his eyes the way a climber would stare across a mountain range. They attempted to conquer that frontier and laughed, calling him the great unknown. He was the kind of person who might go out for a packet of cigarettes and never come back. He left the bathroom door open as if he was the only person left in the world. He disappeared at a party, without explanation, leaving his coat behind. He never phoned back when somebody left a message.
Because he hardly spoke, they would speak for him, guessing what was inside his head. ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ they would say. They would set multiple-choice questions, all he had to do was nod or shake his head. Entire monologues would be put into his mouth while he remained mute. And when he revealed that he was an orphan, they became even more curious, passing the news around like a tabloid confession, as though they wanted to adopt him all over again. And maybe they envied his story. Maybe they were orphans themselves to some degree, disowning their parents, wishing they had no lineage. The freedom of having no family tree.
He placed all of his feelings into his music. He was able to keep a party going with a guitar, but he always sank into a phase of introspection soon afterwards. He was as thin as he was tall. He could ‘live on nothing’, they used to say.
Martin and Gregor got a job together, working in the warehouse of a publishing house. Martin was studying law and Gregor was attending a course on music composition. In the waiting room of Martin’s legal practice in Berlin, there is a framed poster with the word ‘Wanted’ written over the top. It offers a reward for the return of a small painting of the artist Francis Bacon, which was stolen from an exhibition in Berlin. The portrait was done by Bacon’s friend, Lucian Freud, a fellow artist with whom he had a falling-out later on. It shows Bacon with large lips and large eyes turned down, a sad, vulnerable expression in which he appears to be thinking about the nature of friendship and how it never remains static, always increasing or fading. The painting itself has never been recovered. The poster is like a shrine to friendship.
They both wore beards. They often sat on trolleys, holding philosophical debates to pass the time. They kept nix for each other after a hard night so the other person could sleep it off in the bookshelves with a couple of medical dictionaries for a pillow. Gregor still recalls the subsidised dinners in the canteen, pork and red cabbage and salted potatoes, served in a tin tray with tin foil across the top. He refused to eat pork and had to have a special lunch provided. Now and again one of the employees would make remarks about him. There was a residue of fascism left in the arguments of older men who spoke of ‘back then’, meaning under Hitler. Men who sometimes used Nazi phrases and said weirdos such as Martin and Gregor should be ‘taken away’.
Gregor arrived at work every day with his curly hair and a detective hat on his head. He wore white shoes and a tweed jacket, a full contradiction of styles. Martin was equally noisy in colour and style, with long hair and round glasses, carrying a doctor’s medical bag. Gregor’s beard was very black and he had a bright smile that could disarm people even in the most disastrous circumstances. He was taller than Martin, but he had the habit of hunching over to make up for his height, speaking to people from the side, as though he was uncomfortable with the responsibility that his height gave him and wanted to compensate by giving the impression of being smaller, more crouched, more looked after. Martin had the bigger laugh and could often be heard throughout the warehouse, irritating the hell out of the foreman, while Gregor laughed more in towards himself, a laugh that was shrinking rather than expanding.
Life seemed like one long party at the time, with Gregor playing ‘Riders on the Storm’ like an anthem on his guitar every night. Everything revolved around music and sex and drugs. The genius of youth. All that glorious time-wasting and useless enterprise. Gregor remembers taking acid and staring for five hours at his luminous hands, seeing right through the skin like thin parchment at the veins inside, wondering whose blood flowed through them.
On the autobahn outside Frankfurt one day, he and Martin were hitchhiking back to Berlin in the middle of winter when they were questioned by the police. It was a time of mistrust and tension in Germany. A time of protest making up for a time of lack of protest. A time of street demonstrations and rioting and potential terrorists.
It was getting dark early and they were both frozen to the bone. Gregor wore a cashmere coat, which he had picked up for nothing but which was far too small for him, and his detective hat. Martin wore a thin anorak and tennis shoes, hopping around from one foot to the other. There were dirty bits of hardened ice left at the side of the road from the last snow and the only thing keeping them warm was their beards. They cursed each other for the idea of hitching in winter, particularly when Martin’s father had plenty of money and they could easily have taken the train.
They had a hard time getting a lift. Two eccentric figures, one with his bashed-up doctor’s bag and the other with his guitar case, imagining the dreamy heat inside the cars going by. Motorists staring at them with those vacant, alarmist expressions as they passed by. They waited for like-minded people who might take pity on them and kept an eye out for cars like the one-stroke DCV, or the Renault 4, or the Volkswagen; high-mileage, proletarian vehicles that had become a symbol of new, alternative life. They had almost given up hope when a car suddenly pulled up ahead of them. At last, they said, picking up their bags and running towards it. But they stopped short when two men hopped out of the car and confronted them with handguns and badges.
‘Drop your bags,’ one of the men shouted.
They were ordered to step over the rail into an adjoining field. Within seconds, Gregor and Martin found themselves walking away down a slope with the men shouting orders, pointing guns at their backs. It seemed like such a calm place, with crows in the trees, the autobahn out of sight, like a river in spate behind them, and the winter sky fading to an icy blue.
‘Take off your coats and throw them to the side,’ the policemen demanded.
Martin did as he was told and threw his anorak away.
‘And that stupid fucking hat,’ one of the men bawled at Gregor.
Gregor refused to take off his hat, or his coat.
‘What’s all this about?’ he demanded, turning round towards the policemen.
The policemen directed their weapons at Gregor. He had been turned into a suspect by them, but his refusal took on a moral momentum, contradicting their unspoken accusations. Underneath the hippy clothing, there was a need to assert his identity in public, without any shame, without any doubt. This was the moment for it. He smiled, like a flashlight shining through his black beard, while the officers waved their guns and screamed at him to turn away, using the word ‘asshole’ in every phrase. Gregor then became serious, withdrew his smile and stared straight at the officer, telling him that he was refusing to take off his coat in the middle of winter.
‘You won’t get away with this any more,’ Gregor said. ‘I’m Jewish.’
It was like a grenade going off. He was saying it for the first time with great confidence. Everything changed. It was clear that Martin and Gregor were no terrorists. This was just a routine piece of opportunism, two thug policemen deciding to humiliate two free-living hippy wasters. But now it was all going wrong for them. The officers began to shrink back, looking at each other for reassurance. Out there in this ravine with the sound of civilisation so close by along the autobahn, they were asked to stare into the eyes of history. One of them continued bawling out orders for a moment, but the other began to weaken and said it was OK, all they needed was to see identification. Martin and Gregor showed their student ID cards and the policemen backed off, out of that history lesson as fast as they could.
When they got back to Berlin, Martin laughed and said it was the best one he had ever heard yet. He embraced Gregor again and again and said he had ‘saved his ass’ out there on the autobahn. Martin had been carrying
