A Guide to Berlin (16 page)

Now she returned to where the associations had begun, to Nestorstrasse, Wilmersdorf, 10711 Berlin. Vladimir Nabokov's Nestorstrasse. Marco Gianelli's Nestorstrasse.

The message from Marco told her that Gino was staying for a few nights somewhere near Oranienplatz; would she join him for dinner? Cass all at once felt a kind of trepidation. It was serious now, now that she had spoken of herself, now she had exposed her eccentricities and her odd selection of tales. She must prepare for questions and curiosity and the seductive power of mutual confession. She thought of the curve of his bare back, and her own arms encircling. She thought of how sex both generalises and stipulates, how it was this all-purpose lust, vital and urgent, and this glimpse of an individual, singular spine.

Cass buzzed ‘Gianelli' and was admitted to the building. She found the light switch inside the doorway and illuminated the stairs. It was a shabby-looking lobby, stinky and dim, with paint flaking from the walls and a grimy stairwell. Four leaning bicycles crammed the hallway. She climbed nervously to meet him. Waiting in the doorway, Marco
hovered above her. Cass looked up and saw his solicitous gaze, and the way he held the door open, bending slightly, and the calm contentment with which he awaited her. He kissed both cheeks, slowly uncoiled her scarf, lifted her coat from her shoulders and ushered her in.

It was a relief to discover that the apartment was stylish and clean. The lobby had suggested depredation and miserable tenants, but Marco's place was orderly, even expensive-looking, in its furnishings and arrangements. In the sitting room there was a wall of bookshelves, stacked full, to which Cass was immediately drawn, and beneath it a beautiful tan sofa and a beechwood coffee table. She stood scanning the titles of the books – a habit she always succumbed to – lost in hasty calculation of his intellectual tastes and predispositions.

‘Make yourself comfy,' Marco said.

‘Comfy': it was unlike him to sound so casual. On the wall she noticed a Rembrandt print of a small shell she had collected as a child: a cone, or was it perhaps a
volute
?

‘Not an original!' Marco sounded happy. He ducked into the small kitchen and returned with wine and two glasses.

‘I was worried about you, after the speak-memory. We were all a bit drunk, I think.'

‘I was well looked after.'

So they began. There were olives with the wine, a good Bordeaux, and the affable ping of lightly touched glasses. Each sensed a harmony descending, and a recovery of expanded time. Marco said he had returned late from work and apologised in advance, and unnecessarily, for the hasty simplicity of the meal. Cass stood beside him as he stirred a
mushroom risotto, and spoke of how as a child he had liked to watch his mother cook.

Their conversation settled, with relaxed irrelevance, around childhood matters. In response to a question about school, Cass told how often in her primary years they were given the plastic template shape of Australia to colour in, and how the fashion among kids was to outline the island in a fringe of blue. ‘The Island Continent'. Meticulously schoolchildren indicated feathery ocean, following the irregular coastline, making the island float. It gave her a sense, she said, of the Australian shape as a squat body, set adrift, lost, aimlessly floating. A country all alone. A body all alone. Marco was amused and encouraged her reminiscing.

‘I love these details,' he said. ‘These past intensities.'

In his primary school – and in Gino's – they were given the shape of the Coliseum to colour. The Ring, they called it. Every Italian child was required to colour the Ring. Marco said he remembered the fearful pleasure of gladiatorial stories, their atrocity and splendour. He remembered the musky smell of pencil shavings and the dank interior of his oak desk.

‘Children love stationery,' Marco went on. ‘Coloured pencils, with tiny golden writing at one end, the oblong eraser, the little zipped pouch for odds and ends. The metal pencil sharpener, what a brilliant invention …'

Cass imagined his curly head bent very close to the paper, colouring with special care within the lines, then pausing only to change pencils, or earnestly to sharpen. The avid hand of a small Roman boy, filling the
Colosseo
with colour.

Soon they were laughing together. Trivial childhood
details blazed carelessly between them. It was all so much easier now, buoyed by their unimportant stories, those that needed to fit no community or explanation.

 

Only later, much later, did they speak of difficult matters. Marco asked why in her speak-memory Cass had not named her brothers, but for Alexander, and why too she had described herself in such negative terms. She paused before she answered, partly returned to inhibition. Marco did not press or hurry her. Yet when she responded it was easy, and without the anxiety of performance. It occurred to her that she had waited for just this opportunity, to speak at last of her secret, to find relief in the tender satisfaction of telling a single person.

