A buzzing inside the bag brings Lena’s hand down to take out her phone. She’s talking to Mike in New York. They say some intimate things to each other. She tells him that she’s on the train, heading down to see her uncle Henning in Magdeburg. Mike is having his breakfast. She takes out a pastry from her bag and joins him.
She finds herself telling Mike something she remembers from childhood. An incident when she was around twelve years of age, in Philadelphia, just before her father sent her to Ireland to live with her mother for a year. I put a big scratch on a brand-new car on the street, she says, totally deliberate, like I hated that car. It was a protest. I was on my way home from school. I saw this beautiful convertible, blue and shiny. I made a mark right along the paintwork with a coin, she says. The owner saw me doing it. Like, he was at the window watching his car all day and I looked up and smiled at him. Then I kept going, completing this piece of insane vandalism. He complained to my father, but I denied it. And you know what, my father believed me all the way. The owner of the car sued for the repair. It was his word against mine. A police officer came to the house and I pretended to be completely innocent. I was good at looking innocent. The police officer said – so you didn’t do it. And my father said – we have got to believe her.
Then I said – it’s a beautiful scratch.
That blew it, Lena says.
I bet it did, Mike says.
My father had to pay, but he went on believing me and said it was a terrible miscarriage of justice.
What else could he do? Mike says. You keep faith with your child.
I told him the truth later, Lena says, and I think he was so hurt by that. I should have kept it from him. He didn’t need to know, but it was on my conscience all the time. I wanted to be honest.
Bet he forgave you, Mike says.
How’s your mom doing?
Aw, I don’t know, Lena. It’s tough.
I thought the lawyer said it was in the bag.
Meant to be.
It’s a pushover, you said.
We asked for mediation. The neighbours refused to enter any kind of negotiation. Their lawyers are intent on going all the way to court.
And then, Mike says, out of the blue, while I’m down there, she came over one day. Lydia, next door. I answered the door and she was standing there all smiles, asking me to drop in to her house so we could maybe discuss this thing with the parking lot in a rational way, like friends. My mother didn’t want to go, so I called around myself. I thought this might be a chance of solving the problem amicably.
What a turnaround! She was so polite and friendly, Mike says. Offered me coffee. A slice of apple tart, which is not like me to refuse, but I left it, just to keep things simple. She introduced me to her father. I had met the son before a couple times, nice boy, Jake, out there in the parking lot throwing his basketball into a hoop all day.
So, I’m sitting there with Lydia, letting her know that my mother is a bit upset about this whole thing with the parking lot, naturally. It was the legal stuff without warning that gave her such a shock. And then Lydia starts apologizing. She had no idea. It was the way lawyers talk, there was nothing meant by it. She said she would speak to them and see if there was a different way of dealing with the whole thing. The last thing she wanted was to upset my mother. We shook hands and she stood at the door saying – tell your mom not to worry.
Big mistake, Mike says.
You will not believe this, Lena. No more than twenty minutes later, the cops called around to say they had reports of a disturbance. Our neighbour – Lydia, that is, the woman I’d just had a pleasant chat with over coffee – had called to say that I had gone around to her house and threatened her. I had been shouting. Using abusive language. She now felt unsafe. She was afraid to leave the house.
Three days later – listen to this, Lena – there was a letter from her lawyer accusing me of forcing my way into her home. She claims I pushed my way right into the living room and started shouting at her, so the lawyer said. They have video footage of me waving my arm. I can tell it’s been doctored. Speeded up a fraction to make me look aggressive. She’s a single mom and she now feels afraid to go about her business. Her lawyers advised me to desist from these acts of intimidation or else they would have no option but to seek a restraining order.
That’s so fucked up, Lena says.
I’m going to see the lawyers right now, he says, just to deny all of this. What exactly am I denying? It never happened. It’s like fake news, Lena. Some of it always sticks. How can you deny what is false?
She’s borderline, Mike.
Crazy is the word I had.
Keep away from her. She’s borderline. One hundred per cent. I know people like that, Mike. They can’t deal with reality. They constantly make things up. They will lie. It’s all a fantasy to suit their purpose.
Her word against mine, he says.
Some creative instinct gone wrong.
Let the lawyer deal with her, Mike says.
I’m serious, Mike. She wants to manipulate. She wants to micromanage the world. She wants to damage you. And your mother. For no reason other than to get some sense of achievement. Some victory. Imposing her invented reality to take control. Who knows what she might do next?
Look – it’s all going to be OK. Don’t worry, Lena. Got to go. Call you later.
Stay on it, Lena says. You’re doing the right thing.
I miss you, he says.
After she puts the phone down on the table, she begins crying without a sound. The landscape becomes blurred. The trees are like orange balloons. The fields have turned into waterways, the wind farms look like ships. A sandy path sways as it runs away into a forest. A level crossing surges up from under the earth with a group of schoolchildren waiting.
