Читать книгу Unnatural Order - Liz Porter - Страница 6

‘Home, sweet home,’ said Karl as a surly green-uniformed customs inspector waved them through the border crossing. Caroline looked across at him, checking for signs of irony, but his expression was bland and content.

Three hours earlier they had been breakfasting in French sunlight, dipping their croissants into milk coffee at a rickety table outside a small bar-patisserie. Now rain drizzled a grey landscape as they drove along a four-laned autobahn. Huge blue signs overhead pointed to polysyllabic destinations. Echterdingen, Schaffhausen, Zuffenhausen. Untertürkheim. Caroline shivered. What depressing, ugly names. Zosia would have said they all sounded like concentration camps.

As she stared bleakly out the window, wishing she was somewhere cheerful like an English pub, a small snail-shaped Citroen chugged alongside, its windows festooned with Greenpeace and anti-nuclear stickers. The car’s bearded blond driver caught Caroline’s stare and waved at her. She waved back.

‘Do you know him?’ Karl stared past her at the driver.

‘No, he was just being friendly.’ Caroline looked back at the little green car. People who drove those cars always seemed friendly. Hitchhiking in Germany as a student, she had stood in the rain as Mercedes after Mercedes zoomed past, each with one or two people in it. Then a little red Deux Chevaux had come into view, loaded with three people, bags and a lone ski sticking out of the sunroof. It had stopped.

The rock music broke off. ‘Achtung! Achtung,’ barked the radio. ‘Autobahn Dreieck Stuttgart/Degerloch. Wegen Unfall, vier Kilometer Stau.’

‘What on earth was that?’ Caroline gasped.

‘What?’ said Karl mildly.

‘The military announcement. The “Achtung, Achtung”. I’ve only ever heard that in films about prisoner-of-war camps.’

He laughed. ‘That was the traffic report. The radio is programmed so that the reports will break into whatever is on.’ He grinned. ‘German efficiency. That one just said that near the Stuttgart/Degerloch turnoff there’s a four-kilometre traffic jam – Stau. You know what wegen Unfall means?’

‘Because of an accident, Herr Professor,’ replied Caroline.

‘Sehr gut,’ said Karl. ‘How about coffee? I need to get petrol anyway, so we can take a break.’

Minutes later, they pulled into a vast car park and made their way towards a two-storey, factory-like building with a huge sign proclaiming it to be a restaurant. Leaving Caroline at the ladies’, Karl walked upstairs to get a table in the cafe.

The four toilet cubicles in the small washroom had coin-operated locks. All were either locked or occupied. ‘Insert three ten-pfennig pieces here’ said a small sign next to each lock. Caroline groaned. She had no German coins and she wasn’t about to rush out and find Karl to get some. She heard a toilet flush in one cubicle and stood outside it. Surely her predecessor would hold the door open for her. In the few toilets like this she had encountered in Australia or England, women of all ages and social classes co-operated to thwart the system.

When a neat-looking woman in a long black raincoat emerged from a cubicle, Caroline stepped forward and placed her hand on the door, to stop it slamming.

‘Entschuldigen Sie, bitte,’ the woman said stiffly, grabbing the handle and banging the door shut.

Caroline glared at her and moved to stand in front of the next door. When it opened she was ready. ‘Entschuldigen Sie, ich habe kein Geld,’ she said crisply, her hand on the left-hand side of the door, ready to push it open if necessary.

This time she had better luck. The woman leaving, an elfin figure with cropped black hair and postbox red lips, smiled vaguely as she abandoned the door to Caroline. She turned to a leather-jacketed girl who was combing her hair at the mirror and started talking to her in rapid French.

Upstairs in the cafe Karl was sprawled at a table, apparently deep in conversation with a large blond biker and his female companion, both in immaculate black leather bodysuits with slashes of red and blue let in at the elbows and knees.

Caroline thought of pasty, unhealthy London, where everyone looked either thin and pale or white and walrus-like. Here, everyone in the room seemed to be over-sized and bursting with robust health.

Karl and the male bodysuit were engaged in a typically tedious tourists’ conversation about whether France was expensive or not. Caroline sipped the bitter coffee and tried to tune into the conversation, which had moved on to India.

The male biker, broad-shouldered with a wide red face, narrow blue eyes and a furry blond moustache, was doing most of the talking while his female companion, a delicate-looking woman with her blond hair in a thick plait, muttered phrases that seemed to indicate agreement. The one virtue of the man’s conversation, from her point of view, was that he spoke slowly, so she could understand almost every word he said.

Ten minutes into his monologue about India and the wily ways of its inhabitants, she was no longer sure whether her ability to comprehend was an advantage.

‘When you’re taking a bus,’ the man droned on, ‘never let anyone take your luggage and put it up on the roof for you. The first time, I let this man help and I said thank you, and then he wanted money. So then I knew. You have to do things yourself or you’ll always get ripped off.’

