A Guide to Berlin Read online

  In a text message, Marco asked her to meet him at the Pergamon Museum. His message read, ‘Care for a stroll around Babylon? Entrance, 2 pm?’

  The simplicity of the invitation made it easy to accept. Cass had yet to visit one of the city’s prestigious museums. It would be warm, she imagined, toasty warm, and museums had a solemnity that would make her meeting with Marco seem somehow neutral and educative. She was at once enticed and hesitant. She had imagined time alone, longed, truly longed, for contemplative time alone, and already she was succumbing to romantic possibility and the magnetism of her own attractions. But she also despised the false coyness women were expected to display, the sensible containment of feelings and opinions, the demand of high-level tolerance to the inconsistencies of men. She thought how as a child she had striven to be like her three brothers, how tough she had become, how rudely boyish. She wrestled, gave Chinese burns, refused to wear dresses; she swore, she mucked about, she was not sweet or dependable. Her mother had wrung her hands in despair. Now, in a new city, she might recover independent feelings.

  It was still sub-zero, she guessed, without the Apotheke sign to confirm it. Cass located the bridge across the Spree. Plates of grimy ice lay on the water as if thrown like garbage into a chasm. She fancied she heard them scrape in a high pitch, rubbed together by undercurrent. As she crossed to Museum Island, Cass saw that it was another building site, a solid chaos of intentions and structures unfinished. Vast puddles of slush lay on broken concrete. Machines and implements were scattered in disarray. Like so much in the centre, it was under construction or reconstruction. Scaffolding, cranes, the temporary business of architects and workmen, the portable toilets, the short-term fencing, the crash-barriers and the skips. Rubble, more rubble. There was a history of Berlin to be written on the topic of rubble. Wreckage, waste, the sense of corruption or crime scene. A long blue water pipe, held high on a frame, encircled the whole. It was the way of the world, perhaps, that the dignity and sobriety of old public buildings, their temple facades, would be assaulted and covered over by indiscriminate modernity; that new buildings, more severely efficient, would eventually replace them.

  Cass saw a few others struggling with frozen expressions and tightly compressed lips. Everyone wore black padded jackets in a kind of mournful uniformity, and battled the same bladed wind that swept across the open spaces, their fists jammed into pockets, their heads resolutely down. In the courtyard in front of the museum, a mass of gloomy punters surged in a dense queue, moving forward by small increments to the warm haven of the entrance hall. She saw their breath in the air, their virtuous and orderly loitering. When Marco hailed her, holding up tickets, she was overcome with relief. He lifted his arm as if involuntarily, as if pulled by hidden strings, and then he strode to her side. Here he paused, fondly waiting. Cass was aware she must look a fright, and hated herself for caring. Her nose and eyes were streaming. Her face had set in a stiff mask. But Marco said only that he was very pleased she had come, lightly kissed the air at her cheeks, then guided her, without touching, up a rattling ramp and towards the makeshift doors.

  Inside, past the gift shop, everyone was crowded at the cloakroom, discarding coats and encumbrances and collecting headsets. All was loud and clamorous. The barbarian horde of a large group of schoolchildren had taken control, and shouted to each other as they stowed their back packs and clothing. A maddened schoolteacher, with octopus eyes and a stiff straining neck, shouted back, so that the room jangled to the ceiling with conflicting and contiguous voices. Cass ought to have been critical but felt secretly charmed. They were so rebellious, these kids; they all flirted and gossiped and would not be wholly controlled. Each and every one seemed to possess a mobile phone, and this too connected them, the incessant, busy fidget of new-zapped messages, the will only to connect. Into the museum of dead worlds they carried electronic charge. One boy, thinking himself unseen, stole a kiss in a sideways peck from a bashful classmate. Others everywhere collided.

  This time he touched her. Marco reached for Cass’s shoulder and gently pulled her towards him.

  ‘Come,’ he said, leading her away.

  They stepped together into huge rooms of ancient loot. Porticos, walls, statues and friezes, the altar of Pergamon, the Market Gate of Miletus. Labouring Turks, enslaved to nineteenth-century technologies, had somehow packaged entire monuments for shipment to Berlin. Gigantic dimensions shrunk everything human. Cass was suitably astonished, but also unmoved. Before them stood the Ishtar Gate, the model of archaeological feats and megalomaniacal drive.

