Oh my God, the woman beside her says. Did you have to go and sleep somewhere else?
Lena gives a short laugh. An affectionate laugh, turned inwards.
No, she says. She couldn’t move. She could not even walk across the room through the cloud of flying things to reach the door. She was too scared. Or maybe too embarrassed. All she could do was cover up and hide until she fell asleep again.
In the morning, Lena says, most of them were gone.
At this point, I have the urge to contribute. A book wants to get out there and speak up. I want to tell them that I spent two years on the shelf right next to a small book on insects. It was written by a French author who went out into his garden one day and had the idea of recording all the different species he found there. He named them. Made drawings of them and collected them in his journal as if they were part of his family. It was full of warmth, that book. We became great friends. It was the happiest time of my life, living with all that buzzing, like a constant summer.
But this is absurd.
I cannot speak directly to Lena. I remain a silent passenger. I am nothing until my story is set in motion by a reader. What is it they say about reading – it’s like thinking with somebody else’s brain? Stepping inside the mind of the other.
And how I crave a reader. Somebody to breathe life back into my pages.
We (us books) tend to stay out of live situations. We talk among ourselves in libraries at night. You think public libraries are quiet places. You should hear the racket, the debates, the sheer volume of opinions going back and forth along the shelves until dawn. Everyone talking at once. It’s like an enormous thought-fight. Like an ongoing trial in which each book throws in its own piece of evidence without any conclusive verdict ever being reached. Some books are louder than others. Some downright overbearing and full of self-regard. Some droning on like endless lectures, grinding out warnings. Some brightly feel-good, well dressed, trapped inside their own plot. Some just being themselves, speaking only when they have something to say. At times it’s hard to get a word in – the sound of voices rises to a humming din, all cutting across each other like a parliament in session, until the librarian returns in the morning and the hush is restored.
When the food trays arrive, Lena’s fellow passenger returns to the subject of insects. In Africa, she says, she once tasted a burger made of flies. You won’t believe this, she says. Huge swarms of flies drifting over Lake Victoria. The children catch them so their parents can make black burgers that contain five times as much protein as beef burgers.
Lena smiles.
After dinner, the woman decides to watch a movie with a story set in outer space. Lena is going to listen to some music. She puts the earbuds in and closes her eyes. With her foot, she gently pushes the bag in which I lie awake on my back under the seat in front of her.
For a while, everyone is asleep.
And when the plane lands, when the passengers get ready to disembark and start looking at their phones, when they gather their belongings and avoid things falling out that might injure other passengers, it seems for a moment that they have all been turned into books like me. Each one of them a novel, standing in a crowded aisle, ready to be set in motion. Full of thought. Full of self-fabrication. Eyes loaded with possibility. Like a passenger manifest of alternative plots, waiting for the doors of the aircraft to be opened.
Lena stands up and finds herself being watched from behind, a man trying to guess her story. She is wearing a green leather jacket that has become scuffed at the elbows. Her jeans are torn. There is a tattoo, a gecko, emerging from the shoulder onto her neck. She throws a wave of hair across the top of her head. Her eyes are instantly engaging, shaking off the observer with a smile. Her smile could be said to be prominent. She grew up with a mouth full of overcrowded teeth. She likes to describe the marriage between her mother and father as a random, ill-fitting assembly of German-Irish teeth, like a three-dimensional printout of their incompatibility. A mixture of her father’s pragmatism and her mother’s devotion to dramatic climax. It took years to straighten them out. Now she smiles easily, with an expression that will remind some people of photos taken of Bianca Jagger at late-night parties, seen with Andy Warhol and other celebrities who lived it up long before Lena was born.
She reaches into her bag and takes out her phone – a message to Mike to let him know that she’s arrived. The passengers slowly begin to move towards the door. All these narratives glancing around to make sure nothing is left behind before they walk away along corridors following the signs for exit and baggage, holding out their passports when they reach border control.
4
It must be the air. The language. The unmistakable acoustics of Berlin. That timeless echo of voices reverberating along the buildings. Lena appears to have strayed into a crowd of protesters. People moving at a steady pace, calling out their slogans, with drums beating. They want change. There is no time to waste – it’s our future.
Like a swimmer, she throws herself into the crowd and becomes a temporary participant in the demonstration, taken upstream in the strong current. She ends up on the far bank, some distance down from the starting point. Leaving the human river behind, she comes into a quiet street and enters an interior space.
It’s a café bar. There is music playing. A man’s voice singing about seven days to live your life and seven ways to die. Lena is swept up into an embrace by another woman. The woman’s name is Julia. Julia Fernreich, the owner of an art gallery in Berlin.
They sit down, they order coffee.
Julia wants to know how things are in New York – tell me everything. They list off the names of people they both know in the art world. Julia is preparing for a new exhibition at her gallery. The room Lena will be taking up at Julia’s apartment nearby is all ready for her, but the living room, she warns, is still full of stuff right now, mostly packaging.
