughts of the sea coming back to reclaim the streets.

  They pass by a woman sitting in a car putting on her make-up, leaning forward towards the mirror as she applies the lipstick. They pass by a woman standing on the street with her dog on a lead, holding a small yellow sack containing dogshit in her fingers. They pass by a woman sweeping leaves with a wide brush. The brush looks new, with a wooden handle and bright-red bristles. The sweeping woman is joined by other street-sweepers, one of them with a wide rake, all gathering the leaves into one large mound, and then it’s Armin who is the first to speak into that silent walking.

  Sometimes the brush shoots, he says.