A Guide to Berlin Read online

  Cass nodded, wishing for something spongy and buttery to soak in her gritty coffee. She was overcome by discomfort, as if her attraction to Marco seemed suddenly to place her at a disadvantage.

  ‘But you knew that, of course.’

  He was testing her, she was certain. He was intrigued by her nationality and for some reason especially pleased that she was not English or American. Australians were inessential; that might be the key. Perhaps he imagined her in some bucolic or colonial mode, unformed and derivative. Or romping with childish fauna: koalas, kangaroos. Perhaps he thought her gullible and susceptible to old-world persuasions.

  She looked at his beautiful hands, fiddling with unconscious fussiness at a sachet of sugar.

  ‘As a child,’ he went on, ‘I was fascinated by Australia. Two of my father’s older brothers emigrated there in the seventies, just after I was born. I never met them, but my mother has a cache of their letters which I used to read and reread. They are vivid letters, full of improbable information and naïve boasting.’

  Marco paused, halted before whatever came next in his story. Cass was too polite to ask what his father did, and too reticent to offer more details of her own. He drank his espresso in a single gulp and looked away. Some memory had captured him, some private recollection had pulled him inwards.

  And it was then, resting on the brink of disclosing conversation, that Marco changed the subject and told her of his group. He listed the names and offered a little information on each. He had known Gino for years in Rome – before he trained in real estate he’d been a literature postgraduate at La Sapienza with Gino. Though neither stayed there very long, they’d formed an enduring friendship. He’d met Victor only recently, helping him find an apartment. He was a college professor on a six-month sabbatical. A lovely man, Marco added. Very high-spirited, very funny. Yukio and Mitsuko, both writers, had stopped beneath his window, just as she had, to photograph the Nestorstrasse apartment. Yukio was a blogger in Japan of some considerable fame; Mitsuko was an essayist and English–Japanese translator.

  They all met as a group each week, sometimes twice in a week, inspired and compelled by a shared interest in the work of Vladimir Nabokov. They tended to make speeches, Marco said, often effusive and cluttered with personal symbols. It was a new kind of community, not academic, not social, but some new species linking words and bodies with an occult sense of the written world. Like the parasite, he said wryly, that Nabokov claimed spelt out the word ‘deified’ in the jelly substance of its cells.

  ‘Victor hopes to confirm this,’ Marco added, ‘and presents us with images of organisms that seem to display cursive writing. Mitochondria. Golgi bodies. He hands around photocopies of images taken through microscopes.’

  Cass laughed. She couldn’t help herself.

  ‘Yes,’ said Marco, ‘I know it sounds a little crazy. But what a beautiful idea, don’t you think? It’s in Ada, the tiny being with “deified” written inside its body.’

  ‘Everywhere,’ Cass said, ‘there are signs and symbols.’

  ‘So you must join us.’

  ‘I’m not a joiner. Really, I’m not.’

  Marco was earnest in pressing his case.

  ‘Consider how empty most social encounters really are; how nothing is revealed, or known, nothing is risked or truly given. The inner self is disqualified in the rough currencies of social commerce. Who cares about complication? Who cares about Nabokov?’

  ‘Who indeed?’

  She saw now that she had slightly offended him. Marco looked down at his hands.

  ‘Forgive me, I’m lecturing. I must sound like an old fogey. All we want is that our self in words be more precise, and mean more. Matter more, you might say. Make true connections.’

  Cass thought, Yes, he does sound like an old fogey. But she was also touched by the plea, and by the evident sincerity. Outside, a second fire-engine sped through the ash-grey streets, alarmingly scarlet and incongruously silent. Cass and Marco both noticed it, but neither commented. It fled past, a pale fire, into the frosty distance.