‘My brother Alexander was killed,' she said clearly and in a steady tone. ‘He was killed in an accident just before I left the north.

‘I was twelve, he was thirteen, we were both about to leave at the end of summer for boarding school. There was a cyclone, a fierce one, which swung in from the ocean.'

‘I see,' said Marco.

‘We were inside with my parents, crouching under the kitchen table, which was bordered with mattresses. We could hear our dog, Nip, barking frantically outside. Nip was running in circles, going completely crazy, and would not be commanded or whistled in. Alexander lunged from our shelter and rushed out into the storm to retrieve him. That's all. That was it. He just ran out into the storm. A falling tree struck him on the side of his head. My father struggled through dangerous winds to locate him, then returned
within minutes carrying his wet, bloody body. Together we pulled him beneath the table. We sheltered against the roar of the wind and the shaking of the house.'

Here Cass halted, her voice thinning.

‘Blood was draining from Alexander's head. He rested in my mother's lap and I watched her skirt soak red. He was dying then, I know that now. But I felt nothing, really. Not grief, not understanding. I had no sense of consequence, then.

‘It took hours for the cyclone finally to pass. When it did, it was dark. We crept from our shelter to find the house half-blasted away. I remember there was a full bright moon, fantastically shiny, and the lighthouse still shone, entirely unharmed, so that in its intervals we could see that everything was wet and shattered, everything was strewn about, everything was destroyed. And everything was beautifully glistening, like polished silver.'

It had been a vision, an anomalously charming vision. Cass knew that this too was part of her shame, that she had found the wreckage alluring.

‘My older brothers, Michael and Robert, came back for the funeral, but somehow we didn't dare speak of the cyclone. We didn't speak of Alexander, or of what we had all lost. My parents implicitly prohibited it.

‘I chose not to mention the death in my speak-memory, because I was afraid I would cry. And because, during the storm, I had felt such shameful excitement. And because I have never told anyone before, anyone at all.'

She might have been humiliated telling him, or simply relieved, but it was some other kind of feeling – a listlessness, an exhaustion. Soon after she must have fallen asleep,
because when she was next conscious, she was in darkness and Marco was snoring beside her. His body seemed to emit an extraordinary heat. His arm was flung heavily across her chest and she experienced a sense of suffocation. She lifted the arm and slid from the bed, making her way to the kitchen, where she switched on the light and filled a glass with water from the tap. Marco's apartment was warmer than hers, and much more comfortable. She stood naked, thin and hard as a candle, wondering how long it would be before she began to shiver.

It was almost frightening to have spoken of the family secret. Perhaps her parents had felt responsible; perhaps this was why they wanted never to acknowledge or speak of it. Perhaps they had loved Alexander best of all their children – she had often thought this, intuited it, even as a child. Standing at the sink, lonesome in the night, Cass was confronted by the question of what is at stake in staying silent or in speaking; by what intimacy with Marco she had created or supposed. She recalled, vividly now, that Alexander's face was unblemished. He had lain in her mother's lap with his eyes placidly closed. They were so still together, mother and son, so apparently eternal. Now, simply remembering, she felt what she had never remembered feeling before. Now she felt ill.

From the kitchen window there was a clear view of Nestorstrasse. Across the road Nabokov's building looked undistinguished. It was a blank façade, stern, with a metallic lunar glow. Like many buildings in Berlin it was possibly a reconstruction, an address, rather than the walls that had actually held him. There was no snow in the sky to entertain or to distract. No cars passed by on wet
pillars of light, and there were no clip-clopping pedestrians, abroad so late. Cass saw only the bareness of the night and its ghastly stillness.

In her half-awake reverie, caught by the flowing past, she began to think of Vladimir Nabokov's brother, Sergei. Eleven months younger – as Cass was to Alexander – he had been the doomed, the unsuccessful son. Afflicted with social awkwardness, physical frailty and an incurable stutter, which worsened as he grew, Sergei was also homosexual and an embarrassment to his brother. Vladimir considered him indolent and hedonistic. He despised his bowties and his make-up and his handsome boyfriends, but loved him too, with an inadmissible, furtive affection. Vladimir was safe in America, on a butterfly-hunting expedition, when Sergei died in the Neuengamme concentration camp, just outside Hamburg, in 1945. By all accounts the younger brother, the awkward, the frail, the incurably stuttering brother, the brother who was always slighter and much less successful, exhibited extraordinary bravery during the time of his imprisonment.

