Chapter Five
Berlin, a month before
On the Friday mornings of her new life, Saskia collected Die Zeit, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and The Guardian from a kiosk on Müllerstrasse. From there, she walked to her favourite café, ordered an espresso, and lingered over the columns and terse leaders, though she could read each word in parallel and be gone before her coffee arrived. Her quiet Fridays were rocks of habit. She considered her loneliness a success.
Six months earlier, she had entered Germany on an illegal passport and made her way to Berlin. She found an empty apartment in Wedding and filled it with second-hand furniture. She had little knowledge of German history and her life became that of an autodidact. Her discovery of Germany was, she believed, a discovery of herself.
It was an August night when she first saw footage of Checkpoint Charlie. She learned there had been Checkpoints Alpha and Bravo at Helmstedt and Dreilinden. Each name a military fingerprint on the map. And there was the Wall. She watched flag-waving young men and women axing and hammering at its grafitti’d face, assaulting it with feet, pressing with the weight of their bodies until a section fell like a concrete drawbridge. East and West together. Past and present combined. And Saskia, viewing the video, had cried with those young men and women from fourteen years before. Now, it was 2003. The protagonists of that night were well into their lives; the length of a generation had passed. But Saskia saw it for the first time.
An eddy caught her newspaper and brushed it shut. Saskia looked up to see that a customer had entered the café. She scowled at him and pinned the newspaper with her elbows. Kaspar came to her with a second espresso and shut the door. He nodded to her and she smiled back.
She sipped her coffee and watched the winter crowd through the glass wall.
There was a game she played. She picked two people at random and counted the degrees that separated their lives. With nothing more than a sense of curiosity about a person’s mobile phone number, that number would enter her attention as though whispered in her ear. Or a face. Who? she would think, and, moments later, a pixelated image from a driving licence application would fall across her mind’s eye. From this data Saskia could step to, say, the person’s first school, his employment history, criminal record, credit transaction history, and bank account. Once the first person was known, she selected a second. The only rule was that one of the pair had to be visiting Berlin. On average, a person would have one-hundred close friends and several hundred acquaintances. A pool of contact. Where there was potential for the pools to overlap, intermediate lives were stepping stones. In this way, she knew that the sister of Ibrahim, the kiosk owner, had been to school with the bank manager of her café waiter’s third girlfriend. Saskia made the steps and counted the stones.
Today, she did not play this game. In her pocket was a betting receipt worth more than one-hundred thousand Euros, which she planned to redeem within the hour. The victories survived only as trivia in the year 2023; they had been passed to Saskia by her dear friend, David Proctor, in the fast moments before she entered a time machine bound for 2003. She intended to work through this list and finance her life with winning bets. The receipt for one-hundred thousand Euros represented a risk, but a minimal one. The pink sheets on which the sporting victories were scrawled remained in her pocket at all times. They connected her physically to the future.
Someone in the crowd had stopped walking. It was a young woman with blue hair. She turned to look at Saskia.
Na, Schlumpf? thought Saskia. The Smurf had a looseness to her frame. A scarf flickered around her neck, smoky and silent. Her blouse was open on a T-shirt with the logo ‘cool as fcuk’. The woman’s skin was cloud white. So who was she?
Something inside Saskia assaulted the Internet.
(A match from a photo taken at Maynard School, Exeter, 1998: Jem Shaw, British)
Saskia smiled. The woman smiled back: relief. She entered the café as though the meeting were arranged.
Before the Smurf joined her, Saskia thought, Tell me more. Data rushed through her. She noticed an email attachment from a therapist registered in Exeter and stopped it with a twitch of thought. It began:
Jem Shaw: There is this anxiety in the background… like the hiss of a TV tuned to a dead channel.
Me: This hiss actually comes from the music box, doesn’t it?
JS: (is startled) How did you know about that?
Me: You mentioned it yesterday, when you were under.
JS: Perhaps it comes from the music box, yeah.
Me: Do you know the name of the tune?
JS: No, I never did.
Me: Sing it.
(JS hums a tune which I think is Bach’s ‘I call to thee, Lord Jesus Christ’)
Saskia blinked. Ich ruf zu dir, she thought, Herr Jesu Christ.
Me: Tell about feeling split in two.
JS: Split in two?
Me: Feeling like two people.
JS: Two people. Well.
Saskia lingered over those words.
Two.
People.
She thought back to a letter she had written earlier in the summer.
To whom it may concern:
My name is Saskia Brandt but I am living under an assumed name in Berlin. Use the attached information to contact me. It is the year 2003, some twenty years before the summer of my departure, the Indian summer of 2023.
As per the instructions of my representatives, this note should be delivered by hand to my friend Professor David Proctor or his daughter, Dr Jennifer Proctor, no earlier or later than September of 2023. I choose paper and ink because digital media are ephemeral, and I choose plain English because this letter might require the involvement of a third party. This third party should be a close professional associate of either David or Jennifer in the event they cannot be contacted.
Please: To the Proctors—or the person reading in lieu of them—if the technology to travel in time has not been lost or suppressed, I request and require that you make all reasonable efforts to rescue me. I claim this as the right of the second person in history to travel in time. To convince a third party for whom my story is unfamiliar, I will outline my circumstances and how I came by them.
Today, somewhere in Germany, is a little girl no more than five or six years old who will grow up to become the same person who writes this letter. This fact alone makes me sad in a way unique to me.
There was a hope that the time traveller would arrive in some parallel version of their past.
This has not happened. There is one world.
I began this letter with the statement of my name. You should know that my mind is a fusion—I can find no other word—of two people. Some time in the spring of 2023, a woman was convicted of multiple murders. Her name was Ute Schlesinger. This woman was forced to undergo a surgery in which her brain was emptied of all but the deepest structures of her being. Then, a glass bead containing some form of nanoprocessor was implanted near her brain stem. My attempts to identify the source of this nanoprocessing wetware device have come to nothing. It is, I believe, an experimental technology whose existence may not be widely known beyond a few individuals.