A Guide to Berlin Read online

  From her laptop drifted No. 3 in G Major of the Brandenburg Concertos. Third movement, the less popular one. She listened for the curlicue refrains and baroque swings and roundabouts, then decided on something more fitting to her mood and more tonally restrained: Mischa Maisky on cello. Music was one fundamentally reliable pleasure. She would be an old woman one day, alone in a dark room, with only Bach’s cello to keep her company.

  Cass prepared a minestrone, which she hoped would impress, but then realised it was too early to cook anything further. With only two gas rings on her poor excuse for a stove, with a small number of pots and a single frying pan, it was impossible to prepare a full meal ahead. She had bought too much food and had nowhere to store it. A large loaf of rye bread – huge for two people – sat like an outback boulder on the sink. This ‘studio’ was meant for the lonely and indigent, not for entertaining. It had a punitive aspect. At least there were two of everything, two plates and two glasses, two cracked soup bowls; and the reassuring touch of her pink tulips, still unfolding and other-worldly, that stood elegantly detached in the cheap vase she had bought the day before.

  ‘I met your friend Karl,’ Marco said as he unwrapped his scarf. ‘He intercepted me at the front door. It was a shock to see him here, the man from the Pergamon Museum. I didn’t know of your connection. You didn’t tell me.’

  ‘Did he mention his son?’

  ‘Yes. And when he discovered my knowledge of German he launched into a rapid-fire explanation of his history, his family, his experience with epilepsy. His son is a gangster, apparently.’

  ‘Karl’s from the East.’

  ‘Yes.’

  They smiled at each other, amused by what might have been a crass cultural joke. Marco stood still, appraising her.

  ‘New boots?’ he said.

  They kissed with slow confidence, taking their time. When they drew apart he produced a bottle of wine from somewhere.

  ‘Let’s start again. No talk of epilepsy. No Nabokov’s girlfriends.’

  Now an easy atmosphere settled between them. Marco was relaxed and contemplative; Cass was patient and circumspect. This is how it is, Cass thought, between men and women. There are endless tentative beginnings, some in words, some in touch, and these stand in for intermittently true connections.

  ‘I’m glad it’s over, the speak-memory. The anticipation filled me with dread. It’s a relief to have spoken – you’ll feel the same, I promise. It’s a relief to have selected what to say and not say.’

  ‘Will you tell me, later on, what you did not say?’

  ‘Perhaps after your own speak-memory. Perhaps we can talk of it then.’

  Marco paused. ‘There’s been a disturbing emergence of memories since,’ he continued. ‘I’m just beginning to realise that the speaking, even with all these constraints, even in our strange little drinking ceremonies, and with our eccentric group, is like a door slowly opening.’

  So they entered a neutral territory in which Marco’s talk was left unexamined. The missing father, Montefiore, the sisters, the epilepsy. For her part, Cass felt guarded and careful, as if his dreadful anticipation had in the last minutes transferred to her. She must now consider what she might say to the group, and how to fit, unlucky last, with their trusting disclosures.

  ‘I’ve become rather obsessed with the weather,’ she said, opening an unoriginal topic.

  Marco smiled. ‘So let’s talk of the weather, in detail, after the English fashion.’

  It was not superciliousness but humour. Relaxation had made his tone easier to read.

  She told him that she found winter terrible, but for the sublimity of the snow. That darkness fell too early. That there was a kind of sorrow to everything. That she felt a lethargy, a fatigue, when her spirit was normally lively.

  ‘What nobody tells you is that Berlin is haunted in winter, truly haunted. You need to see the city in the spring, when all the ghosts move on, when they’ve all gone on vacation, somewhere else. In spring the city’s full of blossoms and bright light, and people eating ice-creams on the pavement. In June there’s the scent of strawberries in the air and whole booths of them, piled high, great pyramids of strawberries. Berliners swim in the lakes, and take over the streets with bicycles. It’s another city entirely.’

  ‘So everyone says.’

  Cass was thinking: why does everyone say this? Why does everyone defer the ‘real’ Berlin until spring?

  ‘And trains,’ she said, ‘I seem to have my imagination stuffed full of trains.’