Caroline was horrified to see Karl nodding in what looked like agreement.

‘Aber das ist.’ She looked at Karl. ‘How do I say ridiculous?’

‘You can say it in English,’ the biker said.

Caroline took a deep breath. How she hated bloody cheapskate backpacker travellers. At least the despised busloads of American tourists displayed humility about their own ignorance of foreign countries. Travellers like him always knew everything. Whatever you had experienced, they had found it cheaper, better and more authentically in the next village, in the restaurant down the road, or in the same place last year before it was ruined by the dreaded tourists.

‘The man who helped you with the luggage,’ she said carefully. ‘That would be his job. He would feed himself, his wife and children, with the few rupees he gets from all the people he helps. That’s India. Too many people, and all of them doing little jobs so they can survive. Backpacker tourists like you are so obsessed with getting the best deal on everything that you don’t stop to notice that the other Indians pay that man to help with their bags. Because they understand the system. And they have far less money than you. Tourists like you expect to be welcomed into someone else’s culture, but always at a bargain price. You think only of what you can take. You bring nothing.’

‘But tourists like me bring in money to those people,’ the biker said. ‘I just want to pay a fair price for things.’

Caroline shook her head.

‘You can’t go to India with a German mentality. You have to understand their system, try and do things their way.’

‘So you would pay everybody who asks you for money!’ The man’s contemptuous bray revealed a set of shiny white teeth.

‘Not if she was with me,’ chuckled Karl.

Caroline glared at him but felt too dispirited by the interchange to continue it. She was only going to spend a week with him before going back to London. They didn’t have to agree on everything.

Both bikers got to their feet.

‘It’s time we moved on,’ said the man, extending a hand to Karl.

‘Tschuss.’

‘Tschuss,’ replied Karl.

‘Tschuss,’ echoed Caroline.

‘And now?’ Karl turned to Caroline. ‘Shall we go too? It’s another two hours’ drive to Gellingen.’

Caroline woke as they slowed and turned off the autobahn. Suddenly she was in a semi-rural landscape. An open vista of green and yellow fields gave way to a narrow winding road with steeply terraced vineyards on either side.

‘I’m taking you the roundabout scenic route,’ said Karl. ‘The quickest way is a bit boring. And I wanted to show you the vineyards. The best wine in Germany is grown in this area. The wine from the Rhein and Moselle areas is exported; wine from Baden-Wurttemberg is what we drink ourselves.’

The first steep-roofed houses, all with white lace curtains and flower-filled window boxes, signalled the approach of the next village.

‘Do you live in a house like that?’ asked Caroline.

Karl laughed. ‘I couldn’t afford it. I live in an apartment block. Not a big one, only five stories. But wait and see, we’re nearly there.’

First Karl drove towards what signs proclaimed as the town centre. Moving off the main road, he guided the car through narrow cobbled streets of medieval-looking, half-timbered houses and then back into wider streets of modern houses and small apartment blocks.

‘Here we are.’ He swung the car into a small street lined with neat grey apartment blocks, all with steep gabled roofs. Karl’s block was at the end of the street, exactly where the paving and buildings finished abruptly. Beyond, the road narrowed into a path leading into a patchwork of green and brown fields.

‘But you’re in the country,’ said Caroline. ‘I thought you were in a suburb of Stuttgart.’

‘From Gellingen station, it’s a 25-minute train trip to the centre of Stuttgart,’ said Karl. ‘How long did the Tube take to get from Holloway to the centre of London?’

‘Thirty-five minutes.’ Caroline took a deep breath.

‘Let’s go up.’ Karl grabbed both their bags from the car and walked towards the entrance. As Caroline looked up at the grey pebbled facade of the block, she saw the white lace curtains on the second and third floors move. Why did everyone have the same curtains?

As they walked inside, a door on the ground floor landing opened and an elderly woman appeared.

‘Ah, Grüss Gott, Herr Dorfler,’ she said. One hand smoothed an invisible rogue hair from a white braid twisted around her head and held neatly in place with a hair net. Her large watery blue eyes took in the two suitcases and Caroline’s dishevelled hair and crushed black frock.

‘Grüss Gott, Frau Hummel,’ replied Karl and kept walking towards the stairs.

Caroline smiled at the neighbour. She wasn’t ready to say ‘Grüss Gott ’. She preferred a simple hello without God involved.

Karl stood back to let Caroline in.

‘Hungry?’ he said.

She nodded.

‘Why don’t you relax here and I’ll go to the shop and get some fresh rolls and sausage for lunch?’

‘Fine.’ Caroline walked into a large living room, lined with shelves packed closely with books and records. A wide picture window looked out on to green and yellow fields. To the right a door opened on to a small balcony offering the same view. She turned to see Karl taking a framed colour photo of a woman away from a small arrangement of black and white portraits on the wall.

