The Pages

by Hugo Hamilton

  The day after the book-burning in Berlin, Lena’s grandfather brought his copy of Rebellion with him to his hometown of Magdeburg for safekeeping. He passed by the site of a similar fire which had been lit on the main square of his own city, then he went straight home and stored me away in his small, growing library.

  This time, I was placed beside Goethe. Schiller. Fontane. Büchner. Safe books, so to speak. Reliable masters that kept me company in relative peace. They tolerated me, perhaps even got to like me a little.

  I remained safe on those shelves for some years. My keeper took up a position as a schoolteacher in Magdeburg. Professor Glückstein disappeared from the teaching staff at the Humboldt University, so it was hard for Lena’s grandfather to return me safely to my original owner. What intrigued him was the curious map at the back. He wanted to know if there were any further instructions, what the map depicted, where it was located, and whether there was something he should know about or do when all this trouble with book-burning was over. He waited for the professor to contact him, but there was no word.

  As a student, he had once been invited to the professor’s home for a literary evening at which a number of people had gathered to celebrate the launch of a new collection of poetry. A woman read a selection of poems while around twenty people sat in the library on chairs on a summer evening with the doors onto the terrace open, and the words were carried off across the calm surface of the lake. At the reception on the terrace afterwards, he was introduced to the professor’s fiancée, Angela Kaufmann, who also worked at the university in the philosophy department. Among the distinguished guests at the gathering that evening was an author Lena’s grandfather had admired from an early age, the writer of a book called Emil and the Detectives, the same writer who stood watching his own books being burned in the fire when a woman turned to point at him – look, that’s him, there he is.

  Lena’s grandfather still had Professor Glückstein’s address in Wannsee. Knowing that any mention of a banned book would place them both in danger, he wrote to ask the professor if he had time to meet and talk about some of the latest books being published.

  There was no reply.

  One Saturday morning, not long after the day of glass in the streets, he took me down from the shelf and placed me on the table. He then pulled out a well-known novel by Theodor Fontane and placed it beside me. A classic called Effi Briest. The story of a woman who falls in love with her husband’s friend, an army officer by the name of Crampas.

  We lay side by side on the table, like some comparative exercise.

  A knife normally used for cutting meat was brought in from the kitchen. Lena’s grandfather sharpened the knife and began to carry out a piece of urgent surgery that changed my life. He cut out the pages of the Fontane novel. The slicing of paper produced an agonizing squeak, like a stale crust of bread. I was surprised there was no blood. Once the vacant space had been hollowed out, he placed me inside the covers of the Fontane book as though I were being measured for a coffin. I was given a new title. A new author. I had become a stowaway. Like a duplicate key hidden inside a book to be brought to a prisoner in jail.

  I am Effi Briest, I said to myself.

  From that moment on, I saw the world from her point of view. I watched her getting ready to go and meet the army officer named Crampas.

  My author would have studied this book at university. Some part of the Fontane story had already become transposed into mine. Books have a way of dwelling like parasites, carried forth in the minds of readers, turning up by force of succession in later works of art. I was part of that living chain of ideas reaching into the future.

  Under Fontane covers, I entered a double life. Hiding underneath Effi’s winter cloak as she leaves the house on the day of the fateful sleigh ride with Major Crampas.

  After Christmas dinner, her story goes, the guests depart on a recreational outing into the snow. On sleighs pulled by horses, they travel through the winter landscape by the sea and come to a hidden river. The horses know it’s too dangerous to cross. The party must seek an alternative route, and while the rest of the guests return to the house by carriage, Effi follows her husband on a daring route back through the forest. At the last minute she is joined by Major Crampas, who jumps onto her sleigh, saying he cannot let her travel alone.

  This is the point when they become lovers. She falls under a spell from which she has no wish to escape. In the movie version, they are placed inside a carriage, stopping for a brief minute in a clearing. A deep silence that feels like the interior of a white room.

  Here is the love scene described by Fontane –

  Crampas speaks her name softly in her ear. He prises apart the fingers of her tightly clasped hand and showers them with kisses. She is about to faint. When she opens her eyes, they are out of the woods again.

  After that, her world falls apart. Her husband discovers the affair in her letters and she is ousted from the marriage. The child she gives birth to is taken from her. She descends into a deep depression.

  Once I had been implanted into the folds of this tragic story of a woman’s quest for freedom, Lena’s grandfather brought me with him on a journey back to Berlin. It was winter, not unlike the day of the treacherous sleigh ride. There was no point in going to the university, so he made his way out to Lake Wannsee. The lake was frozen over. People were skating on the ice, making designs like handwriting on the surface.

