A Guide to Berlin Read online

  ‘That’s all. That’s all I have to say.’

  ‘Bravo, Montefiore!’ Gino sounded drunk.

  ‘Bravo,’ chimed Yukio.

  ‘And here ends Therapy Session Number Five,’ announced Victor.

  Silence followed in a shockwave. The others looked at Victor in quiet alarm. He was instantly contrite; his expression of triumph fell away. He realised he had casually offended Marco and the others, and that he had denounced and ridiculed the commonsense trust of their speak-memories.

  ‘A joke!’ he objected, raising his hand like a traffic warden.

  Marco tried to placate. ‘No problem,’ he said.

  But the exchange had dispelled the calm the story inspired.

  ‘So you think that’s what we’re here for?’ asked Gino. His tone was unmistakably aggressive. ‘You think we’re here for cheapskate psychotherapy, to hear each other confess and sob?’

  ‘Of course not … Jeez.’

  ‘You want to know our foolish inner selves, our clowns?’

  ‘Now you’re not making sense,’ Victor said feebly, his face dark with hurt.

  ‘You want sense? Explanations? You want your damaged life explained to you?’

  ‘Basta! Enough!’ Marco spoke something in brisk Italian. He had looked exhausted at the end of his story; now he looked angry and dismayed. Discord had arrived so rapidly. Cass saw that Mitsuko appeared upset and Yukio had disengaged, perhaps unable to follow the entire exchange. Gino seemed to sulk: he muttered as adolescents do, making audible, but not entirely, his undercurrent protest, his body pulled tight into an indignant slouch.

  It was like delirium, Cass thought. In this over-decorated room, reeking of tasteless excess and bookless ignorance, images from Marco’s story had saturated and disordered them all. It had startled her, the swan. Why had he mentioned the flailing swan? And she had seen too how he felt he had to account for his epilepsy, how he had made it historical and the side-effect of a fatherless childhood. She had never been to Rome, but saw it in her head as a sequence of pre-empting monuments, the Coliseum, St Peter’s, the Trevi Fountain; instead there was nothing at all definite in Marco’s Rome, but names without images: Trastevere, Via della Luce, Via Amerigo Vespucci. As if each must invent for themselves the world of the others, from barely comprehended scraps and faint associations. What mattered, she told herself, was the human element: his mother, her old hands, gracefully disembowelling a watch. The boy painfully atremble, his brain alight in zaps and flickers. Montefiore. The sisters, the protective sisters.

  Marco was by her side. She felt the shudder of a reawakening and jolted back to the present world.

  ‘When can I see you again?’

  There was an intensity to the question, slightly fevered, slightly anxious.

  ‘I’m meeting Victor tomorrow. Perhaps tomorrow night? Or the next?’

  ‘Tomorrow night then. May I return to your place? Gino is staying with me. It’s been a little tense.’

  Cass looked over to Gino and saw that he was watchful and still unsettled after Victor’s tasteless joke. She must defend Victor, she thought. There had been no malice in his remark, and no snide intention. Dear Victor, playing the comic, mistaking the genre. So much depends, Cass reflected, on correctly determining the genre.

  Gino was scratching at his neck. He was drinking too fast. There was psychoactive fizz and a countermanding note of exhaustion. And at that moment Cass saw him look at her and register that Marco had revealed something. Faux priestly, with a sneer, Gino raised a hand to acknowledge them.

  ‘Come for dinner,’ she said to Marco. ‘Come about seven.’

  14

  There is a short story by Vladimir Nabokov called ‘A Guide to Berlin’, written originally in Russian and first published in 1925. In this story, a man sits in a pub and describes to his friend, his ‘pot companion’, five topics that compose his personal guide to the city. The first is Pipes. He simply describes the pipes of the city, its black iron entrails, which he saw that morning laid out and exposed on the pavement in front of his apartment. He is charmed by white snow recently fallen on the black pipes, and by the fact that someone has written ‘OTTO’ with his fingertip in the virgin snow.

  The second topic described is The Streetcar. This is a lyrical sequence on the specific loveliness of a tram, and the particular beauty of the tram conductor’s hands and uniform, noted because trifles are meaningful, and must be cherished in the future. The tram will vanish, the conductor will die. The future will devour them, so they are both sad and remarkable.