  ‘Ah, this makes you a Berliner. U-Bahns, S-Bahns, they are the skeleton of this city. No citizen is unaware.’

  ‘Skeleton,’ she repeated. ‘Of which particular body?’

  ‘And now you’re waxing metaphysical. Tell me about your outing with Victor.’

  Cass saw the change of subject. She had the impression that Marco too was interested in this business of trains, as others in their group were, historically or indirectly. The U and S-Bahn routes continued to cast a net in her head, as the sticky pads of neurotransmitters, sprouting and interpretive, are placed outside the skull of some unfortunate woman in an experiment. This is how she imagined herself, within a web of buzzing connections and charged cognisance. And when would she tell Marco of the body beneath the train? She recalled Mitsuko sobbing as they rode, creating a mournful soundtrack. She recalled night-time Berlin, traversed from above, sliding below them in streaks of light and blurred, glossy images.

  ‘Do you know “A Guide to Berlin”?’ she asked.

  ‘The short story? Of course.’

  ‘Victor and I went to the aquarium today. We walked arm in arm through corridors of semi-dark, we peered into fishes’ faces and shallow-water wonderlands. The jellyfish were especially exciting. Victor was just like a kid, exclaiming, chattering away.’

  She was thinking: there was nothing adult about our visit; it was regressive and naïve and not at all Nabokovian. Aquaria and zoos do that, cancel the adult mind. She saw again the reflection of Victor’s avid features, opening like an umbrella. It had swum there, the slick film of his searching face.

  ‘The tortoise? Did you see the tortoise?’

  ‘Yes, we saw a tortoise. I couldn’t say if it was the tortoise, the one in the story. But it was old and venerable, as such creatures are. Victor waited for it to whisper a secret to him. I think he believes he has looked into an eye that in 1925 looked into Vladimir Nabokov’s eye. As if a creature, not a place, is the custodian of his phantom. There was a delight to Victor’s attachment, a real wish for material connection.’

  ‘Nabokov would have been, what: twenty-six?’

  ‘Yes, the same age as me,’ Cass said shyly.

  ‘I love that section on the tram. The tram conductor’s unusual hands, the way they dabble and rummage. They are thick and proletarian, but also busy and agile …’

  The wine was uncorked with a friendly squeak. Cass reheated the soup and fried portions of salmon. The boulder of bread was sawn, a lemon was sliced. It was a simple meal, which they ate unromantically. In the studio there was a gentle enfolding of dull light, and a limpid calming down as each became silent. Two lovers, newly met. A promise, implicit or imagined. Time had adjusted, somehow. There was an expanding sense of the present moment, full of his complex other-existence, and an invitation to imagine a coupled future, however short-lived. Cass suppressed an instinct of ironic recoil. And she remembered Marco’s elegant phrase, ‘silent propinquity’, and wondered if it might describe forms of intimacy, as well as reading. She wanted to ask, but vacillated between expression and reticence.

  There was no hesitation in their physical meeting. Later, as they lay tipped towards each other in Cass’s cramped little bed, they spoke in hushed tones about the others in their group. Though a contrived association, it had unusual affections and affinities: they agreed on this. Marco said there was a dignity and convergence he’d not expected, and an unspoken trust. Cass had been surprised, too, she said. She’d
joined half-expecting a polite social club, flimsily premised, dilettantish, a few dislocated bookish expats with time on their hands, but had been overcome by a vast tenderness in hearing the speak-memories. From the moment Victor had begun, on her first day, she had realised how unusual they were, how fortuitously well met. His words had moved her, she said. There was a soft continuation of this feeling. Would it be old-fashioned to say that they would be friends forever?

  It was too early for Marco to say more about himself, and he refrained from asking Cass about her life before her chance to speak of it on her own terms. Instead they shared more sleepy reflections and observations on the weather. Marco recommended the third chapter of Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, which he said was full of oddball speculations and historical musings on things like lightning, sunshine, tornadoes and shadows. Pliny died near Pompeii, said Marco, covered in ash and pumice, having set sail to observe the eruption of Vesuvius. He said the Elder’s nephew, Pliny the Younger, closer than any son, waited on the far shore for the boat to return, but was met only with the spectre of the old man’s death. A cargo of stones. A beloved uncle, fallen. The year was 79 AD.

