I will publish some chapters of The Page, Book 2, in these pages. Readers interested in reading the first part of the story start here.
For an introduction to Paul, read his interview
The studio
The studio has two rooms, a spacious kitchen, and a bathroom. The smaller room, whose window opens onto the park, is Paul’s study, furnished with an old desk, a comfortable chair, bookshelves, and a small safe. The larger room is his living room cum bedroom, furnished with a large convertible sofa, a long table, two armchairs, more bookshelves, a sound system, and a wide mirror on the wall opposite the balcony that opens over the narrow, quiet street. The walls are decorated with prints and photographs, either Paul’s own or of artists he likes.
Viktoria Park
Early this morning, Paul is working at his desk on his Ph.D. paper. From time to time, he sips coffee brewed on the Melitta machine in the corner of the room. The window is open to the cool air of early September and the animated conversations of crows, blackbirds, and other birds in the park. His work is proceeding well. Later, he is meeting with his tutor at Humboldt University. He joined the course three years ago and got his master’s degree last year. He’s passionate about his subject and already well advanced with his paper. His ambition is to soon start another Ph.D. in astrophysics.
Julian
On the desk, there is only his keypad, mouse, the flatscreen connected to the Mac hidden on a shelf, and a color portrait of a young man in a military jacket covered with the multicolored bars of campaigns. His hair is cropped, his smile a little timid, with a small scar on his left jaw. An observer could not miss the similarity between Paul’s face and the portrait. This is Julian, Paul’s father, a little older than Paul when he came back from North Africa, a decorated veteran just recovering from multiple head injuries.
In the living room, Paul has a portrait of his parents on their wedding day: Sarah, an image of grace and beauty, and his dad, sober in an immaculate grey suit without decoration but a small flower. Paul smiles at his dad and continues his work. He will soon take a break and get ready to meet his tutor.
The safe
He takes a shower and shaves carefully. From Julian, he adopted the habit of shaving with an old-fashioned razor blade, as his mother explained to him when he started shaving. In his study’s small safe, along with Julian’s Makarov handgun, he keeps his dad’s computer, an older model of his own, which holds on its encrypted drive all of Julian’s papers, correspondence, and writings.
From the living room’s clothes rack, he picks some casual clothes for his meeting: a pair of light chinos, a short-sleeve blue linen shirt, a light wool jacket, and smart, non-showy sneakers. After locking his place, armed with a light tote bag, Paul walks downstairs to the street and soon heads down Monumentenstrasse. His parents had lived here for a couple of weeks during a visit to Berlin before they started seriously looking for a more spacious space.
Seestrasse
He knows from Sarah that his dad had hoped to find the right place in Kreuzberg, already outrageously expensive back then, but they had finally settled for Wedding, the historic red center of Berlin in the 1920s, way north near Tegel, in a beautiful apartment on Seestrasse. He crosses the park and walks to catch the S-Bahn at Yorckstrasse, from where he will ride to the Tor.
Paul thinks back about those years when his parents had fallen in love with the city, which was to be a source of inspiration for their work – Julian’s writings, Sarah’s teaching – and their base for visiting the old kingdom. He knows that difficult years had followed for them and for Berlin. Now the city is peaceful again, but he is aware of the trouble that had followed his parents’ return to the UK as the plague and political turmoil engulfed the city.
Unterdenlinden
Then the war had turned the skies dark in the East. In a way, he is glad that he’d been too young then to understand the tragedy of those years. He’s arrived at the Tor and strides along Unter den Linden towards Museen Insel and the University.
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