A Guide to Berlin (17 page)

Only Victor knew of the Bebelplatz bookshelves. ‘Best seen at night because of the supernatural glow.'

‘Yes, you peer into a lit square, as down a deep well, and you see only empty shelves. I like the simplicity of this installation, and the accuracy of the idea.'

Marco fell silent. He rose and stood staring at the window, as if he expected a book to materialise there. The window was black and opaque. No text would emerge. They watched him, their leader, wondering what would come next.

‘To books!' toasted Victor. His voice flew up to the ceiling.

Dear Victor, funny Victor. They all toasted books.

Then, sounding like Groucho, and holding up an invisible cigar, he asked in a briskly slapstick tone, ‘So who was this guy Kępiński, anyway?'

It would seem like handwriting in snow, or in the breath adhering to a windowpane. There would be no visible trace. The obliterations of winter had use-value, after all. Later she would remember how still the day had been, how all motion but snowfall had seemed abruptly to stop.

They had all agreed to two weeks without any meetings, to recover their lives apart. Cass missed Marco much more than she expected, but enjoyed the white radiance of the winter and the return to her own preoccupations. Gradually the city was unfolding for her; she saw that she might know herself more subtly here, that the pressure of history, imposed like a spy mission, required her to develop a kind of inner sincerity. Small in the face of a terrible history, foreign, young, uncool, antipodean, she might find here an expression of her accumulated questioning. It was a challenge, she decided; there was a logic she must achieve, there were encryptions, there were passwords, there were possible solutions. Not only the train system, but littered everywhere: signs and symbols, implications.

When Cass arrived for their next meeting at Kępiński's
building, Marco and Gino were outside, standing beneath a lamp in the cold dark, smoking on the pavement. Both greeted her warmly. In the aqueous brown lamplight Gino looked wild-eyed and hyper. Cass saw how altered he seemed in so short a time. He looked thinner, pale; his body and mind on the errant edge of crystal meth impulses and tics. But he was also friendly and somewhat crazily verbose; as if wanting to entertain, he greeted her with a racy description of their train ride.

Marco touched Cass's cheek as he gave the formal greeting, a sign of all that still remained unspoken and hidden. It was a claim, she understood, and a promissory gentleness. Gino noticed the gesture. When he leant into the hello kiss he seized Cass's forearm and gripped. She decided simply to ignore him.

They could not use Kępiński's, Marco said: another agent from his company would be showing someone around. They needed an alternative. He suggested they meet in Cass's apartment, since it was the closest option, only a ten-minute walk away. Marco and Gino would wait and tell the others. Cass would go ahead, and return to her studio.

It was foolish, she knew, but she felt anxiety at the idea of them all gathered in her single room. The ignominy of it. Her poor, undecorated existence. Practical trivia was rushing through her brain: she had only two wine glasses. Four could be seated, two on the bed, two on chairs; the others, she and Yukio perhaps, could sit with pillows on the floor. She must duck into a shop on the way to buy more glasses. She must buy snacks and more alcohol, just in case. It alarmed her to have been given this role so casually, and with no time for preparation. Indignantly she thought
Marco should have suggested a café; and why did she not have the presence of mind to recommend and insist on it? She felt her privacy was to be invaded, just as she had, rather meanly, when Yukio and Mitsuko arrived.

 

How then would she describe it all, if she was compelled?

It had begun well enough. They had arrived in one group, clomping up the stairwell, their voices echoing upbeat in the narrow and dreary space. They all shrugged off their coats, sprinkled with snow: it must have begun to fall again soon after she'd arrived home. There was the damp smell they brought with them, and slightly loud exclamations at the novelty of a fast walk all together to the new location. Cass offered them tea to warm up and the lovers both said yes. Gino was picking up her books, scanning them without permission, moving restlessly, back and forth, as he flicked through random pages. He scratched at the back of his hands and was evidently agitated. Victor stood alone looking out of the window, peering with a frown into the dark, sunken square of the cemetery, and Marco was busy opening wine bottles at the sink. They were crowded, she felt it; they all felt the pressure of confinement. Mitsuko sat on the bed sipping her tea; Marco soon joined her. As anticipated, she and Yukio were seated on the floor. She will remember that Yukio lolled a little, as if half-asleep; he may have been stoned. She will remember the shine of hot water in his teacup, a perfect circle of shine, one of those entirely incidental images that in retrospect returns as a small, certain thing.

