A Guide to Berlin Read online

  And then, as if in afterthought, Marco mentioned that he had read that there were fifteen thousand unexploded bombs buried somewhere beneath the city. Could this be true? His sentence stopped the casual wander of their conversation. Cass had nothing to add. Victor looked alarmed. The five fell silent, each contemplating a newly exploded Berlin.

  10

  Marco and Cass parted but agreed to meet at the end of the week, after the next speak-memory. Marco’s embarrassment had entirely dissipated. He smiled as Cass left with Yukio and Mitsuko. When she turned to look back, he stood at the top of the stairs, benevolently watching as they descended in single file.

  ‘Gino is my brother,’ Yukio said. ‘More than Ichiro.’

  ‘Yes.’ Cass felt she understood.

  Gino and Yukio had scarcely exchanged a glance after the talk, but the group had sensed the charge in the air, the bolt of immediate fellow-feeling. They saw how carefully the two men avoided each other. The bruise of their own families, the terrible histories of railway stations. Both had admitted to their own unmanning.

  At the entrance to Oblomov’s building a fat legless man, almost spherical, sat in a wheelchair smoking a cigar. Ash dusted his belly. He had the gravity of a statue. They pushed through his turbid air, excusing themselves, and crossed the street at a diagonal, heading together for the crowded bus stop on Kantstrasse. Yukio refused to travel in the underground.

  ‘I wonder,’ Mitsuko said, ‘if the man in the wheelchair knew Mr Oblomov.’

  Oblomov, the missing Russian art collector. The émigré ghost in whose evacuated space they told their stories. Cass imagined a network of individual connections, friendships, unguessed links, like forms of hidden inheritance, which might lead back to Vladimir Nabokov himself. Oblomov’s father might have known him as a boy, or seen his hatted head pass by, or sold him a Russian newspaper on the street. He might have been a student, or a neighbour, or a near-relation. It was the word ‘brother’ that had triggered this connective imagining, so that Cass was seized with a wish to net the world into a system of real affiliations. Vulnerable, lonely figures, a man smoking in a wheelchair, might be the survivors of a linking chain of historical compatriots.

  When they arrived at the bus stop, Yukio said he wanted some time alone. He may have been allowing the women a chance to speak together, or he may have been disturbed by the story of the deaths in the Bologna Centrale Station. Mitsuko and Cass left him there, waiting in a crowd of padded bodies, and headed together towards the S-Bahn. It was Mitsuko’s idea. She said she adored trains but travelling with Yukio rarely had the chance to try one. The elevated S-Bahn appealed to her: she could look down on Berlin, she said, she could see it from above, sweeping backwards into the night.

  Charlottenburg Station was of seventies red brick and blankly functional. But there, up high, was the bright grass-green S button, and a busy crowd streamed in and out of its gaping, bunker-like entrance, gradually engulfed by fluorescence or darkness. Cass handed Mitsuko one of her tickets. It was early, possibly seven, but the night freeze had set in. On the platform they saw breath in the air and the bodily huddle against the cold. Mitsuko’s pink hair was a startling flare of colour in the waiting crowd.

  ‘Noodles and coffee,’ she said, rubbing her hands. ‘Yukio will join us later.’

  She studied the rail map for their route – to Alexanderplatz, then a change to U8 for Kottbusser Tor.

  It was an enthusiasm they shared: the circuit delight of a train map, its multi-coloured intersections, its neat calculus of routes and connections and oblong-symbol changeovers. Cass secretly loved the image of ring lines with their lace-patterned interiors; and the threads unravelling outwards, and the names of far-flung stations. London was like this, too; she carried the London Underground map in her head, and enjoyed the predictable sequence of names and the tranquillising effect of their reiteration. As a child Cass had assumed that everyone was under the spell of such ideal forms; only in adolescence did she discover the disappointing truth.

  The train appeared almost immediately, exhaling and slowing before them. The automatic doors shoosed open. Mitsuko leapt up and in, but the seats were all taken. They stood together by the doors and their faces, close as lovers, were bleached and somewhat drawn in the thin, spilling light. Yet in the anticipated freedom of a train ride Mitsuko was cheery.

  ‘Alexanderplatz,’ she whispered, nodding upwards to the map arched on the ceiling above them.

