A Guide to Berlin Read online

  ‘You bet,’ said Victor.

  ‘I don’t believe in angels.’

  ‘No one does. Kids maybe. Only kids. But in this weary flux of sensations, why not love the enchantment of a symbol? My temperament allows me to pretend. Call me old-fashioned!’

  They spoke of imaginative knowledge and the impossible drive to precision. They spoke of the enchantment of symbols, and how the defects of language required a more figurative gesture. At length, Victor asked Cass about her childhood. He liked the detail of the lighthouse, he said; it must have been so romantic. No lighthouses in the third ward! There was a lighthouse in New Jersey on the Hudson, a red-and-white-striped candy bar, but it was a tourist site, he said, and good for stoners and skaters. Nothing like a working lighthouse, dominating the night. Cass verified, as best she could, the adequate romance of lighthouses, not lying exactly, but protecting his lustrous vision. He was satisfied with her answers. Pity about the kittens. Poor little kittens. He had a black cat called Sirin that his daughter was looking after back in her apartment in New Jersey. Sirin liked to tear at the furniture, a psycho cat, and attack rival felines and strangers to the house.

  Cass had not seen Gino, nor had he contacted her. No one had seen Gino. Marco had met Yukio and Mitsuko at a bar after his work; Mitsuko had texted her saying she guessed of their affair. ‘Have you slept together yet?’ Cass wondered what had been said to prompt such a direct question. She did not answer, and now felt the offense of exposure and the need for distance.

  So they were all orbiting each other. They were a human orrery. The six eccentrics were swinging through deep space in close or faraway circles.

  This Kępiński meeting would be easy and carefree; it was the meeting at which they each felt more secure and connected. The completion of the speak-memories had given them access to each other, and paradoxically its formality had strengthened their interconnection. There were inevitably misunderstandings and strange attractions, inevitably misconstruals and hypersensitive reactions, but they could greet each other warmly, and with a kind of love. For all the cynicism their age had bred in them, there were these discoveries of affinity, made simply in speaking and listening.

  It was Cass’s turn to contribute the alcohol. Since they had all recently suffered the drastic power of spirits, she bought wine, excellent wine, more expensive than she could afford. Marco came by to help her carry it and together they walked to meet the others, escorted through the darkness by the soft chink-chink of the bottles.

  She had waited to meet him again, to recommence their conversation. At her disclosure of Alexander’s death, Marco had said little other than to offer more or less conventional condolences. But now, on their walk, he said how much the story of her brother’s death had shocked and affected him. He had dreamt that night that it was he who was under the table, with the wind spinning around them. It had been his father – looking young, looking a lot like himself – lying dead in the blood-soaked lap of his mother. At some point in the dream they moved to the centre of the Coliseum, with the mad Roman traffic surrounding them in its cacophonous roar. He’d woken with a start, he said, his heart massively pounding.

  ‘I don’t usually remember my dreams, except for a rare image or two. And this one, though dramatic, seems somewhat transparent in its meaning …’

  Cass heard the effort in his voice.

  ‘Almost a cliché,’ he went on, as if feeling responsible for the lack of originality in his dream.

  This was a closeness, now, that he had spoken of a difficult dream. She understood that they might discuss it later, and that in the bold presumption of dream-logic, symbolically assertive, he had confused his own uncompleted mourning for hers.

  The lamplights they passed under cast little radiance, but it was a companionable walk, less dark than either expected. Cass was aware of the rhythm of Marco’s limbs and his rapid, light step. The swing of his coat, the steady bulk of his body. She liked walking beside him. Other pedestrians would have thought them a long-term couple; they walked easily together, they were comfortably close.

  For her part, something crucial had lifted and shifted. Having spoken finally of Alexander, Cass still felt only relief. And after the night standing naked at the Nestorstrasse window, stricken by what she had said, desolated by memory, she was now recomposed. Almost sane, she thought wryly. She was now almost sane. Alexander could rest in peace and she could fall in love with Marco. It felt as if she had scooped at a pond of icy water, dashed her face clean, felt a shock intake of breath, and then come suddenly alive.

