In life—you liked to warn me when I had grievously sinned against you—I can do anything I wish, just as long as I’m prepared to pay full price for it. Well, Father dear, I’m prepared. I’ll pay full price. If that means good-bye to my beautiful but brief career, I’ll pay that too.
And it so happens that by an act of benign Providence, if that’s what we believe in, I am in temporary possession of two apartments: one that I can’t wait to see the back of, the other a gem on the harbor front that I bought with the last of my beloved grandmother’s money just six weeks ago, and am in the throes of refurbishing.
And if that was not enough, Providence, or guilt or a sudden surge of unexpected compassion—she had no time to fathom which—had provided her with money. Brue’s money: on account of which there was not merely a short-term plan—an emergency plan of strictly limited duration and convenience—but, thanks to Brue’s munificence, a longer-term plan; a plan that allowed her time to cast around for solutions; a plan that, prudently implemented with help from her beloved brother, Hugo, would not only keep Issa safely hidden from his pursuers, but set him on the path to recovery.
“And you’ll call me, I imagine,” Brue had said, as if he, like Issa, needed to be rescued by her.
From what? Emotional deadness? Was Brue drowning too? Did she only have to hold out her hand to him as well?
They had reached her house. Turning, she saw Issa cowering in the darkness of an overhanging lime tree, his bag clutched in the folds of his black coat.
“What’s the matter?”
“Your KGB,” he muttered.
“Where?”
“They followed us from the taxi. First in a big car, then in a small one. One man, one woman.”
“They were just two cars that happened to pass by.”
“These cars had radio.”
“In Germany all cars have radios. Some have telephones as well. Please, Issa. And keep your voice down. We don’t want to wake everyone up.”
Glancing up and down the road but seeing nothing out of the ordinary, she descended the steps to the front door, unlocked it and nodded him forward, but he shied to one side and insisted on entering after her, and at a distance.
She had left the flat in a hurry. Her double bed was unmade, the pillow crushed, her pajamas strewn across it. The wardrobe had two sides, to the left her own clothes, to the right, Karsten’s. She had thrown Karsten out three months ago, but he’d never had the guts to fetch them. Or perhaps he thought that by leaving them there he was asserting his right of return. Well, screw him. One top-brand buckskin jacket, one pair of designer jeans, three shirts, one pair of soft leather moccasins. She dumped them on the bed.
“These are your husband’s, Annabel?” Issa inquired from the doorway.
“No.”
“They are whose, please?”
“They belonged to a man I had a relationship with.”
“He is dead, Annabel?”
“We broke up”—wishing by now she hadn’t told him to call her by her first name, although with clients she always did, and kept her surname to herself.
“Why did you break up, Annabel?”
“Because we weren’t suited to each other.”
“Why were you not suited? Did you not love each other? Perhaps you were too severe towards him, Annabel. That is possible. You can be very severe. I have noticed this.”
At first she didn’t know whether to laugh out loud or slap him down. But when she looked at him for guidance, she saw only puzzlement in his eyes as well as fear, and she remembered that, in the world he had escaped from, there was no such thing as privacy. Simultaneously, a second thought overcame her and she was both ashamed and disconcerted by it: that she was the first woman he’d been alone with after years of confinement, and they were standing in her bedroom in the early hours of the morning.
“Would you lift that bag down for me, please, Issa?”
Taking a large step back to make way for him, she wondered whether she should have put her cell phone in her jacket pocket, though God knew who she was going to ring if things got heavy. Karsten’s holdall was gathering dust on top of the wardrobe. Issa lifted it down and laid it on the bed beside the clothes. She shoved the clothes into it and fetched her rolled-up sleeping bag from the bottom of the airing cupboard.
“Was he a lawyer like you, Annabel? This man you had a relationship with?”
“It doesn’t matter what he was. It’s not your business, and it’s over.”
Now it was she who wished urgently for greater distance between them. In the kitchen he was too tall for her and too present, however much he hung back. She set a bin bag on the table and brusquely held up items for his approval: Wholegrain bread, Issa? Yes, Annabel. Green tea? Cheese? Live yogurt from the funky organic shop ten minutes’ cycle ride away that she determinedly patronized in opposition to the supermarket up the road? Yes, Annabel, to all of it.
“I can’t give you meat, okay? I don’t eat it.”
But what she wanted to say was: Nothing’s going on here. All that’s happening is I’m sticking my neck out for you. I’m your lawyer and that’s all I am, and I’m doing this for the principle, not the man.
They carted their luggage to the crossroads. A cab appeared and she directed it to a point above the harbor front. Then for the second time, she walked him the rest of the way.
Her new apartment was eight rickety flights of wooden staircase high, set in the loft of an old dockside warehouse that according to its owner was the only building the British had had the grace to leave to posterity when they bombed the rest of Hamburg into oblivion. It was a shiplike attic fourteen meters by six with iron rafters and a grand arched window that looked down onto the harbor; and a bathroom crammed into one eave and a kitchen in the other. She had first seen it at an open house, with half of Hamburg’s young rich tripping over themselves to buy it, but the owner had taken a shine to her and, unlike her present landlord, he was gay and didn’t want to get her into bed.
