In Berlin, where I have to change trains, it is raining. I am ravenous and I walk through the station underpass and into the first fast food place I see. Under the comforting yellow, red and orange banners of McDonald’s I order three quarterpounders, two large fries and a German version of the ubiquitous sloppy dessert. I wolf it all down with a giant Coke. I burp and I am happy. It is night in Germany and I have five hours’ wait for the train to Paris.
I can recall every moment of the last few days. I can map the contours and recall the textures and minute details of every face: the doomed old couple in Venice; the smiling waitress at the Café Beirut; the sailor who fucked me contemptuously in the sleazy hotel in Brindisi; Pano and Milos, Maria and Syd; the woman on the train. If it had been demanded of me, I could have scripted every word and nuance of the conversations between Sal Mineo and myself. I am all too aware that the events that have occurred on this journey through Europe are objectively perplexing and disturbing. But I do not feel distressed. Instead I am experiencing a remarkable clarity. Without a tremor of guilt or betrayal, I am clear about Sal Mineo’s dissipation. He is whoring his art. I understand that the sexual encounter with the woman on the train had nothing to do with lust, and everything to do with nourishing myself on her blood and her spirit. None of this shames me. Of course, I can give it no clear sense or meaning. This journey seems to be taking me further away from myself, from all my certainties, from even a sense of my own origins.
I let out another large burp and stare around at the sterile space of the restaurant. A dishevelled old woman, a bundle of her belongings held tight underneath one arm, is sipping slowly on a coffee. When I catch her eye, she quickly looks down. Some atrocious pop song, sung in a little girl’s voice, is playing on the radio, and a group of dark-haired, dark-skinned boys with blonde-haired, pale-skinned girlfriends are crammed across a tier of seats. They wear a global street style, all brand names and sportswear. There’s a grin on my face. I have clarity and I am in control. I feel contempt. The shitty pop song, the frightened old homeless woman, the faux-Yank niggers with their slutty white-trash girfriends: all of them shit, refuse. Nothing.
I deposit my backpack in the railway station lockers, but take my camera. I am not interested in the faces and bodies that I pass as I walk the grim city. Berlin seems devoid of colour. The only splashes of brilliance that pierce the night are those emanating from the plasma television screens that dominate the shop façades. Otherwise, the streets are bleak and dark. But I have no fear of the night and its shadows. Beggars, cops, drunks, teenagers, sullen men, defiant women, gay men in leather, financiers in suits, blacks, whites, Arabs, Turks, Asians, they all pass by me, smoking, laughing, drinking, scowling, grimacing, throwing me looks of hate or diffidence, or curiosity when they spy the camera in my hands. There are the sounds of the city: cars, bars, music, shouting, laughter, fighting. And there are the smells. The whole city stinks, a putrid sewer of filth and waste. The smells are chemical, of the city. There is nothing organic in any of it. I walk and I wander, a huge smile on my face, aware as I have never been before of my separation from the mass of bodies that throng this metropolis. The whole human species exudes a foul, bitter stench.
It does not cross my mind to take a photograph of any human. Instead I photograph the bricks and steel and mortar and vinyl and plastic and wood and silicon. My flash illuminates a bare automatic teller machine wedged tight between two shopfronts. I capture buildings and streetlights and billboards. I rid Berlin of its people and capture instead the evidence of their passage. I am fascinated by the banal modernity of the city. It is as if history refuses to be trapped in this sterile landscape, as if history never happened. The flashlight falls on the last negligible vestige of the old Wall, and as the light quickly fades, there is a whirr from my camera; my film is exhausted. I buy a kebab at a kiosk and wolf it down. A radio shrieks a Lebanese lament. I lick the juice from my fingers.
I make my way back to the station and I buy a coffee, an English-language copy of Rolling Stone, another pack of cigarettes, and I book into an hour session at an all-night internet cafe. I experience no loneliness, no fear. I am not even a tourist in this city, for to consider myself a tourist I would require a home to have begun my journey from. I am above all that. In this heightened state of omnipotence, I don’t even miss Colin. I am alone in this world.
But Colin has emailed and I smile to myself on reading his short, restrained message. The cats are well. There is spinach in the garden and the lemon tree is finally producing abundant fruit. I miss you, I love you, he finishes. Colin has an antipathy to the computer. I am touched by his effort. There is an email from Sophie, and she writes about our mother and about my nephew and niece. There’s also a message from Clem, who works with me at the video store, and who invites Colin and me to a party the weekend I am to return to Melbourne. I have to scroll through one hundred and seventy-eight pieces of junk to find these three stray missives from family and a friend. There are two hundred and four messages remaining unread when I look up at the cafe clock and realise I have only ten minutes left on my time. I load page after page of electronic text and scan rapidly through the email addresses. Porn, penile extensions, miracle pills, cheap drugs, insurance advice, gambling opportunities. The list confirms the puerility of the human race. I don’t mind, I don’t mind it at all. I am experiencing pure joy. The machine is slow in loading new pages and I am tempted to log off and ignore any possible messages from friends. Or the promise of someone, some agency, wanting to look at my photographs. That is what I am really searching for.
