‘Didn’t I tell you it would be,’ she said, and gave me an ironic, sidelong smile—the same smile that was often on her lips in the years ahead, when revolution came to Central Europe, and she was the spokesman for the Solidarity movement in Warsaw, and all that had seemed fixed and certain in her world began to change.
‘That’s an ironic look,’ I said: ‘You can almost decode it: part resignation, part defiance; part acknowledgement of the way things are, part announcement that they’re really something else.’
‘But I’m the princess of ironies,’ she said: ‘Ironies are all we have. We have to play the hand we’re dealt.’
And such quick-fire comebacks and one-liners, which she held ready and could deploy with dazzling speed and perfect timing, served her well in her new life: they gained her a degree of prominence, even a kind of brief celebrity. Armed with such weapons she ascended smoothly to the realm of international consultations and diplomatic forums; and I would see her often, at round tables in the first years of European reconstruction, discussing detailed points of economics with an air of vast assurance, her mysterious half-smile flickering constantly—until the cascading of events had led me far away, and time had flowed on with such turbulence that nothing in those countries where I had learned so much seemed familiar any more.
*
Then, one autumnal afternoon, after a lengthy absence from that part of Europe, I found myself in transit in Berlin. Tegel Airport, which was for so long the shining gateway to the West, was nearing the end of its commercial lifespan: its sharp-angled terminal now seemed to my eyes cramped and ill-designed. I was searching the departures board for the connecting flight when I heard a voice call out my name: once, twice. I turned. A woman stood before me. I was plunged into a penumbra of half-recognition: I knew the face, I knew it had been familiar to me once. Then she smiled—a deep, irony-laden smile. It was Berenika, changed: immaculately dressed, radiating authority, a handful of aides deployed at a discreet distance around her.
‘And what do you remember most, from those days?’ she demanded, almost as soon as the first words had been spoken: ‘Tell me. What? Those crowded press conferences, every morning, in the Europejski Hotel’s corner suite on the first floor, when history was being made each hour, and we had to laugh at the pace of things, and repeat the headlines because they were so impossible to believe? Do you remember all that? I do—vividly—I can still live through those moments as if they were unfolding inside my head. I can even remember the day the new government was formed: do you? We went together to the national museum, and there was the famous Witkacy exhibition, with all the savage portraits and the notations beside the artist’s signature, giving the details of the drugs he’d taken, and I can hear myself arguing with you, and telling you it was the greatest cultural event in the modern history of Central Europe. My God—what could I have been thinking? We’ve all come a long way since then! And just think: we had no real idea, in those times, what would happen, what our future might be.’
‘But don’t you also remember that trip we made,’ I said: ‘To Dresden, maybe a year before the changes came. I’d only just met you: we went to visit a dissident you knew, Haffner—and he told us everything; the course of the story still to come, laid out, as if he had an open book to read from, and the laws of history in his hands.’
Berenika looked unsure, and screwed up her nose, as if at some distant, unpleasant smell.
‘Listen,’ she said: ‘It was the strangeness of the time. Back then, anything a dissident said seemed deep and true.’
‘And what about his own story,’ I persisted: ‘That story he told us, about the north: the whiteness of the sea, the white gleam veiling the world—nothing?’
‘I don’t dwell on the pre-revolutionary times too much,’ she said.
‘You don’t remember any of that? I do. Even when we went to see him I had the sense of being present at a moment when patterns in the world were becoming clear. And he was very clear: it really was as if he understood that a golden year was coming, when all the regimes would fall, one by one.’
‘I know who you mean, now,’ she said: ‘You mean that Stasi man! He was working for them.’
‘What makes you think that? I didn’t hear his name mentioned after the Wall came down. Did you check? Did you find out from the files?’
‘I didn’t need to—it was obvious to me, at once, that night, as soon as he began talking about his Russian years. And if he had the idea there were unstable times ahead, and told us, maybe he knew: maybe he’d already heard about some deep security service plot. The whole saga comes back to me now. He vanished from Dresden as soon as the changes came: his old students couldn’t find him; you won’t find any trace of him there. No sign of his former presence; no hint; no memory. Besides, he was a fantasist—it was clear at once, and you didn’t seem that taken with him at the time.’