  The third is Work, in which the man, recalling his journey on the tram, also recalls the forms of work he witnessed looking out of the window: two men pounding an iron stake with a mallet, a baker on a tricycle, a postman emptying a postbox, and a butcher who carries a heavy carcass on his back. It is the butcher who most impresses him, because the meat (chrome-yellow with bright-pink arabesques and splotches) is carried on a colourless winter’s day into a red-coloured shop.

  The fourth is called Eden. In this segment, the guide recommends a visit to the aquarium section of Berlin Zoo. In winter the tropical animals have been hidden away, but one may see the fish tanks of sea creatures and a gigantic tortoise. This is a pure counter-world of imported wonders. One may see a starfish, five-pointed, crimson and possibly Bolshevik, resting alive at the bottom of a murky pool.

  The last is The Pub. The friend responds to his ‘guide’ with a mournful yawn: what do trams and tortoises matter? he asks. How boring. How dull. The guide then notices the pub’s mirrors and the billiard table and the publican’s wife. He sees a little boy eating soup at the far end of a long hallway. All these he notes with the most languorous and tender regard. Imagining that the boy has caught his gaze, he thinks of his companion. ‘How can I demonstrate to him that I have glimpsed somebody’s future recollections?’

  This was the story Cass had discussed with Victor the first evening she met him. His face had beamed at her. He was delighted that she knew ‘A Guide to Berlin’ and also considered it wonderful. Regarded by critics as slight, almost an affectation, or a trivial and somewhat formless exercise, both Cass and Victor were its champions, fond of its exceptional humanity and modesty, and the fact that Nabokov thought a city guide might include items as mundane as pipes and billiard tables. No monuments, no Brandenburg Gate or linden-lined boulevard, only what is noticed in a single day.

  When Victor had leant close and whispered, as though it was a secret, that he wanted to visit the aquarium, Cass had immediately agreed to join him. It was the only named location in the story, the aquarium at the zoo, the only remnant of the fleeting world of the ‘Guide’. Victor wanted to see if the Bolshevik star was still visible and thought it possible that the tortoise Nabokov had seen might still be there, since they live for ages, he said. For ages and ages. Cass had charmed him by relating the story of Harriet, a tortoise taken by Darwin from the Galápagos to Australia in 1835. Harriet was estimated to be 176 years old at her death, in Queensland, in 2006.

  So she waited now, hugging herself, for Victor to arrive at the aquarium. He was late. Her feet were damp and burning with cold. New boots. She really must buy a new pair of boots. The sub-zero weather and black slush had emptied the streets. Only a few people were entering and leaving the zoo, adorned, inexplicably, with pagoda-like towers and an oriental archway held aloft by two majestic stone elephants, condemned to ceaseless burden. Cass watched the elephant archway, in case Victor mistook it as the aquarium entrance, but then could endure her frozen feet no longer. She hobbled into the foyer of the aquarium building to wait for Victor there.

  In the toilet Cass hid in a cubicle and removed her boots. She unpeeled her damp socks and rubbed her marbled blue feet to try to return them to the rest of her body. They were hard foreign appendages and stung appallingly. When she had revived them a little, she wrapped her feet in toilet paper, Egyptian-mummy-style, and wedged them carefully back into the sticky cavities of her ineffici
ent boots. She was foolish to be so unprepared.

  The toilet was drab, with smeared windows and a coppery mirror, apparently unreconstructed since the 1920s. She rested, dressed, on the toilet seat, and contemplated sneaking away, inventing an excuse for later, should Victor eventually arrive. But as she opened the door back to the foyer, she saw him there, depositing his coat in exchange for a small plastic token. He gave an exaggerated wave across the room, already in high spirits. His greeting was so fulsome and warmhearted that she was again drawn to him immediately.

  Arm in arm, like father and daughter, Victor and Cass walked into the dimly lit corridors in which the aquaria were held. On each side of the walkway, underwater lights shone within round and oval worlds, separate, artificial and entire unto themselves. Soft bluish radiance shimmered around them. Cass loved the windows into underwater, the chambers of slow, languid fishes with sullen faces, the fake grottoes, the undulating weeds, the simulated beams of sunlight shot from some electrical heaven above. Simple maps showed in red the region from which the sea-life came, but it was all tropical to Cass, all appeared warm and sequestered. She was reminded of diving in the ocean with goggles as a child, blinking and astonished by what she then saw. She remembered her own arms pushing away the water, how mottled they were, how thin and how pale. The bubble-trails of her own breath, wavering upwards. The hot rays of sun, shining on her back.

