The Man Who Saw Everything by Levy Deborah

Author:Levy, Deborah
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9780241977613
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2019-08-28T16:00:00+00:00

14

There were at least nine women wheeling prams around the fountain in Alexanderplatz when I finally said goodbye to Walter Müller. Everywhere I looked there were women steering babies through the pigeons. It had been a sad and tense walk, but this time I carried my own bag. It seemed that Walter had suddenly stepped into his job as translator, just as I was leaving East Berlin. A copper relief sculpture on a tall building called the House of Travelling had caught my eye in Alexanderplatz. It was of an astronaut in a helmet setting off on his journey into the unknown, surrounded by various planets and birds and the sun. Walter translated its title for me.

‘Man Overcomes Space and Time.’

‘Yes,’ I said, linking my arm with his, ‘that’s what I have been struggling with while I have been in the GDR. Space and time. But no way have I conquered it. In fact, it has conquered me.’

He squeezed my arm. ‘No. You’re just crazy. We look forward to your report on our economic miracle.’ He threw back his head and laughed like a hound.

‘No, Walter,’ I said, ‘you and I will soon meet for a beer in Kreuzberg.’

‘When will that be, my English friend?’

‘Whenever you decide.’

‘Okay,’ he replied. ‘I would prefer to meet in Paris.’

‘Then that’s what we’ll do.’

Walter stretched out his hand and messed up my hair. Although I was laughing, I was unhappy and scared, which made me wonder about Walter laughing all the time. Perhaps he was unhappy and scared, too.

The TV tower with its steel sphere and striped antenna was never out of view. Walter explained that it was designed to celebrate the Soviet obsession with space travel in the 1960s. ‘Look at our World Clock,’ he said in English. ‘You will see on top of it a metal sculpture of the solar system.’

‘Ah, asteroids and comets,’ I said.

We were doing everything we could to avoid the moment we would both go our separate ways.

‘Goodbye, Walter.’ I said it very quickly with my eyes shut, and then I opened my eyes and saw all the women wheeling their children in prams. Perhaps the young woman in a yellow dress and white stilettos was his wife?

Walter stepped over my bag and held me fleetingly in his arms. I could smell the brown coal in his hair. He told me that while I was on the train heading back to the West, he would be helping out his friend who worked in a small kiosk at the end of his street. She sold sweets, drinks, cigarettes and newspapers. In the afternoon he was scheduled to teach English to men and women who had good careers but who were going to build socialism elsewhere, including Ethiopia. He seemed to want me to know what he would be doing while I was on the train to the West. And I did want to know. I wanted to know everything about Walter Müller. The fact that he had kept the details of his real domestic life hidden from me only made me love him more.

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