By the same evening, the flat was miraculously hers, a Karsten-free life in the making, and for the last six weeks she had been cosseting it, fussing over its wiring and plasterwork and paintwork, replacing rotting floorboards, and in the evenings, after another sickening tribunal or another lost battle with authority, racing down here on her bicycle, just to stand at the arched window with her elbows on the sill and watch the sun go down, and the cranes and cargo ships and ferries interweaving and relating in the way that human beings should, respectfully and without crashing into one another, and the gulls swirling and warring, and the kids rampaging on the playground.
And in what she knew to be a rosy surge of optimism, she would congratulate herself on the woman she was about to become, married to her work and her family at the Sanctuary—Lisa, Maria, André, Max, Horst and doughty Ursula, their boss—men and women who like herself were dedicated to fighting the good fight for people whom the accidents of life had earmarked for the scrap heap.
Or put another way: coming home exhausted and as empty as the flat that awaited her, knowing that however hard she had pushed herself all day, there was only herself to look forward to at night. But even nothing was better than Karsten.
They climbed the stairs slowly, Annabel leading, and at each floor she put down her bin bag of provisions and made sure Issa was struggling after her with the holdall and the bedroll. She would have shared more of the load with him but every time she tried he waved her angrily away, although after two flights he was looking like an old, thin child, and after three his breathing was coming in rasps that echoed up and down the stairwell.
The din they were making alarmed her until she remembered it was Saturday and there were no other tenants. All the other floors were given over to fancy offices of haute couture, designer furniture and gourmet food companies: worlds she told herself that she had resolutely left behind.
Issa had stopped halfway up the last flight and was staring past her, his face stiff with fear and inc
omprehension. The door to her loft was of old hammered iron with heavy bolts. Its giant padlock would have secured the Bastille. She hurried down to him and this time accidentally seized his arm, only to feel him recoil.
“We’re not locking you up, Issa,” she said. “We’re trying to keep you free.”
“From your KGB?”
“From everyone. Just do as I say.”
He slowly shook his head, then in an act of terrible submission lowered it, and step after step, but so laboriously that his feet might have been chained together, he followed her up the last of the stairs. Then stopped again, head still bowed and feet together, while he waited for her to unlock the door. But all her instincts told her not to.
“Issa?”
No reply. Stretching out her right hand until it was directly in his eyeline, she laid the key on her open palm and offered it to him the way she had offered carrots to her horse when she was small.
“Here. You open it. I’m not your jailer. Take the key and unlock the door for us. Please.”
For a lifetime, as it seemed to her, he remained staring downward at her open hand, and at the rusted key lying on it. But either the prospect of taking it from her was too much for him, or he was fearful of making contact with her bare flesh, for abruptly his head, then his whole upper body, turned away from her in rejection. But Annabel refused to be rejected.
“Do you want me to open it?” she demanded. “I need to know, please, Issa. Are you telling me I may open this door? Do I have your permission? Answer me, please, Issa. You’re my client. I need your instructions. Issa, we’re going to stand here and get very cold and tired until you instruct me to open this door. Do you hear me, Issa? Where’s your bracelet?”
It was in his hand.
“Put it back on your wrist. You’re not in danger here.”
He put the bracelet back on his wrist.
“Now tell me to open the door.”
“Open.”
“Say it louder. Open the door, please, Annabel.”
“Open the door, please.”
“Annabel.”
“Annabel.”
“Now watch me unlock the door at your request, please. There. Done. I go in first and you follow me. Not like prison at all. No, leave the door open behind you, please. We won’t close it until we need to.”
It was three days since she had been here. A swift look round told her that the builders were more advanced than she had feared. The plastering was nearly complete, the tiles she had ordered were stacked and waiting, the old bathtub her mother had found in Stuttgart was in place, fitted with the brass taps Annabel had bought at the flea market. The water supply was restored, or why would the builders have left their coffee cups in the sink? The telephone she had ordered was in its blister pack at the center of the floor, waiting to be connected.
Issa had discovered the arched window. Stock-still, his back to her as he contemplated the lightening sky, he was tall again.
“It’s only for a day or two while I make other arrangements,” she called to him lightly down the room. “This is where we keep you safe for your own good. I’ll bring you books and food and visit you every day.”
“I cannot fly?” he inquired, his gaze still on the sky.
“I’m afraid not. You can’t go outside either. Not until we’re ready to move you.”
“You and Mr. Tommy?”
“Me and Mr. Tommy.”
“He will visit also?”
“He’s consulting his files. That’s what he has to do. I’m not a banker, neither are you. Not everything can be solved at once. We have to move one step at a time.”
“Mr. Tommy is an important gentleman. When I am appointed a doctor, I shall invite him to the ceremony. He has a good heart and speaks Russian like a Romanov. Where did he learn to do this?”
“In Paris, I believe.”
“Is that where you learned your Russian also, Annabel?”
This time, at least, it wasn’t about Karsten. He had stopped sweating. His voice was calm again.