  The train was approaching the next station, just at the beginning of the long platform, when it juddered to a halt. Mitsuko grabbed Cass’s forearm and smiled a timid smile. The other passengers were curiously quiet and subdued, studiously formal and not looking at each other, but there was some sort of commotion developing outside. Just visible, a policeman appeared from nowhere. A woman in a uniform waved a red flag. They heard a whistle and saw an official-looking man running up the platform, along the clear strip, too dangerously close to the canyon of the tracks. It was only then, after the speeding man, that an announcement was made and a low collective murmur sprang up among the passengers.

  Mitsuko had not listened, and Cass could not understand the loudspeaker German that had reverberated through the carriage.

  ‘Excuse me?’ she said. ‘Do you speak English?’

  The young man beside her turned. ‘Ambulance mission,’ he responded in a bored tone. ‘This means a suicide. We will all have to wait now. They won’t open the doors and we will just have to wait.’

  Mitsuko’s bleached face contracted; she seemed to go limp. Cass put her arm across her thin shoulders and squeezed.

  All around them passengers became busy with handheld devices. They were unconcerned, or self-protecting, enjoined and apart in the senseless distraction of screens. Ten minutes passed. Twenty. So many screens, privately shining. Mitsuko was sending an extended text message to Yukio; Cass stood by, silently unoccupied. She had become aware of the thick human smell in the carriage, of the stifling air, of the isolation of each individual, of the swollen sense that they were all contained, a massed human cargo, against the sight and inconvenience of a single death.

  Outside, police had begun evacuating the station. Their silver labels, POLIZEI, sparkled on their backs, under the lights. Then, without further announcement, the carriage doors opened and all were funnelled in solemn order towards the exits. Cass and Mitsuko did not look back. They rode the escalators down to street level and set off to walk to the next station. Shaken by what they knew but had not witnessed, they walked solitary, rather than together, in a tight withdrawal and in silence. At Zoo station they recommenced their journey. Almost at once, Mitsuko began to weep. Berlin did indeed slide past, but she saw only the streaming world of her tears, her pink head hung low. In her soundless weeping she looked like the single mourner.

  It flew behind them, the tracked spaces of Berlin at night. Cass saw, below, the streaks of red and white light that marked the passage of cars; she saw streets stretching away, she felt how the train curved around the dark-as-death shape of the Tiergarten, and crossed over the black and ice-shining Spree. She saw the central station, the Hauptbanhof, and the Charité Hospital, she saw the university and Museum Island. There were lit windows, regular squares and livid patches of abyssal dark. There were countless hidden lives, countless hopeful or hopeless souls. And at last she saw, swallowing their train, the gargantuan mouth of Alexanderplatz.

  Cass guided Mitsuko. She found the U8 line. One of the new trains, daffodil-yellow and decorated with a Brandenburger Tor design, drew sleek alongside them. It was this local emblem, repeated as a motif, that she dumbly stared through, suddenly tired. At Kottbusser Tor station she took Mitsuko’s arm and led her slowly to the exit under the vast steel archway, so high it might have been holding up the night. Addicts with their dogs, and shady dealers dressed in black, hung abject and half-present in the exit shadows. A dreadlocked man wearing a Dead Weather hoodie stepped forward to offer a grubby folder of cannabis. His unha
ppy face, in the deep-purple cave of his hood, mumbled affordable euros. Cass was tempted, but held back, not sure what Mitsuko would think. He slunk backwards, his sly insistence fading, and she saw a scrawny brown dog yanked and dragged away.

  It seemed to Cass that although they had travelled and arrived together there was a new distance between them. In her apartment Mitsuko prepared a simple meal of noodles with fried mushrooms. Neither had much appetite. Conversation was patchy. When Yukio appeared, Mitsuko rushed to be held and laid her pink head on his waiting shoulder. He whispered, low and comforting, in a sibilant Japanese. Cass wondered how she had described what happened on the train. She watched them embrace and enter the safe absorption of each other, aware of her own frozen feelings and uncertainty of response. The invisible dead: what might it mean in this city? How, in the context of its history, ought she respond to one unknown body, crushed and smeared beneath the irresistible wagon of a train? It was exhausting to weigh and properly consider the matter. Her mind became empty, her instinct defensive. She wanted neither to think nor to feel.