Standing at the kitchen window, staring into the night-chasm of Nestorstrasse, Cass in her nakedness began quietly to weep. It may have been self-pity. She was not really sure for whom she wept. Alexander and Sergei conflated into one abstract cause. It was an affectation, or something like it, to mourn a historical figure, brother of a writer, a man famous for his family connection. But looking at the blind windows opposite, and imagining the Nabokovs living there, this amorphous double grief was a convenient displacement. She had sat with Alexander's body, beneath the table, in the roaring wind, and felt an indecent sense of adventure.
She had refused with a lazy soul – an indolent and hedonistic soul, perhaps – to imagine him truly and permanently gone. Now it was easier to attach to a remote historical example. Poor Sergei Nabokov, poor gay war hero. Dramatically taken by the Nazis and killed in 1945.

The plan was to meet again at Kępiński's.

After the drunken conclusion to Cass's speak-memory, the group had met in twos or threes to recalibrate their links to each other. Apart from the meeting with the lovers and Karl, and her night spent with Marco, Cass met Victor at an English language bookshop in Prenzlauer Berg. He was still talking of the aquarium: for some reason it had become the ever-ready answer to his directionless search for meaning. He said yet again that he loved the jellyfish as well as the tortoise; that he had sensed the presence of the master; that he had seen in the fluid bluish light some kind of mesmerising confirmation. Did she know that Nabokov had proposed marriage to his seventeen-year-old girlfriend, Svetlana, at the aquarium, in 1923? It was a place of ardour. Ardour, he repeated, tapping the side of his nose like a comedian. For Victor, idiosyncratically fixated, all Berlin turned in a gyre around the liquid centre of the aquarium.

They sat together on a freezing bench not far from the Watertower. Cass had complained to Victor of the macabre
element in Nabokov's work, and he responded simply by declaring that it was the joy he read for. Look at the stories, he said, there are murders and deceptions, there are grotesques and mistakes, but there is also humour, a theme of happiness, and the great adventure of being. Victor had quoted one or two of his favourite passages, then Nabokov's aphorism: ‘We are the caterpillars of angels.'

‘Corny,' said Cass.

‘You bet,' said Victor.

‘I don't believe in angels.'

‘No one does. Kids maybe. Only kids. But in this weary flux of sensations, why not love the enchantment of a symbol? My temperament allows me to pretend. Call me old-fashioned!'

They spoke of imaginative knowledge and the impossible drive to precision. They spoke of the enchantment of symbols, and how the defects of language required a more figurative gesture. At length, Victor asked Cass about her childhood. He liked the detail of the lighthouse, he said; it must have been so
romantic
. No lighthouses in the third ward! There was a lighthouse in New Jersey on the Hudson, a red-and-white-striped candy bar, but it was a tourist site, he said, and good for stoners and skaters. Nothing like a working lighthouse, dominating the night. Cass verified, as best she could, the adequate romance of lighthouses, not lying exactly, but protecting his lustrous vision. He was satisfied with her answers. Pity about the kittens. Poor little kittens. He had a black cat called Sirin that his daughter was looking after back in her apartment in New Jersey. Sirin liked to tear at the furniture, a psycho cat, and attack rival felines and strangers to the house.

Cass had not seen Gino, nor had he contacted her. No one had seen Gino. Marco had met Yukio and Mitsuko at a bar after his work; Mitsuko had texted her saying she guessed of their affair. ‘Have you slept together yet?' Cass wondered what had been said to prompt such a direct question. She did not answer, and now felt the offense of exposure and the need for distance.

So they were all orbiting each other. They were a human orrery. The six eccentrics were swinging through deep space in close or faraway circles.

 

This Kępiński meeting would be easy and carefree; it was the meeting at which they each felt more secure and connected. The completion of the speak-memories had given them access to each other, and paradoxically its formality had strengthened their interconnection. There were inevitably misunderstandings and strange attractions, inevitably misconstruals and hypersensitive reactions, but they could greet each other warmly, and with a kind of love. For all the cynicism their age had bred in them, there were these discoveries of affinity, made simply in speaking and listening.

It was Cass's turn to contribute the alcohol. Since they had all recently suffered the drastic power of spirits, she bought wine, excellent wine, more expensive than she could afford. Marco came by to help her carry it and together they walked to meet the others, escorted through the darkness by the soft chink-chink of the bottles.