So, what did they speak of? There were Nabokov stories:
Victor was pleased to tell them that Nabokov shared his rooms in Cambridge with someone called Kalashnikov. Like the Hitler-pansy story there seemed to be no point, other than Victor's literary delight at the unusual association. Gino visibly sneered. Marco thought perhaps they should all nominate ‘transparent things': those according to Nabokov through which history mysteriously shines; those objects that carry time past or the ghosts of our childhoods. Bright things, he said, metaphysically admitting light. There were no takers, this time. No one wanted prescribed conversation or Marco's intellectual guidance. He accepted quietly and poured more wine.

Mitsuko spoke of how Nabokov had loved to go to movies in the cinema palaces around the Gedächtniskirche; how sad it was that they'd left the bombed ruins of the old church standing. Better gone, she insisted. Better to start again. Ruins are too sad. Sometimes forgetting is better than remembering.

Yukio, awoken by tea, said that he liked the sporty Nabokov - the man who broke his ribs and was knocked unconscious playing goalie for a football team at Fehrbelliner Platz. When he came to, Yukio added, they'd had to prise the ball from his frozen grip. They were all quiet then for a moment, contemplating this image of their writer, parting the air with his body, sideways flung; the writer with his two arms outstretched, seizing the ball from its fleet arc, just as his extra-clever head struck the waiting goalpost.

Such disconnected conversation; such irresponsible idleness.

And what had she spoken of? Cass could not remember. But she remembered the tone and the content of Gino's
speech. In the studio together they became very warm. Cass saw that Gino was edgy, sweating and ill at ease. He scratched at his chest and had trouble sitting still. He was drinking quickly. There was a sense they all shared of the dissolution of narrative order; there was a decline to arid blather and unacknowledged tensions. Conversation at some point turned unexpectedly taut. Sentences seemed to twang in the air; there was the strain of pulled wire and the threat of something retracting with a vicious whip of release. A prolix energy emerged, a warp factor that may have been a consequence of their lack of structure and ceremony.

Then Gino made his speech. Biochemical mixture fuelled an articulate hostility. Unprovoked, he stood and spoke in a hissing, loud voice. No one dared interrupt.

‘We are all shits, my friends. We are all literary snobs in this vicarious little room of our own, dilettantish, smug, hidden from the fucked-up world. We are enslaved to the folly and the whirlpool of our own obsessions. Where is
now
rather than our own deeply intoxicating pasts? Where is Lampedusa, where is the tragedy of others? What do we think of a man playing “Nessun Dorma” on a saw in the shadows of a U-station? The lost homeless in Kreuzberg, the drug pushers in Gorlitzer Park, the illegally immigrant prostitutes, freezing their arses at Hackescher Markt? And all the other foreigners, wretched foreigners, who don't have wine and company? Why do we meet for this writer who laments his lost Russia, when losses are everywhere, and always inestimable? We adore him because we find some cracked mirror there, we think that words will save us, that a fine description will drag us away from our own disappointments, and offer consolation, or explanation, or the
return of a disappeared father. We want to cancel our nothingness with his vigour of incarnation, we want to believe, truly believe, in literary salvation. Who else tells us that a twig reflected in a puddle in the middle of a black pavement is worthy of our notice? That it looks like an undeveloped photograph, that it symptomises something inside us, that it reminds us of the entanglements of words and things and reflections; that we must all notice the withering as well as the blossoming; and that the immortal gesture is always present and exists inside the word …'

There was a stunned silence. Cass was struck less by the anger than by the eloquence of the speech. It was Victor who rose and gently took Gino by the elbow. Gino pulled instinctively away, but then submitted when Victor insisted and tried again, leaning in close and whispering something that none of them could hear. If it was a reconciliation of some kind, it was quiet and easy; they saw Victor summon verbal authority against Gino's unfocused fury. There was kindness in Victor's manner, and a gentle fatherly command. They saw Gino's shoulders sag, then he moved into Victor's embrace. The two men stood there, silently communing. They made a strange sight: Gino was so much taller than Victor, yet he was the one supported.