  For once, they all arrived at the apartment at exactly the same time. In threes they rode upwards in Kępiński’s small metal lift; Cass with Yukio and Mitsuko, the others following. Gino was looking rumpled and worn, but was making an effort to be sociable, especially with Victor. With exaggerated politeness he was asking Victor about the tortoise, knowing this was the topic that would most engage and delight him. Gino looked across at Cass, who smiled her approval. Accord; there was a sweet if tentative accord. Victor was saying, once again, ‘It was really something, that tortoise.’ For a literary scholar his expressive powers seemed sometimes rather limited; or perhaps, thought Cass, he had reverted to adolescent wonder, when encounters have their own form of ‘something’ that exceeds description.

  Cass sat next to Marco, who was explaining the German expression ‘toi, toi, toi’. ‘It’s like saying “touch wood”,’ he explained, ‘but it represents the sound of spitting. And since we are all superstitious, perhaps we can bless this meeting with a traditional German spit: toi, toi, toi. Lucky. It will make us all lucky.’

  They laughed. Jointly they felt both happy and non-German. There had been times all were aware of their exclusion and foreignness, but now asked to speak of Berlin they set about summoning a connection. Marco said, ‘Let’s have a free-for-all.’

  ‘Fountains!’ said Mitsuko.

  ‘The Stattbad,’ said Yukio.

  Victor paused. ‘You all know mine: the Berlin Aquarium.’

  ‘Gino?’

  ‘Too many sites to choose one. Perhaps the Anhalter station. Or the Cemetery of the Nameless.’

  There was an uneasy silence. To fill it Cass said, ‘The trains, U-Bahn and S-Bahn, and all those stations along the way.’

  ‘I’m a bit like Gino,’ Marco said. ‘Hard to choose. But I shall start with Bebelplatz.’

  Each was enjoined to say a little more.

  ‘So me first,’ said Mitsuko. She was dressed in jeans and a jumper, as was Yukio. Cass was surprised to see them appear so unexceptional.

  ‘There are so many fountains in Berlin. I noticed them straight away when we arrived in the summer, because people clustered there, and there were children bathing and frolicking, and because so many seemed frivolous, and even comical, in this very serious city. They have no water now, of course, because it would freeze in the pipes. Everybody knows the golden deer on the pedestal in Schöneberg, but there is a four-penguin fountain in Boxhagener Platz; a yawning rhino in Friedrichshain; and a frog fountain in Mitte: so many creatures! In Leon-Jessel-Platz, not far from here, there’s a huge toadstool; and in Barbarossaplatz there’s a fountain that features eight babies, all sitting in a circle staring at a spray of water. Cute! My favourite is the Medusa head in Henriettenplatz. It’s a great monstrous thing, extremely ugly, and I can imagine it would give any child nightmares. It’s a severed head, just stuck there on the pavement with the usual Gorgon snakes for hair and bulging sad eyes. When I first saw it I wasn’t really sure what it was. And each time I look at it now, it’s still something of a riddle.’

  Mitsuko was pleased with herself. She had shared her fervour. Yukio followed.

  ‘I make a blog in Japanese. It is called “Japan in Berlin”. And I tweet, and have Facebook with many, many friends. So, I have many stories for Berlin and they are all sent to Japan. The Stattbad in Wedding was a swimming pool; now it’s a club. Now you can dance in the pool to super-cool DJs. There’s
a basement room, with tunnels and taps and old water pipes; but Mitsuko and I love to dance in the swimming pool. The sunken dance floor means that the low sound …’

  Yukio played air-guitar. ‘Bass,’ Mitsuko said.

  ‘The bass is very boom-boom; there is a feeling of being in another world.’

  ‘Truly,’ said Mitsuko.

  Victor was entirely affable, with his tortoise affirmed. What more to say? He sat back in his chair, holding his thin belly like a sage enlightened.

  ‘The other world is those living beings who carry their own lives inscrutably. We gawp at animals in the zoo, and fish in the aquarium, with little thought they gawp back, and see in our looks another strangeness. Do you know I’d never been to an aquarium before? And this one – perhaps it’s not special at all, because I have no comparisons – this one was such a joy.’