In acknowledging this desire, the sense of completeness and power that has buoyed me in this city begins to desert me. Not that I am aware of it immediately. As if descending from a drug rush into a pleasant plateau of stillness, I become slowly aware of my physicality, my body in this space. The computer screen is dusty, the chair I am sitting on too hard, the fluorescent lights in the cafe too harsh. I watch the electronic words tumble across the screen as I keep my finger firmly pressed on the computer mouse. An address captures my attention. The postfix is fr: I know no one in France. I look across at the subject attachment, and then I take a deep breath. Are you the son of Vassili Raftis?
Vassili. Bill. Billy boy. Lucky. The various names my father was known by. It was never Basil. That prim English rendering of my father’s name never suited him. Of all his names and nicknames, it was Lucky that stuck and the nickname most suited to the continent he was to make his new home. It was a name my father carried well. He was cheerful, he was easygoing, and despite my mother’s half-hearted sporadic attempts to make him responsible, he was always looking for a good time. Lucky, a bastardised abbreviation of the Greek Vassilaki, which means Little Bill, may have an echo in the tender English appellation of Sweet William. He’s sweet, your old man, it was said to me of my father. Not cute, not effeminate. Sweet as in alright. As in a good man. My dad was Lucky.
He wasn’t Lucky in France. In France he was Guillaume. On the mantelpiece above our gas heater, I have placed an old photograph of my father taken when he was nineteen, and a student in Paris. It is a small black and white photograph. My father is one of a trio of young men, squinting in the sunlight, their arms across each other’s shoulders, on one of the bridges that cross the Seine. The three men all have well-groomed, slicked hair, all are wearing identical white shirts and black trousers; they are handsome and smiling. The other men are wearing thin dark ties but my father’s shirt is unbuttoned at the neck and a packet of cigarettes is visible in his shirt pocket. My father rarely talked about his two years as a student in France. I know he studied philosophy and politics, and that he still read French literature right up to his death, never wanting to abandon the language. When we were children, Sophie and I would be embarrassed by his eagerness to speak it. We would be on a tram and he would hear French spoken and immediately interrupt and introduce himself to the speaker. Our embarrassment was also laced with a certain resentment that he never
introduced the language he loved to his own family. It was a point of separation between himself and his children, and between himself and his wife. French marked another life, another continent, and I believe, another class. You sound like a bloody Kraut, he would answer my stilted attempts to speak high-school French. When he spoke the language I could hear the beautiful measure of it. I was ashamed by my nasal pronunciation. My French is pitiful, but Dad could not help but instil a love for the country in his children, and when I first arrived in Paris as a young man, I unconsciously dressed as my father did in the photograph I had of him. All austere black and white.
Sitting at the terminal, I am now remembering my father without sadness. I am remembering his unshaven face, the short sharp black bristles that as a child I loved running my fingers across. His clear bright eyes that would seem to implode and be masked by a cloud of film every time he took the heroin into his blood. My hands have dropped to my sides, off the mouse, off the keyboard. I do wish the bastard had not died, that he had had the opportunity to meet Colin. I do wish the fucking prick had lived.
—Why did your father come to Australia? Why didn’t he just go back to France?
—My Papou, my grandfather, insisted he migrate here. He didn’t want him to go back to France because he blamed France for my father’s politics. Anyway, from what I can understand France was caught up in the Algerian mess they made for themselves and were reluctant to take on any Greek commies. I think Papou thought that if Dad was to remain in Europe he’d just be caught up in politics again. He thought Australia would be safer.
—Did he have to leave?
—Papou thought so. Dad was already blacklisted, thrown out of university. His family was terrified the next step would be to put him in prison.
Colin finished his coffee. His fingernails were black from the earth and he pulled up his torn pair of trackpants in which he always gardens. His faded indoor-cricket t-shirt was also full of holes. He walked off the porch and began weeding.
—He should have returned to Paris.
His back was to me. I know. Guillaume. Not Lucky.
I open the email. The message is short and the grammar is awkward. He is an old friend of my father and he realises I probably will not remember him. He wishes me to contact him when I reach Paris and he has forwarded a mobile phone number. He signs off, simply, Gerry. No surname, no address, no further details.
I don’t remember Gerry. I certainly don’t remember any French mate of my father. I write the phone number down on the back of my return plane ticket, and I am about to reply to the email when I receive a message that my time is up. In an hour I will be on the train to Paris.
Berlin. It is my second time through this city and once more all I have seen of it is the railway station and the cold bleak office buildings of its commercial heart. My euphoria has waned and I am tired.
Fuck the Germans, my father had roared, fuck those treacherous Poles and those swindler Czechs. Fuck them all. If the fall of the Berlin Wall had seemed to inaugurate a moment of universal happiness, it was not so in my father’s house. They’ve got what they’ve always wanted, those dirty Poles: fascism. Same with all of them—fucking dirty Eastern European scum. He spat at the television screen. May your children die in poverty, he roared at the jubilant Hungarians, may you sell your whore bodies to the Americans, he cursed the East Germans leaping through the shattered concrete of the wall. He took their jubilation about capitalism as a personal betrayal, and every slab torn from the wall he saw as an attack on his very own home, his very own property. My father did not believe in a soul, but his spirit hangs over me as I impatiently await the train to Paris. The German faces I brush past in the underground corridors of the railway station seem mute and distant. I can’t relax in Berlin; my father’s soul won’t let me.