  In the end he persuaded her. It may have been the sense of rare meeting or incipient sexual attraction. It may have been his charming appeal to an inner self, so primly defended. Nothing much at this time merited her full attention. The city was mysteriously closed in hibernation, and somehow inaccessible. Her vantage was one of ignorance, and her intuition was that whatever was concealed would take time to unconceal. She had come to Berlin to write, an ambition as vague as it was hopeful, verified only by her saying so. There was no evidence of her writing, for she had not yet begun. Her torpor would eventually – necessarily – lift. But she was a kind of tourist, after all, and bent on swift amusements. The weather oppressed her. She sensed herself frozen inside. She was like one of the ubiquitous cranes located high on building sites in Mitte, a stiff shape merely, stuck mechanical in mid-air.

  Cass wondered what happened at the meetings, sometimes held in coffee shops, sometimes in empty apartments to which Marco had access. She was without friends in this city, aimless and contingent: why not follow the possibility of a literary fellowship? Marco said that the meetings so far had been rather anarchic; they were all a little odd, he declared honestly, and none of them were really ‘joiners’. At the next they would begin a ‘speak-memory’ game, in which each would introduce themselves with a densely remembered story or detail. They had made a kind of pact, a narrative pact, to speak openly and freely. There was no compulsion, Marco insisted. No pressure or obligation. But each would try to speak with candour in whatever manner or genre they chose. Victor had offered to go first.

  Outside the bar, on the footpath, they murmured shy farewells. Marco scribbled an address on a piece of paper.

  ‘Oblomov,’ he said.

  Cass had no idea what he was referring to.

  ‘Five pm, tomorrow. Please join us. Please.’

  He seemed reluctant to leave. They stood motionless for a few expanding seconds. Cass half expected another fire-engine to appear and zoom past, since the world was like that now: Berlin was already declaring itself in replications and convergences. Blue U and green S signs seemed everywhere suspended, faces were not entirely distinctive, the same yellow bus roared everywhere between orange LED-lit signs. Colour drew her attention; any interruption to the overall grey caught her gaze. She had noticed too the surreal apparition of fibre-glass bears - life-sized and brightly decorated, standing in erect human postures – a ubiquitous public art of comic-book taste.

  Prone to awkwardness in these situations, Cass spun on her heel with what might have seemed a decisive impertinence. She pushed away from Marco into the freezing air, feeling the turbulence, and the faint thrill, of scarcely admissible feelings.

  4

  The central heating was on and the apartment was cosy.

  Cass placed her paper sheath of tulips near the doorway so she would not forget them. She loosened her scarf and removed her gloves and coat. This was the repetition that a European winter imposed, this on-again, off-again, this robing and disrobing.

  Mitsuko, acting like a hostess, handed Cass the mysterious drink and led her with a delicate touch at the elbow into the sparsely furnished room. What struck Cass most were the empty walls and the pale squares and rectangles where once had rested paintings. Oblomov’s disappeared images were now secretive shapes. There was a black leather lounge and two matching leather armchairs, but no coffee table, so that the drinks were served on the floor. There were two vintage standing lamps, of enamelled green metal, Venn-diagrammatically arranged to pour rings of light where a coffee table might have been. Cass recalled the squat she lived in when she had first fled home – sitting on the floor around candles in bottles and dope in plastic bags, and the queasy joy of having only a few books and a duffel bag of scant possessions. She had followed a boyfriend to London and her parents and brothers had been scandalised.

  Victor’s geographical announcements, manic and apparently lighthearted, had
been a sign of his nervousness. His voice was curiously thin, high and insistent. He had rattled on – listing cities, engaging in fanciful speculations. Now he sat himself down and prepared to speak in a more tranquil tone. Mitsuko and Cass sat with Victor on the lounge, Marco and Gino each had an armchair, and Yukio sat between them on the floor, his legs crossed like a buddha. It was not an arrangement Cass, in her forward imagining, had at all anticipated, sitting opposite Marco, faced with his inquisitive scrutiny.

  ‘We are grateful,’ said Marco, ‘that Victor has agreed to be the first in our speak-memory disclosures. This cannot be easy.’

  He nodded to Victor. ‘So, shall we begin?’

  It was the simplest of commencements, no pomposity, no introduction.

  Victor cleared his throat, a little too loudly, like a worried actor, warming up. Then he began. ‘So, here goes, kiddos.

