A Guide to Berlin Read online

  More in awkwardness than passion, Marco leant forward again. His hand reached for the back of Cass’s head, he touched lightly, and he kissed her mouth. Both felt an immense and instant relief. She could feel it in the variation of his touch and in her own relaxation. She hoped he wouldn’t apologise, and he did not. When he drew back he smiled and looked directly at her.

  ‘Restoration.’

  It was an enigmatic word, and Cass did not ask what he meant. She saw a burden lift from him. She composed herself by brushing back her hair with her hand.

  ‘I’ve wanted to kiss you since Nestorstrasse, since we first met.’

  It was astonishing, how feelings work; she had often thought this. It was a simple enough reflection: that without witness two people might become personal and simplify. Might move closer. Ramify. Astonishing too how a new kiss still carried uncomplicated exhilaration.

  But there was no time to think on this, or to consider if she was immature, or needy, or a sucker for seduction. These were cynical times. The door buzzer had sounded; someone downstairs wanted admission. They were both startled to hear it and for a moment stared at the handpiece on the wall, and the closed door, as if together they might ignore it and hide.

  It was Victor. His joyful American voice crackled though the wires: ‘Major Tom to Ground Control! Super-cool!’

  They stood apart as they heard him clomp up the stairs.

  ‘I thought I’d come early!’

  Victor greeted Marco warmly and then turned to Cass.

  ‘I have a daughter, Rachael. You remind me of her.’ He hugged with a vigorous, clumsy embrace.

  ‘Rachael,’ he added proudly, ‘is a pediatrician. In Jersey. Very successful.’

  ‘Nothing at all like me, then.’

  But Victor wouldn’t hear of it. He spoke of how close they were, he and Rachael, he boasted of her beauty and wished she would marry and settle down. Rachael had been upset after his divorce, years ago, but now she understood, he added.

  Victor wore a shapka this time; it was of artificial fur, a tourist item, and the dangling earflaps looked childish and comical. Goofy. Snoopy.

  ‘Alexanderplatz. The poor schmuck selling them looked so miserable I had to oblige. Fish fur, Momma would call this.’

  He held the hat out for inspection. It had a red star in the centre, where the ophryon might have been. In tourist areas, even in unpromising midwinter, Cass had seen vendors with their trolleys of fake Soviet-era memorabilia. They were gritty-looking men, tough, all down on their luck. They had the faces of Stakhanovites, carved by ice and hard as coal. Just that day she had seen a group of Spanish students larking about, trying on the shapkas and flinging one between them. It sailed in the air, barely flapping, like an incompetent bird.

  Victor was discarding his coat onto the floor.

  Marco and Cass maintained their distance. Victor took his seat and was already uncorking a bottle.

  ‘Come, let’s talk.’

  His research was going nowhere, precisely nowhere, he said cheerfully. He had wanted to work on Russian émigré writers in Berlin, but found it had all been done before; there was nothing left to uncover. He would return to textual analysis and give up the dream of literary history.

  ‘It was always a pretext,’ he conceded. ‘I just wanted an excuse to come. The elevated railways remind me of Chicago. The old women in the subways sometimes look like my momma. The sausages are fantastic. The lakes are mysterious. I can’t quite bring myself to go to Poland, so this is the next best thing. Is that nuts, do you think?’

  ‘No, it’s not nuts. We go where we are able. We find our way slowly.’ Cass was aware she sounded like a counsellor, full of easy platitudes, but Victor seemed pleased with her answer.

  ‘That’s just what Rachael said.’

  ‘There is a street in Rome, my home city, I cannot even walk past,’ Marco added.

  Neither asked him why. The door buzzed again. It was Mitsuko and Yukio.

  ‘We thought we’d come early,’ they shouted through the intercom.

  So in the end the five who were early waited for Gino. After the appointed hour passed, they discussed the possibility he had decided he could not go ahead with the speak-memory, and had disappeared somewhere, perhaps even returned home. But thirty minutes later Gino arrived. He was well dressed and assured and seemed entirely unaware of his tardiness or of the critical speculation.