  Yukio had bought cannabis from the men near the station. He held up a plastic bag in his long slim fingers and waved it, offering. Cass was relieved. She wanted not this austere clarity and her philosophical bent, but to be blunted and deranged. She watched as Yukio rolled a joint with tidy and finicky skill, licking the paper with a swift, spontaneous flick of his tongue, extracting one or two stray threads, patting the tube into place. Then he rolled another, placing the first, like a regular smoker, behind his ear. Before long the air of the sitting room was smoky and permeated; they were each puffing away, flushed and urgent, as though desperate to be calm. Cass noted how much she liked the tiny crackle sound of dope igniting, that barely audible combustion, that pure time of the inhale. And so they settled, and began to relax, and might have slipped into each other’s arms, so dreamy they soon seemed, so close up and so far.

  In the end, they sat talking late into the night, finding their way slowly back towards each other. Yukio spoke a little more of his time as a hikikomori, describing himself as an astronaut, high in his ever-night capsule. Cass was reminded of Gino, how he too had spoken in the restaurant of spaceships and isolation. Something men shared, perhaps, a boyish aspiration or affection. Mitsuko confessed to a nostalgia for that nocturnal time, when they met while everyone was asleep and the darkness was wholly theirs. Cass had nothing to contribute to this easy romanticism, she was tired, she was stoned, she was suppressing yawn after yawn. When she could continue no longer, she asked the lovers if she might stay and sleep on their couch.

  It was pure elation when Yukio switched off the light – the great relief when the body knows it can succumb to heavy sleep. How grateful she was. She removed her boots and arranged a cushion under her head. The effect of her long day and its jarring sequence of feelings was that she could not have contemplated returning alone to the train station, facing the cold once again, travelling back through the mean streets or the rushing tubes of the late-night city.

  A thin band of light issued from beneath the closed door. Cass lay on her back, very still. In the dark she heard the lovers continue to talk in sweet, rippling tones. Their Japanese washed around her, tidal and sedative in its effect. It was an ocean of whispers she wanted to sink into.

  It may have been a few minutes, or even less – her doped brain disassociated and imprecise – but she stayed awake and afloat for a short, drowsy while. She was thinking not of the anonymous body beneath the train, dragged in agony to kingdom come, though she maintained a vague and impersonal sorrow in response. There was a ruined family out there somewhere, a destroyed mother, or sibling. This was the necessary abstraction of invisible death. This was her rigid control and her refusal to be affected. Instead, she was recalling the man smoking in the wheelchair outside Oblomov’s building: his tough, balled form, his messy spray of ash, his obstinate and casually lifeless persistence.

  11

  In the dark morning a branching frost lay at the windowpane. It glittered, an unearthly plant, in the rays of the standing lamp near the couch. Wrapped in a blanket Cass rose, stiff from uncomfortable sleep, and tapped on the glass to see if the frost would shatter. It remained intact. Its crystal form was a wonder, like so much here in deep winter. It looked such a brittle deposit, but held on, gently ablaze and unsynthetic, scattered like filigree on the surface of the glass.

  She tried to recall her dreams, but nothing coherent remained. They had all been there - Marco and Gino, Yukio and Mitsuko, Victor and herself – but nothing bound them in a story, there was no sense truly to be made. They were merely coincidental, figures becoming wisps of human meaning, then threading away, like blown smoke. Wind; she remembered there had been wind in her dream, and that she had felt cold. But this may have been her awkward rest on the couch, the body half-sensing.

  An hour later it was still dark, and Mitsuko and Yukio had not woken. Their apartment was immensely quiet and still. Cass took paper and pen from her bag and scribbled a short note. In the stuffy room she loitered, quiet as a thief. When she had located her coat and scarf, she drew them on, thinking how abnormally loud the rustle of clothing could sound. She left carefully, gliding on tiptoe, pulling the door shut behind her.