  He found the house where Professor Glückstein lived and rang the doorbell. There was no answer. He waited for a while, then he began looking in the windows. The rooms seemed empty. He walked around to the back of the house to see if everything was alright. On the terrace overlooking the water, he placed his face up to the glass, but it was hard to see inside with the bright reflection of the lake. He discovered the back door onto the terrace had been left open, so he entered the library in which he had once been honoured to belong to a literary salon. The room was abandoned, with books strewn all over the floor.

  What are we doing here? Don’t stay in a place that has been so desecrated by haters of books.

  We heard voices in the hallway and were forced to hide behind one of the bookcases. My heart, Effi’s heart, was pounding inside my chest. She was out of breath. A tiny cry emerged from the back of her throat and I thought for a moment that her sense of guilt and adventure might give us all away. Two men came into the library carrying boxes of letters and other documentation. They began searching through this material and when they found what they were looking for they went back through the hall into another room. At the first opportune moment, we made our way back out onto the terrace and slipped away through the gardens onto a lakeside walk.

  9

  Back in Magdeburg, in the house where Lena’s grandfather lived with his ageing mother, there was a knock on the door one morning. It was the same two men who had gone through Professor Glückstein’s documents at the house by the lake. They now came into the library and began searching through the shelves where I was kept undercover inside Effi Briest. I felt the security of her cloak around me as well as the respect of other classics. I was placed right next to Woyzeck, that great figure of human jealousy and natural destruction, the unfinished drama about a soldier who kills his lover after she sleeps with a drum major. Perhaps the barrel organ player should have done the same when his wife Katharina called him a useless cripple and began to seek the affections of a police officer with two legs, but he merely turns his sorrow like a knife on himself.

  As the men were searching through the shelves, book by book, they asked Lena’s grandfather why he had written to his old professor in Berlin. He no longer had any connection with the Humboldt University. Lena’s grandfather said it was a courtesy, nothing more, just to see how his former literature professor was doing. They accused him of belonging to a degenerate group of academics who were conspiring against the state. They sat him down and began to question him more
thoroughly. One of them took his wristwatch off and placed it on the table to show they had all the time in the world.

  My author would have described the chief interrogator as a man with a beige-coloured face like unrisen dough, thin lips that hardly covered his teeth and yellow ears that were translucent against the light coming from the window.

  We know you have it.

  What?

  You were his favourite student.

  He’s a brilliant lecturer.

  You became friends.

  It was the classic interrogation scene in which each party gives away as little as possible. The person under questioning pretends to know nothing. The interrogator pretends to know everything.

  Lena’s grandfather responded to their questions by saying he had no idea what they were talking about.

  All this time, I was worried that Effi might open her cloak and let out the faintest sound of the barrel organ.

  Nobody mentioned the title, but it was clear as daylight that they were looking for the book with a map at the back. The map led to untold rewards. Everyone was aware that David Glückstein was the sole heir of a paper industrialist and that, like many family traits that skip a generation, he had little interest in the wealth that had fallen into his hands, preferring to devote himself to the pursuit of literature and art. The father produced raw paper – the son became the end user. He was more interested in what could be printed on it, particularly those books written by new revolutionary authors like mine who defended characters with no wealth.

  The chief interrogator told him not to waste their time. It was another one of those well-worn interrogation strategies in which the person under questioning is reminded that there is a limit to politeness. It led to a moment of confusion in which Lena’s grandfather said he had no idea what book they were referring to.

  The interrogator smiled.

  What makes you think we’re looking for a book?

  Why else would you be searching the bookshelves?

  The innocence of that answer displeased them. Still refusing to mention the title, the interrogator simply said in a voice that was now depleted of all patience – you know the book I’m talking about.

  Tell the truth, the other man shouted.

  At that point, Lena’s grandfather became aware of how little the truth mattered to them as long as they got what they wanted. He could avoid a lot of trouble by handing over what they were looking for. He decided there was no way out but to be perfectly honest with them, even going so far as to mention the book in question.

  You mean – Rebellion, by Joseph Roth.

  Exactly, the chief interrogator said.

  Lena’s grandfather began to explain how the book had come into his possession. On the night of the book-burning, he told them, a copy of that banned book had been given to him for safekeeping by the professor. He had wrestled with his conscience, he explained, not knowing what he should do with it. He didn’t want to be seen with the book and so carried it under his coat out of the university. As he emerged onto the opera house square and saw the crowd standing around the fire, he told himself to do what every good German would do under the circumstances.

  Of course, the interrogator said eagerly.

  I had to do the right thing.

  What’s that?

  I threw it into the fire.

  It was one of those moments in police questioning when the lie sounds just right. Not only plausible but politically fitting. The interrogator clearly found the words hard to disbelieve. It was impossible to argue with a double bluff.

