A Guide to Berlin Read online

  Karl swept his arm low like a courtier. ‘Welcome!’ he said proudly.

  ‘Schön! Beautiful!’

  She half-expected to see a lithograph of Stalin or Honecker hanging on the wall. He had a pot of coffee already made, and Cass waited politely as he bustled in the kitchen, heating milk, wiping clean a second cup with what looked like a dirty rag. Karl was talking in rapid German and she asked him to speak more slowly.

  ‘So, then I moved to the West side,’ he said; and Cass realised she had missed the main features of his biography.

  She sat with his bitter coffee warming her hands. He was telling her his story, spilling out his own speak-memory, unprompted and relaxed. Her German was simple and it was an effort to keep up. She was piecing together his narrative largely from randomly heard nouns and verbs. What Cass established was that Karl had been a widower for many years, and that his wife Clara had died of cancer when his two children were young. He had raised them himself – this announced with pride – but both carried a life-long sadness at their mother’s passing. Both had never really recovered from the loss. As well, he said, his son Franz had epilepsie – Cass didn’t need a translation – and this was why he knew what to do last week at the Pergamon Museum. This was why, he said seriously, he didn’t panic, as the others did. He wondered how her boyfriend was, he said in a rhetorical aside; and whether, like his son, he was ashamed of his condition. Beschämt, ashamed; how did she know that word?

  ‘It’s under control now, medication is better these days,’ Karl went on, ‘but he is a broken man; he lives with gangsters in Moabit, and only visits his papa occasionally.’

  ‘And your daughter?’

  ‘She is gone,’ he said simply. ‘My daughter Katharina is gone.’

  There was self-control in the statement, and resignation. Cass knew not to inquire further. Karl leapt up and returned with a tin of butter biscuits, which he offered with a thrust. It was impossible to refuse. Cass sat before him crunching on a biscuit as he continued to talk. Now and then he included sentences or words of English, mightily pleased with himself, but his monologue was largely in German and now slowed and pared for her audience. He looked reformed, somehow: he was less puffy and sweaty; his moustache had been trimmed. He was self-assured, or his story-telling had made him so.

  As she left Karl seemed happy and unburdened; he seized her hand like an old friend. He’d asked her nothing about herself, Cass realised, but this had been a relief. She had not wanted to explain anything, or account for her ‘boyfriend’, or to tell entertaining tales about a quasi-mythical Australia. That would surely come later.

  In her room, blue and violet, as if in deep water, Cass undressed and walked into the steaming shower. She stood there for a long time, soaking her hair, inhabiting the soothing sensation of time suspended. She wondered what had possessed her, to count the train stations of Berlin. It had been like a temporary obsession, to break the code of the city, to imagine that somewhere in this pattern lay essence or historical secrets. Still, the pattern remained. She had an eidetic faculty that made it easy to remember maps and suchlike; it was a party trick, mostly useless and sometimes startling; an inner, exceptional compass others seemed not to possess. But it occurred to her now that it was also rather close to delusion, that she might be overcome and infatuated by her own visions of organisation. As a child she had dizzied herself noticing arbitrary diagrams and maps, storing them for a further, lonely consideration.

  Nabokov was hyperthymesiac; he carried too many past memories. He forgot too little. The past was ever-present. It was a dreadful risk to mental health, to forget too little. It was an affliction, not a boon, to recall involuntarily and excessively and without the requisite dose of irony. She told herself these things, as if a teacher lived in her head and must instruct and reprimand. She told herself she must resist her fascination with forms and her somewhat fanatical tendency to referential mania. She felt foolish. Trains. Trains indeed.

  As Cass was dressing she noticed a change in the light. The blue violet of shadows had lightened and there was a radiance splintering across the wall. When she turned she saw it: the first snowfall since she had arrived. Doubtless, there had been snow in December – it was an unusually harsh winter, everyone said so – but since she arrived in January she had seen only ice and endless grey. Now the windows were trembling and alive with slow-falling flakes. She pulled on her jeans, socks and sweater and rushed to witness it. The sky was white-spangled all over in a pointillist stipple. She felt her heart beat faster. She remembered reading somewhere that if one watches falling snow long enough, it seems as if one’s building is floating upwards. This was true. Verifiable. Already she was ascending, already her elation was a levitation.

