A Ladder to the Sky(109)

‘Well,’ he replied, blushing a little, and it seemed as if he was about to say something to justify himself, but I didn’t let him.

‘Look, on the night that we met I could see how drawn he was to me. It was so obvious it was almost pitiable. Erich had shut down that part of his soul for decades after the death of Oskar G?tt and, for whatever reason, I had reawoken him. He was utterly reinvigorated by my presence, as if he’d taken a deep breath after staying underwater for too long. That’s why he invited me to visit all those cities with him; it wasn’t to help him, it wasn’t to be an assistant, it was because he fancied me. And why not? I was a good-looking boy and I brought him back to life. I may have taken advantage of his good nature, but why not? I flirted with him, made sure that I remained sexually ambiguous at all times. Always a possibility but never a certainty. I led him on to the point where he was so overwhelmed with desire that I think there was literally nothing he wouldn’t have done for me, had I asked. And then, when I got everything I needed from him, I wrote Two Germans.’

‘And your friendship ended there?’

‘This might seem callous to you, Daniel,’ I said. ‘Theo, I mean. But once I had what I needed, why would I have stuck around? Are you planning a lifelong relationship with me after you complete your thesis?’

‘No, but—’

‘I didn’t consider him a friend, anyway, and it’s impossible to define how he saw me. He was paying me, remember, and you don’t pay your friends to travel with you, do you? You pay an assistant. And also, other than a love of books, we had very little in common. Think about it: he was old; I was young. He wanted a lover; I didn’t. His career was almost behind him; mine was yet to begin. You could say that I actually did him a favour when I severed the umbilical cord that connected us, even if the cut did produce more blood than either of us had anticipated. No, the time had come to say goodbye. Anything else would have just made Erich look foolish. If he could only have seen that, then he might have thanked me.’

‘So you dropped him.’

I shrugged. ‘If you want to put it that way, yes.’

‘Would it be fair to say that you took his friendship, his mentoring, and all his belief in you and simply threw it back in his face?’

I considered this for a moment. ‘Try to look at it from my point of view,’ I said. ‘What you’re describing is a young man utterly calculating and dishonest in his actions. But was Erich honest with me? Let’s face it, if I had been two hundred pounds overweight and looked like something that had been washed in on the tides after a particularly brutal storm, do you think he would have asked me to join him for a drink that night in West Berlin? I wasn’t the only waiter working that night, you know, but I was the one he chose. It’s easy to look at me as the villain of the piece but, really, Erich’s actions weren’t entirely honourable either.’

‘I suppose it comes down to motivation,’ said Theo. ‘Whatever Erich did was done out of love. And confusion. And regret for a wasted life. While you were just using him. And, really, did he deserve it? An elderly man who, many decades before, while he was still a teenager, had made a single terrible mistake, one that he’d had to live with ever since. How many young men in Germany at that time did something to send people to their death? Oh, it doesn’t make it right, of course it doesn’t, but he wasn’t a monster. Just a bewildered boy who acted without thinking. He spent his entire life punishing himself for that. Did he need that extra suffering at the end?’

I lowered my head, closed my eyes and tried to control my temper. It seemed a little rich to me that, with all the help I was giving this boy, he had the audacity to be so judgemental towards me. I looked up again, ready to say as much, but he was doing that thing again, tapping his index finger quickly against his thumb, just as Daniel had done, and I softened. I needed his forgiveness, not his condemnation.

‘Like I said,’ I continued quietly, ‘it’s all a long time ago. And if you don’t mind, I’d prefer not to talk about Erich any more. Sometimes it feels as if I’ve spent half of my life discussing that man and, sooner or later, it has to stop.’

‘But—’

‘No, Daniel,’ I said, placing a hand flat on the table. ‘It has to stop.’

He nodded. ‘All right.’

The notepad reappeared and he turned to a blank page and started scribbling away, a curious smile on his face. He didn’t talk for a long time and I found myself fixated on his hands.

‘Do you remember when Miss Willow tried to get you to write with your right hand?’ I asked, smiling at the memory.

‘I’m sorry?’ he said, looking up.

‘When you were seven or eight. And Miss Willow said that it would be better if you stopped writing with your left hand. She tried to force you to write with your right and I had to go in to the head, Mrs Lane, and lodge a complaint.’

He said nothing, shook his head, and began scribbling in his notebook again. I ordered some more drinks and drank another neat whisky at the bar, which wasn’t like me. I had my strict drinking routine and preferred not to alter it. Somehow, though, I just felt like I needed more. I wanted to fade away.

‘Let’s move on to something else,’ he said, when I sat back down again. He moved his beer to one side, barely glancing at it, while I took a long draught from mine. ‘I’d like to ask you about your time in New York. You wrote two books there, am I right?’