By the sound of it, Julia is a big woman, in her late forties. Her voice is husky and confident. She has a large laugh. Her choice of words is full of fight and irony, giving advice, pointing out all the places where she has gone wrong in her own life. She goes right to the heart of the matter and begins to talk about happiness. Wrong goal, she says. I’ve never heard so much shit being talked about happiness, she says, and the world is out of control with anxiety. We are humming with optimism in a time of doom, she says with a broad laugh. Living in the moment, they might as well go back to religion. Have you ever known so many people talking things up, using positive words like great, fantastic, amazing, awesome, epic?
Beautiful. Tremendous. Terrific. All liar words. It’s a triumph of lies. They’re running out of superlatives.
In the middle of this, Julia asks Lena if she’s hungry – would you like to eat something?
No thanks, Lena says, I’m good.
Happiness does not make people happy.
Look at me, Julia says. Not very lucky in love. My latest partner has just moved out. It’s my default situation, getting left behind. Crazy bitch. I still love her. You see her going around on a motorbike.
I have a son from a previous relationship, Julia says. Matt – you’ll meet him later. He’s a lucky boy. He’s got two mothers. He’s not entirely without a father either, you know, a male father. I try to make sure we go on holidays as a family once a year, all four of us. Matt has got himself into some bad company, a bit of trouble with drugs. Might have to send him up to his other mother in Hamburg.
I hope he’ll be OK, Lena says.
I’m sorry, Julia says. You didn’t come to Berlin to hear me complaining.
Then it’s Lena’s turn to talk about her life. She speaks with a younger voice. The words come up in a wave of enthusiasm. Her body leans forward as she tells Julia that she’s hoping to do something new. My work, she says. I hope that being here in Berlin will take it in a new direction. I’m gathering material, let’s put it t
hat way.
Go for it, Julia says.
Lena is slow to say this about herself, but her Misfortune collection has won her quite a bit of acclaim. Julia already knows about that exhibition at a small East Side gallery in Manhattan and wants her gallery to do Lena’s next show. She gives Lena a bit of straight advice. As a curator, she has seen a lot of artists come and go into oblivion. It’s not about fame and success. It’s about being outrageous. Aggressive. Ruthless. You have all that, Lena. Trust yourself. Tear up the clichés. Allow yourself to do something completely crazy.
Thanks, Lena says.
Take a shit, Julia says, right in the middle of the floor, for yourself.
Lena laughs.
On the back of her success, Lena has managed to get a research grant to help tide her over while she’s in Berlin. All she needs is a small studio space.
Let me nose around, Julia says. Maybe we can find someplace. I’ll put out the feelers.
The music in the café seems to have become louder. Now it’s the screaming voice of a man asking a woman where she slept last night and she replies that she slept among the pine trees, where the sun never shines, and she shivered the whole night through. The singer’s voice seems infected with great sorrow.
Julia says – I love Cobain. I mourn him every day. He took a shot of heroin, he masturbated to a picture of his wife, then he shot himself, in that order.
A shout rises above the roar of the singer. It’s the voice of a customer inside the café, sitting at the bar, turning to say – ladies, mind your handbags. A piece of delayed wisdom drifting across the room, which might have been confused initially with the voice of the singer belting it out from the back of his raw throat. The man at the bar repeats his warning – handbag – but it takes time for the word to reach the table where Julia and Lena are sitting.
Julia stands up. The chair howls.
Hey, she shouts. Is that your bag, Lena?
Oh my God.
The bag in which I have been happily recalling my early years in this city is now being hoisted onto the shoulder of a thief making his way out of the café. How come it doesn’t surprise me? This used to be the capital of book thieves and disappearing bags. The city of opportunists. Where people were constantly offered the chance to buy back their own possessions at a knock-down price.
I was content inside that bag. Dreaming about my newly printed days, when I was first published. I was well received, if not exactly celebrated outright, a newcomer on the literary scene. I was overshadowed by a bigger, weightier book, with many more pages than mine, a masterpiece about a sanatorium that came out in the same year. It’s a book I envied very much. I sometimes wished my author had thought of it. But then, I have to say, I’ve always been happy with the brevity of my own story about a man who gave up one of his legs in defence of his country and is then betrayed by his own people, forced in the end to rebel against them all.
There is no time for that kind of reflection. I am being rushed out the door onto the street.
My first night home and I get stolen.
You were meant to keep me safe, Lena. I’m supposed to be your little brother, right?
I become conscious of sudden acceleration. I feel myself running along the street. I hear Julia’s sharp voice coming after me, as if the shivering singer on the sound system in the café has been brought back to life and has run outside with his burned-out throat roaring along the doorways. A shout like a piece of vocal graffiti. The person carrying the bag is fast, a young man, light on his feet in soundless shoes. Julia cannot keep up with him. By the sound of it, she hurls a beer glass, swiped off the bar counter at the last minute, with extraordinary accuracy, striking my assailant, my wrongful inheritor, somewhere in the back of the head with a solid knock before it crashes in shards on the ground.
Glass in the street. Not something I can forget.
