A Guide to Berlin (8 page)

‘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.

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.

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 unhappy 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.