  ‘Built by Nebuchadnezzar,’ Marco was saying, ‘575 BC.’

  Cass looked dumbly at the massive gates, speculating on what she should feel, and why it was that here, surrounded by reverential murmurs and breathing melancholic museum air, that she felt almost nothing. She scanned the prestigious surfaces and experienced only detachment. Expatriated signs and symbols to be gawked at, all immemorial. Was this History, then, this sense of stony alienation?

  Marco pointed informatively to the lions and aurochs, striding in regular sequence across lapis tiles. He was speaking in low, impassive tones of gods and goddesses. There was the drone of authoritative commentary in his voice; Cass wondered at how remarkably well informed he was, how he might almost have been a paid guide, or studiously out to impress her.

  But still she felt nothing. Her clarity of vision was prompted by his presence, not by any special reverence for objects two thousand years old. A broken umbrella in an oily puddle might have affected her more. What was missing in her, that she had the urge to retreat?

  Marco noticed at some point that Cass was no longer listening. They moved to smaller rooms, with smaller, more acceptable marvels. They stood at a basalt water basin, carved – so the sign said – from a single piece of stone, and decorated with images of men who had both legs and the bodies of fish. 704 BC.

  ‘Early surrealism,’ she said wryly.

  But now it was Marco who was inexplicably absent. Without any warning he gasped, as if in deep surprise, and collapsed beside her. He had suddenly buckled, his knees giving way, and fallen to the floor. He lay still for just a second, prone, strangely resting, then began to shudder and seethe, his body battered inside by waves of convulsion. Cass saw him arch as if pulled and cracked on a wheel, his head thrown back. Popping eyes, a gaping mouth, and what might have been a grunt emitted there; Marco clenched with the junk electricity of his body. In an instinct to protect them both, Cass wanted to look away. Still he seethed, with visible and invisible currents. She saw now the whites of his eyes, the sweat on his brow, how he twitched even across his face and to the very ends of his fingertips. Others had noticed too – she heard voices swimming around her, pitched in high tones of concern and exclamation.

  A large man in a uniform arrived from nowhere. He was at once upon them, active and intervening. He pressed down on Marco’s shoulders to try to hold him still. When she looked into the man’s face Cass saw Karl, and in the welter of the event thought she must be mistaken, or confused with the surprise of Marco’s condition. Only later Karl explained that he had a few hours’ work at the museum on Fridays and Sundays, that it was a routine, easy job, another kind of caretaking, in which only mischief or accident provided excitement and conversation.

  Karl’s large hands held on, and at last Marco became still. There was ebbing retraction, his brain settling down. Cass saw that she too was on the floor, and that a small crowd had gathered, human voltage drawing them in, and the delicious scandal of a poor man rattled and undone. She held her hands to his face. His eyes returned. There was no focus, no recognition, and Marco appeared utterly baffled. Tears rested in his eye sockets, squeezed out in the moment of return.

  There were more uniforms, now, as other men moved the crowd away. With unusual courtesy, two museum guards pulled Marco upwards, and half-carried, half-dragged him to a room hidden behind the exhibits. They sat him down and offered to bring him a cup of tea. Marco was unresponsi
ve and seemed incapable of speech. Cass accepted for him, as if she were his girlfriend, or wife, suddenly assuming the mantle of his protector in this public setting. She could hear the men discuss whether or not a doctor should be called, her schoolgirl German heightened and alerted by what she had witnessed.

  ‘Aqua,’ Marco said softly.

  He was distraught as he said it. He could not bring himself to look at her.

  Karl extracted a silver flask from a pocket inside his jacket and handed it to Marco. It was vodka, he said afterwards.

  An official-looking woman with a mirthless smile appeared before them to offer a blanket. Marco took it meekly, like a child, and as if given permission, dropped his head to his chest and almost instantly fell asleep. Cass sat beside him, waiting. All around them the air seemed to whorl and hum. Left alone now, with sleeping Marco, Cass was aware of the sound of museum visitors beyond the thin partition, of their parallel world and quiet, peaceful strolling. They were visiting legendary kingdoms, gazing to take in details, commenting respectfully on ancient ambitions and the vigour of fantasy religions. It was a comfort, this low murmur, this ambient seep, as though everyone had consented by polite contract to whisper in the same tonal range. A guide returned with a cup of tea. Cass gratefully accepted it.

