A Guide to Berlin Read online

  Cass stared at the names, so carefully inscribed. She stayed crouched for a moment, contemplating the three small squares, the shape of narrative residue. She had seen these brass stones before and knew what they were, but had never inclined to look, nor paused to contemplate. Her crouched posture seemed appropriate. She considered it respectful. Such an unobtrusive commemoration. Yet she could not imagine Moses, or Esther, or Judith Levi, and knew that her mind was closed to the frightening scale of historical violence. Their miniature tombstones lay slanted to the west, in pitchy blackness, and appeared like mislaid pieces rather than deliberate inclusions. What she saw was the shape of tessellation, the artful arrangement of the stones, calculated and logically interacting, the tight fit of the pavement stretching away down the street. The information that lay there was so easily disregarded and overlooked. And it was horrible to consider stepping, unbearably heavy upon the names.

  Cass rang ‘Kępiński’. Marco’s voice said, ‘Welcome, come on up,’ and the door growled as it opened. There was no hint of how they would be together, or what manner he or she should adopt.

  This apartment building contained an old-fashioned lift, a tarnished metal cage with clanging doors. Less architecture than contraption, it rattled and shook as it ascended, as if complaining of its endless entrapment in the journey up and down. Marco was waiting at the open door.

  ‘Welcome,’ he repeated.

  They were all there, once again. Cass had arrived on time, but still managed to be the last. The surprise was that the apartment was furnished. It was a let, Marco explained, and would be rented fully furnished. Was she interested? he asked, half-facetiously. She could not read his mood. He seemed fidgety and distracted, but also fixed on her face. He wanted her attention, but seemed mostly silent. She realised at once that Marco was fearful of his own speak-memory, just as she was of hers, and that the strain in his behaviour was the effort of holding himself together. Subtly she took his hand and patted it, as one might an old man in a nursing home. He pulled his hand away.

  Kępiński’s sitting room was lavishly appointed. There were thick brocaded curtains, of emerald-green damask, frilly standing lamps, not entirely perpendicular, and commodious settees and armchairs, all corpulence and plush. There were touches of gold around mirrors and on the frames of mediocre paintings, and in the light over all. At the centre of the room hung a giant chandelier, which on closer inspection was missing more than a few of its crystals. And at the periphery was an old oak writing desk, clearly never intended for use, upon which stood a tulip-shaped reading lamp, fashioned in a tone of pink not unlike that of the blooms in Cass’s studio. No bookcases anywhere, no books were visible. Victor was sprawled in a decadent pose on a chaise longue. He waved his glass.

  ‘The manner to which I am accustomed,’ he called to her. ‘The manor to which I am born!’

  Yukio stepped forward to embrace her; Gino ground his cigarette and was stepping inside from the balcony.

  ‘Kępiński is probably a long-lost cousin!’ Victor continued.

  Cass looked over to Gino and saw what she now realised were signs of chemical fervour. Gino was all mind-zap and twitch and stimulated emotions. He had begun talking rapidly to Mitsuko, who was pretending to listen.

  Marco stood apart, pouring himself a drink. Now they were all assembled, there was a theatrical air to their meeting. Mitsuko wore a triangular garment of magenta wool, Yukio a suit of royal-blue velvet. But it was less costuming than this new Kępiński location, and the sense of embellishment and faded glory it superficially implied. Marco stiffened formally and began his speech.

  ‘Let me begin by saying that I find myself feeling nervous. When we each agreed to participate in the speak-memory exercise, I did not really imagine what it might yield. I expected something, I suppose, less confiding and more random. I expected a backward glance, token and brief, offered up in this improvised community we have created.

  ‘Now that it’s my turn, I’m aware what effort this might have taken, and what unusual courage. So I thank you all.