  They sat, once again, in exactly the same places. Their assembly was already composed of ritual behaviours and intricate assumptions. Oblomov’s imageless room hung quietly around them.

  Gino took a large swig of his drink.

  ‘I cannot tell my story,’ he began, ‘without first telling you that my family is obsessed with the idea of coincidence. For us, signs and symbols converge, duplicate and interweave. There is no moment or event that is not referring to another moment or event. This is not just delusion, or some family madness. My family make up a design, as we would say in Italian.

  ‘I was born in Bologna on the 12th of December 1980, which is also the date that my father, Aldo Scattini, then aged thirty-seven, died from injuries received at the central train station in August that year. So from the beginning I was destined to carry his memory, and my mother was bent on a lifetime of sad comparisons. Curiously, I was named not for my unfortunate father, as if this honorific would too closely link us, but in memory of my mother’s father, Gino Lorusso, who was also killed in the central train station, though many years before, during the wartime bombings of Bologna, in 1943.

  ‘I have four older sisters, Lucia, Maria, Claudia and Antonella. I was the longed-for son, and since my birth coincided with my father’s death, I became the “little man” of the household. My childhood is saturated with the singsong of my quartet of sisters: “Ah, uomo piccolo; ah, que bello …” and their repetitious faces bending above me.

  ‘For my mother, my existence was more emotionally complicated. She doted on me, but she was a widow with five children and believed herself abandoned and fated to struggle. She carried about her a gloomy doom-laden atmosphere, her own weather, as it were, which was never sunny. She died five years ago, and when my sisters and I peered into the coffin, we saw that she wore the same expression, as if cemented, she’d carried throughout her unhappy life. It was one of grim disappointment, puckered in a sullen pout. Her bosom was immense; oddly, it was only seeing her lying down, in the coffin, that I saw how stout she was, how unusually top-heavy.

  ‘Seeing her at rest helped us all. Antonella said the satin in the coffin was the wrong colour – she had asked for pink and it was standard white – this too somehow helped; I remember we spent ages discussing banal funerary details. My mother’s face nested in a frilled, babyish bonnet of the wrong-coloured satin, she held a frail, breakable rosary between her chubby fingers.

  ‘I mourned my mother. But I was also relieved that her lifelong unhappiness was at an end.

  ‘Like Yukio, my childhood was marred by imagining disaster. My father, Aldo Scattini, had been seriously injured in the bombing of the Bologna Centrale train station on the morning of the second of August 1980. His name is not on the memorial plaque at the station: it lists 85 people, most of whom died on that day. He lingered too long to be an official casualty, or perhaps he was simply forgotten or overlooked. My mother resented his exclusion, as if having his name printed officially might have made a difference to her grief.

  ‘Perhaps it would have, who is to say? Perhaps she might have borne the loss better. Or perhaps it would have become a trivial detail, like the colour of satin in a coffin or the shocking contrast between a big bosom and the light trail of an arranged rosary.

  ‘At the train station today you will see the clock stopped at 10.25 am, the time of the explosion. I used to think this a glib and insulting thing, and believed for years it should have been consigned to the garbage. But now it seems to me profound, this broken, stopped clock. Now I know a little more about stops and starts; I know t
hat there are time signatures to certain events, and that the world of objects stands there, mutely unchanging, to remind us that we are careless and inconsiderate of our own given time.

  ‘As a boy I read obsessively on the Bologna bombings. I knew that Bologna was then a Left-wing city – Bologna Rosso – and that Right-wing fascists had planted the bomb. It was compelling information. As a vulgar teenager it pleased me to think of my father as a victim of fascists, but this is no solace, of course, and a moral distraction. His death was meaningless, entirely meaningless, and there is no profit in thinking it was for a cause, or carried historical purpose.