  ‘I was born in New Jersey in 1952. Momma said I came out yawning, and liked to tell the story: “You came out yawning, little one, you came out yawning!” Like I was over it already and bored with the world. But she was wrong. I was never bored. I always wanted more and more world.

  ‘She was forty-two then, an old mother in those days, and I was to be their only child. My parents loved me in an impassioned way that I found embarrassing: Momma would fuss over the smallest things – she was always tweaking my clothes, pulling at my sleeves, adjusting the cute bowties they inflicted on boys at that time. She was obsessed with cleanliness, spitting on her hanky and wiping away invisible smuts or blemishes; holding my chin with her thumb and index finger, tilting my face upwards, wiping and rubbing so that I imagined my face shone like a lamp. Her eyes would fill with tears at the slightest provocation: when I handed her a drawing, or recited some fragment in Yiddish, inept and stammering, or showed her a school certificate, given simply for attendance. I had a sense of power over her and my father, who was silent to the point of anonymity, a shade of a man who had left his full self behind him in Poland.

  ‘My mother stayed at home and took in ironing for better-off households, so that our front room was always filled with piles of clean washing, as if there was a huge population hidden away in our house, forever casting off their clothes. I loved pushing my face into the piles, like a housewife in a TV commercial. It was like a secret vice, I guess, because it seemed so womanly and so wrong.

  ‘My father worked in an umbrella factory – on Ferry Street, I think it was – doing who knows what, he never really told me. I was always asking him, “Tateh, what is it you actually do?” He would wave me away, so that I was left in the dark, contemplating the mysteries of making an umbrella. At school I told the kids that my papa was a cop; it sounded much nobler, somehow, and much more plausible.

  ‘But Papa gave me my first real sense of the mystery of things, specific things, how something ordinary might carry extraordinary detail. Once, when he’d become tired of the ignorance of my questions, he drew an umbrella and named all the parts. There was the ferrule at the top, there was the open cap, the top notch, the ribs all joining at the rosette in the centre, there was the runner, the stretcher, the top and bottom springs. There was the shaft, the crook handle, and at the end of the crook handle there was the nose cap. Above was the canopy, that lovely shape, the dome some call the parasol. I remember him saying this in Yiddish, “Some call this the parasol.” He sat back in his chair, surveying his named umbrella, and this was the closest to contentment, even happiness, I’d ever seen him. He was transfixed by his own drawing, and by the modest vocabulary of his labour.

  ‘When the factory closed down in the early sixties, and he was dying of some unknown illness that made him even less substantial and more withdrawn, Papa one day, out of the blue, entered a kind of confused monologue, mixing Yiddish and English, about the bits and pieces of umbrellas. I understood then that he probably made the springs by hand. He’d been a watchmaker before the war, and it made sense to me then, that he might find a more simple expression of the skill his eyesight no longer enabled. He had a contempt for newer umbrellas with metal shafts and mass-produced springs, and owned a stick umbrella from the olden days, beautifully fashioned, a pointy miracle, which stood propped like a kind of furniture by our front door. I never saw him use it. I don’t know where it came from. I know only that the old umbrella was his single treasure. When I popped it open after his death, the canopy was torn in two places. He must have known this, but kept it still.

  ‘Other boys had basketball pennants in their rooms, and baseball cards and posters, especially after the Mets started in sixty-two. Other boys had small metal toys, cast-iron cars and tanks, and plastic figurines of cowboys and Indians. I had just a few books and my dead father’s useless umbrella.

  ‘My parents, Solomon and Hanka, later Solly and Anna, were Polish survivors of the Holocaust. I know very little of their story and they evaded my few questions. But at some level, too, I was guiltily incurious. I was a pretty dumb kid when it came to family, I can tell you.