‘You don’t have to censor your photos on my behalf.’ Caroline walked over to look at the picture Karl was holding. A bland-faced young blond smiled into the camera. ‘It’s nothing to do with me if you have girlfriends.’ Or if they don’t look interesting enough to be impressive, she added silently.

Karl shook his head. ‘Mother has been staying here while I’ve been away. She likes to take a break from my father, and she uses the excuse that she’ll come and clean my flat. She must have taken this picture, framed it and put it up here.’

‘That’s nice. So your mother chooses your girls as well as cleans your flat.’

‘I don’t deny that she’d like to.’ Karl slid the offending photo into a drawer. But she doesn’t. She just likes Elfrieda. And Elfrieda dropped in to see her every day when she was staying here. Mother told me that before. I phoned her when we stopped at the petrol station. I just wanted to check that she was safely home.’

Caroline laughed. ‘You mean safely out of here.’

When Karl returned Caroline was towel drying her hair. She wore a bathrobe she had found in his wardrobe.

‘No trouble finding you.’ Karl laughed, as he put three sorts of bread roll in a basket and set out five different kinds of sausage. ‘I just have to follow the trail of Dior talcum powder.’

Caroline bit into the roll that Karl had made for her. The sausage, larded with shavings of red and green capsicum, was delicious. ‘What’s this one called?’

Reaching for her handbag, she took out the small hardbound exercise book she used as a journal and wrote down Paprikalyoner, spelling it as Karl dictated. There was a German deli in Mayfair. She’d probably be able to get it there. She looked down at the battered green book with disapproval. There wasn’t as much in it. So too bad for her if the unexamined life wasn’t worth living. She’d been too busy living to examine anything.

Even on holiday, she had written little more than names of hotels and places visited. Last year’s week in Morocco with Jane had yielded just three entries, one of which included her room number in the Palais Jamail in Fez, where they had occupied the most opulent suite, complete with balcony, looking over what was said to be the garden once used exclusively by the ladies of the Caliph’s harem. La chambre deux cent onze, Caroline had written. Thirty years on we’ll be elegant ladies of uncertain age’ and we’ll reserve it in advance.

The pages referring to London indicated a life rich in outings to plays and films and parties but almost bereft of introspection.

An entry dated March 5 referred to matters of the heart. But not hers. Took day off to console Jane after David, it read. Expressed absolute sympathy but only felt it in theory. Can’t remember what it feels like to be so in love that a breakup makes me sick with grief. This makes me feel good. And free. But should it?

While they ate Karl leafed through a huge, heavily illustrated travel guide. He wanted to take her to Mad King Ludwig’s Neuschwannstein, the turreted castle that Walt Disney used as a model for the symbolic home of Disneyland. And to Rotenburg-ob-der-Tauber, one of Germany’s most famous and well-preserved medieval towns. The guidebook photo showed a row of beautifully painted half-timbered houses. To Caroline’s untrained eye, it looked just like a scene from the old part of Gellingen, but she made appreciative murmurs. There was a village festival on this very night, and there were the friends he wanted her to meet. The green eyes gleamed.

Caroline looked down at her journal with sudden affection. This week she was going to metamorphose into a conscientious diary-writer. An hour a day minimum, she would tell him. That’s what I need to write my journal. It looked like that would be the only time she’d get to herself. While Karl made coffee, she wrote August 1, Gellingen at the top of a new page, then closed the book and replaced it in her bag. She’d do her first hour that night.

At midnight, as she wearily brushed her teeth in Karl’s immaculate bathroom, she realised she’d forgotten all about it. She hadn’t had a minute to herself all day, but somehow it hadn’t mattered. Karl continued to make such an effort to give her a good time that she would have felt ungrateful for quibbling about anything.

Has any man ever put so much energy into giving her pleasure? She asked herself that question in bed that afternoon, and again later, as she perched on a stool in the kitchen sipping a glass of the fruity local red wine and watching Karl make chicken soup with Maultaschen, large pockets of meat-filled pastry like giant wontons. And again that evening as they strolled among the tents and stalls erected for a local festival, whose name she never quite caught, and he spent five minutes carefully explaining the difference between Bratwurst, Knackwurst, Weisswurst and Rodewurst – and then bought her one of each so she could tell for herself. He was also sticking to his promise to avoid pressuring her about any future plans. Instead he questioned her about her past, encouraging her own confessions by telling stories of his own, and refilling her glass to aid the conversation’s flow.

Perfect interview technique, Caroline noted. But she kept on talking, carelessly aware that her mere presence in his flat was a delight to him. If something she said were to shock him out of his obsession with her, then so much the better. So she held nothing back.

When she looked back on this short idyllic period, it seemed that they must have talked for the whole week. With time out for sex – a wonderfully huge amount. And hours spent eating meals cooked or chosen for her by Karl.

Her confidence was supreme. She took it for granted that he loved her. The only question was: would she be able to love him in return?