‘Perhaps not—but often one doesn’t grasp what matters when it first comes. That night’s still very present for me: that entire trip. I’ve thought about him, and the things he had to say.’
‘What kind of things?’
Berenika had been joined by a handsome individual, wearing a cashmere coat of great elegance, who now turned his head attentively, cocked it slightly to one side, and adopted a pleasant, neutral air.
‘Not so much the politics,’ I said: ‘More the ideas that seemed so important to him, about the paths we have to take in life. The way everyone has to find their own order from the rubble. How time’s deep current flows, on rare occasions, close to the surface of events—just as it did then; how places give off echoes of other places; how there are secret affinities waiting for us, strewn all through the world…’
I tailed off. Berenika let the silence hang an instant, and stared at me with something like triumph.
‘My husband,’ she then said: ‘Klaus-Emil: he has responsibility for economic progress in the East—among other things’—and with that majestic formulation, she bestowed on me a brief smile that seemed to mirror all life’s richest ambiguities, and swept on her way.
*
Some days after this encounter, its after-echoes still at the forefront of my mind, I was driving south on the autobahn from Berlin, headed for Ostrava, when a turn-off sign for Dresden loomed ahead: Dresden, which I had not set eyes on since the Wall came down; Dresden, which had been rebuilt and refashioned in its old image during the intervening years. I was alone for the journey, and in that space of cocooned solitude where even slight decisions take on great weight. Should I turn the wheel, and change my route? Would that be free will; or just another sign that all my actions were conditioned by past events; or would any attempt at free choice prove more deeply the extent of my subjection to circumstance—and what was free thought; what could it ever be, in the mind’s crystalline, interconnected realm? The turning rushed towards me: ‘World Culture City’—at the last second, I veered right, across the slow lane, almost colliding with a Polish long-distance transport truck.
A side road, thin, straight. Pale landscapes, ploughed fields, wind turbine farms, assembly plants. As I was driving I became conscious of a dullness present in the sky, a greying, a leaching out of colour from the air. An hour passed: the feeling grew in me that I had made a wrong choice, a sentimental choice—then, abruptly, before I could think further, I saw the city, in its valley, spread out, as if in the shelter of a protecting hand: all its buildings, old and new; there were the churches, and the palazzos, and their soft reflections in the curving river. It was Bellotto’s view—a view that I had never seen, for at its centre was the stone bell of the rebuilt Frauenkirche, rising where the ruins had once been. I stared at this spectacle, calmly, as though I was staring at a trick of the light, a play of shadows—something atmospheric, worthy of note—but inside myself I felt time’s different levels clash: they ground against each other; they ground hard, as if memory itself was being pulverised, and time’s forward movement could come only from what pulp it made
of us.
I stopped, and began walking towards the city centre, which was still at some distance. The spires and palaces rose up ahead, but pale, the colour of warm, clean sandstone, where in my memory they were stained a dark brownish-black: with such stray ideas and impressions as these in my head, I navigated through the maze of crowded, unfamiliar streets, and through the museum quarter. At last I found my way to the new gallery of paintings, and spent some while in a systematic, dutiful survey of the lower floors, examining an exhibition on the history of court life in old Dresden, and becoming conscious, as I lingered, of crowds of Russian schoolchildren, laughing, speaking loudly, hurrying through. I followed them: up the grand stairs, through the main galleries full of old masters, to a final room. It was the home of the Sistine Madonna—there she was. I gazed up at her. How familiar that figure should have been to me—and yet the Madonna seemed to my eyes to float rather disquietingly upon her cloudy platform, raised high above her painted, saintly worshippers. Her eyes looked out in serene and non-committal fashion. The entire canvas was coated by a thick yellow glaze that damped and masked its colours. I must, at some point, have frowned as I took this in.