Lena reaches into the bag for a Kleenex and continues staring at the world travelling past. She feels the absence, the separation, the lack of certainty. She may be concerned about the direction her life is taking. Some unspecified anxiety. The motion of the train has left her exposed to a galaxy of memory. That’s what trains do. They put the passengers into a dreamy state outside time. That great human protector has suddenly lost its ability to shield her.
An older woman sitting opposite Lena asks her in English if everything is alright. Lena puts the inside of her sleeve up to her eyes and smiles back – it’s nothing. The woman says – it’s the distance. She begins telling Lena that she has a son now living in Thailand with his wife, Pla, he’s a guide on adventure holidays, taking tourists down the rapids. They have a small boy who is so sweet you want to sit all day and talk to him. They have a conversation twice a week on FaceTime. He sings pop songs to her. One minute he’s there in front of me, the woman says, then he’s so far away. She shows Lena a picture of the boy sitting at a table with plates of food laid out.
Is this your first visit to Magdeburg?
Yes, Lena says. I’m visiting an uncle.
Oh, that’s nice, the woman says. You’re from here.
No, Lena says. From the US. My father was from here. He emigrated after reunification.
The woman begins telling Lena some of the places worth seeing in the city. Such as the cathedral. It has two organs now, she says, one that was built during the GDR times in place of the one destroyed in the war. Now they’ve put in a new organ, in the nave, where the original one was, she says, because the one built in GDR times was in the wrong place. They could play both of them at the same time, theoretically, the GDR organ and the post-GDR organ. You wouldn’t know which is which.
It’s worth having a look at the famous sculpture of the happy maidens and the sad maidens.
And the green citadel, of course, you can’t mistake it, a crooked sort of building with trees growing out the windows and a waterway inside.
And there’s a small Stasi museum. If you have the time. It u
sed to be an interrogation centre. On our way to school we passed by the gate where the flower delivery truck went in with the prisoners concealed inside. Our classrooms were directly overlooking the windows with the bars. But we never saw any faces.
26
It’s not a long journey, around two hours. When the train begins to cross the Elbe river, the passengers seem to be struck by the need to stand up, as if the presence of water beneath them has set off a biological sense of arrival. They get ready long before the train reaches the other side and the announcement is made that we will shortly be arriving at Magdeburg main station. Lena gathers up the crumbs of pastry and places them into a paper bag. She finds the refuse bin, then she folds up the newspaper and puts it away in her bag and stands up to get her case. Her uncle Henning is standing on the platform waiting.
He embraces her like a daughter coming home. He picks up her case and leads her out through the station hall.
In the car park in front of the station entrance, two police officers burst into a sprint and come running past. One of them is fitter than the other, holding on to the gun at his side as he leads the way. The less fit officer runs a couple of paces behind, taking off his hat as though it’s too heavy. They make it to the side entrance of the station and then come back moments later in no hurry, walking calmly side by side as though they’ve changed their minds. The faster officer is on his phone. The slower officer is putting his cap back on.
A man is seen walking away from the station holding a bunch of flowers upside down. Lena will mention this to Mike at some point later, how she has observed people in Germany holding flowers the wrong way round. It leaves her wondering if they have been taken straight from a bucket of water at the station flower shop and the idea is to stop the drip running into the sleeve, or is it to make sure the remaining sap flows to the flowers, keeping them fresh longer? Or maybe the bringer of the flowers only turns the display upright at the last minute, for the right person, the true recipient.
Henning’s voice is familiar. His words are old, full of authority and patience. They go to an Italian restaurant and Henning talks to her about the floods, when the Elbe rose one year and the restaurant they are sitting in right now was underwater up to the ceiling. Lena tells him about her life and how she has access now to a small studio in Berlin where she has begun to work on an art project. Henning wishes her the best of luck, encouraging her to go at it with great daring and confidence.
Strike another match, he says.
Another match?
Bob Dylan. Go start anew.
At the house, Henning brings her case upstairs and shows Lena to her room. She takes me out of her bag to show him. Then he gives her a tour of the library.
The books all begin cheering in a collective hum. It’s the greatest welcome you can imagine. Like the sound of a thousand monks or nuns in a monastery awaiting the return of one of their own. They call out my title – Rebellion. My author’s name – Joseph Roth. They have a place ready for me to fit back in among them. Their voices emerge from deep inside a prolonged silence, full of gasping and whispering. As if the outside world from which they were once forged has come back to revisit them. Home again. The familiar scent of other books, the static air, the tranquillity. This gathering of human insight. This sanctuary filled with an infinite volume of thoughts and segments of imagination. They break out in a moment of unrestrained joy. The arguments between them are put aside. They go back to being themselves again, giddy as children, cut off from the real world for so long they want to dance around the library in celebration.
