A Guide to Berlin Read online

  ‘After four years in my room things became sad. I was skinny and sick. For some reason my parents started again to try to get me back into the world. They battled with me, I stayed still, protecting myself. But in my double-click world I had begun to feel lonely. I think I knew I could not live in my bedroom forever.

  ‘When Mitsuko arrived, I was angry my parents had told my life to a girl, and I was sure I would not open my door to her. She came almost every night for weeks. I could hear her behind the door, reading aloud to herself in English, sometimes talking to me in Japanese. I learnt she was practising her language, but she was also waiting for me to come out. After the first week she pushed a photograph of herself under the door and I was very surprised. Her voice was sweet and low, but her photograph looked nothing like the girls I had known. She was in her goth Lolita costume and dressed in black. She had black make-up and red lipstick and long wild hair. She was the same age as me and I was impressed that she was already so confident as herself. She was out in the world, and dressed like that.

  ‘I began to wait for Mitsuko’s visits at night. My parents gave her keys and she let herself into our apartment about two am. Sometimes she stayed for just an hour, sometimes two, even three. Once I think she fell asleep behind the door, because I did not hear her say goodbye, and in the morning I was woken by my mother’s voice, exclaiming.

  ‘After a few weeks I began to talk a little to Mitsuko. I was curious about her. I think I was already in love, but I didn’t know it yet. I began to wait for her voice and long for her visits. And I began to ask her questions about herself – this was the first time for many years I was curious about another person. She told me all about Hagi and her parents, she described her room in Aoyama and her strict Aunt Keiko. She told me her strange ideas about time: we all live in different times, and only sometimes these match. This is called friendship, or love, this matching time. We talked about forever, what that might be.

  ‘Infinity – that was one English word Mitsuko taught me.

  ‘When I asked Mitsuko about her English language, she said she was translating a difficult story, she had discovered a Russian writer who knew special things about the world and memory and how words fit in. I had never heard of Nabokov. One night Mitsuko put under the door three pages of her translation of the story “First Love”. In this story – you know it – a boy is in a train, travelling to the seaside where he meets a little girl called Colette. They are on holiday. She is English, he is Russian. She has a dog called Floss. When they are looking at a starfish together, she kisses him on the cheek. Only this. It sounds like nothing, but it is a whole world. I didn’t know anyone had written a story in this way, noticing everything, taking a child’s mind seriously.

  ‘When I read the first pages of the story, I remembered my train trip to Nagoya. I was on the shinkansen, the fast train, not like the train in the story, but I understood how the boy watched the world rush away, how he saw the telegraph wires go up and down, how the white daytime moon follows the train, how he hears new sounds and notices a voice, or a cough, or words from other passengers, floating to him in the new world of the train.

  ‘Mitsuko explained the story to me. I remember that after she left me with a copy of her translation, I read it again and again. It was different to anything I had read before. I think the story reminded me of how to see. Myself and others, my grandparents in Nagoya. The world outside where people meet, and talk, and change each other. I had a very safe room-world – everything around me was set up in tidy piles, everything had a place, everything was dead, and easy. My TV, my computer, my comic books. But this story reminded me of the chess games I played with my grandfather. Small shapes in the sunlight. His wrinkled left hand, with spots and long fingers, reaching slowly for a piece and bumping one of my pieces out of the way. I wanted that world to come back. I wanted little shadow things. Another person’s hands, and something playing between us.

  ‘Mitsuko took her time. She waited. I waited. The first time I left the room with her, we went for a walk together while my family slept. She was not wearing her costume, so I saw her as she was. It was very strange for me to be near a girl. I was nervous and shy. I saw small things, and looked away when her face was close. We didn’t say very much. I remember I asked her what “meerschaum” was; it was in the short story. She spoke very softly as she explained. It was like she had made a new thing in the world.

  ‘Everything shone under the streetlights, everything was close. Afterwards she said goodbye in front of my building. I wanted to kiss her, but she turned and walked away into the darkness. The next night she didn’t come, and I was in a panic of waiting. I thought I would die. Really, I thought I would die. But on the second night she came again, at two am, and something in me had changed. Like the little Russian boy looking down at the starfish. I opened my door and saw her round face there, smiling, and looking back at me.’