  Victor was one of those embarrassing companions who read every sign aloud.

  ‘Get this! “Gefleckte Qualle: Spotted Jelly, Phyllorhiza punctata”.’

  Cass stood with him before a high blue tube of jellyfish. They pulsed up and down, aimlessly beautiful. They were indigo with gathered water, and waving threads of pale tentacle.

  ‘Umbrellas,’ Victor said, in a low, bemused voice.

  He had cultivated, Cass thought, a personal aesthetics, derived from childhood enchantment and the authority of ideal forms. Perhaps he saw these shapes everywhere, in cloud formations and in ice-creams, in architecture and topographies. Perhaps umbrellas were evoked by certain feelings, or melodies, or a retrieved infant scent.

  ‘What?’ Victor asked, turning towards her. He might have read her thoughts. He gazed quizzically in her direction, then looked again into the water.

  ‘Isn’t that something?’ Victor exclaimed. His face was so close to the glass that she saw his image there in the aquarium, huge and distended. It had the distortion of a ghost, stretched like a balloon. Cass pulled him back. A young couple nearby were taking photographs with their smartphones. They each had their arms stiffly upraised, as if in a fascist salute. Victor noticed too. But they could not draw away. The domes of the spotted jellyfish, their glistening propulsion, their silver luminosity and simple lives: there was a kind of exemplary peace, just here and now, in merely standing and observing them.

  At last Victor said, ‘The starfish! Where is it?’

  What they found, in the end, was un-Nabokovian, not a notorious emblem signifying hoped-for-utopia pitched into murky depths, but a blotchy and rather sad-looking specimen, more brown-coloured than crimson, more superfluous than emblematic. It was small and singular, a disappointment. They stood together patiently, waiting for others to appear.

  ‘The Berlin Aquarium is deficient in starfish!’ Victor announced, a little too loudly. He sounded like a complaining American, brash and entitled, when he wanted simply to enthuse and entertain.

  Cass could not look into his face without remembering his speak-memory. This was the man whose father had worked in an umbrella factory, who as a boy plunged his face into piles of washing, who saw his grey-haired Polish mother rage and disintegrate. This was a man who had whispered ‘umbrella, umbrella’ because the word and the thing were his especial inheritance and it had entered his dozy intention as the verbal pathway to sleep. She knew more about him than his colleagues – this for sure – or possibly even his oldest friends. He had spoken so bravely to strangers of all that was lost. Cass remembered the names: Solomon, Hanka, Leah Rabinowitz. New Jersey. Ferry Street. Keer Street.

  She imagined Victor with a younger face. He had sunken cheeks, pimples on his chin and a Mets baseball cap on his head. He wore unflattering geek-glasses then, as he did now. He bore a baffled and slightly defeated expression, and possibly possessed a minor, self-revealing habit of some kind, a flickering of the eyelids when he spoke of his parents, a sagging mouth when he attempted Yiddish, an unselfconscious tic or repetition that his students later noticed, and wondered about. She wanted to ask questions, questions, in particular, about his saviour, Leah Rabinowitz, but this was not the right context.

  On the second floor, in the impossibly steamy ‘Reptile and Amphibian’ section, Victor and Cass saw a tortoise. It may have been, said Victor, the 1925 tortoise. It was utterly still, certainly ancient, and the only sign of life was its glaucous, slow-moving eyes. Cass noticed the array of the tawny scute plates that made up its shell and thought of stumble stones, tessellation, the interconnection of parts. Patterns continued to complicate. Victor gazed at the creature too long, wanting some historical nod from its wrinkly head, a Galápagosian confirmation of the proximity of the past. It refused to comply. It was inert and indifferent. In the counterfeited swamp, pumped with warm water sprays and planted with limp foreign grasses, it had lost all momentum and would look exactly like this – inanimate – when one day it was discovered conclusively dead.