“I learned my Russian in Moscow,” she said.
“You were at school in Moscow, Annabel? That is most interesting! I too was at school in Moscow. Only for a short time, it is true. What school, please? What number? Maybe I am familiar with this school. Did they accept Chechen students?”—clearly excited to be making a connection between his world and hers, imagining perhaps that they were school friends.
“It didn’t have a number.”
“Why not, Annabel?”
“It wasn’t that kind of school.”
“What kind of school is it that doesn’t have a number? Was it a KGB school?”
“No, it most certainly was not! It was a private school.” In her sudden weariness she heard herself telling him the rest. “It was a private school for the children of foreign officials living in Moscow. So I attended it.”
“Your father was a foreign official living in Moscow? What kind of official, Annabel?”
She was backtracking. “I happened to be staying in the house of an official foreign family. I was eligible to attend this private school, and that’s where I learned to speak Russian.”
And that’s more than I meant to tell you, because not even you are going to drag out of me the fact, unknown even to the Sanctuary, that my father was legal attaché to the German embassy in Moscow.
A beeper was screaming and it was not her own. Fearing they had set off some clever alarm left behind by the builders, she peered anxiously round the room for the source, but it was Issa’s electronic pager, given him by Melik, summoning him to the first prayer hour of the day.
Yet he remained at the window. Why? Was he looking for his KGB followers? No. He was plotting the direction of Mecca by the dawn light before his pencil-thin body folded to the bare floorboards.
“You will please leave the room, Annabel,” he said.
Waiting in the kitchen, she cleared a space and unpacked the bin bag. Sitting on a stool with one elbow on the decorators’ table and her fist bunched against her cheek, she lapsed into a daze in which, by an act of self-transposition, she found herself staring, as often when she was tired, at her father’s collection of small paintings by Flemish masters that hung in the drawing room of the family estate outside Freiburg.
“Bought at auction in Munich by your grandfather, darling,” her mother had replied when, as a rebellious fourteen-year-old, Annabel had launched her one-woman investigation into the paintings’ provenance. “The way your father likes to collect his icons.”
“How much for?”
“In today’s money, they’re no doubt worth a great deal. But back in those days, pennies.”
“Bought at auction when?” she had demanded. “Bought who from? Who did the paintings belong to before Grandpa bought them for pennies at an auction in Munich?”
“Why don’t you ask your father, darling?” her mother suggested, altogether too sweetly for Annabel’s suspicious ear. “It’s his father, not mine.”
But when Annabel asked her father, he became someone she didn’t know. “Those times are over and done with,” he had retorted, in an official tone he had never used to her before. “Your grandfather had a nose for art, he paid the going price. For all I know, they’re fakes. Never dare ask that question again.”
And I never did, she remembered. Not in all the family forums since, whether out of love, or fear or, worst of all, submission to the family discipline she was in revolt against, had she dared ask that question again. And her parents considered themselves radicals! They were rebels, or had been: sixty-eighters who had manned the barricades at student protests, and carried banners urging the Americans to get out of Europe! “You young of today don’t know what real protest is about!” they liked to tell her laughingly, when she overstepped the mark.
Taking a notebook from her rucksack, she began jotting herself a must-do list by the glow from the skylight. Her lists were as much a family joke as her intransigence. One minute she was
this chaotic snail with her whole disorganized life in her rucksack, the next she was this German over-organizer who made herself lists about the lists she was going to make.
Soap.
Towels.
More food.
Sweet and savory.
Fresh milk.
Loo paper.
Russian medical journals: where to find?
My cassette player. Classical only, no trash.
And no, I won’t buy a bloody iPod, I refuse to be a slave to consumerism.
Unsure whether Issa was still at prayer, she softly returned to the big room. It was empty. She ran to the window. It was locked, no broken glass. She swung round and, with the light behind her, looked back into the room.
He was standing two meters above her on top of a builder’s ladder. Like some Soviet-era statue, he was holding a giant pair of scissors in one hand and in the other a paper airplane he must have cut from the roll of lining paper at the foot of the ladder.
“One day, I shall be a great aeronautical engineer like Tupolev,” he announced, without looking down at her.
“No more doctor?” Annabel called up, humoring him as she might a suicide.
“Doctor also. And maybe, if I have time, lawyer. I wish to acquire the Five Excellences. Do you know the Five Excellences? If you do not, you are not cultivated. I have already a good grounding in music, literature and physics. Maybe you will convert to Islam and I will marry you and attend to your education. That will be a good solution for both of us. But you must not be severe. Look, Annabel.”
Articulating his long body forward to a point where he defied the laws of gravity, he gently laid his paper airplane on the still air.
He’s simply another client, she repeated to herself angrily as she closed the door behind her and snapped shut the aged padlock.
A client who’s in need of special attention, granted. Unorthodox attention. Illegal attention. But a client for all that. And soon he’ll get the medical care he needs as well.
He’s a case. A legal case. With a file. All right, a patient too. He’s a damaged and traumatized child who’s had no childhood, and I’m his lawyer and his nanny and his only connection with the world.