  ‘I’m a pedant,’ he concluded. ‘You must have guessed this by now.’

  Cass did not know how to respond to Marco’s tale of ancient disaster. She thought of no witty comment, laced with seductive wit. Instead she explained in imprecise terms why snow was exotic to her. Her own account was deeply banal. There was no convincing language, these days, for epiphanic surprise, no verbal nuance or refinement that might explain etherealised seeing or the quality of novelty usually reserved for describing children’s pleasures. She was tempted to tell Marco of the discovery of the frost, superincumbent on glass in Yukio and Mitsuko’s apartment, but it seemed too obscure a moment to describe. Not yet, she thought, not yet. And how, without sounding provincial, would she say it had seemed an apparition?

  At some point their conversation returned to Nabokov’s story.

  ‘Gino’s own “Guide to Berlin”,’ Marco said, ‘will be something remarkable. He writes beautifully and audaciously; it will be an extraordinary book. He’s now calling his Guide “The Book of Conclusions”.’

  ‘Conclusions?’

  ‘Who knows?’ Marco paused. ‘Conclusions are everything. In the Nabokov story, what matters is that the guide is one-armed and scarred.’

  Cass had forgotten. How could she have forgotten?

  ‘It’s in the last couple of sentences. The guide imagines that the little boy eating soup in the pub will remember him in the future, with his empty right sleeve and his old scarred face. He’s a war victim, I guess.’

  In her discussions with Victor, they had never spoken of the ending. They had both forgotten that the guide is historically damaged, and that the future recollection includes his disfigurement.

  ‘It’s the whole point of the story,’ Marco insisted. ‘Not an angel looking backwards, seeing ruins and history blown away, but an old man, gentle and kind, looking at ordinary things, and seeing mystically into the future memory of a small child.’

  Cass was annoyed and embarrassed. She did not wish to be told that she was a poor reader, or that she had missed a vital detail. She would not tell Victor. She would keep to herself Marco’s revelation and preserve their ignorant delight.

  They were happier, she reflected, not talking of Vladimir Nabokov, his life or works. In the mental life of couples there are these reticent areas, of which, both know, it is better not to speak. She suspected Marco would have been academically stringent, and a tough perfectionist. When they knew each other better she would ask more about his ideas; and she might discover the real nature of his relationship to Gino.

  Marco prepared to leave around midnight.

  ‘Forgive me,’ he said. ‘There’s no way two can sleep here. And I should check on Gino. He’s been disappearing again in the last couple of days, scoring from the dealers at Görlitzer Park, or hanging out with the homeless who camp under tarpaulins in that wild strip behind the zoo. Then he returns, haunted-looking and edgy, and he wants to talk all night. It’s exhausting. Sometimes he sobs. Sometimes he punches the wall.’

  Marco waited for Cass to ask for details. When she didn’t he added, ‘Be careful, Cass.’

  He was sitting on the bed, leaning forward, tying the laces of his shoes. Cass leant over him and kissed the nape of his neck. His springy hair curled there, she felt it graze her moist lips. She encircled him with her arms and rested her face on his back. Fully dressed now, he was no less desirable, and she was reluctant to part with his warmth and the skill of his embrace.

  What had been remote and impersonal was now becoming individualised. Each tale of childhood was a gateway, each observation he made, or new word he taught her, was a personal effect he left in his wake. Holding herself above him, looking directly into his eyes, she had seen the sallow child swooning and the Madonna sisters nearby. She had seen the exemplary pathos of a small convulsed boy.

  When Marco left, Cass returned to the warmth of her bed. In the darkness her room had a violet sheen. Her insomniac mind wandered. She thought of Vesuvius and the deadly wallop of ash and stone from the sky. Catastrophe: the wracked scope of every history. She thought of Victor, alert, watching the unalert tortoise. She thought more generally, and yet again, of their visit to the aquarium. Almost asleep she saw anew the subdued world of sea creatures, alight in the dark and liquid corridors, drifting, on display, gleaming meekly and seeming – this was the trick, surely, of aquaria and zoos – to be prolonged, or even imperishable, in their own dwarf kingdoms. The paradoxical attraction was in their remove from the world, their apparent self-sufficiency. How safe they all were. Needing no true ocean and no true sunlight; needing no actual freedom.