She had waited to meet him again, to recommence their conversation. At her disclosure of Alexander's death, Marco
had said little other than to offer more or less conventional condolences. But now, on their walk, he said how much the story of her brother's death had shocked and affected him. He had dreamt that night that it was he who was under the table, with the wind spinning around them. It had been his father – looking young, looking a lot like himself – lying dead in the blood-soaked lap of his mother. At some point in the dream they moved to the centre of the Coliseum, with the mad Roman traffic surrounding them in its cacophonous roar. He'd woken with a start, he said, his heart massively pounding.

‘I don't usually remember my dreams, except for a rare image or two. And this one, though dramatic, seems somewhat transparent in its meaning …'

Cass heard the effort in his voice.

‘Almost a cliché,' he went on, as if feeling responsible for the lack of originality in his dream.

This was a closeness, now, that he had spoken of a difficult dream. She understood that they might discuss it later, and that in the bold presumption of dream-logic, symbolically assertive, he had confused his own uncompleted mourning for hers.

The lamplights they passed under cast little radiance, but it was a companionable walk, less dark than either expected. Cass was aware of the rhythm of Marco's limbs and his rapid, light step. The swing of his coat, the steady bulk of his body. She liked walking beside him. Other pedestrians would have thought them a long-term couple; they walked easily together, they were comfortably close.

For her part, something crucial had lifted and shifted. Having spoken finally of Alexander, Cass still felt only relief.
And after the night standing naked at the Nestorstrasse window, stricken by what she had said, desolated by memory, she was now recomposed. Almost sane, she thought wryly. She was now almost sane. Alexander could rest in peace and she could fall in love with Marco. It felt as if she had scooped at a pond of icy water, dashed her face clean, felt a shock intake of breath, and then come suddenly alive.

For once, they all arrived at the apartment at exactly the same time. In threes they rode upwards in Kępiński's small metal lift; Cass with Yukio and Mitsuko, the others following. Gino was looking rumpled and worn, but was making an effort to be sociable, especially with Victor. With exaggerated politeness he was asking Victor about the tortoise, knowing this was the topic that would most engage and delight him. Gino looked across at Cass, who smiled her approval. Accord; there was a sweet if tentative accord. Victor was saying, once again, ‘It was really something, that tortoise.' For a literary scholar his expressive powers seemed sometimes rather limited; or perhaps, thought Cass, he had reverted to adolescent wonder, when encounters have their own form of ‘something' that exceeds description.

Cass sat next to Marco, who was explaining the German expression ‘
toi, toi, toi
'. ‘It's like saying “touch wood”,' he explained, ‘but it represents the sound of spitting. And since we are all superstitious, perhaps we can bless this meeting with a traditional German spit:
toi, toi, toi.
Lucky. It will make us all lucky.'

They laughed. Jointly they felt both happy and non-German. There had been times all were aware of their exclusion and foreignness, but now asked to speak of Berlin
they set about summoning a connection. Marco said, ‘Let's have a free-for-all.'

‘Fountains!' said Mitsuko.

‘The Stattbad,' said Yukio.

Victor paused. ‘You all know mine: the Berlin Aquarium.'

‘Gino?'

‘Too many sites to choose one. Perhaps the Anhalter station. Or the Cemetery of the Nameless.'

There was an uneasy silence. To fill it Cass said, ‘The trains, U-Bahn and S-Bahn, and all those stations along the way.'

‘I'm a bit like Gino,' Marco said. ‘Hard to choose. But I shall start with Bebelplatz.'

Each was enjoined to say a little more.

‘So me first,' said Mitsuko. She was dressed in jeans and a jumper, as was Yukio. Cass was surprised to see them appear so unexceptional.

‘There are so many fountains in Berlin. I noticed them straight away when we arrived in the summer, because people clustered there, and there were children bathing and frolicking, and because so many seemed frivolous, and even comical, in this very serious city. They have no water now, of course, because it would freeze in the pipes. Everybody knows the golden deer on the pedestal in Schöneberg, but there is a four-penguin fountain in Boxhagener Platz; a yawning rhino in Friedrichshain; and a frog fountain in Mitte: so many creatures! In Leon-Jessel-Platz, not far from here, there's a huge toadstool; and in Barbarossaplatz there's a fountain that features eight babies, all sitting in a circle staring at a spray of water. Cute! My favourite is the Medusa head in Henriettenplatz. It's a great monstrous
thing, extremely ugly, and I can imagine it would give any child nightmares. It's a severed head, just stuck there on the pavement with the usual Gorgon snakes for hair and bulging sad eyes. When I first saw it I wasn't really sure what it was. And each time I look at it now, it's still something of a riddle.'