My thief is cursing. He checks for blood. He holds on to his plunder and continues his escape. Julia’s shouts fade away and I want to call back like they do in movies – I will find you – but I am taken out of earshot into a nearby park. In darkness, next to an overfilled rubbish bin, my thief calmly turns the bag out. He takes what is valuable to him – passport, phone, money. He throws the bag on top of the bin. He leaves me rejected on the ground. I lie abandoned in the city of my birth, a witness to my own robbery, next to the remains of a Vietnamese takeaway. It begins to rain. A warm, late-summer rain that is nonetheless cold and has the potential to chill me to the core. I feel the dampness under my skin. My pages are beginning to warp.
5
It was raining on the night of the fire in May 1933. A last-minute downpour threatened to ruin the event. It was too late to postpone plans that had been underway for weeks. A specialist pyrotechnic company had been hired to oversee the spectacle. On the opera house square, they had set up a dovetailed structure of wooden logs doused with fuel. Underneath, a layer of sand to protect the surface from scorch marks.
At the State Library, next to the site of the proposed fire, students were heard entering with their slogans echoing around corridors, carrying with them a list of unwanted books. The list had been drawn up by a disgruntled former librarian who found you could hate books as much as you could love them. My author was on the list. He had already fled to France by then.
A sense of fear ran through the shelves as the titles were called out. Books saying quick goodbyes to each other as they were being tied up in bundles with twine, ready to be carried outside. The students worked diligently, using their considerable learning skills to search the catalogue for titles to be torn from the canon like bad teeth, passing them along in a human chain to the site of the fire outside on the square.
Incompatible with the national interest.
The students had an air of triumph. This was their moment. Their revenge on learning. All those years spent sitting at desks, forced to love books they detested. Their hearts and minds were no longer dedicated to books but to new infrastructure, the autobahn. This was their chance to step outside received wisdom and take part in a glorious act of self-vandalism. Returning to a time before knowledge. The right not to know.
Unlearning everything but the spirit of the nation.
As it happened, I was not in the library myself that evening. My author’s books were part of the catalogue at the State Library, but I belonged to a professor of German literature by the name of David Glückstein. He had brought me with him in his briefcase to the Humboldt University on the other side of the square because he was unsure how far this cleansing action would go, whether the students would also be going into people’s homes, which they later did. In his office, the professor had arranged a meeting with one of his trusted students, where I was quietly handed over for safekeeping.
The student’s name was Dieter Knecht – Lena’s grandfather. A tall young man with a soft voice, given to reading more than to athletic pursuits. He was about to finish his undergraduate degree in German literature. He took me in his hands and they spoke about my author for a little while with some fondness.
By accepting this contraband novel, by rescuing this single volume from the fire that evening, Lena’s grandfather set in motion a quiet wave of resistance that has continued to this day. It was a small but significant event taking place behind closed doors, away from the catastrophe outside. It changed the course of people’s lives. It had an impact on decisions made later under entirely different circumstances, long after the book-burners disappeared.
Hearing the chants and slogans in the corridor, Lena’s grandfather swiftly tucked me inside his coat, next to his heart. He held me in place with a stiff arm across his chest and made his way out, down a wide set of stone stairs.
Outside on the opera house square, the fire was going strong. Students had already raided the offices of the Hirschfeld Institute for Sexual Science. They railed against filth in literature, against se
xual freedom, capitalism, Jewish dominance, as they called it. The human chain leading from the library to the site of the fire continued delivering the hated books. Each author was denounced in a summary trial, the name called out, giving a reason why they no longer fitted into the national vision, before their books were committed to the fire. All this was being broadcast by radio around the nation.
My author belonged to what was called asphalt literature, the new writing of multicultural cities.
The first books to be thrown into the flames were written by Karl Marx. Followed by many more Jewish authors. An author who was mistaken for being Jewish by the sound of his name and later protested vigorously at being maligned in this way. A woman whose female characters showed too much self-assertion and didn’t fit in with the Nazi ideals of motherhood. The Magic Mountain was spared from the fire but his brother The Blue Angel was not. A playwright who wrote about a man who has his genitals blown away in battle. And the more famous playwright, whose Threepenny Opera had won huge acclaim in Berlin and who later wrote a poem to express how glad he was not to be left out – burn me, please don’t leave me unburned.
Among the spectators gathered around the fire, a woman’s voice was heard saying – beautiful time, beautiful time. What did she mean? Rejoicing at this new anti-intellectual age in which you could stop thinking, when you no longer had to find out anything you didn’t already agree with?
More and more books were being added to the flames. A man in a white shirt recoiled from the slap of heat when he got too close. Fire brigade attendants stood by. An author whose books were being burned in front of his own eyes had to leave suddenly when his name was called out.
Many of the books burned alive that night had something to do with war. Books that refused to glorify death. Non-heroic accounts of men with missing limbs and severed spines and lung trouble. Men with half-faces. Berlin was full of shivering men sitting in rooms with their families unable to make sense of them. All those descriptions of casualties were to be taken out of the public domain because they were deemed bad for morale and they put people off war, encouraging a poor attitude towards death and suffering.
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