After a few seconds they turned, pulled open the glass door and stepped out together onto Cass's small balcony. Gino lit up and Victor remained with him, talking. They appeared to float together outside in the semi-darkness. The tiny star of Gino's cigarette appeared only when he inhaled. The flare, then the shadow of his arm, falling to his side, faint light from the studio only partially revealing them.

The others watched, transfixed, then slowly and surely, and in a tone of concern, they began talking quietly among themselves. It reminded Cass of the decorum of a funeral, where there is one exceptionally grieved person, comforted singularly and especially, and others hover at a distance, knowing for certain that their own pain cannot possibly be so great.

Without warning, Gino raised his voice, and then he was shouting in Italian. They were not sure what he said, but his tone was angry. A black ferocity possessed him. In profile they saw him push forcefully at Victor's chest, then push again. They saw him lift Victor up and onto the iron edge of the balcony, balance him for a second or two on the railing, and then let him fall. Simply that. Gino lifted Victor, rested him, and then let him fall. It must have been a surge of incredible strength and perverted will. Victor seemed to offer no word or physical resistance – he was there balancing, seeming inanimate, teetering over nothingness, and then he was gone.

There was a moment of delayed response, in which nothing was felt, or could be felt, at such an incomprehensible act.

Gino was at first motionless, outside, looking over the edge down to the street, then the glass doors burst open, and he stood before them, guilty. Nothing could be said. Gino's mouth was slightly open at his own shock and derangement. His face was unearthly white and his expression distracted. Marco pushed past him in a great rush to witness the fallen body. They all knew it without seeing: Victor had crashed and was shattered.

‘Oh Jesus,' Gino was saying. ‘Oh Jesus, oh Jesus.'

Mitsuko was already sobbing and Yukio had his arm around her. He appeared to screen her eyes with his hand, as though the sight of Gino was too awful. Cass saw Gino's desperation and stepped forward to touch him. But there was ice in him now; he was stiff and remote, glittering with his own act and its terrible enormity.

In a tight voice Marco said, ‘We must call an ambulance, the police.' But instantly Gino wailed, ‘No, no!' And again they were stopped in time, two men halted and confused, robbed of the strength of sensible volition and rational decision. The room filled with the sound of Mitsuko's hollow sobs.

How much time passed? In truth none was sure, none would be able to say. There was a magnified quality to their responses, and a stylisation, yet all was hopelessly fixed, somehow, in inactivity and indecision. Marco argued with Gino, but nothing moved forward. There was a knock at the door, then the alarming pound of a fist, and they all returned to the present.

‘Jesus, oh Jesus.'

Cass opened the door and saw not the faces of
polizei
or strangers, but Karl, sturdy Karl. In the hallway light he looked unusually solid, monumental. He was heaving from a hasty climb up the stairs.

‘We must get the body inside, into my room,' he said.

The body
. He had said it - he had called Victor a body. The directness and lucidity of his statement was scandalous.

And already Marco was trying to rewrite history.

‘It was an accident,' Marco pleaded. ‘I was talking to him on the balcony and he leant backwards onto the slippery railing.'

But Karl was not listening. ‘Come,' he commanded.

Why had Karl arrived? Why would he involve himself in their affairs? Cass wondered if she was the only one feeling such puzzlement. Yet having been shocked, and stuck, they were now overcome with the momentum of authority.

They followed mute and miserable. The six of them, the new six, filed down the stairwell, saying nothing. Karl had asked no questions and seemed simply activated by his chore and the pressing need to tidy up. He was focused and deliberative. The others were united in blank disbelief and the altered speed of the world, together with their own rising fear, which came in sickening surges.

In Karl's room Mitsuko refused to sit, so Yukio waited with her, held in his arms. Karl led Cass, Marco and Gino out into the night. Gino held back, but was also compelled. He was riven by the need to see and not to see, and so too Cass and Marco needed to confirm what they dreaded, if only to meet a settled image when so many were uprising as possibilities.

Such a beautiful night. New snow was everywhere, lightly fallen, and it collapsed in soft crunchy pits beneath their feet. None had taken a coat as they left, so they stood unprotected in the cold. Yet it seemed appropriate somehow, that they should feel the sting and the risk of it, that their bodies at this moment should feel frail and assaulted. They all looked around anxiously. No one. No one visible. There was not a soul on the street. It was possible that no one at all had seen. On so cold a night, and so late, everyone was indoors. A body might hurl from above, darkly and undetected.