They can’t wait to hear the news.
Things have changed beyond recognition, I tell them. People do most of their reading on phones now, in smaller instalments. Life is too short and books are too long, but they continue to be as relevant as always, I assure them, on the cusp of being rediscovered like an ancient archaeological find. The world is full of confusion and people need stories more than ever before.
They give me the latest news in Magdeburg. A man recently performed a re-enactment of the book-burning in public. On the main square, on the exact same spot where books were burned in May 1933, a hate-motivated individual took it upon himself to douse the diary of Anne Frank with petrol and set it on fire in front of a small crowd of like-minded supporters. It was reported in the paper. The police were said to be making enquiries. No arrests have been made.
The books are packed in floor to ceiling, spreading into further interconnecting rooms. There is a copy of Anne Frank’s diary on the shelves and it feels safe. No need for her to be hiding any more in an attic. She has sold many millions of copies around the world by now. The public burning of one single copy is not going to silence her.
Henning goes straight over to find Effi Briest. The book that became my protective cloak after the book-burning. Since then it has been reused as a disguise for a Russian novel which was in danger during the GDR years. At one point, he tells Lena, that Joseph Roth book you have in your hand was no longer banned, but this one was. He opens the copy of Effi Briest and shows her the hidden book inside. A slim volume called One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
It tells the truth about Stalin’s gulags, a story still not acknowledged in Russia, Henning says. He describes the scene in the Siberian camp where the narrator finds a fish eye in his soup and faces that moral dilemma, whether he should declare this great piece of luck and share it with the other inmates, or whether he should quietly eat the fish eye and keep that piece of glorious protein to himself.
Henning tells Lena that, during the GDR times, after the Berlin Wall went up, her grandfather used to receive books from the West through friends. The parcel would always be opened and checked at the border, but sometimes a banned book would get through without being noticed. Possibly, Henning tells her, because the title had not yet been placed on the banned list, or because the customs officials didn’t read books and thought any book by a Russian author had to be OK. Or maybe they were more interested in consumer goods.
As you know, Henning says, your grandfather was a schoolteacher, liable to have his personal library examined at a moment’s notice every time a banned book or record was found among the incoming parcels. He occasionally forgot himself and mentioned some literary detail in school which a clever student then reported to a parent, drawing suspicion. He once recited a section of George Orwell’s Animal Farm – that got him into trouble. He was not a member of the party. He was active in other ways, running athletics clubs, chess tournaments, drama groups that gave him a status within the community.
Rebellion, he says, taking me into his hands and leafing with affection through the pages. A century old. We should have a birthday party with a cake, one candle.
What about the original owner? Lena wants to know.
Professor Glückstein.
My father didn’t tell me a whole lot, she says.
We don’t know what became of him, Henning tells her. Your grandfather made repeated attempts to find out. He was unable to travel once the Berlin Wall went up, so he got his friends in the West to investigate for him. Nothing. The Glücksteins disappeared like so many other Jewish people. There was no mention of their names on the register of camps, he says, and no evidence of them having emigrated.
If only books could speak.
If only I could tell them what I know, what I witnessed. David Glückstein was a good cyclist. On weekends he could travel up to two hundred kilometres, right across Brandenburg, up to the lakes of Mecklenburg. Some weekends he went all the way to the Baltic coast. In his mid-forties the journeys got even longer. He cycled to Breslau. He cycled up to Kiel.
I was with him one day when he cycled out towards the Oder river. He was going to visit his fiancée, a young woman by the name of Angela Kaufmann. She had studied philosophy in Jena. They had met at the theatre in Berlin, after The Threepenny Opera, and she had told him that she was interested
in writing. He was cycling out to visit her on the farm where she lived with her brother and her mother. Glückstein was up early that Saturday morning in April, before the city began to wake up. It was still cold out, but he soon got warm from cycling. He had me in his pocket, so I could feel the rhythm of his legs pumping up and down. I could hear his breathing. I could measure his heart rate gradually slowing down whenever he stopped to have a drink of water.
This was before the map was drawn. My last pages were still blank, as they were when I was first printed.
He cycled along the straight avenues with the trees lined along each side, planted to shelter horse-drawn carriages from the winds across the open fields. He got to the farm and met his fiancée. He was invited for lunch. They served Gulasch. For dessert it was coffee with Streuselkuchen, followed by a single praline each and a small glass of liqueur.
After lunch they walked around the farm together. Angela brought him into the walled orchard, where the apple trees were in blossom. They went to one of the farm buildings where a swing had been erected in the doorway for the children when they were small. He watched her swinging like a child. They walked as far as the bench under the oak tree and sat down.
He noticed that she had ink on her fingers. She told him that she had been trying to write a novel but that there was more ink on her thumb than any paper. He asked her what she was writing about.
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