The End of the Alphabet Read Online Free Page B

spoken of his Uncle Jack. How he had taught an annoyingly inquisitive nephew the subtleties of life. The first gentleman I ever met, Ambrose would say.
    Every Remembrance Sunday, Jack came up to the city, wearing the same threadbare jacket and regimental tie he had worn the year before. His shoes always shone, he smelt freshly shaved, he stood whenever Mrs Zephyr entered or left the room. He had an unsure smile that matched his limp.
    One particular November young Ambrose asked his uncle about the war. What had he done? Where had he been?
    All over, said Jack. France, Holland, Berlin.
    That’s right. Germany.
    Wasn’t very nice.
    People weren’t very nice either.
    Didn’t like us, I suppose. They didn’t like a lot of people.
    They did. People they’d no business killing.
    Friends? A few.
    No. I didn’t help my friends. I was away.
    A few years later at his uncle’s funeral, Ambrose read about someone named Sylvia. She had died when an air raid blew up her house near Spitalfields. Jack had left her a note, apologizing for not being there. For not keeping her safe.
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    Zipper knew that, with odd exception, Ambrose held a modern view of the world. He kept himself informed well enough, knew there was neither black nor white, believed what the BBC told him. Yet when she reminisced about her younger location-shoot days in Germany, she could watchhis view become as black and blind as ash. With an unnerving Berlin at its centre.
    In its greyness. The weather always threatening, the streets always wet. The architecture all cold stone: large and hard and lacking in windows.
    With its inhabitants. Sour and stiff with permanently furrowed expressions. They spoke a jarring language: phlegmy, incapable of expressions of love. No one smiled. Laughter was faked. There never seemed to be any children.
    With its music. Unlistenable. Funereal. Loud.
    And its ghosts. Prowling, wearing uniforms, black, brown, grey. Lurking in doorways, dropping bombs on houses, burning Zipper’s books. Watching and waiting to steal her away.
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    That was then, Zipper said. Jack was then.
    She pulled Ambrose to his feet and they set off to walk the city she knew.
    They made their way through the Reichstag. Once an asylum run by madmen, now through its centre an atrium of glass and mirror poured sky into the building and warmed Ambrose’s upturned face.
    They visited the zoo, where people had once eaten the animals left behind. On this day it was full of children, laughing at the monkeys, waving at the pandas, having their photographs taken by tired parents.
    Along more than one boulevard Ambrose and Zipper jostled past crowded coffee bars and neon dance clubs and persistent gypsy beggars; bored fashion models and charged young lovers and old people with old dogs; graffiti artists and boisterous hawkers and women for sale and men who smiled like cartoon spies and made Ambrose chuckle.
    They walked, perhaps a little lost, along Oranienburgerstrasse and through an ancient neighbourhood. They asked directions from a young man with a long and unkempt beard. He mumbled through his whiskers and pointed vaguely down the street. Zipper thanked him in the only Yiddish she could recall. The man grinned and shuffled Ambrose and Zipper along their way.
    As dusk came, they returned to the avenue under the lime trees. The street performer was calling for last requests. Ambrose watched a woman in tailored red trousers and a black turtleneck approach the violinist. She whispered in his ear. The performer bowed and played the opening notes of the woman’s request. She turned to her companion, a reluctant gentleman with greying hair, and offered her hand. The couple danced to a waltz composed by a German whose name Ambrose could not recall.
    This is now, Zipper said, as she picked up a small stone and slid it in her pocket. The sky grew dark and the stars came out.
    Ambrose smiled and asked if she had said something. If she was safe.