“I’m thinking—nothing.”
“Andreas.”
“Please go away so I can masturbate!”
He was protecting her, not the other way around, and when his father came home from yet another round of factory tours and informed him that he had a date with a psychologist, he assumed that his mission in the counseling sessions would be to continue protecting her. His father wouldn’t have entrusted him to anyone but the most politically rocksolid, Stasi-certified psychologist. However much Andreas was coming to hate his mother, there was no way that he was telling the psychologist about the ghost.
The Republic’s capital wasn’t just spiritually flat but literally flat. Such few hills as it had were composed of rubble from the war, and it was on a minor one of these, a grassy berm behind the back fence of the football pitch, that Andreas had first seen the ghost. Beyond the berm were disused rail tracks and a narrow stretch of wasteland too irrationally shaped to have fit into any five-year development plan to date. The ghost must have come up from the tracks on the late afternoon when Andreas, winded from sprints, hung his hands on the fence and pressed his face into its links to catch his breath. At the top of the rise, maybe twenty meters away, a gaunt and bearded figure in a ratty sheepskin jacket was looking at him. Feeling his privacy and privilege invaded, Andreas turned around and put his back to the fence. When he returned to running sprints and glanced up at the hill, the ghost was gone.
But he appeared again at dusk the following day, again looking directly at Andreas, singling him out. This time some of the other players saw the ghost and shouted at him—“Stinking deviant!” “Go wipe yourself!” etc.—with the morally untroubled contempt that club members had for anyone not playing by society’s rules. You couldn’t get in trouble for reviling a bum; quite the opposite. One of the boys peeled off and went to the fence to shout abuse from a closer range. Seeing him approach, the ghost ducked behind the hill and out of sight.
After that, he appeared after dark, loitering at the point on the hill where the light from the pitch ended, his head and shoulders dimly visible. Running up and down the pitch, Andreas kept looking to see if the ghost was still there. Sometimes he was, sometimes he wasn’t; twice he seemed to beckon to Andreas with a motion of his head. But he was always gone by the time the final whistle blew.
After a week of this peek-a-boo, Andreas took Joachim aside when practice ended and everyone else was leaving the pitch. “That guy on the hill,” he said. “He keeps looking at me.”
“Oh, so it’s you he’s after.”
“Like he has something to say to me.”
“Gentlemen prefer blonds, man. Somebody should report him.”
“I’m going to jump the fence. Find out what his story is.”
“Don’t be stupid.”
“There’s something weird about the way he looks at me. It’s like he knows me.”
“Wants to get to know you. It’s your curly golden locks, I’m telling you.”
Joachim was probably right, but Andreas had a mother in whose eyes he could do no wrong, and by now, at the age of fourteen, he was accustomed to following his impulses and taking what he wanted, so long as he didn’t directly disrespect authority. Things always turned out well for him: instead of falling on his face, he was praised for his initiative and creativity. He felt like talking to the ghost in the sheepskin jacket and getting his story, which was bound to be less boring than anything else he’d heard in the past week, and so, with a shrug, he went over to the fence and wedged a toe in its links.
“Hey, come on,” Joachim said.
“Call the police if I’m not back in twenty minutes.”
“You’re unbelievable. I’m coming with you.”
This was what Andreas had wanted, and, as usual, he was getting it.
From the top of the rise, they couldn’t see much in the shadows along the rail tracks. A truck skeleton, urban weeds, small prospectless trees, some pale lines that might have been the remains of walls, and their own attenuated shadows from the pitch lights. Banks of mediumrise socialist housing were massed in the far distance.
“Hey!” Joachim shouted at the darkness. “Antisocial Element! You here?”
“Shut up.”
Down by the tracks they saw a movement. They took the straightest line they could to it, picking their way slowly in the poor light, weeds grabbing at their bare legs. By the time they reached the tracks, the ghost was all the way down near the Rhinstraße bridge. It was hard to tell, but he seemed to be looking at them.
“Hey!” Joachim bellowed. “We want to talk to you!”
The ghost started moving again.
“Go back and shower,” Andreas said. “You’re scaring him.”
“This is stupid.”
“I’ll only go as far as the bridge. You can meet me there.”
Joachim hesitated, but in the end he almost always did what Andreas wanted. When he was gone, Andreas trotted down the tracks, enjoying his little adventure. He could no longer see the ghost, but it was interesting just to be in an unregulated space, in the dark. He was smart and knew the rules, and he wasn’t breaking any by being here. He felt entitled to it, just as he felt entitled to be the player on the football pitch whom the figure stared at. He wasn’t afraid; he felt unharmable. Still, he was glad of the safety of the streetlights on the bridge. He stopped in front of it and peered into its shadows. “Hello?” he said.
A foot scraped on something in the shadows.
“Hello?”
“Come under the bridge,” a voice said.
“You come out.”
“No, under here. I won’t hurt you.”
The voice sounded gentle and educated, which somehow didn’t surprise him. It wouldn’t have been appropriate for a person who wasn’t intelligent to stare at him and beckon to him. He moved under the bridge and made out a human shape by one of the pillars. “Who are you?” he said.
“Nobody,” the ghost said. “An absurdity.”
“Then what do you want? Do I know you?”
“No.”
“Then what do you want?”
“I can’t stay here, but I wanted to see you before I go back.”
“Back to where?”
“Erfurt.”
“Well, here I am. You’re seeing me. Do you mind if I ask why you’re spying on me?”
The bridge above them shook and boomed with the weight of a passing truck.
“What would you say,” the ghost said, “if I told you I’m your father?”
“I’d say you’re a lunatic.”
“Your mother is Katya Wolf, née Eberswald. I was her student and colleague at Humboldt University from 1957 until February 1963, at which time I was arrested, tried, and sentenced to ten years in prison for subversion of the state.”
Andreas involuntarily took a step backward. His fear of political lepers was instinctive. No good could come of contact with them.
“Needless to say,” the ghost added, “I did not subvert the state.”
