The Boy Who Followed Ripley Read online

  “I’ll get dressed and knock on your door in about ten minutes,” Tom said, standing up. “Bring your passport, Ben. That’s for the Wall.” The boy was dressed, but Tom was still in pajamas.

  They caught an old-fashioned streetcar from the Kurfürstendamm to Charlottenburg, and spent more than an hour in the museums of archaeology and paintings. Frank lingered over the models of activities of long ago in the Berlin area, copper mining by men in animal-pelt garments three thousand years before Christ. As at Beaubourg, Tom found himself watching out for anyone who might show an interest in Frank, but Tom saw only parents with chattering and curious children peering into cases. Berlin, so far, presented a mild and harmless scene.

  Then another streetcar back to the Charlottenburg S-Bahn stop for the ride to the Friedrichstrasse stop and the Wall. Tom had his map. They were aboveground all the way, though this was now an underground or subway type of train, and Frank stared out the window at the passing apartment houses, mostly rather old and drab, which meant that they had not been bombed. Then the Wall, gray and ten feet high as promised, topped with barbed wire, sprayed with covering paint in spots by East German soldiers, Tom remembered, before President Carter’s visit a couple of months ago, so that West German television could not send the anti-Soviet slogans painted on the Wall into the homes of East Berliners and of many East Germans who could get West German television programs on their sets. Tom and Frank waited in a room with some fifty other tourists and West Berliners, many laden with shopping bags, baskets of fruit, tinned hams, and what looked like boxes from clothing stores. These were mostly elderly people, probably visiting for the umpteenth time their siblings and cousins cut off by the Wall since 1961. Tom and Frank’s seven-digit numbers were finally called out by a girl behind a grilled window, which meant that they could file through to another room with a long table manned by East German soldiers in gray-green uniforms. A girl returned their passports, and a few yards on they had to buy from a soldier six DM fifty pfennigs’ worth of East German money, which came to more in East German marks. Tom had an aversion to touching it, and stuck it in an empty back pocket.

  Now they were “free.” Tom smiled at the thought as they began walking along the Friedrichstrasse, which continued here, beyond the Wall. Tom pointed out the still uncleaned palaces of the Prussian royal family. Why the hell didn’t they clean them, Tom wondered, or plant some hedge boxes around them, if they wanted to make a good impression on the rest of the world?

  Frank looked all around him, speechless for several minutes.

  “Unter den Linden,” Tom said, not in a merry tone. A sense of self-preservation made him try, however, for something cheering, so he took Frank by the arm and swung him into a street on the right. “Let’s go this way.”

  They were back on a street—yes, Friedrichstrasse again now—where long stand-up counters projected from snack cafés halfway across the pavement, patrons stood spooning soup, eating sandwiches, drinking beer. Some of them looked like construction workers in plaster-dusty overalls, some were women and girls who might have been office workers.

  “I might buy a ballpoint pen,” said Frank. “It’d be fun to buy something here.”

  They approached a stationer’s shop which had an empty newsstand in front, only to be greeted by a sign on the front door saying: CLOSED BECAUSE I FEEL LIKE CLOSING. Tom laughed, translating it for Frank.

  “Bound to be another shop along here,” said Tom as they walked on.

  There was another, but it was also closed, and another handwritten sign said: CLOSED BECAUSE OF HANGOVER. Frank thought this hilarious.

  “Maybe they do have a sense of humor, but otherwise it’s just like what I read about it, sort of—drab, maybe.”

  Tom also felt a creeping depression that he remembered from his first trip to East Berlin. The people’s clothes looked limp. This was Tom’s second visit, and he would not have come if the boy hadn’t wanted to see it. “Let’s have some lunch, cheer ourselves up,” Tom said, gesturing toward a restaurant.

  This was a big, modest, efficient-looking restaurant, and some of the long tables bore white tablecloths. If they hadn’t enough money on them, Tom thought, the cashier would be delighted to take DM. They sat down, and Frank studied the clientèle thoughtfully—a man in a dark suit with spectacles, eating by himself, and two plumpish girls chattering away over their coffee at a nearby table—as if he watched animals of a new species in a zoo. Tom was amused. These were “Russians” to Frank, he supposed, tinged with Communism.

