Sorry. Shaun Whiteside

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       Before

      KRIS

      BEFORE WE TALK ABOUT YOU, I’d like to introduce you to the people you will soon be meeting. It’s a cool, late August day. The sun is extremely bright in the sky and resembles the flickering gleam of light switches in corridors. The people turn their faces to the sun and wonder why so little warmth comes back.

      We are in a small park in the middle of Berlin. This is where everything starts. A man sits on a park bench by the water. His name is Kris Marrer; he is twenty-nine and looks like an ascetic who decided a long time ago not to be part of society. Kris knows only too well that he is a part of society. He has finished school and his studies. He likes going to the seaside, he enjoys good food and can talk about music for hours. Even if he doesn’t want to be, Kris Marrer is definitively a part of it, and this Wednesday morning he feels that clearly.

      He sits on the park bench, as if he were about to jump up at any moment. His chin is thrust forward, his elbows on his knees. It isn’t a good day today, he knew it wouldn’t be a good day when he woke up, but we’ll get to that later. What’s important at this moment is that he regrets seeking out this particular park bench at the Urbanhafen. He thought a few minutes’ peace to gather his thoughts was exactly what he needed. He thought wrong.

      A woman sits on the grass a few yards away. She’s dressed as if she can’t believe the summer is over. Sleeveless dress, sandals. The grass around her looks exhausted, the ground is damp. A man stands in front of the woman talking to her. His right hand is like an axe cutting silently through the air. Sharp, angular, quick. Every time the man points at the woman she flinches. The couple isn’t particularly noisy, but Kris can clearly, distinctly hear each of their words.

      He knows now that the man has been unfaithful. The woman doesn’t believe him. When the man lists all the women he has slept with, the woman begins to believe him and calls him a bastard. He is a bastard, there’s no getting around it. He laughs in her face.

      “What did you imagine? Did you think I’d be faithful to you?”

      The man spits at the woman’s feet, turns his back on her and leaves. The woman starts crying. She cries silently; the people react as people always do and look the other way. The children go on playing, and a dog barks excitedly at a pigeon, while an indifferent sun sees nothing it hasn’t seen a million times before.

       On days like this it should rain, Kris thinks. No one should split up with anyone while the sun’s shining.

      When the woman looks up, she notices him on the park bench. She smiles embarrassedly, not wanting to display her sadness. Her smile reminds Kris of a curtain that he’s been allowed to glimpse behind for a second. Nice, inviting. He’s touched by her openness, then the moment is just as quickly over, the woman rubs the tears from her face and looks across the water as if nothing has happened.

      Kris sits down next to her.

      Later he will tell his brother that he didn’t know what he was doing. But that’s later. From here on it’s all very simple. It’s as if the words had always been in his head. Kris doesn’t have to search for them, he just has to say them out loud.

      He explains to the woman what’s just happened. He takes the bastard who cheated on her under his wing, and invents a difficult past for him. He talks about problems and childhood anxieties. He says:

      “If he could, he would do lots of things differently. He knows he’s screwing up. Let him go. How long have you known each other? Two months? Three?”

      The woman nods. Kris goes on.

      “Let him go. If he comes back, you’ll know it’s right. If he doesn’t come back, you can be glad it’s over.”

      As Kris is talking, he’s taking pleasure in his words. He can observe their effect. They’re like a calming hand. The woman listens attentively and says she wouldn’t have been sure what to think about the whole relationship.

      “Did he talk about me a lot?”

      Kris hesitates imperceptibly, then pays her compliments and says what you say to an insecure, twenty-three-year-old woman who will find her next lover without any great difficulty the very same week.

      Kris is good, he’s really good.

      “Even though he’ll never admit it,” he says at last, “you shouldn’t forget that he’s sorry. Deep inside he’s apologizing to you right now.”

      “Really?”

      “Really.”

      The woman nods contentedly.

      Everything starts with a lie and ends with an apology—even this morning here in the park. The woman doesn’t know who Kris Marrer is. She doesn’t even want to know how he knows the bastard who has just left her. And although she has no other connection with Kris, she asks him if he’d like to go for a drink. The woman’s pain is like a bridge that anyone can walk on, if they can summon up some compassion.

      Sometimes, Kris thinks, we’re so interchangeable it’s embarrassing.

      “A glass of wine would do me good,” she says, smoothing her dress over her legs as if the dress were a reason to think about her offer. He sees her knees, he sees the red-painted toenails in the sandals. Then he shakes his head. He didn’t do this to get closer to the woman. He acted purely out of instinct. Perhaps it was the banal primal urge of the protector. Man sees woman, man wants to protect woman, man protects woman. Later Kris will reach the insight that he has pursued his vocation—he had an urgent need to apologize. Later one part will find the other and form one big whole. Later.

      Kris rests his hand on the woman’s and says, “Sorry, but I’ve got a date.”