  Cass flung open the glass doors and stood on the balcony. The cold stung immediately. But she leant out, her wet head gathering the adhesive flakes, her face dumbly upturned, her mouth wide open. She forgave Berlin its cruel winter for this first moment of snow. Below, it dappled the street and the cars and the people walking past. She saw how it accumulated over every broad and elaborate surface, how umbrellas had popped open to catch it on vinyl circles of black. Bare branches against white were gradually disappearing; the sounds of the traffic became sifted, muffled and restrained. And her own body, it seemed, also lost definition. She might have been dissolving into airy whiteness. She might have been experiencing transfiguration.

  When she closed the doors Cass was so cold that she knew she had turned blue. Her head ached as she wrapped it in a towel and then began vigorously to rub it dry. But the rapture remained. After so many grey days, there was now this ordinary excitement, and the world becoming beautiful. She would wait until her hair dried before she ventured outside. But this was enough, for now, this thrill of a crystalline sky.

  12

  When Marco arrived in the evening Cass had not long returned from a second walk in the snowfall. Her first, in the morning, had been in a spirit of discovery. She had walked through the cemetery, now looking like a period-drama film set, then up streets already draped in creamy shapes. There was a delicious glassy crunch beneath her boots. There was a lustre upon windowsills and building façades. She saw the plump layering that took the edges off things, and gave a rounded, more organic look to the city. It was possible – she knew it – that this novelty would not last, that she would tire of sumptuous white as she had tired of fascist grey (finding it soaking inside her, altering her moods), but outside and within it she could not really believe this was so. A thin wind picked up, and began to spiral the white flakes in unwinding circles. Cass was reminded of the coiled colours lodged magically in her brothers’ glass marbles. She felt an instantaneous, novel delight.

  It was her first experience of enwrapment in the soft surround of snow. When she could bear the cold no longer she slipped into overheated shops, lingering in her damp coat, discreetly stamping her feet. But before long she was out again, trudging with pleasure.

  Her second walk had been to buy milk and cakes. Marco had rung asking if he could come by after work, and instead of postponing his visit, which felt too soon and importunate, she had instantly agreed. The afternoon was dark, the snowfall had become dense, more impressive, almost entirely filling the sky. The world bore a mirrory-blue shine she’d never seen before. The muffle-effect, too, was more pronounced and almost eerie. She had hurried back, freezing, her shopping tucked under her arm, aware suddenly of a kind of hazy, incipient fear.

  Marco arrived early. No one in this city, apparently, arrived at the appointed hour. Cass was anticipating coffee; then perhaps a meal in the Greek café down the street; and she was imagining Marco’s face resting against hers. But the buzzer rang before she had warmed herself back into emotional equilibrium and recovered the poise that she knew she must practise.

  ‘Ciao,’ he said softly. ‘Snow at last, yes? Hexagrams!’

  He shook his cap free of hexagrams. Flecks lay on his shoulders and on the back of his coat. He disc
arded it apologetically, faintly showering the floor, and hung it with his speckled scarf on the hook nearby.

  He pecked at both cheeks in a wholly formal way.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind.’

  ‘No, not at all.’

  Cass felt herself blush. She did not know what he referred to. The visit itself? His presumption in meeting three days before they’d planned? Some yet unannounced mistake, or liberty? He had said nothing in particular but she was discomforted in his presence. This was a condition of genuine attraction. She knew how vulnerable she was, how sexual yearning had lodged in her.

  ‘I wasn’t sure,’ he began, ‘if we should meet, just the two of us, before our speak-memories, or after. We don’t yet know each other’s stories, but this is the usual case, is it not? This is the usual way a man and woman meet? And I realised that if we met on the Saturday, as we had planned, you’d have heard my story, but I would not know yours.’

  It was sophistry, or delicacy, or his fear that she might have an advantage.