  She might have dozed. Time fell away. When Marco stirred, Cass found that her arm was stiff, and that an entire hour had passed.

  He had been humiliated, she saw. He did not want to speak of it. They parted outside the museum, shivering, in the early dark.

  ‘I was intending to suggest dinner,’ Marco said apologetically, ‘but another time, perhaps? This condition always leaves me violently tired.’

  She was struck by his phrase, ‘violently tired’. He made a sign to go, clearly wishing to be alone. He’d been overtaken by a cloudy strangeness that made small talk difficult. Cass headed back across the footbridge, back into the fierce, icy wind, and towards the S-Bahn station that rumbled high up in the distance.

  There must be an etiquette to such events, but she had not known how to perform it. There must be a discipline, a medical discipline at least, that might comfort and settle those whose brains had misfired and brought them tumbling down. She’d hung around, ineptly, then she had left. She’d really done nothing at all. Nothing at all. Marco seemed to assume that Cass had been repulsed, but the force of his distress and disturbance had intensified her interest. As he walked away she had the impulse to call him back, but let it fade.

  On the train Cass saw how faces looked eroded by the cold. In the dim light everyone appeared both indistinct and familiar. The woman sitting next to her was speaking loud Russian into a mobile phone and all she said sounded angry, like an accusation, or a curse. There was a jointly blond pair who might have been any modern couple, dressed in brand names and alike, both swiping their text messages. Sitting opposite, a young man, gaunt and unearthly, had his eyes closed like one who has fallen asleep sitting up. Cass stared at him for a whole minute before noticing the tiny buds of earphones and the thin cords dangling into his buttoned-up jacket. He was otherwise transported, she thought, lost to the world. He was supernaturally removed, travelling essentially on sound.

  6

  They were meeting a second time at Oblomov’s apartment on Goethestrasse. Though she had neither seen nor spoken to him since the episode at the Pergamon Museum, Marco was there again at the door, acting with composure. He looked healthy and handsome. There was no bruise or mark, no evidence of the fall. Nothing betrayed what had passed between them. The episode in the Pergamon might never have happened. He admitted Cass with a slight nod, and she saw once again that the others were assembled, and had already begun drinking.

  ‘Am I late?’ she ventured.

  ‘No, not at all.’

  Still, she felt the pang of what a child might experience in a playground, the simple exclusion of secrets and others turning away, or of being in a game in which she was spectator and must stand alone as others played. She felt their gaze as she unzipped her overcoat and discarded her gloves and scarf.

  ‘Today is my turn,’ said Mitsuko. She kissed Cass thrice.

  It sounded like a boast. Mitsuko wore a black velvet cape, festooned with mauve flowers, fake pansies, made of felt. She had smaller felt pansies arranged in her hair. Cass admired the hippie audacity of her style; she might have been a famed retro singer coming home from a gig. It was Yukio, this time, who handed her a drink, and discreetly kissed her once on the cheek before slipping away. Victor gestured a greeting from the floor, where he was arranging piles of paper. Gino stepped in from the balcony, leaving his smoker’s privacy to offer a casual mini-salute.

  Cass was pleased to return. She had thought of them all, how unlikely a coalition they were, how misfitted and intimately haphazard. It had pleased her to be considered part of their group. She was not a ‘joiner’, she told herself again. Yet she had treasured Victor’s story and the trust of its disclosure; and she had carried with it an impression of the others’ kindness towards him.

  They sat as before. The drink, as before, was unidentifiable and strong.

  ‘Okay,’ said Mitsuko. ‘I don’t have a crazy mother or an umbrella father,’ and here she glanced at Victor, believing she was offering an empathetic introduction. He nodded graciously, slightly embarrassed, but understood and acknowledged the kind intention.

  ‘My parents are ordinary, sweet and ordinary. I grew up in Hagi, Yamaguchi Prefecture. It’s on the west coast of Honshu, not far from Nagato, if you’ve heard of that, with its famous hot springs. Hagi is a little town, a port town, with a ruined castle at the foot of Mount Shizuki. So I am not a Tokyo girl, I am really a Hagi girl.’

  Mitsuko looked across to Yukio, who smiled his encouragement. It was a sensitive exchange. They confirmed each other in the manner of couples newly in love, setting up a code of shared stories and a cautious protocol with others.