‘She doesn’t please you?’ said a voice with a faintly Slavic intonation.
I turned. It belonged to a young man, with long hair, and a soulful expression on his face, wearing a brown corduroy suit and a polka-dot cravat.
‘She means a great deal to us,’ he went on.
‘Us?’
‘Russians’—he waved, at that point, at a large class of students who were traipsing out of the gallery where we stood. Suddenly it was quiet in the room. ‘Young Russians, of today’s generation. We come on pilgrimage to see her; she speaks to us; she fills up our thoughts. I find myself set free a little just by being here. All the hatefulness and self-involvement that grips me in life flies away.’
This was said in an easy, confiding fashion, as though it was the most normal thing in the world to strike up such a conversation, with a stranger, in such a place.
‘And why are you telling me this?’ I asked.
‘Don’t be defensive,’ he said: ‘Don’t be like the world outside. Everyone who comes here, to this special little room, in this city in eastern Germany, has come for a reason—because they need to. I came all the way from the province of Tver—perhaps you know it? I came because I had reached a point of stillness, where the shadows were gathering around me. I had dreams with dark figures raising their arms against me. I would wake up every night in black fear. And you?’
‘If I were to tell you,’ I said, ‘that this picture has been in my life for many years, but I have never seen it, would that seem too strange to believe?’
‘You can tell me whatever you want,’ said he: ‘What matters is what you feel, and see, in her. What I see is time’s stamp. I see all life tangled up: the past, and the present, and what will come. We’re bound together, all of us. Long after my little trials and darknesses have gone, and I am nothing, nothing but the dust, men like me will stand here, and seek their peace in turn.’
‘You—and Dostoyevsky!’
‘And them all. Every author, every artist, every seeking man.’
‘What’s your name?’ I asked him.
‘Alexandrov—Sergei Dimitrievich—and I am at your service, if I can be of any help to you at all.’
‘Truthfully?’
‘Of course.’
‘Then—will you do me a favour, Sergei Dimitrievich?’ I went on, and I listened to myself speaking: my voice was low. ‘Will you walk with me through Dresden for a while: just to take the sting of time away. Time’s stamp is different for me, you see. I know the city. Or I knew it before, I should say. With every step I take I come up against the past: the mind’s eye and the eye collide.’
‘Do you mean that you were here in Soviet times—in the time before I was born?’
He looked at me, with an air of wonderment on his face, and I wondered, in my turn, that such a creature could have grown, been educated and reach adulthood in so short a space of time, a blink of memory, a quick carousel of days and nights, no more— and this creature could be standing before me, now, offering me words of kind advice.
‘It was exactly those times that I was thinking of,’ I said: ‘The student protests, the rallies and the demonstrations, the days when police with batons patrolled the streets. And before that, too: further back. I can still see the dark buildings, and dark skies, and the people who were here before: I remember what they felt, I hear what they said.’
I continued; he listened; we walked out together, into that greyish light, through the pavilions and the gardens, to the riverfront, and back, our conversation drifting: his childhood, his work, and mine—the coincidences and accidents that go into shaping a life. Then we turned, and headed down a stone-paved street. I glanced up. I realised that I was once more where Haffner’s eyrie had been, high above, on the top floor of the concrete-fronted apartment block—but in its place a new building, a recreation of a baroque house, with pillared arcades, and an ornamented façade, and projecting windows now stood, commanding the angle of the street, which was lined with boutiques, and neat market stalls, and was full of passers-by. I veered over: there, beside the entrance, was an elaborate video intercom, and the names of the residents. I looked: I ran my fingers up and down the list.
‘You knew this address,’ asked Sergei Dimitrievich, watching.
‘I used to come here, once.’
‘Life must be a succession of ironies for you, when you revisit places like this.’
Before us, the piers and spurs of the great church rose at the street’s end: the pale blocks of the new structure glowed; the old stones, deep dark brown, retreated from the eye so much they seemed like gaps.
‘You would know the story well,’ said my companion: ‘How they rebuilt it. Why.’