  ‘My father, Aldo Scattini – I still love saying his name – exists in a nebulous, slightly brown photograph, taken at the time of his wedding. He wears a moustache like a cowboy and appears stiff and unsmiling, a young man evidently having second thoughts. My mother is slim and almost elegant – hardly recognisable – at his side. She holds a spray of gardenias and clematis that spills over her fruitful belly. I recovered other photographs of my father after my mother’s death, but this was the one that I knew him by, since it stood in the centre of our sitting-room mantel-piece throughout my entire life. This is the photograph, the cowboy, that I held in my mind as a child, that still returns to me in dreams, or when I think of or imagine him …’

  Gino paused in his story and looked around him.

  ‘I’ve never told anyone else of these things. It must be this drink’ – here, Gino held his glass up, as if to a toast – ‘this tricky Russian drink is making me chatty.’ He smiled a wan smile.

  He was silent for a minute or so and might have been reconsidering his participation in the speak-memory. The room seemed to close around them with the claustrophobia of withheld speech. As they began restlessly to shift, Gino recommenced.

  ‘It was a hot August day, the day of the explosion. In Bologna we have very hot, humid summers – many locals go on holiday, to the seaside, or up to the mountains. But the central train station is always busy, and on this August day the second-class waiting room, where the bomb exploded, was crammed full to bursting because it had air-conditioning. Anyone with children, any exhausted tourist, was seeking shelter in the relative cool of the second-class waiting room. My father was not, as it happens, but he was still crushed under the rubble as the whole side wing of the station exploded.

  ‘He was carried to hospital in a bus, number thirty-seven. It was passing by and became an ambulance. Only my mother and Lucia saw him in hospital; all the long months that followed my sisters were kept away. When I was old enough Lucia told me that he’d been brought in with his chest collapsed and bleeding from the ears and eyes. This gory detail haunted me all my childhood. I hated Lucia for telling me. For seeing him like that. It was a boast, needing to tell me.

  ‘There is a terracotta sculpture in Bologna Cathedral, Compianto sul Cristo morto, a lamentation of the death of Christ, and all the mourners standing above the holy body have their mouths open in horror. This is how I thought of my own father - that all around him, all who saw him, would have had their mouths open in horror. So my father also reminds me of these figures of clay, standing in a dim candlelit corner of the Bologna Cathedral. You can see them for yourself; they are bathed in the tawny light of little chapels and crypts, they stand timelessly for the silent shock of a young man tortured.

  ‘I was never a believer, but I always admired these analogues, the way art gave us a true expression of what left our mouths hanging open. I found the priests of my childhood dull and incompetent, they reeked somehow of personal failure and wasted ambition, but I loved the velvety air of the cathedral and the way footfall echoed, the sense that voices always floated upwards towards the apse, and were caught there, very high, circulating like stray birds. There is an amplification of muffled and whispered words – perhaps you’ve experienced this, perhaps you know it too. If a metal candle stand is knocked over in an old church, there is a shattering clang, louder that you can imagine, so that even as a priest rushes to upright the blasphemous object, everyone is reminded of these special qualities of the air, the way this is an enclosure, and one that both registers and exaggerates.

  ‘Accidents of all kinds do this too, I think - show the invisible energies around us, and the waves of a higher-order empiricism …

  ‘I moved to Rome as a young man to study art history, still a plausible career in Italy. But I was already lost to literature – never a very plausible career anywhere, really, and changed courses early. My father had been an accountant, but with his own literary aspirations. He had left behind a small library that showed his classical tastes, and was devoted entirely to works in French and Italian. He clearly adored Dante, and the only thing he owned of value, and which I have inherited, is an old edition of Paradiso, dating from 1748. He seems never to have owned Purgatorio or Inferno, or at least they were nowhere to be found in his collection. There are also scraps of his poetry, clumsy and sentimental, full of shining moons and the pearly moon-face of some lost love and though amateur and incompetent their existence moves me enormously. It may have been an element of my mother’s sadness that she’d kept these poems, because not one line of verse seemed addressed to her. They’re written in an immature hand, but I look at them and think: this is my father’s handwriting. This is my father’s true sign.