  Now Berlin was all trains. She saw how fundamentally the city had mapped itself in rail, how the layers it held, the archives, the spaces of its forgettings and transports and covered-over deaths, were reflected horizontally in striations of overgrounds and undergrounds. It was mid-January, freezing, she was a foreigner to the city, and it may have been presumption or madness to imagine it thus: that these configurations of tracks and stations were the structure of its hieroglyph. She rode the U-Bahn heading south towards the ring line. Again, the Brandenberg Gate formed a veil on the windows of the train. The design monument of choice: the firm Doric columns, the prancing horses of Victoria’s quadriga, the city represented, reduced, to a neat white stamp.

  It was not any dark morning in any northern European city, but precisely Berlin. In the rushing underground Cass consulted her map, and counted the lines and the stops. The U-Bahn had ten lines and about 170 stations. The S-Bahn had fifteen lines and 166 stations exactly. They radiated in a wild way not visible on the official plan, which made the routes uniform and intelligible, just as the London map did. Around the city were the cast-iron, wrought-iron, steel and iron stations, the arcade genre of modernity, the horizontal claim, just as skyscrapers were its assertive vertical. The stations of East and West, not of any cross. The speeding into tunnels, the hollow roar of concavities.

  Cass glanced up to see a man looking directly at her. He had seen her pore over the train map; he had witnessed her ridiculous counting. Catching her gaze, he turned away in a kind of knight’s move, pulling down his cap like a secret agent. He wore a torn jacket over workman’s clothes, spattered with old paint. He was rushing to work as she was rushing home; they were both captive in the train, they were both in the belly of the beast.

  Almost immediately Cass thought herself histrionic: she became wry and self-critical. It was her Australianness, she thought. One must not be earnestly conceptual; one must not think too hard on the allusive, or the enticingly symbolic. One must not mention the war. She both embraced and resisted this business of national definitions; and when she refused them, other people could be relied on to ask, and to insist.

  The doors parted, shoosh, and the man in the cap left the train in a sliding rook’s move. Cass stayed put. She was pulled away from daft conjecture to await the S-Bahn ahead. She had somehow added the horizontality of a chessboard to her figurative imaginings. It was Nabokov who likened the bishop’s move to a torchlight, scanning in the dark, swinging into angles, and now she thought of herself as a lighthouse, fixed and bright, searching for some legible shape to light on. A voice announced Hermannstrasse as the next stop, and she rose, readying herself, keeping the train map fixed in her head, then moved diagonally.

  On the S-Bahn
platform Cass saw daytime. Not sunlight, but sunrise, somewhere behind the fog. The milky trace of a lost sun hung over sleepy buildings. Above ground, heading west, she looked down at the gaping emptiness of Templehof, a pool of pure mist, and the dereliction, on the left side, of wastelands of rubble and rubbish. Graffiti in tag-lines and throw-ups covered flat surfaces near the railway. She rested her head against the glass and let the world drift and roll away. At each station a blast of icy air entered the open doors, and when she stepped out onto the platform at Innsbrucker Platz the shock of the cold almost drove her back into the cabin. But she needed a shower, and a coffee. She walked up Hauptstrasse, still hazy with her own confusing visions, and then on to her apartment.

  Cass had just opened the door to the building when Karl appeared, real and shabby before her, unselfconsciously scratching at his balls.

  ‘Fräulein Turner, good to see you. Coffee maybe, before the day?’

  He was standing at the door of his ground-floor rooms, and it occurred to Cass that he was aware she’d not made it home during the night, and had been worried, or simply vigilant, or neo-Stasi, on her account.

  ‘I stayed with friends,’ she explained. ‘Japanese friends.’

  It sounded fictitious. Why in any case did she feel the need to account for herself? Why did she feel protective of her own privacy when he had not actually asked a question? She looked into his face and it was then, seeing the tacit plea there, that Cass realised that Karl wanted simply to talk. He tilted in a Chaplinesque bow and gestured to his doorway. She consented to join him.

  The room looked like something from the Eastern side, she guessed, circa 1965 – the furniture was of angular blond wood with feature handles in fake brass, an elliptical plastic clock hung high on an orange wall, a table of cheap kitsch – shepherds and milkmaids, terrier dogs with bowties, a set of glasses with ‘Dresden’ scrawled in a Gothic script – stood arranged together on a kind of altar against the wall. On a side table sat a glass ashtray, stuffed with bent butts.