  ‘I was born on April the 23rd 1974. April the 23rd, as you know, is Nabokov’s birthday, and Shakespeare’s birthday, a petty fact Nabokov delighted in, as if it meant a literary transmigration or intermingling of souls. It means nothing to me, confers no warm glow of association, but I’m reminded how coincidence matters to us all, so claim this one only as a banal beginning.

  ‘When I began reading the master, I recorded his precise images, believing these refined my own existence in the world. My words and the writer’s lay side by side. I look at my notebooks now and think: this is what reading is, no? A silent propinquity made of words. And this is what attention is, seeing and notating with care.’

  He was beginning to calm. ‘Eh, professore!’ Gino called out, offering encouragement.

  Victor raised his glass. ‘To silent propinquities!’

  Mitsuko and Yukiko had bought with them a connoisseur’s vodka.

  It seemed to Cass they had developed a rare kind of happiness. They all ignored the refrigerated night, hanging, slightly quivering, behind the window, they all abandoned inhibition, to some extent at least, they sat in a circle of six, the communicating points of a brief star. Mitsuko was carefully refilling the glasses. In the bottle rested a single yellow-faded blade of grass, which it was claimed added the flavour of the windswept plains of Georgia to the vodka.

  ‘Like Gino, I grew up without a father. Mine was an enduring grief; he disappeared when I was eight and never returned.’

  Marco stopped. He swallowed hard. They saw a constriction in his throat, the tension of holding back emotion.

  ‘Let me begin again.’

  They were all settled now, and embarrassed by Marco’s embarrassment. In kindness, each looked away from his face. Marco began for the second time, now more collected.

  ‘I grew up in the rione of Trastevere – do you know Rome? It is a suburb, you would say, in the historical centre, on the west bank of the Tiber. Nowadays this is a prosperous area of cafés and tourists, but when I was little it was rather neglected and poor. My mother still lives on Via della Luce, with one of my three younger sisters, Francesca. My other sisters, Fiorina and Rosa, have both moved away, into marriages, and I am now the proud uncle of two bouncing little boys.

  ‘We were close as children, linked by our formidable mother and absent father, but also by word games, fantasy and the world that siblings sometimes share. We trusted each other. We confided. We were utterly devoted. We spent hours happily playing in each other’s company. We also published our own little handmade magazine, populated by preposterous characters we had invented, and full of faraway journeys and ridiculous events. My contribution was Montefiore, a clownish man, adorable and stupid, who had the ability to transform at will into a horse. He was in love with Bella, Francesca’s invention, known as the most beautiful woman in Rome, despite her great height and toothy smile. You must imagine drawings in coloured pencil, and stories that went on and on, tall tales that we elaborated with rococo ornamentation. Nothing was too outlandish, nor too dubious. Rosa’s character was a Neapolitan fishmonger who had migrated to Mars, from which he made comparative commentary on our small Roman world; Fiorina developed a domain of talking insects, led by a stag beetle. These fictions, altogether, grew hugely silly. Even today we sometimes refer to them as a kind of code, a family secret unknown to anyone else.

  ‘What my mother called my affliction also united us. Although the oldest, and the only son, a privileged place in the Italian family, I suffered from epilepsy. It made me vulnerable, how shall I say, in almost feminine ways.’

  Marco paused: Mitsuko was whispering in Yukio’s ear, translating ‘epilepsy’ into Japanese.

  ‘I think I was seven when I had my first grand mal seizure, and in my childish mind I thought for years that my father had left because of it. I felt responsible, somehow. The doctor who sat me down to explain my condition likened the brain in my skull to a defective
light bulb, flashing. I understood that he referred to electrical discharge, but this terrified me because I knew electricity could be fatal. I was appalled that spontaneous electrical activity might happen inside my head and my body, with violence and without warning. The doctor, a turtle-faced man with waxy skin, did nothing to allay my fears. When I convulsed on the floor my sisters would rush to aid me; I would wake with a headache and sore tongue to their faces bending above. They would hold me, one or other; I slumped into their laps, as if in the form of a pietà.