  This was Victor’s word, thought Cass, joy. This was a man who had retained some early skill, the ineffable pleasure a child feels – lavish and quick – when a butterfly alights on the back of her hand. He was unafraid of expressive emotion, its metaphors and its forms of knowing.

  Gino hesitated in the face of Victor’s delight in his own location, but when he spoke his voice was languid and thoughtful.

  ‘Anhalter Bahnhoff. It used to be the largest railway station in Europe and Hitler wanted it to be one of the centres of “Germania”. The architecture was grand, all arches and round windows, and the building massive, with a magnificent façade. More cathedral than station. An underground tunnel connected it to a fancy hotel, “The Excelsior”, and the whole construction was entirely luxurious. Of course, it was bombed in the war and today there’s only one fragment of wall, standing alone. There are three circular windows, up high, and three empty arches. It’s in the middle of open ground and looks pitifully abandoned.’

  ‘Theresienstadt,’ Victor said. ‘It was the point of departure for Jews being sent to Theresienstadt.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Gino. ‘So many stations in Berlin, even the glamorous ones, have these awful dark histories. And it’s hard to feel sentimental with the Topography of Terror just around the corner. But this ruin interests me because it is so meagre and nihilistic: it speaks of emptiness and demolition. The ruin above, the tunnel below. It represents something fundamental to what we meet here, in this city.’

  Mitsuko and Yukio did not know this ruin, they said. Cass was recalling when she had first seen it, and her sense of bewilderment. She had expected more, somehow - more ruin, more remains.

  Cass considered Gino’s contribution corrupted by romanticism. She would say so, afterwards. But she was chastened by the knowledge that she was also attracted to sites of destruction, and to empty spaces, to havoc, and to things broken persisting.

  ‘My sense of Berlin is entirely dominated by the trains. I carry the route map in my head and think often of the shape of the city, and how essentially it is netted and webbed by the rails. There’s a sense of a circulatory system, a sense of the conveyance of energies and the very pulse of life. I like the shadowy, tiled U-stations, with their varying fonts and colours, the familiar smell in there, so thickly human, and the loud sounds of the trains coming and going. The iron arcades of the S-stations are beautiful too, and I have a special fondness for the green struts and arches of Eberswalder and Schönhauser Allee. There is something both old-worldly and futuristic in the vision of overground rail – and the rise of the tracks across the city, the curve past buildings and highways, and the way they make an extra, and another, architectural level …’

  ‘Dahlem-Dorf,’ said Victor, ‘with its fairytale station building. And the Gothic script names on the S25.’

  ‘Or that little station in Schöneberg, with the lake outside.’ Mitsuko’s favourite, clearly.

  It may have been that each of them was mentally entering their station. City portal and place mark, and the satisfaction of a punctual train. Cass knew she had summoned communal imagining, had invited them to salute their especial station.

  ‘I’m interested,’ Marco was sounding more serious, ‘in memorials. Berlin has many, of course. One of the least conspicuous is the rows of empty bookshelves underground in Bebelplatz. They commemorate the book burning there by the Nazis in 1933. It’s such a simple thing, the empty bookshelves. Have you seen it?’

  Only Victor knew of the Bebelplatz bookshelves. ‘Best seen at night because of the supernatural glow.’

  ‘Yes, you peer into a lit square, as down a deep well, and you see only empty shelves. I like the simplicity of this installation, and the accuracy of the idea.’

  Marco fell silent. He rose and stood staring at the window, as if he expected a book to materialise there. The window was black and opaque. No text would emerge. They watched him, their leader, wondering what would come next.

  ‘To books!’ toasted Victor. His voice flew up to the ceiling.

  Dear Victor, funny Victor. They all toasted books.

  Then, sounding like Groucho, and holding up an invisible cigar, he asked in a briskly slapstick tone, ‘So who was this guy Kępiński, anyway?’

  21

  It would seem like handwriting in snow, or in the breath adhering to a windowpane. There would be no visible trace. The obliterations of winter had use-value, after all. Later she would remember how still the day had been, how all motion but snowfall had seemed abruptly to stop.