  ‘On that hot August day in Bologna Centrale, Aldo Scattini may have been solving a knotty accounting problem, but I like to imagine that he was composing a poem. It suits me to imagine that in the agony and mayhem of the explosion, he was halfway through a lyrical composition, and that a word or two stayed undamaged when his body was broken. On bus thirty-seven, his eyes and ears streaming, perhaps he stayed sane repeating the fragment of a line, a word or two, or a memorable phrase, possibly on the conventional topic of moonlight. I know nothing of course; this is all wild surmise, and a symptom of my rather anxious and futile need to connect. But it is a necessary imagining. My spiritual practice, you might say. Each year on my birthday and his death-day we lit candles in the cathedral for my father, and I was obliged to look into the red eyes of my weeping mother and sisters and realise that my own undistinguished life was no compensation.

  ‘And only recently did I consider my namesake, Gino, who died in the bombing of the Bologna Centrale train station during the Second World War. He was a member of the resistance, my mother once said. He was a true hero. She said this often: “He was a true hero,” and I was never entirely sure if she was encouraging or criticising me.’

  Gino patted the outside of his jacket to locate his packet of cigarettes. He found it, tapped one out, then absentmindedly turned a cigarette unlit in his fingers as he continued to speak, his voice lowered.

  ‘I truly love Rome. It was a relief, to be honest, to leave the world of women in Bologna and enter the noise and masculine commotion of a new city. All those motorbikes! I bought a battered red scooter. From the moment I arrived, I sensed the possibility of a bigger life, one less hemmed in by my family and our mournful repetitions. At Sapienza University I wrote on Calvino and Nabokov. Each, as you know, is a superstitious writer, attracted to coincidence and the fearsome pleasure of patterns. In this study I felt a modicum of control and understanding. I felt I could approach my assassinated father by a symbolic route. I felt too the solace I experienced seeing the Compianto sul Cristo morto, the sense that art might convert something destroyed – exploded – into something else entirely, ennobled and justified, solid, approachable.’

  Gino paused again. ‘Marco knows that I failed to complete my doctorate.’

  ‘As I did,’ said Marco. ‘We are legion, we failures. Next time, my friend, we will both fail better.’ It was a warmhearted response, an affirmation.

  ‘But it was important to study in this way. Now I am travelling for a year and find myself here, visiting Marco, initially, but compelled to stay for a reason I cannot fully comprehend. I call it research, but I’m not entirely sure. I’m not entirely sure what story I
am writing.’

  Gino’s speech drifted away. It was an unconcluded story, sounding as if he had become bored, or simply decided not to go on. In the silence that followed Cass was thinking of the cowboy father, and the red-eyed sisters, and Gino’s mother with the huge bosom and perpetual sadness. Cass had been struck by his eloquence, and by the unusual formality of his telling.

  Gino cleared his throat.

  ‘I need a cigarette.’

  He rose abruptly, upsetting his half-empty glass. Mitsuko drew an indigo scarf from somewhere in her voluminous jacket and mopped the spill. It was a peculiar moment – in which each of them saw the puddle of Gino’s drink glistening like a miniature lake on the parquetry, in which Mitsuko’s hand swept, wiping the liquid away, and then a gesture, no-nonsense, as she flapped the scarf as if to dry it.

  ‘Butterfly effect,’ she said.

  None could resist a symbol.

  And so Gino turned away abruptly, and stepped out onto the balcony. This was his place, this little platform, jutting into the sky above the street. It was clear he wanted no comment on what he had disclosed, and no chorus of solicitude, encouragement or approval. The others fell into hushed and inconsequential conversation.

  Yukio told them that his blog on Berlin was doing very well: Japanese were interested in the artistic reclamation of a city so ruined by war. He was taking photographs of ugliness, he said, with no apparent irony. Brutalist architecture, rubble piled around building sites. The arrangement of cranes in Mitte. The graffiti in Kreuzberg and along the S-Bahn lines. ‘Super-cool,’ he added.

  Mitsuko said she had begun a new translation. A young British writer, only twenty-six, described London in the same way, like a second Berlin.

  ‘Everywhere is Berlin,’ she announced in a merry tone.