  Yukio paused. Mitsuko was staring into her lap. It perhaps occurred to each listener that one meets couples all the time but is never told the story of their love, is never given access to the blazing first moments in which a connection is made. It was a startling, rare thing, to be told of falling in love, accentuated on this occasion by Yukio’s sincerity, by his wish to capture the essence of his transition from hikikomori to lover. Victor seemed especially moved. He was dabbing at his eyes beneath his spectacles, possibly disguising a tear. Gino and Marco were looking intently into Yukio’s face, as if expecting or silently willing more words. Cass saw that Yukio would say no more, and that the proper conclusion to his narrative was Mitsuko’s round face at his door.

  A love story, a first love story. After Mitsuko’s disclosure it was somehow fitting that Yukio tell the other side of the encounter, that he match her gentle words with his own declaration. No one spoke. Mitsuko and Yukio seemed both to be blushing with pleasure. Unable to endure the quiet pause any longer, Victor let out a single, ecstatic burst of applause.

  8

  So again they were gathering their coats to depart. And again feeling or instinct flickered unacknowledged between them. Yukio and Mitsuko left swiftly, their twin shapes bounding, released and joyful, down the long zigzag stairway. They were heading to a nightclub in Neukölln, they said, to hear a famous Japanese DJ play remixes of David Bowie. Super-cool! It would be super-cool! repeated Yukio. Victor was tired: no remixing DJs for him. No Ground Control to Major Tom. He offered bear hugs as he left. Whacked, he said.

  Gino shuffled and lingered. ‘I suggest that we three have dinner together.’

  Marco hesitated, perhaps feeling a little caught out, or wishing he had bounded away with the Japanese lovers. His face concealed whatever he might truly be thinking. ‘Of course,’ he said softly. It was only then he looked directly at Cass. ‘I promise I won’t disgrace myself again.’

  Gino discreetly declined to follow up. ‘So, it’s settled. I took the liberty of booking nearby.’

  Outside, he linked arms with Cass, determined to support her across the uneven flagstones. It was an assertion gallant and kind, and declaring his own physical superiority. Slightly taller than Marco, there was also a rigour to his body, a hint in the veined neck and broad chest that he was of the new class of man who reshaped in gyms. Millions out there, thought Cass, millions fashioning their bodies. She was a walker, miraculously alive just as she was, without lifting and pumping. Slim, slight even, and secretly disdainful of energetic movements going nowhere.

  Together they walked through the freezing streets of Charlottenburg, this evening festive and bright, but also slowed, somehow, flowing in distended duration. Lights in beaded strings looped around the restaurants, warm interiors were ablaze in tones of amber, and a soft radiance arose behind moist glass windows and doors. A man stepped from an apartment, pulling a triangle of yellow light; the door closed again and the triangle contracted and disappeared. They each saw it, the tricksy and liquid aspects of the evening and the forms of illumination that shifted shapes. There
were few people on the street – too cold still – but within each restaurant were dispersed cosy couples and groups, leaning together in apparently fixed tableaux. At one window two children, a boy and a girl of about five, pressed their noses to the pane of glass, looking outwards. The palms of their hands were splayed likewise, held up in four pale stars. Marco stopped, stooped to their level, and pressed his face towards theirs. The children sprang back, excited. Their hands left ghostly impressions on the glass, white traceries of palm prints, which faded as they noticed them.

  ‘Scimmie,’ he said. ‘Monkeys.’

  They walked on in silence. After Yukio’s story, casual chatter was no option, the world needed no commentary that evening; it was self-sufficient. When they arrived at the restaurant, hyperbolically Italian (chianti bottles hanging from the ceiling, the Italian flag decoratively draped above the bar, trattoria-style fake wood panelling coating the walls), they had each to make the effort to move from reverie to conversation, to break the hypnotic sense they had of someone else’s words still acting within and upon them.