  ‘When I think back to my childhood this is a persistent memory: the ambivalent and tormented feelings of that pose. My sisters’ embraces were loving – they sought to reassure me – but they never quite relieved my sense of self-disgust.

  ‘Epilepsy is still a concern, though until last week it had been seven years since I’d had a seizure.’

  Marco addressed this remark to Cass.

  ‘Seven clear years. I thought it was finally over. All these neurons firing and sparking out of control.’

  Marco held out his glass. Mitsuko refilled it.

  ‘Excellent vodka, thank you.

  ‘So I have this image of myself jerking and quaking, a puny creature, a pint-sized freak. My sisters tried to save me from social disgrace. Francesca, one year younger than me, once punched a boy on the nose when he mocked my convulsions. She said she was proud when he snuffled into his bloody handkerchief, and cried.

  ‘My epilepsy no doubt added to my mother’s trials. She grew impatient and at times irrational and shrill. She never once explained why our father had left. For the first months she maintained the fiction that he’d gone to visit his family in Napoli, but gradually she tired of so dull a story, until eventually, one day, she simply shouted that he was not coming back, then burst into tears. We were shocked by her honesty – we’d preferred the lies. And we were shocked to see our normally stoical mother with her face buried in her apron and her body hunched in distress, sobbing like someone savagely beaten. She told us nothing more. Our hopes dwindled and Papa became a mythic figure.

  ‘A little later my character Montefiore set out on a quest to find him. There was a sighting in New Guinea, another in Brazil, and he used his speed to chase a train, rushing by in Algiers. In this Algerian train he had glimpsed a face, caught lit and rectangular as if on a celluloid strip, that might have been a fleeting vision of our long-lost father. It was an image from a dream. The bluish gleam of a film, the face blurring into shadows. The train headed straight off a suspension bridge and hurled in a curve with terrific sparks into the chasm below. Montefiore watched it glide to its fiery end. Observing from a cliff, he could not say if there were any survivors of the crash.

  ‘It seems pathetic, I suppose, to claim that these stories helped us all. But they did, they truly did. My sisters were always more ingenious than I, and they too imagined sightings, fictive and inconclusive. We entertained each other with our endlessly disappearing father.

  ‘Letters arrived from Australia – we saved the kangaroo stamps – and for some time we suspected that our father had emigrated and would one day admit it and send word for us to follow. But the letters turned out to be from my father’s brothers. One brother, Mauro, wrote regularly, once every few weeks, and the other, Luigi, wrote only occasionally, but in vividly excited prose. Our mother would regale us with tales of Down Under. It was like a Zembla to us, every description serving as the footnote to this extravagant distant land. In our stories we sometimes sent our characters to Australia, where there were many madcap adventures, all fuelled by childish conjecture and comically inadequate hints from the letters. Luigi wrote that in a pub somewhere in Queensland he had seen a snake twirling like a dancer on an overhead fan: this was the kind of exotic detail we loved. With this slim image we concocted an entire chorusline of dancing snakes, swaying on a stage.

  ‘There is another set of stories that compelled and formed me. My mother is Jewish. Before the war her family lived in Via Amerigo Vespucci, on the other side of the Tiber, where the old Ghetto had once been. She was a little girl of just four when the Italian Jews were rounded up. She was hidden away and then adopted, by a Catholic family. I don’t know many details, but her family was lost. I am named for the old man who was her adoptive father. He was a watchmaker and she was apprenticed for a few years before she was married; so she practised arcane and mechanical skills. With a set of watchmaking forceps her second father had left to her, metal instruments with slim bodies and fine grasping hands, she liked to open up watches and then put them back together again.

