The Secret Wife(71)
His notebook was sitting on the table next to the typewriter – thank goodness it hadn’t got lost – and he sat down with a cup of coffee to read through his notes from the previous day. Suddenly he remembered telling Rosa that he was writing a novel. Why not? He had recently started reading novels again, borrowing them from Rodina’s bookshop, which stocked Russian-language books. Many works by émigrés were self-indulgent laments, with little plot or characterisation; he was sure he could do better.
He went out to the local bakery to buy some warm pastries, then came back to eat them with another cup of coffee, and he began to jot down ideas for his novel: a boy and a girl meet in their teens and fall in love but are torn apart by civil war when their families are sent to opposite ends of Russia; then he would write of the boy’s long search to find her again. Tatiana was in his head every moment and he decided to try and define the effects of love on body and soul. He found the first scene was clear in his mind: the boy, whom he would call Mikhail, watches the girl – Valerina, after his beloved sister – falling off her bike and trying desperately not to cry at the pain of grazed hands and knees. At that moment Mikhail feels the beginnings of the empathy, basically an insight into another person’s emotions, the first step that will lead to love. He began to write, and the words flowed from his pen, bringing a sense of tranquillity.
Two nights later he went back to the café where Rosa worked and asked if she would like to have dinner with him on her night off.
‘Well, of course I would,’ she replied, rolling her eyes as if she couldn’t understand what had taken him so long.
Chapter Forty-One
Dmitri had only seen Rosa in her tight black-and-white waitress’s uniform so he was somewhat taken aback when she met him for their dinner date wearing her own rather eccentric clothes. Her frock of a yellow and purple pattern was a couple of sizes too large, as if she had borrowed it from her grandmother’s wardrobe then belted it round the hips so it didn’t fall down. She wore strings of multi-coloured beads round her neck and multiple bracelets that clattered as she moved her arm, while on her head there was a cloche hat with a knitted purple flower attached. When he looked closely, he saw there was a knitted bee inside the flower. It was like a parody of the flapper style worn in the more expensive clubs of Charlottenburg, but somehow it worked. While they talked, her dress slipped down to reveal the creamy flesh of her shoulder and she ignored it for a while before pulling it up with a wink.
They ate in a medium-priced restaurant, and he ordered steak for them both, followed by a rather good apfeltorte. Rosa asked about his life in Russia but he didn’t feel like talking about that, so instead he questioned her about her own background. Born in the countryside, she said she had always longed to swap the sound of cows outside her bedroom window for the traffic and bustle of the city. She moved to Berlin when she was eighteen and shared a tiny apartment with three other girls, one of whom was her cousin, a dancer. She was now twenty-one and she loved dancing, eating good food, and meeting new people. Especially people.
‘So you enjoy waitressing?’ Dmitri asked.
She wrinkled her nose. ‘For now. The tips are good, but some customers are rude. They look down on me for the job I do without knowing anything about me. I could be a ballerina or a scientist, an artist or a pearl diver, but they don’t see past the uniform to my magnificent brain and sparkling personality.’ She flung her arms out dramatically like a compére at a cabaret announcing the star guest.
Dmitri laughed. ‘Tell me then, what are you?’
She cocked her head to one side and thought before answering. ‘I don’t entirely know yet, but I like looking after people. I want to have dozens of babies one day; hundreds of them.’
‘I sincerely hope you achieve your ambition.’
‘Well, at least I can have fun trying,’ she twinkled.
Dmitri marvelled at the freedom of this woman’s life, so unlike those of women in Russia. She could do what she wanted, say what she felt without fear of repression. It was refreshing.
After dinner they strolled through Charlottenberg, which she told him Germans were now calling Charlottengrad because of the high percentage of Russian immigrants.
‘How did you learn to speak such fluent Russian?’ Dmitri asked, because that was the language they conversed in, although she sometimes switched to English mid-sentence if she didn’t know a word.
‘I picked it up as I went along. You’ll find I’m very chatty. Some cruel folk say it’s hard to shut me up.’
‘Would you like to come back to my apartment?’ he asked.
‘That sounds mar-r-vellous,’ she replied in English, rolling her ‘r’ with a broad smile.
Soon after climbing the stairs, they were undressing each other and jumping into Dmitri’s bed. Rosa made love enthusiastically and expertly, rolling him over onto his back so she could sit on top. It was clear she was not a virgin and afterwards, he rather ungallantly asked about her previous lovers.
‘There was just one before you,’ she said. ‘He was also Russian. I liked him but he disappeared one day and several weeks later I got a postcard from Paris. He said he thought Bolshevik spies were following him and had to flee. I don’t know if it was true or not.’
‘You didn’t want to join him in Paris?’