  The Italian restaurant was, unpatriotically, depopulated and quiet. Gino and Cass ordered pasta, Marco ordered veal, and they all spoke in euphemisms about Victor, Mitsuko and Yukio. It was in part the anxiety of knowing they would soon join the speakers, and needed to find, each one of them, a credible self to display. Gino said everyone should have a sabbatical as a hikikomori, remain inaccessible for a time, and then be greeted extravagantly by love. Everyone, he continued, might move between radical isolation and ardent connection. Think of an astronaut returning; think of the shift from zero-gravity aloneness to jubilant over-attention.

  When an aged waiter with speckled hands interrupted to pour their wine, Gino took the opportunity to touch Cass’s lower back. Sitting in the middle, she understood that she was a token between Marco and Gino, that they were obscurely competing for her attention. She ignored the subtexts and the hints, she tried to remain self-possessed. Yet there was undeniable desire and the stirring of delectable sensations. She told herself later that ignoring Gino was an act of forbearance, but in truth she had been pleased at his explorative touch. She hoped Marco would move closer, or brush lightly at her thigh.

  Gino spoke with a lack of focus of his few months in the city. He was writing freelance pieces on the topic of ‘haunted cities’ and composing a book, he said firmly, about his personal Berlin. This was, he announced, an unconcluded city, all open systems, broken circles, damaged stars, ravaged ’scapes, so that the polluted past wafted like toxins into the atmosphere of the present. He was pleased with his own metaphor; Marco saw it too. Cass thought the allusion melodramatic and unhistorical – and too easy, somehow – history as poison wind. Gino’s tone was sure. She was reminded of academics who spoke of their own projects with a certain highbrow disdain, wishing both to promote and stylishly bluster, but also convinced that no one else would really understand.

  Encouraged by their lack of objection, taking silence as assent, Gino went on to speak of the features of Berlin that he intended to write about: the ghost stations of the underground, the various unreconstructed ruins, the site of the former Gestapo and SS headquarters, now known as the Topography of Terror. Museums were one thing, he went on, but it was Nazism and Nazi kitsch that had a universal appeal, indivisible from Hollywood movies and one’s own haughty self-righteousness. Everyone is better than a Nazi; everyone takes assurance, pleasure even, at knowing how barbaric others have been. There was a consolation, an immoral consolation, he granted, in looking back at the history of this tragic place.

  Gino was warming to his subject now, wanting to offer morbid insight and cryptic knowledge. He was claiming his own sense of affliction as a mark of good taste. Cass caught Marco’s gaze and wondered if he too, at this moment, was feeling repelled.

  The waiter returned. He unobtrusively took their plates, piling them together, and whisking away the empty bread-basket, which he placed balancing atop the whole. They ordered coffees. Cass was thinking of how she and Marco had let Gino take over, presenting his version of Berlin as if it spoke for them all, not objecting, not arguing. His adjective stayed with her: unconcluded. Every city, she reflected, is surely unconcluded.

  Marco took the waiter’s actions as an opportunity to break Gino’s spell. He mentioned that they must all soon move from Oblomov’s apartment, that he had sold it that very morning to an investor from Milan.

  ‘Don’t worry, I promise I won’t talk about real estate in Berlin.’

  ‘He won’t say,’ added Gino, ‘that he is selling the city. That he is one of the agents of foreign hype – a foreign agent, no?’

  Marco did not respond.

  Only when the conversation became Nabokovian did they all begin to relax. Following the prompt of Yukio’s story, Cass said he had reminded her of the moment she discovered the word ‘lemniscate’ in Nabokov’s work, and had needed to consult the dictionary. What a distinctive thrill it was, to have a familiar shape named.

  ‘Lemniscate? I don’t remember it.’

  ‘Me neither,’ said Gino.

  ‘It’s the shape of infinity. It’s the figure of eight lying on its belly.’

  And so their conversation swung to those connoisseur pleasures that new words brought with them. Marco loved ‘conchometrist’, one who measures the curves of seashells; he thought it might have come from Pale Fire. Gino liked ‘kibitzer’, the non-participant in a game, the one who stands at the side, observing, giving advice. They all loved ‘fritillary’, as Mitsuko clearly did.