  The interview was brought to a conclusion. Perhaps the men were already thinking of other ways in which the information could be attained. The interrogator picked up his watch and put it back on his wrist in a feigned gesture of satisfaction. Just to be certain, they carried out another search through the bookshelves, and for one moment they picked Effi Briest out as a suspect. But they were not readers. They failed to see what she was hiding and left empty-handed.

  10

  There is no wind. It’s like a funeral morning. The mist in the streets of Berlin seems to bring the city to a standstill, even while everything is moving. The people Joseph Roth described a century ago are back in their starting positions. Same lives down the road in history. The little girl pouring sand on a balcony. An old man reading a book in his room. The young man in a parallel room putting on some music, sending out a fragment of sound into the city.

  A fragment of a fragment, he called it.

  Inside Armin’s bag feels like being in the back of an ambulance. You follow the imagined street map in your head. Another five hundred metres straight ahead, then left. We have now reached the market stalls on Hermannplatz. Where the shopping centre once stood like a giant anniversary cake with two towers, before the bombing took it away and it was replaced by, what, a shopping centre with no towers and no swimming pool on top.

  All around, the flow of people passing by like a library in motion. Books gathered in clusters around fruit and vegetable stalls. A melodic book shouting special offers on avocados. A steady stream of books going down the escalator, joining the books already waiting on the platform. Books getting off and books getting on. A last-minute book, rushing to jump in before the doors close.

  That musical gift for hearing what cannot be seen – it was something the organ grinder had. The ability to distinguish the tiniest sounds. His ears became sighted. He knew the difference between the hoofs of a carriage horse and those of a dray horse. Between the old and the young. Between the weak and the strong.

  My fellow travellers this time – a notepad, a measuring tape and a laser distance meter. Armin’s livelihood involves measuring empty spaces. As part of a research project, he has been tasked with surveying sites around the city such as gas stations and parking facilities which have been given over to private motorized transport. In his notebook, he has recorded the details of a single-storey corner site, once a beer store, then a Starbucks outlet, now an Italian restaurant. The aim of the project is to calculate the available vertical space, how many housing units could be provided once the capital has been turned into a green zone.

  I have now become a measurer’s assistant.

  Only one thing troubles me. I am carrying a cargo of cash. Inserted between two pages right in the middle, there is a bundle of banknotes. This calculable world of money gives me a bloated sensation. Have I now been turned into a wallet? I want to renounce this wealth. I want to be a book that carries only its own literary content, a vehicle of storytelling, not for transporting money.

  On a street of twenty languages, Armin steps into a barber shop. He sits on the waiting bench. In front of him there are two men draped in black sheets, buried up to the neck, it seems. On a TV screen a woman is seen walking along a beach, singing with the sunset behind her.

  The men in the barber chairs show implausible levels of masculinity. The man on the left is getting a buzz cut, leaving a full black beard untouched. His eyes are fierce and self-hostile – that’s how I imagine it, ready for a fight with his own reflection. The other man has a pointed beard and a tattoo of what looks like a chainsaw on his neck. He’s getting a skin fade, but again, the beard stays. The space underneath their barber robes is spring-loaded with musculature, as though they are both armed.

  Are men always going to war or returning from war? Either defeated or going off to fight in a conflict that is already lost? Are these men getting ready for some unknown enemy? Maybe a big fight with nature. A battle with water. Without water. With fires spreading.

  This sacred cutting room where men face themselves in the mirror with great intensity while the barber works on their external appearance. It’s a day of reckoning. A place to reflect and fess up and collect the latest news. Joseph Roth wrote a newspaper piece a hundred years ago about a man who walked into a barber shop and started talking without any introducti
on, giving a stream of political developments to the silent men in their chairs.

  A large fly has entered the room, taunting the men, making their strength appear ludicrously overstated. One of the barbers tries to chase it out from behind bottles of spray with the use of the hairdryer. The fly is blown away in a hurricane, lifted vertically like a helicopter.

  The overwhelming masculinity of the two bearded men, along with the barber’s deep voice and the scent of aftershave, makes Armin feel androgynous. He will tell this story about himself later. A memory of childhood in which he was once turned into a girl at school. For a minor misdemeanour, he was dragged out from his desk. The master decided to bring him over to the girls’ section of the school, where he was dressed up with a veil over his head and made to sit at the back of a classroom full of girls. They kept turning around to giggle at him as if there were something funny about being female. He sat there wearing his veil for a full day, inside the life of a young girl, waiting to escape back into his own body as a young boy. He tries to forget that memory of the time when being a woman was a form of punishment.

  The barber picks up a magazine with a woman in a swimsuit on the cover. He slaps it down on the counter with lightning speed. The big fly is dead. Twice dead. Once in life and once in the mirror. His black corpse is carried over to a bin, where it becomes part of a vast collection of cut hair. The fur of a dozen men has become his grave.