  In the coffee shop Victor recovered his good humour. The sight of so many non-human creatures had engaged and invigorated him.

  ‘Give me a zoo over a museum any day,’ he said.

  ‘An aquarium over a library?’

  ‘Hell, yeah, why not?’

  He was in a jokey mood.

  ‘That tortoise sure was something,’ he added.

  ‘Yes, it was.’

  ‘Hey, I remembered a word: “ocellated”.’

  He waited for Cass to ask, but she did not, so he rambled on.

  ‘The eye markings on animals, some of the fish were ocellated: they had eyes on their cheeks.’

  Cass knew the word from butterfly descriptions: there were butterflies, too, that carried ocellated spots; they swept high on wind drafts, gliding with opaque eyes on their diaphanous wings. The Apollo. The Apollo was one butterfly that had ocellated wings. She sipped her milky coffee, only half-listening to Victor. To her left sat a young couple who spoke in English with New Zealand accents: it took all Cass’s willpower not to turn around and greet them, and try to forge a global connection. She glanced sideways. The man, bearded and New Zealand-ish, clad in superior hiking gear, was swiping images on his computer pad, flicking from one polychromatic fish to the next. He might have been batting flies. The woman, Mansfield-ish, was unimpressed. She sat back in her chair, twirling a toggle, bearing an expression of haughty boredom. There are couples everywhere on the globe that look uncannily familiar, replicants of others, sly double-takes. This was such a couple. Cass observed them longer than was polite, but neither saw her. Three tiny female Germans, possibly three-year-old triplets, dressed alike in tight parkas of strawberry pink, rushed in a fan formation towards the door. An encumbered mother plodded behind them, hopelessly calling.

  Victor had moved from ocellated markings to smudges.

  ‘Smudges,’ he said. ‘There’s a section somewhere in Nabokov – it must be at the end of the autobiography – where he stands with his son and looks down at a flowerbed of pansies. The dark smudges on the pansies’ faces remind him of Hitler’s moustache, so he says to Dmitri, “Hey, a bed full of Hitlers!”’

  Cass was not sure what purpose this anecdote served. Victor chattered on. She knew she should ask him about his research, but she liked his manic mood, his lighthearted banter. Scholars asked about their research become dourly existential and feel obliged to account for their being-in-the-world. Victor talked as children do, sure that he was interesting. And in this manner he released her, as Karl sensibly had, from the burden of her part in the conversatio
n.

  It was unclear at what point a certain gloom descended. She was thinking ahead, to new boots; then she was thinking again of ocellated wings; then she was recalling a section in W. G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz, in which he writes about moths. Not butterflies, but moths, the dismal cousin. Struck by their immobility, clinging to walls at night, Austerlitz decides that moths on indoor walls know they have lost their way, so simply stay still, completely still, until they stiffen and die. The anti-butterfly. Ragged-winged, plain, taupe and grey-coloured. Staying completely still until they die.

  Victor pushed the remains of his cheesecake in Cass’s direction.

  ‘Try it!’ he insisted.

  They parted on excellent terms, each agreeing they had joined in the spirit of ‘A Guide to Berlin’. Cass walked unevenly in her paper socks, determined to shed them as soon as possible. The damp wool socks in her shoulder-bag, furtively stowed, were already giving off a sour whiff of must. She needed fresh socks and waterproof boots.

  The sky was white overhead, but no snow fell. There was ice aplenty, even rows of small icicles, hanging like sea-animal teeth from eaves and above the mouths of windows. Dainty, serrated, sharp with caught shine. But again she wanted snow. Cass wanted that powdery light, that world-filling softness. She wanted total immersion.

  15

  In the hours before Marco arrived, Cass was restless; her thoughts had a reeling, unstable quality. He was no longer arbitrary in her life, nor was he yet essential, but she felt the need to fortify herself against too soon a surrender. A surrender then of what? A surrender to what? What is it that a woman gives to a man, apart from the curve around him in darkness, apart from a moment of freefall from one body into the deep space of another? What do any lovers, of any arrangement, most truly exchange? She had enough experience not to fret, but was still uncertain of her feelings. He reminded her of areas of dissatisfaction in her own life: not enough sexual elation, not enough untrammelled joy.