  ‘And I too’, said Cass, ‘didn’t know what a meerschaum was.’

  They were good-humoured now. They spun out words as if drunk on them. When it came to a summary, Cass opted for the simple ‘drisk’, as one of her favourites: it was a type of rain, drizzly and misty, a very European rain, which the author considered exclusively Russian.

  ‘We don’t have “drisk” in Australia,’ she said. ‘No way. There is no Russian rain falling in Australia.’

  It occurred to Cass then that she had drunk too much.

  Gino liked ‘ensellure’ – it was that concave in the lower back, in the lumbar region. He had discovered it in Lolita and thought it opened an entire, personalised erotics. He stared at Cass as he said this, willing her to agree. There was a pause in which he might have gone on to describe his own arousal.

  Marco ignored him. He placed his index finger at the centre of his forehead: ‘ophryon’, it was called. The middle transversal supra-orbital position. Third eyes. Headaches. Inspiration. Epilepsy.

  Gino quoted Nabokov to the effect that writerly inspiration begins with a prefatory glow, not unlike a benign version of the aura that epileptics sense just before an attack. He looked knowingly at Marco, challenging a confirmation or refutation. Cass saw then that he knew of Marco’s condition, and wanted to provoke him. Had Marco told Gino of the incident in the Pergamon Museum? Now, she thought, he would say something of their time there, reverse its power to silence them, thank her for staying, perhaps, or offer an affectionate squeeze of the elbow as he told Gino a deftly comic account of falling in front of the water basin of fish-men, dating from 704 BC. But again he did not.

  ‘Shall we get the bill?’ Marco asked.

  Seeking the toilet before they left, Cass blundered by mistake into the kitchen. She had expected to see an ample Italian woman with huge forearms and a food-stained apron hefting a saucepan or stirring a gigantic pot. Instead, she saw two reedy men who may have been Sri Lankan. They stared at the intruder with no visible interest at all, completely indifferent; then turned back to producing authentic Italian cuisine.

  Gino and Marco walked her as far as the subway. There were others also leaving restaurants and entering the night. Everyone was bulky in hats and coats, extra-large with the winter. Even in the buses that thundered by, people were bigger, slower, clumped and indistinct at the smeary windows, like a specially captured tribe. But there was a lustre to the air, and a quali
ty of bright delineation. Cass felt strangely immortal. Now, right now, she cherished the city she was in, saw how Berlin supplied and allowed her this tipsy elation, this clever conversation, this sense of participating in a new internationalism and a time beyond her own.

  As Gino and Marco retreated, she heard their voices, almost indistinguishable, begin a new conversation. They may have been speaking about her. Italian vowels rose and fell in departing music. Cass felt suddenly self-conscious and drunk. She felt like the kibitzer, just as she had when she’d arrived for Yukio’s talk. She realised she had wanted one of them to invite her to his bed. It was an abrupt, self-interested, elementary knowledge. She stood silent for a while, watching the two men disappear, then descended to her train.

  9

  Gino’s speak-memory was to be the last in the Oblomov apartment. Cass arrived early and found Marco alone. He opened the door and could not disguise his expression of surprise at her untimely arrival. He ushered her in, and stood back as she performed the ritual once again, placing her bag on the floor, unwinding her scarf, unzipping and removing her coat, adjusting by degrees to yellow warmth after the black cold outside.

  Marco kissed each cheek.

  ‘So cold!’

  ‘Yes, it’s freezing out there now.’

  They needed this formal exchange, this impersonality. Behind Marco’s head the shapes of the disappeared paintings appeared more symbolic than before: what had once hung in the vestibule? What had visitors seen as they entered? Perhaps there had been a gilt-framed mirror in which they saw merely themselves, arrived. Perhaps Herr Oblomov had peered at himself there and wondered if he was about to die soon, abrupt and irrelevant, of heart attack or stroke, leaving his classy apartment to the care of apathetic strangers.