  16

  In the underground station at Innsbrucker Platz, an old man was playing ‘Nessun Dorma’ on a saw. It sounded Martian, thought Cass, like a Theremin whine, like the tune of titanium spaceships approaching in a dream. The bent-over musician looked Central Asian and poor. He wore an ill-fitting jacket that might have belonged to someone else, borrowed perhaps, or raided as a cast-off. His face was scabby and squashed and spoke of many hard winters. The saw was caught between his legs and he played it gently with a bow, lifting, lowering, lifting and again lowering. A saw, she thought. That a saw could sound so extraterrestrial. The musician did not look up; he was intent on his recital and in a world of his own. Some sort of quivering, ineluctable spirit contained him. In this drear and lurid tunnel, with its rushing commuters, he was seancing Puccini.

  Cass and one or two others stopped in their tracks to listen. The passage between the U-Bahn and S-Bahn was a perfect chamber for music: the saw sounds reverberated loudly, rang in the concrete shadows, travelled paranormal in thin waves through the dingy tubes. A concert audience of three. They each offered a few euros.

  Gino was there to meet her, as they had planned. He stood at the exit, smoking. When he saw her approach, he dropped his smoke and cowboy-style, without looking, ground the butt with his heel.

  ‘What would Pavarotti think?’ he said, as he leant to kiss her in greeting.

  ‘Or Joey Ramone?’

  ‘Both dead. Touché.’

  It was a fatuous exchange, completely contemporary.

  Gino’s face was ice cold. Cass wondered how long he’d stood there, waiting for her to appear. He looked tired, she thought. His handsome features were drawn, his eyes were inflamed and baggy. Around him hung the fusty reek of too many fervid cigarettes. She wondered when last he had used.

  ‘Come,’ she said. ‘I promised you good coffee.’ Together they walked up Hauptstrasse and into the backstreets of Schöneberg; Cass led Gino into the pokey place she considered her local. They sat on uncomfortable chairs that indicated hip Berlin, and gazed in the direction of Apostle Paulus church. A light snow fell. Cass stared calmly out of the window as Gino fidgeted and stirred, touching at his clothes like a man who discovers he has lost so
mething and immediately feels a wild need to locate it.

  ‘I’ve lost my wallet,’ he confirmed.

  ‘I can pay, don’t worry.’

  ‘No, I mean really lost. My credit cards, everything.’

  He was ruffled by his misfortune. He stood abruptly, pulled upwards, and the wallet appeared as in a trick, fallen in a plop from somewhere inside his jacket. There were tears in his eyes.

  ‘Jesus, I’m such a mess.’

  Cass remained silent. She would let him recover his dignity, she would watch the snow. The windows were slightly fogged with damp, but there it was, still apparent, a pure-white scrim descending. Already the streets were halfway transformed, becoming crème-smooth and beautiful.

  ‘Don’t you think,’ she ventured, ‘that one of the effects of snow is to make everything, even people, appear almost motionless?’

  Gino looked vacantly at her face as if not comprehending the question. Then he reconnected, and calmed.

  ‘Yes,’ he said quietly. ‘Yes, almost motionless.’

  After that, they could speak. Gino leant close so that Cass caught the scent of his masculinity intermixed with the tart cigarette smoke. He spoke, as Marco had, of their tight little group. Victor was inauthentic, he declared, but he was unable to explain why he knew this to be so. It was a feeling he had, a definite feeling. Victor was inauthentic. Yukio and Mitsuko were the real thing: they were true lovers who had found each other, they were a paradigm case, a rare modern example. Marco, well, he was Marco; he was the exceptional Marco.

  ‘Has he told you yet about Pliny the Elder?’ Gino asked. ‘He has these points of obsession: the uncle who was really the father, the death of excessive poignancy as Vesuvius gushes fire, the encyclopedic, and scholarly, and finally futile life.’

  Cass lied. ‘No.’

  ‘He knows a huge amount, really, but it’s all self-referential. History is full of allegories that he considers marvellously personal. Don’t trust him, Cass. He has crazy theories about everything.’