  Cass looked up into his face and drew him down for a kiss. This time, robustly, it was her initiative. This time she claimed him as her lover. She did not waver or hesitate. She closed her eyes and felt that his cheeks were still cold from the outside. She slid her hands beneath his sweater and found that the warmth of his body carried a distinctively erotic shock. How important it was to her: that first slide of a curious hand. In so many films a man enters a room and begins pressing a woman against the wall, or flinging her into a bedroom with lusty energy and a rough tearing-off of clothes: all exertion and demand, all muscular haste, and agitation, and masculine power. But she saw them quiet together in the corner, standing near the doorway. Each was stilled and mysteriously centred by the other, each was waiting.

  Marco unzipped Cass’s jeans with his left hand. When he explored her with his fingers he looked into her face, uncertain, asking a question; and she held his wrist there firmly, answering a silent ‘yes’.

  They undressed quickly in the cold room and slipped under the covers. Cass enjoyed her own nakedness. She wrapped herself around Marco. Curled herself into him. Felt how easy it all was.

  The light was still on – neither had thought to extinguish it – so when they paused in the gasp and shudder of their meeting there was the surprise of seeing each other so close and so clearly. Her chin gently touched his. Her open palm cupped his cheek. There were so many inklings and intuitive gestures that composed their encounter, so many flipped switches of common circuitry, already brilliantly in place.

  ‘Hello,’ she said.

  Marco laughed, his face astonishingly near. With a pang of tenderness she noticed for the first time that his teeth were a little crooked.

  Later, when he napped a little, his dark head deep in the pillow, she looked at his naked shoulders and his curved back, and stored the details for future recollection. She was thinking too of the word ‘hexagram’; she was constructing a new pattern of reference.

  It was not romance, she told herself, nothing so conventional. But the advent of the snow, and his warm human arrival, and such an unforeseen abundance of mutual pleasure. She moved her bare legs under the covers, adjusting to his napping shape, sliding her thigh between his. She tugged the doona higher. Then slowly she collected him again in her arms, nudging him gently awake with her pelvis. There was the tranquil seesaw of each body, and the temporary design of two that they made. There was the post-coital heat and comforting accord. She felt absurdly happy.

  They decided to stay in. Cass found a wedge of cheese, which they ate with a packet of crackers and a cheap bottle of shiraz. She poured the wine and they clinked glasses, unsure what to toast, since both were still in a state of expansive disinhibition, fuzzy and lethargic with their own immediate physical relief. Marco had hummed in the shower; now he grinned and chattered. When the wine was finished, they ate the fresh schnecken rolls Cass had bought, and drank new-brewed coffee at her tiny table. It was a time of raw appetite; both ate with vigour.

  ‘So,’ said Marco, ‘what do you think of our group? Are we not remarkable?’

  ‘Complicated,’ she responded. ‘We’re a complicated group.’

  As all groups are, she might have continued. But there was something else, some way in which, entering their pact, learning the details of each life, they were binding themselves irreversibly to each other. The aloof and withholding habits of social meeting had already been replaced by something less predictable and more precious that made their storytelling possible. Only in fiction had Cass encountered the lengthy declaration of life stories; only in specialist study had she ever gleaned the delight of order and correspondence and the way the act of telling itself was a kind of technical comfort. This was a new understanding. She saw she was habituated to secretive privacy and the hiding of her feelings.

  ‘I need to tell you something.’ Marco looked suddenly weary. ‘Gino is using.’

  ‘Using?’

  ‘Ice, methamphetamine. He used to use heroin. He had a problem in the past and started again after his speak-memory, though he’d been clean for months. There’s a deep misery inside him. Speaking didn’t seem to alleviate it.’

  Cass felt at a loss. She’d not realised. Or noticed.

  ‘Only since the speak-memory. But you should know, and be careful. There’s a volatility there. He can be aggressive. Unreasonable.’

  Here Marco looked away, as if he had said too much, or too little. Cass waited for precise details, but none were forthcoming. She felt overcome with confusion and a sense of alarm.

  They were silent for a moment, then Marco began irrelevantly to chat. ‘Before he married her,’ Marco said, moving from the topic of Gino, ‘Nabokov gave Vera a list of the twenty-eight women he had slept with, not including Svetlana, the woman who was then his fiancée.’