The train comes, I board it, take a seat next to a sleeping man, his backpack his pillow, and squeeze past the knobby knees of a young woman. She smiles at me and I drop into my seat as the train begins its slow chugging journey out of the metropolis. I know I will never return to this city.
—Where you are?
There is still a faint trace of Australia in his voice.
—At the Gare du Nord.
—You know how to make the Metro?
—Yes.
He barks out a destination and I ask him to repeat it.
—I will be there.
—How will I recognise you?
—Do not worry. I will know you. I will see Lucky in you.
The sharp Slavic cheekbones. I share those. I have his thick black hair. I look like my father.
In the end, I did recognise him. We met outside the final suburban Metro stop on the eastern line. Whereas I had descended into the underground from a clean pristine Paris, I ascended into a bare concrete vault, littered with rubbish and cigarette butts. There was garish graffiti on every spare surface, and a homeless woman was peeing on the concrete. I walked past her and she screamed out for money. I ignored her. Outside the station was a huge concrete car park and a long stretch of motorway; beyond that, empty, barren fields. Behind the fields, blocks of grey high-rise apartments stretched for miles across the blighted plain. The sky was dark with threatening clouds.
I heard my name called. He was now an old man, much thicker around the middle, but he was still tall, imposing and bear-like. His hair was chalk-white, but still thick on his head. I was very young when I had last seen him; he had been one of those figures on the periphery of my childhood for a few summers, and then he was gone. I did not know if I had ever registered his going. I know that he and my father had been very good friends because I could only recall my father’s happiness at being with him. The memory came back of slipping out of bed one night to see the two of them engaged in a loud boisterous argument, one moment shouting, one momnt with their arms wrapped around each other. But there was little else I could remember of him; he must have slipped out of our lives at a time when I was still too young to realise that there could be anyone of more importance to my parents than their own children. My most vivid memory of him was as one of a group of stocky men, seated in their singlets, in high summer. They were in Tassios’ garage, drinking beer. On that occasion it was not clocks they were dismantling but ugly, ostentatious sofas and footstools. They were slicing open their cushioned backs. My sister had climbed up on the milk crate alongside me and we were looking through the dirty louvres into the garage. My father then laughed and held up bags of powder that he had pulled out of the furniture. My sister whispered, too loudly, and the men had looked up. Tassios chased after us, shouting and kicking at our bums. The man who was now holding out his hand to me in Paris had said nothing on seeing our young, curious faces. He had continued doing his work. I don’t ever remember him having a name. He was always the Hebrew, that was how the Greeks always referred to him. That’s what Dad had called him. The definite article was important. Back then I thought he was the only Hebrew in the entire world.
He took my backpack and waved off my attempts to assist him. We walked to a small Mercedes truck, battered, rust visible on its underside. A colourful mural of fruit and vegetables was painted across one side of the truck.
—Get in, he ordered. The van smelt and I fought off an urge to sneeze. As soon as he started the ignition, George Jones came in midway through a song about heartaches and hangovers in his baritone voice. The volume was loud and it was only when the song finished that the old man lowered the sound and spoke.
—Do you remember me?
Again, a faint echo of Australia.
—Yes, but I don’t remember your name.
—Gerry. Then he smiled across at me. Or the Hebrew. He used the Greek word.
I laughed at this.
—Yeah, I remember that.
—How did Lucky die?
I only hesitated a moment. I knew instinctively with this man that I did not have to pretend. I mimed pumping a syringe into my arm. He nodded slowly.
—I always sa
y to Lucky that he is a fool for taking that shit. He spoke slowly, as if it had been a long time since he spoke the language. The words were full of French inflections: the long final diphthong when he said my father’s name; the stretching of the obscenity into two syllables, shee-it.
—And your mother?
—She’s clean. She’s been clean since his death.
—Pardon? I’d confused him.
—She doesn’t use heroin anymore.
Gerry let out a long sad whistle.
—Your father very wrong for doing that to your mother.
I had nothing to say.
He exited the motorway and almost immediately he pulled up in front of a square squat block of flats. The building was isolated amid the criss-cross grid of motorways. In the distance, rows of tower blocks seemed to fall into the horizon. I grabbed my backpack and followed Gerry up a flight of stairs. He pulled out a bunch of keys and inserted one into a flimsy white door, then he ushered me into the flat.
It was sparsely furnished: a small television, a white electric kettle, a camp stove with two rings, a black vinyl couch, and, incongruously, a junk photographic print of a Bondi Beach sunset on the wall. A door led into a further room with a single mattress on the floor. Gerry indicated the bedding he had ready for me. A small alcove contained the shower and the toilet.
—You can stay, he said. The new tenant is not moving till next week. It is yours till then.
Dead Europe Page 25