  They had all agreed to two weeks without any meetings, to recover their lives apart. Cass missed Marco much more than she expected, but enjoyed the white radiance of the winter and the return to her own preoccupations. Gradually the city was unfolding for her; she saw that she might know herself more subtly here, that the pressure of history, imposed like a spy mission, required her to develop a kind of inner sincerity. Small in the face of a terrible history, foreign, young, uncool, antipodean, she might find here an expression of her accumulated questioning. It was a challenge, she decided; there was a logic she must achieve, there were encryptions, there were passwords, there were possible solutions. Not only the train system, but littered everywhere: signs and symbols, implications.

  When Cass arrived for their next meeting at Kępiński’s building, Marco and Gino were outside, standing beneath a lamp in the cold dark, smoking on the pavement. Both greeted her warmly. In the aqueous brown lamplight Gino looked wild-eyed and hyper. Cass saw how altered he seemed in so short a time. He looked thinner, pale; his body and mind on the errant edge of crystal meth impulses and tics. But he was also friendly and somewhat crazily verbose; as if wanting to entertain, he greeted her with a racy description of their train ride.

  Marco touched Cass’s cheek as he gave the formal greeting, a sign of all that still remained unspoken and hidden. It was a claim, she understood, and a promissory gentleness. Gino noticed the gesture. When he leant into the hello kiss he seized Cass’s forearm and gripped. She decided simply to ignore him.

  They could not use Kępiński’s, Marco said: another agent from his company would be showing someone around. They needed an alternative. He suggested they meet in Cass’s apartment, since it was the closest option, only a ten-minute walk away. Marco and Gino would wait and tell the others. Cass would go ahead, and return to her studio.

  It was foolish, she knew, but she felt anxiety at the idea of them all gathered in her single room. The ignominy of it. Her poor, undecorated existence. Practical trivia was rushing through her brain: she had only two wine glasses. Four could be seated, two on the bed, two on chairs; the others, she and Yukio perhaps, could sit with pillows on the floor. She must duck into a shop on the way to buy more glasses. She must buy snacks and more alcohol, just in case. It alarmed her to have been given this role so casually, and with no time for preparation. Indignantly she thought Marco should have suggested a café; and why did she not have the presence of mind to recommend and insist on it? She felt her privacy was to be invaded, just as she had, rather meanly, when Yukio and Mitsuko arrived.

  How then would she describe it all, if
she was compelled?

  It had begun well enough. They had arrived in one group, clomping up the stairwell, their voices echoing upbeat in the narrow and dreary space. They all shrugged off their coats, sprinkled with snow: it must have begun to fall again soon after she’d arrived home. There was the damp smell they brought with them, and slightly loud exclamations at the novelty of a fast walk all together to the new location. Cass offered them tea to warm up and the lovers both said yes. Gino was picking up her books, scanning them without permission, moving restlessly, back and forth, as he flicked through random pages. He scratched at the back of his hands and was evidently agitated. Victor stood alone looking out of the window, peering with a frown into the dark, sunken square of the cemetery, and Marco was busy opening wine bottles at the sink. They were crowded, she felt it; they all felt the pressure of confinement. Mitsuko sat on the bed sipping her tea; Marco soon joined her. As anticipated, she and Yukio were seated on the floor. She will remember that Yukio lolled a little, as if half-asleep; he may have been stoned. She will remember the shine of hot water in his teacup, a perfect circle of shine, one of those entirely incidental images that in retrospect returns as a small, certain thing.

  So, what did they speak of? There were Nabokov stories: Victor was pleased to tell them that Nabokov shared his rooms in Cambridge with someone called Kalashnikov. Like the Hitler-pansy story there seemed to be no point, other than Victor’s literary delight at the unusual association. Gino visibly sneered. Marco thought perhaps they should all nominate ‘transparent things’: those according to Nabokov through which history mysteriously shines; those objects that carry time past or the ghosts of our childhoods. Bright things, he said, metaphysically admitting light. There were no takers, this time. No one wanted prescribed conversation or Marco’s intellectual guidance. He accepted quietly and poured more wine.

  Mitsuko spoke of how Nabokov had loved to go to movies in the cinema palaces around the Gedächtniskirche; how sad it was that they’d left the bombed ruins of the old church standing. Better gone, she insisted. Better to start again. Ruins are too sad. Sometimes forgetting is better than remembering.