  “They’re not all Communists, really,” Tom said. “They’re Germans.”

  “I know. But it’s just the idea that they can’t go and live in West Germany if they want to—can they?”

  “That is correct,” Tom said, “they can’t.”

  Their food was arriving, and Tom waited until the blonde waitress, who had a friendly smile, had departed. “But the Russians say they built the Wall to keep the capitalists out. That’s their pitch, anyway.”

  They went up to the top of the Alexanderplatz tower, pride of East Berlin, to take coffee and admire the view. Then both were seized by a desire to leave.

  West Berlin, surrounded as it was, felt like the wide open spaces once they had quit the district of the Wall and were rattling along on the elevated train toward the Tiergarten. They had changed a few more ten-DM notes, and Frank was now pouring over his East Berlin coins.

  “I might keep these as souvenirs—or send a couple to Teresa for fun.”

  “Not from here, please,” Tom said. “Keep them till you get back home.”

  It was refreshing to see the lions strolling in apparent freedom in the Tiergarten, tigers lounging by their swimming pool, yawning in the faces of the public, though there was a moat between them and the visitors. The trumpeter swan, just as Tom and Frank walked by, lifted his long neck and trumpeted. They made their way slowly toward the aquarium. Here Frank fell in love with the Druckfisch.

  “Unbelievable!” Frank’s lips parted in astonishment, and he looked suddenly like a child of twelve. “Those eyelashes! Just like makeup!”

  Tom laughed and stared at the little fish of brilliant blue, hardly six inches long, cruising at what could be called moderate speed, apparently in quest of nothing, except that its little round mouth kept opening and closing as if it were asking something. The lids of its oversized eyes were outlined in black, and above and below were what looked like long black lashes, gracefully curved, as if a cartoonist had drawn them on its blue scales with a grease pencil. It was one of the wonders of nature, Tom thought. He had seen the fish before. It astounded him again, and it pleased Tom that the Druckfisch evoked more admiration from Frank than the celebrated Picassofisch. The Picassofisch, equally smallish, bore a black zigzag on its yellow body, suggesting a Picasso brushstroke of his Cubist period, and a blue band across its head with several raised antennae—odd enough, surely, but somehow no match for the Druckfisch’s eyelashes. Tom turned his eyes away from their watery world, and felt like a clumsy lump as he walked on, breathing air.

  The crocodiles, in their heated and glass-enclosed quarters with a pedestrian bridge through, had a few slightly bleeding wounds on them, no doubt inflicted by their fellows. But just now they were all dozing, with fearful grins.

  “Had enough?” Tom asked. “I wouldn’t mind going to the Bahnhof.”

  They left the aquarium and walked a few streets to the railway station, where Tom got some more German money with his French francs. Frank changed some also.

  “You know, Ben,” Tom said as he pocketed his marks, “one more day here, and you have to think about—home, maybe?” Tom had cast an eye about the Bahnhof interior, meeting place for hustlers, fences, gays, pimps, drug addicts, and God knew what. He walked as he spoke, wanting to get out of the place, in case one of the loitering people, for some reason, might be interested in him and the boy.

  “I might go to Rome,” Frank said as they walked toward the Ku’damm.

  “D
on’t go to Rome. Save it for another time. You’ve been to Rome, didn’t you say?”

  “Only twice when I was a little kid.”

  “Go home first. Get things straightened out. Also with Teresa. You could still go to Rome this summer. It’s only the twenty-sixth of August.”

  Some thirty minutes later, when Tom was relaxing in his room with the Morgenpost and Der Abend, Frank rang him from his room.

  “I reserved a ticket to New York for Monday,” Frank said. “Takeoff eleven-forty-five Air France, then I switch to Lufthansa in Düsseldorf.”

  “Very good—Ben.” Tom felt relief.

  “You might have to lend me a little money. I can buy the ticket, but it’ll leave me maybe a little short.”

  “No problem,” Tom said patiently. Five thousand francs was over a thousand dollars, and why should the boy need more if he was going straight home? Was he so in the habit of carrying big sums, he felt uncomfortable without a lot? Or had money, from him, become a symbol of love to Frank?