Mitsuko was pleased with herself. She had shared her fervour. Yukio followed.

‘I make a blog in Japanese. It is called “Japan in Berlin”. And I tweet, and have Facebook with many, many friends. So, I have many stories for Berlin and they are all sent to Japan. The Stattbad in Wedding was a swimming pool; now it's a club. Now you can dance in the pool to super-cool DJs. There's a basement room, with tunnels and taps and old water pipes; but Mitsuko and I love to dance in the swimming pool. The sunken dance floor means that the low sound …'

Yukio played air-guitar. ‘Bass,' Mitsuko said.

‘The bass is very boom-boom; there is a feeling of being in another world.'

‘Truly,' said Mitsuko.

Victor was entirely affable, with his tortoise affirmed. What more to say? He sat back in his chair, holding his thin belly like a sage enlightened.

‘The other world is those living beings who carry their own lives inscrutably. We gawp at animals in the zoo, and fish in the aquarium, with little thought they gawp back, and see in our looks another strangeness. Do you know I'd never been to an aquarium before? And this one – perhaps it's not special at all, because I have no comparisons – this one was such a joy.'

This was Victor's word, thought Cass,
joy.
This was a man who had retained some early skill, the ineffable pleasure a child feels – lavish and quick – when a butterfly alights on the back of her hand. He was unafraid of expressive emotion, its metaphors and its forms of knowing.

Gino hesitated in the face of Victor's delight in his own location, but when he spoke his voice was languid and thoughtful.

‘Anhalter Bahnhoff. It used to be the largest railway station in Europe and Hitler wanted it to be one of the centres of “Germania”. The architecture was grand, all arches and round windows, and the building massive, with a magnificent façade. More cathedral than station. An underground tunnel connected it to a fancy hotel, “The Excelsior”, and the whole construction was entirely luxurious. Of course, it was bombed in the war and today there's only one fragment of wall, standing alone. There are three circular windows, up high, and three empty arches. It's in the middle of open ground and looks pitifully abandoned.'

‘Theresienstadt,' Victor said. ‘It was the point of departure for Jews being sent to Theresienstadt.'

‘Yes,' said Gino. ‘So many stations in Berlin, even the glamorous ones, have these awful dark histories. And it's hard to feel sentimental with the Topography of Terror just around the corner. But this ruin interests me because it is so meagre and nihilistic: it speaks of emptiness and demolition. The ruin above, the tunnel below. It represents something fundamental to what we meet here, in this city.'

Mitsuko and Yukio did not know this ruin, they said. Cass was recalling when she had first seen it, and her sense
of bewilderment. She had expected more, somehow - more ruin, more remains.

Cass considered Gino's contribution corrupted by romanticism. She would say so, afterwards. But she was chastened by the knowledge that she was also attracted to sites of destruction, and to empty spaces, to havoc, and to things broken persisting.

‘My sense of Berlin is entirely dominated by the trains. I carry the route map in my head and think often of the shape of the city, and how essentially it is netted and webbed by the rails. There's a sense of a circulatory system, a sense of the conveyance of energies and the very pulse of life. I like the shadowy, tiled U-stations, with their varying fonts and colours, the familiar smell in there, so thickly human, and the loud sounds of the trains coming and going. The iron arcades of the S-stations are beautiful too, and I have a special fondness for the green struts and arches of Eberswalder and Schönhauser Allee. There is something both old-worldly and futuristic in the vision of overground rail – and the rise of the tracks across the city, the curve past buildings and highways, and the way they make an extra, and another, architectural level …'

‘Dahlem-Dorf,' said Victor, ‘with its fairytale station building. And the Gothic script names on the S25.'

‘Or that little station in Schöneberg, with the lake outside.' Mitsuko's favourite, clearly.

It may have been that each of them was mentally entering their station. City portal and place mark, and the satisfaction of a punctual train. Cass knew she had summoned communal imagining, had invited them to salute their especial station.

‘I'm interested,' Marco was sounding more serious, ‘in memorials. Berlin has many, of course. One of the least conspicuous is the rows of empty bookshelves underground in Bebelplatz. They commemorate the book burning there by the Nazis in 1933. It's such a simple thing, the empty bookshelves. Have you seen it?'