  ‘What a bastard, what a boaster.’

  ‘He was being honest. And it was his way of committing only to her.’

  Marco was looking directly now, as if in challenge.

  ‘Rubbish. He was placing her in his list. She was another treasure flying by that he wished to catch and pin.’

  Marco looked taken aback. Cass would not meet his eye. What was he trying to tell her? Why would he refer to another couple, at this moment, when she thought only of the sufficiency of one? Was it an act of comparison? He may have been trying to entertain and inform, as he had in the Pergamon Museum, asserting his knowledge, readjusting the uncertain balance between them. Or he may have just added her to his list, finding in Nabokov a self-aggrandising analogy. She hardly knew him, she thought. This might be an end, not a beginning.

  ‘You may be right.’

  Marco was trying to conciliate, trying to regain her trust. ‘I do not admire the man,’ he went on. ‘Except as a father. He seems to have been an excellent father. What I admire is the work.’

  It sounded weak, and a familiar literary-critical distinction. The work is admirable, the writer flawed, narcissistic, more or less reprehensible.

  After that it took some time before their conversation again steadied. Both had become more guarded and circumspect. Cass saw now that her room was ugly. What she had at first taken as austerity, a kind of artful restraint, looked bare and deprived. A new bunch of tulips, powder-pink this time and still holding their prayerful shapes, was its only patch of colour and beautification.

  She speculated on what Marco’s Nestorstrasse apartment looked like, and what she might learn visiting it.

  ‘I should go,’ he said abruptly, and was already rising from the table and heading to gather his coat and scarf. When he finished buttoning he stood still for her brief inspection.

  Like a dutiful wife she extended her hand and adjusted his scarf.

  ‘So.’

  ‘Yes, so. Thank you. Thank you for everything.’

  He offered a weak smile, kissed her briskly on both cheeks, and then was gone. It was just nine o’clock. In her room, suddenly so confined and so plain, wit
h only a few books and her papers and the tulips to console her, Cass felt abandoned. She wondered about Gino. She wondered what history existed between Marco and Gino. Then, bored by her own ignorance, disappointed at their parting, she wondered half-heartedly how she would spend the rest of the evening.

  Of Marco’s presence there was only a vague scent of citrus in the room. She imagined invisible particles, twisting in ampersand with every slight movement of her body. And, and, and. This was the shape of her desire and its relentless wish for connection. She would never be satisfied. For all her practice with her own feelings, her restraint, her repression, her acting unafraid, there was still this glorious upset of the enlivening charge of one other.

  13

  The next address was a stately old apartment in Wilmersdorf. Marco seemed only to deal in up-market properties, or perhaps he chose only those that matched the lost time of their retrospecting speak-memories. A new apartment would not do. They all wanted the old, incrusted place, somewhere which, even empty, would seem to carry embedded secrets and a hidden history. Creaking stairs, figures in the carpet, the allure of relic architecture and gentrified remains: this was the antiquarian aesthetic they all silently coveted.

  Cass would walk, it was not far, though she needed new boots – hers were leaking in the snow. There was black slush in the gutters and on the roads and pavements, but new snowfall swathed and recoated the sullied world. She had retained her initial exorbitant thrill. Each time she found herself in snow she felt again the charm of the first moment she had rushed to her window. Each time she faced the fierce arctic air, she was relieved when it sprang alive with a bulge and billow of soft flakes.

  The street was a sombre one, toned by the denudation of winter. The lighting was poor and the pavements empty. Nevertheless, a kind of porch light had been left on to show the way, so that a pallid shine lay at the entrance, and the names on the buzzers were faintly illuminated. The name this time was Kępiński. Cass considered it: Polish? Kępiński. Just as she was about to press the button beside the name, she dropped her umbrella. As she turned to retrieve it, she noticed a brassy glow beneath the coating of thin ice. It was a row of three ‘stumble stones’, commemorative paving stones wrought of shiny metal. She bent down to examine them and discovered that three members of the Levi family had lived here, Moses, Esther and Judith Levi, and that all had been murdered at Auschwitz, in 1942.