  That evening they went to a cinema, walked out before the end, and since it was after eleven and they had had no dinner, Tom steered them toward the Rheinische Winzerstuben, which was just a few steps away. Half-drawn glasses of beer, at least eight, stood lined up beside the beer taps, awaiting customers. The Germans took several minutes to draw a beer properly, a fact which Tom appreciated. Tom and Frank chose their food from a counter offering homemade soups, ham, roast beef and lamb, cabbage, fried or boiled potatoes, and half a dozen kinds of bread.

  “It’s true what you said about Teresa,” Frank said when they had found a table. “I should get things clearer with her.” Frank gulped, though he had not yet eaten a bite. “Maybe she likes me, maybe she doesn’t. And I realize I’m not old enough. Five more years of school if I finish college. Good Christ!”

  Frank seemed furious with the school system suddenly, but Tom knew his problem was uncertainty about the girl.

  “She’s different from other girls,” the boy went on. “I can’t describe it—in words. She’s not silly. She’s very sure of herself—that’s what scares me sometimes, because I don’t look as self-confident as she does. Maybe I’m not.— Maybe one day you’ll meet her. I hope so.”

  “I hope so too.— Eat your meal while it’s hot.” Tom felt that he never would meet Teresa, but illusion, hope such as the boy was trying to hang onto now—what else kept people going? Ego, morale, energy, and what people so vaguely called the future— wasn’t it for most people based on another person? So very few people could make it alone. And himself? Tom tried for a few seconds to imagine himself in Belle Ombre without Heloise. No one to talk to in the house except Mme. Annette, no one to switch on the gramophone and fill the house suddenly with rock music or sometimes Ralph Kirkpatrick on the harpsichord. Even though Tom kept from Heloise so much of his life, his illegal and potentially dangerous activities which could put an end to Belle Ombre if discovered, she had become a part of his existence, almost of his flesh, as they said in the marriage vows. They didn’t often make love, didn’t always when Tom shared her bed, which was hardly half the time, but when they did, Heloise was warm and passionate. The infrequency of their making love didn’t seem to bother her at all. Curious, since she was only twenty-seven, or was it twenty-eight? But convenient too, for him. He couldn’t have borne a woman who made demands several times a week: that really would have turned him off, maybe at once and permanently.

  Tom summoned his courage and asked in a tone both light and polite, “May I ask if you’ve been to bed with Teresa?”

  Frank glanced up from his plate with a quick and shaky smile. “Once. I— Well, of course it was wonderful. Maybe too wonderful.”

  Tom waited.

  “You’re the only person I would tell this to,” Frank continued in a lower voice. “I didn’t do very well. I think I was too excited. She was excited too, but nothing happened—really. It was at her family’s apartment in New York. Everybody was out, we had all the doors locked.— And she laughed.” Frank looked at Tom as if he had made a statement of fact, not one that hurt him, even, just a fact.

  “Laughed at you?” Tom asked, trying to assume an attitude of only mild interest. He lit a Roth-Händle, the German equivalent of a Gauloise.

  “At me, I dunno. Maybe. I felt awful. Embarrassed. I was ready to make love to her and then I couldn’t finish. You know?”

  Tom could imagine. “Laughed with you, maybe.”

  “I tried to laugh.— Don’t ever tell anybody, will you?”

  “No. Who would I tell, anyway?”

  “Other guys at school, they’re always boasting. I think half the time they’re lying. I know they are. Pete—one year older—I like him a lot, but I know he doesn’t always tell the truth. About girls, I mean. Sure, it’s easy, I think, if you don’t like a girl so much. You know? Maybe. Then you just think about yourself and being tough and making it and everything’s fine. But—I’ve been in love with Teresa for months. Seven months now. Since the night I met her.”

  Tom was trying to compose a question: had Teresa other boyfriends with whom she might be going to bed? Tom didn’t get the question out before a loud introductory chord rang out over the beerhall’s clatter and chatter.

  Something was happening on the far wall opposite them. Tom had seen the show once before. Lights had come on there, and the rumbustious overture to Der Freischütz boomed out from a rather rusty gramophone somewhere. From the wall, a flat tableau of spooky houses made of cutout silhouettes projected a few inches—an owl perched in a tree, the moon shone, lightning flashed, and a real rain of water drops slanted down from the right. There was also thunder, which sounded like big pieces of tin being shaken backstage. A few people got up from their tables for a better view.