  ‘I know they were from Warsaw and had been in the ghetto. And I know they were both in Auschwitz, because I saw the numbers tattooed on their forearms. I have no idea of their actual experiences, or how they were taken, or when, or how each of them managed to survive. Even now, mostly when I’m watching movies or documentaries on TV, I feel a kind of despair that arises from knowing so little. I look for their faces in photographs and grainy footage. I think for a second: Hey, that’s my father! But it never is. Hey, that’s my mother! But no, not once.

  ‘So every torment is possibly theirs, and nothing wholly is; I insert them into any memoir, anxiously imagining, then have to remove them again. Their lives in Europe are remote and obscure and their times in the camp are appallingly generalised. It pains me now to know so little. And it astonishes me how well we all avoided the topic.

  ‘What I know of their story only starts after they were released. This much I know. They were two years, three maybe, in a displaced persons camp run by the Soviets, and this was where they met. Momma once told me they refused to be repatriated back to Poland because they’d heard there had been executions of those on the Left, and of participants in the uprising. Some had survived the camps, only to be killed when they arrived home. So they held out, waiting and waiting, hoping to get a passage to Palestine. When this didn’t happen, they settled for America. On the boat they already heard about Newark, New Jersey.

  ‘Newark, New Jersey, they heard, was a paradise for Jews.

  ‘I think it was very hard when they first arrived. My mother spoke a little English, she had been well educated, and came from a middle-class family. My father spoke not a word and was reluctant to learn. A welfare agency set them up in two rooms with a few possessions, and not long afterwards Papa started at the umbrella factory. When I came along, they must have been mighty surprised – there were times when they looked at me as if I’d arrived from Mars.’

  Here Victor halted. The group remained silent, wondering if his story was over. Mitsuko was examining her fingers. The men were all looking down. Cass was conscious of Victor sitting beside her – she’d entered the dreaminess of his story, she’d let it dissolve her Berlin surroundings into his New Jersey past – but now she was aware of him physically, the way he hunched over in his telling, the way he fiddled with his watchband, all the small giveaway signs that spoke of the effort of revelation. Marco looked up and caught her glance, but then looked away almost immediately and did not speak. Someone would soon pour another glass, say something trivial, and make time move again, back to the present, in this room, in Oblomov’s room, on Goethestrasse, in freezing Berlin. Just as the strain of this quiet indecision took hold, Victor recommenced.

  ‘I was a clever student, impeccably behaved, and I managed in grade school to blend in and seem like one of the others. But high school was a nightmare. I was fourteen when my father died and I felt ashamed of my stricken mother, and our lack of family, and our obvious poverty. No amount of lying disguised it. No amo
unt of academic success. Everyone I knew had aunts and uncles, grandparents and cousins, and we had no one. The rabbi visited once or twice, when I quit Hebrew classes and refused to take my bar mitzvah, but otherwise I can’t remember a single caller to our apartment, apart from clients dropping off and picking up their ironing. Momma had no friends to speak of and said Americans had no souls.

  ‘After Papa’s death, she underwent a bewildering change; only in adulthood I realised it was a kind of breakdown. She lost it, completely lost it. She began casually to insult people on the sidewalks and in supermarkets. They understood nothing, she said. That was her line. They understood nothing. They played golf and had swimming parties, the women baked each other cakes and took their children to Dairy Queen and pizza bars, and all this seemed to her frivolous and a spiritual dereliction. She especially resented the wealthy Jews who lived on Keer Avenue, with their free-standing houses and their Cadillacs and their thin strips of emerald lawn. She resented their American speech and their extended families.

  ‘I remember once we were walking together and she stopped before the window of a hairdressing parlour – this was in the days when women sat for hours under those metal hoods that looked like the heads of aliens – and she just started berating them, gesticulating and shouting loud insults in Yiddish. I could see the women, all in white capes, all in a row beneath the metal heads, turn towards her in unison. All together, like automatons. They looked stunned at first, at this crazy foreign lady shouting at them from the pavement, but then one began to giggle and the others followed suit. It shocked her, their jollity. It made her shout even louder. I’m guessing she never went to a hairdresser once in her life. She had grey hair, even when I was born, always bound in a loose bun; something from the old world, maybe, something from before the war.