  ‘It is a combination that imparts to me an unfathomable sensation: a lost family, and the disassembling and reassembling of watches. I thought the minute cogs and levers, the clever fit of the parts, the gold circle into which everything perfectly slotted: I thought these all very beautiful. For a while I imagined I would grow up to be a watchmaker, without knowing that it was a craft – centuries old – about to disappear. This virtuous grandfather died before I was born; his wife, who had no children of her own, died when I was an infant. I would have liked to have met them, since my mother’s parents never returned, nor any member of her extended family. I know their names, that’s all; and there are one or two photographs. But their fates in Germany and Poland are entirely obscure.

  ‘At some stage my mother’s hands began to stiffen and cripple and now she no longer tinkers with old watches or disassembles and reassembles them. These days she rubs her own watch on her wrist with an air of nostalgia; it is a habit she has; I see her turn and turn it again. Perhaps she’s remembering the substitute father, or her own disappeared parents and her two older brothers. I see her drift into memory, and I see death moving towards her.

  ‘The deportations were of course all over Europe, the camps …’

  Here Marco acknowledged Victor with a soft, humane glance.

  ‘And our story, I know, is not an unusual one. Disappearances. Adoptions. Conversions. Secrets. But she is still alive, my mother, and she still wants to know what happened. I tell her that I will one day write the history of our family, and that there will be a recompense in words for those who come after.

  ‘The uncles in Australia paid for my education. I don’t know why. I guessed Mauro had been in love with my mother – there was something about the oblique way he expressed private sentiments in his letters. Or perhaps both simply felt responsible for their brother’s abandoned family. When I wrote to them as an adult, neither could tell me his whereabouts. They seemed unable even to confirm if he was alive or dead …’

  It was speaking of the father that wounded Marco’s speech. It pained him to explain that there was no resolution. They waited patiently for the return of his voice.

  ‘At La Sapienza, at university, I discovered silent propinquity. A pompous term, perhaps, but this is how I think of it. Reading. Imagining. I discovered the vast population of others also trying to make sense. Books of poetry and fiction extended what it was possible to think, not just in fact, but in feeling; not just in the primitive accumulation of stores of knowledge, but in the questions we are faced with every day. I felt these questions unwind like a spiral inside me. I felt myself becoming at last an adult.

  ‘And as I grew older my epilepsy gradually receded – the medication is so much better these days – so I was able to become more social and more confident.’

  Cass heard the echo.

  ‘But my thinking and reading nevertheless set me apart. There is an isolation to reading, just as there is a community. There is a philosophical learning, impossible to unlearn, and we have all, each of us here, discovered this form of enchantment. Forgive me, I’m sounding like a preacher, like a fanatic.’

  ‘Too many mysteries,’ said Gino.

  ‘Yes, you are right. Mankind cannot bear too many mysteries.’

  Victor laughed at the exchange. Some inexplicit tension had been released.

  Cass thought again, not for the first time, that Gino and Marco seemed some
times like brothers.

  ‘For some reason, some reason I cannot quite understand, telling you of these things makes me recall the end of Nabokov’s story about his governess. The narrator is walking late at night beside a misty lake and sees a white swan floundering as it tries to hoist itself into a moored boat. The poor bird flaps ineffectually, stumbles in air, struggles with ungainly wings to rise and to nest itself. The narrator is repulsed, but also fascinated. He describes the swell of the water, and the slippery sounds, and the sensations in the dark that are impossible and dreamlike. You all remember this, I’m sure. He reflects that his governess, now dead, exists somehow in the agony of the struggling swan … and that unhappiness impedes the development of a soul. This was a scandalous idea, a shocking idea.

  ‘I had of course read of Romantic swans ascending. I knew how writing and imagining works with these typical symbols. But the misery of Nabokov’s ending was a true surprise. This childhood is told in a mode of tedious irritation; yet love for the governess becomes apparent, so that when, at the end, the swan is a kind of monster, the creature is also more truly “art” than Tchaikovsky’s lovely dancers in Swan Lake, with their fluffy low curtseys and slow drooping arms.’

  Marco paused, and it was clear he had stopped. It seemed both a capricious and confusing point at which to leave his story.