  “That’s mad!” Frank said, grinning. “Let’s go look!”

  “You go,” said Tom, and the boy went. Tom wanted to stay seated to assess Frank from a distance, to see if anyone paid attention to him.

  Frank, in Tom’s blue blazer and his own brown corduroy trousers—a bit short, the trousers, and the boy must have grown since he bought them—watched the tableau-almost-vivant with his hands on his hips. No one that Tom could see paid the boy any attention.

  The music ended with crashes of cymbals, the lights went off, the raindrops trickled out, and people returned to their seats.

  “What a great idea!” Frank said, ambling back, looking relaxed. “The rain falls in a little gutter in front, you know?— Can I get you another beer?” Frank was eager to be of service.

  It was nearly one when Tom asked a taxi driver to take them to a bar called the Glad Hand. Tom didn’t know what street it was on. He had heard of it from someone, maybe even Reeves.

  “Maybe you mean the Glad Ass,” said the driver in German, smiling, though the name of the bar remained in English.

  “Whatever you say,” said Tom. He knew the Berliners changed the names of their bars when they spoke about them among themselves.

  This bar had no sign at all outside it, just a lighted list of beverage and snack prices behind glass on the outside wall by the door, but booming disco was audible from within. Tom pushed the brown door open, and a tall, ghostlike figure pushed Tom back in a playful way.

  “No, no, you can’t come in here!” said the figure, then grabbed Tom by his sweater front and pulled him in.

  “You’re looking charming!” Tom shouted at the figure that had pulled him in—over six feet tall in a sloppy muslin gown that swept the floor, his face a mask of pink and white paste.

  Tom made sure that Frank was in tow as he forged toward the bar, which looked impossible to get to because of the crowd—entirely men and boys, all yelling at each other. There seemed to be two big rooms for dancing, maybe even three. Frank was much stared at and greeted as he endeavored to follow Tom. “What the hell?” Tom said to him, with a cheerful shrug, meaning he didn’t think he would ever make it to the bar to order beer or anything else. There were tables agains
t the walls, but these were taken and more than taken with fellows standing and talking to the ones seated.

  “Hoppla!” roared another figure in drag into Tom’s ears, and Tom realized, almost with a twinge of shame, that it was perhaps because he looked straight. A miracle they didn’t throw him out, and maybe he had Frank to thank for being in. This led to a happier thought: Tom himself was an object of envy for having a nice-looking boy of sixteen in his company. Tom could in fact see that now, and it made him smile.

  A leather figure was asking Frank to dance.

  “Go ahead!” Tom shouted to Frank.

  Frank looked for an instant bewildered, scared, then seemed to collect himself, and he went off with the leather chap.

  “. . . my cousin in Dallas!” an American voice was shouting to someone on Tom’s left, and Tom moved away from that.

  “Dallas-Fort Vort!” said his German companion.

  “Naw, that’s the fuckin’ airport! I mean Dallas! Friday the bar’s called. Gay bar! Boys and girls!”

  Tom turned his back to them, somehow got a hand on the bar edge, and managed to order two beers. The three barmen or barmaids wore beaten up blue jeans but also wigs, rouge, ruffled blouses, and very gay lipsticky smiles. No one looked drunk, but everyone seemed wildly happy. Tom clung with one hand to the bar, and stood on tiptoe to look for Frank. He saw the boy dancing with even more abandon than with the girl in Romy Haag’s. Another fellow seemed to be joining them, though Tom couldn’t be certain. Now an Adonis-like statue, bigger than life and painted gold, descended from the ceiling and rotated horizontally over the dance floor, while from above colored balloons floated down, twisting, rising, stirred by the activity below. One of the balloons said motherfucker in Gothic black letters, others sported drawings and words Tom couldn’t make out from where he was.

  Frank was coming back, pressing his way through to Tom. “Look! Lost a button, sorry. Couldn’t find it on the dance floor and I got knocked down trying to look for it.” He meant the middle button on the blazer.

  “No importance! Your beer!” Tom said, handing the boy a tall, tapering glass.