The campaign began almost immediately after the upheavals of 1989, only a few weeks into the new year, while the reverberations from the collapse of the old regimes were still dying away. A ‘Call from Dresden’, an appeal signed by a list of citizens with unblemished reputations, went out to the world, seeking support for a scheme to rebuild the ruined church, and rebuild it as a Christian centre of peace—a testimony in stone to faith. Was the ruined church not the cradle of the protest movement that had helped dethrone the dark powers of the past? Had the young people of Dresden not ceaselessly persisted with their lighting of candles, and their placing them amid the fallen stones, as signs of hope—hope that peaceful times and justice would one day return? And something in this high-flown text, issued from the silent, frost-ridden East in deep midwinter, seemed to resonate with the established powers of the German state: the appeal was heard, and disseminated. I was sitting in a conference room in Moscow one morning that same month, together with a colleague of mine, leafing through the western papers; he opened the feuilleton section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine; there, beneath a fetching photograph of a Bellotto view of Dresden, was the appeal from Saxony: ‘Rebuild the bell of stone’, proclaimed the headline, above an article rich in grand abstractions. We both smiled quiet, world-weary smiles, and raised our eyebrows gently. How impossible! My colleague said nothing; he turned the page—but, placed as we were, watching the fine detail of events, too close to them, we had no instinct for history’s slow, well-masked patterns.
The appeal circulated, the funds flowed in, debates were held, the scheme took shape. It would be not just a rebuilding of the church, but an archaeological recreation—it would use the first structure’s scattered stones: the rubble would be undone; annihilation would be annihilated. Everything would be as it once was: a sandstone bell, bound together by iron ring beams, would once more set its seal on the cityscape.
As I was recounting this story, we walked through the church, gazing upwards, like all who set foot there, our eyes drawn by the frescoes and the high, receding vault above—and perhaps it was a phenomenon of the dull sky that day, but with eac
h passing second my capacity to resolve the painted surfaces that stretched overhead seemed to weaken; the objects before my eyes faded; the light became an obstacle, more than a transmissive field. No such problems plagued the legions of stone carvers and engineers, the gilders and the carpenters who laboured for a decade to remake what had been in fragments. In October 2005 the church was reconsecrated, before large crowds, on a day of piercing sunshine—and its fame has only grown since; it is the symbol of the city, and the remade nation; it speaks, even now, of realised dreams; it looms in grandeur over the sharp roof eaves of the town.
‘What a tale,’ said Sergei, as we walked out into the market square. ‘A tale of will, and triumph. As you were telling it, I realised that fate can be turned back. It is the proof that disaster can be confronted—it is an example for us.’
‘Indeed,’ I murmured, listening to him—but why, then, did I feel so insubstantial, as though we two were no more than figures in a painting, tiny figures in a panoramic view, with shadows dwarfing us, and the grey sky stretched above us? Why did I feel so caught, in those moments: so trapped in the vice of time?
II
MURATTI AMBASSADOR
LATE IN THE YEAR 1895 the art historian Aby Warburg left Europe, the centre until then of all his studies, and embarked upon a short trip to the United States, where he spent some weeks in New York City, and was present at the grand, dynastic wedding of his brother Paul. But the charms Manhattan held for him soon dissipated: Warburg moved on, extending both the scope and the duration of his travels; he went first to Cambridge, and its Peabody Museum, then to Washington, where he visited the newly established Bureau of American Ethnology. This journey coincided with a point of inflection in Warburg’s life. He was twenty-nine years old; he was well advanced in his dissertation on the forms of Florentine art and poetry; he was on the verge of committing himself to his lovely, long-suffering companion, Mary Hertz; he was increasingly aware of the manic tendencies that expressed themselves in both his stray thoughts and the texture of his intellectual endeavours; he was eager, above all, to escape the confines of his being and his background: it was his dream to expand his grasp of man’s symbolic language—the language he saw inscribed in the artworks of the Renaissance, and which he now began to pursue and seek to read in a new continent.
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