  ‘Hagi is a town renowned for its pottery, and my father is a potter. In the 1590s a Japanese warlord from Hagi invaded Korea and abducted its potters, so the tradition begins then – every Hagi schoolchild knows this story. My father is the last in thirteen generations of potters, and very proud of his work. I’m sure it is a sadness to him that he didn’t have a son, and that I had no interest at all in becoming a potter, but he is a philosophical man, and to this day he is still happily potting, back there in Hagi, fulfilling the dream of his ancestors to outlive their own time. Behind our house is a large kiln hundreds of years old, built into a hillside. There are many kilns like this, and ours is one of many ancient potteries.

  ‘As a child I believed that history was a kind of smell, the scent of baking clay – musty and biscuity. Or of the sunshine drying seawater on human skin. I had no specific image of the past, because the pots of the eighteenth century look like the pots of the twenty-first century, but I somehow knew that this was it, that something as immaterial as a smell might carry time itself, that the dusty past was inside us, that the earth was inside us.

  ‘A child from Hagi cannot resist an obsession with time.

  ‘I love the wet clay that smatters my father’s workroom, and the fine dry suspensions hanging in the air. I love the mess of his labour, and all the little instruments and wooden tools, unchanged for centuries, that a potter uses every day. I love to watch him at the wheel, turning it with his foot, as his father and grandfather and great-grandfather have done before him. There is the slick and the shine, and the flecks of clay spinning away. It’s mesmerising, watching a rotating pot, seeing the hands cradle it and shape it, hearing the low sound of the turning wheel. This is my earliest memory. The pot turning on the wheel. And my father’s long hands creating a shape.

  ‘Hagi pots are very prized and collected all around the world. There are delicate cups, with a translucent white glaze and there are heavy, lumpish teacups of rough, gritty clay. These have a creamy thick glaze, slightly pink, that has been likened in haiku to a woman’s blushing skin. My father
makes the second kind, but secretly I prefer the others, and my vision is always of powdered green tea spinning and spiralling in one of the fine cups. Because the clay is slightly porous, tea stains and recolours the pots as they are used, entering into the crazes and crackles, making the white slowly turn pink.

  ‘I like this idea - that an object sucks in the memory of its use. I often wonder if this happens with other objects, too, at some level of perception we don’t see or haven’t yet learnt to recognise. Is this possible, do you think?’

  It was a rhetorical question: Mitsuko had her own answer. She turned to Cass briefly as if to say, Yes, it is possible; I know it is possible.

  ‘I believe I would have been happy to stay all my life in Hagi, with my beloved parents. But at the age of sixteen I went to live with my aunt Keiko in Tokyo. I was a very clever student, and my mother, who is also clever and wanted success for her daughter, decided I should finish my high school in Tokyo, and try for a good university, Waseda or Keio, Japan Women’s University or the University of Tokyo. I was a dutiful daughter and in those days, not so long ago, I already knew I wanted to be an English translator. English was always my interest – I love the English language. I was excited about going to Tokyo, and I wanted to meet the new world with diligence and a good heart. People forget how high-minded a sixteen-year-old can be.

  ‘From the beginning, Aunt Keiko was a disciplinarian. She felt responsible for my success and imposed strict bedtimes and study times, strict mealtimes and little leisure. I went along with it for a while, then inevitably rebelled. I began to take bus rides away from my usual route between school and home, and always explained my late return as enrolment in a new after-school study class. In this way I began to know the city, and to find in anonymous wandering a wonderful freedom. In Harajuku district – perhaps you have heard of it? – I discovered music subcultures and street fashion and the world of Lolita Girls. It was a revelation, seeing young people dressed in cult outfits and fetish clothes. You have seen photos, maybe? Before I had heard of Nabokov, I had become a Lolita Girl. There’s kawaii, the cute version – all cupcake dresses, lace and frills and pastel colours – the girls wear bonnets, corsets, ribbons, blonde wigs and petticoats, many petticoats. Often they carry parasols. This fashion is for girls who grew up with Minnie Mouse and Hello Kitty and want to look like dolls, even as adults. They wear special contact lenses to make their eyes look rounder. They pose a lot, attend make-up parties and gather in chattering pink groups.