by Gail Jones
Gino’s face was close, insistent; he had the tone of a fanatic. For all the details Cass knew of them, Gino and Marco were still unknown to her. She ought to defend Victor, she ought to speak of her own judgements.
Instead she said, ‘And you? Is there some historical story you like to tell that is the marvel that tells you?’
They both sipped their coffee. Gino was moving a forkful of chocolate cake across his plate, without eating.
‘Later,’ he said cautiously.
The café was full of mothers with hefty babies and hipster-cool men. Everyone was young, relaxed, leaning back in their chairs, talking in polite and respectful murmurs, charming each other, kindly amusing. Here they were, by contrast, mere faltering strangers. Cass wondered why Gino had felt it necessary to warn her off Marco. There was a secret somewhere between them, and a vague animosity. The snowfall outside was growing faster and more dense. Both paused and stared into its fluctuating and dimensionless depths. The church before them was disappearing, fading into white.
‘Me too,’ said Gino, intuiting her thoughts. ‘I also love the snow.’
Conversation turned to politics. It was a relief to consider social meanings, to acknowledge real urgencies and those not their own. Gino was still upset, he said, by the mass drowning of African refugees, a few months back, off the island of Lampedusa. Cass knew the figure: 366 lives lost and not one child under twelve who’d survived. She knew that the survivors were heading to Sweden. She knew some had burnt off their fingerprints with melted plastic bags so as not to be registered as refugees in Italy. Gino looked shocked at the details.
‘In Australia,’ she added, ‘we have a government policy of hard hearts. In Australia we are meant to accept such calamities as inevitable. To enjoy our own good luck.’
She restrained herself. How national shame diminishes us all, she thought. How brutally the lucky country guards its unearnt luck.
Gino looked away.
‘Don’t you hate luck?’ she asked, in what must have seemed a somewhat perverse and irrelevant question. She was thinking of the German word: glück, luck; glücklich, happy. Such a sticky word.
Gino did not answer. Instead he seemed to drift off into private thoughts.
‘I had a holiday in Lampedusa only a year ago,’ he said. ‘I swam in the sunshine at the beach where all the bodies were retrieved. When I watched the TV reports it was all so familiar – that bay, those rocks. I thought of this again when Yukio told us of seeing his subway on television as a child, how somewhere is stained with tragedy and becomes an intolerable memory. Those people, wanting escape. All those poor people, Jesus Christ …’
Gino pulled out his cigarettes. ‘Do you mind if I smoke?’
They left the warmth of the café. The heavy door did not smother or close away their feelings. Gino lit up immediately.
‘We can go to the Ramones Museum, or to Oranienplatz,’ he said.
Ramones Museum? ‘What’s at Oranienplatz?’
Now they moved together from single to communal stories. As they continued moving towards Oranienplatz, Gino explained that it was an occupied space. Refugees from Africa seeking asylum, seeking a warm, safe haven, had built there a shantytown of tents and shelters. There were ramshackle huts, stretched canvas beneath bare trees, there were signs that read: ‘Kein Mensch ist illegal’; ‘Refugees are welcome here; Deportation is murder’. It was a community, said Gino, an ephemeral community.
When they arrived the Platz looked almost deserted: few people were out and about in the cold. Snowfall lay heavy and threatening in the deep folds of the large tents, the sag and strain of the load looked fundamentally precarious. Snow was piled high on park seats and clung to a few stranded bicycles, and Cass could hear it being scraped away, somewhere nearby, the raw shivery grind of metal on a concrete path. It was an impediment now, and an inhuman threat. Some of the tents, Cass thought, would surely sink. She looked around her. On the corner stood a boarded-up building, so firmly closed, so untended and dead that it was hard to believe living people had ever been inside. Posters for yoga, cinema and punk bands were stuck haphazard across its walls, and everywhere lay strata of garish graffiti with impossible-to-read messages. High up, almost beyond sight, there was a sign in English: ‘Reclaim your city’.
A man wrapped in a purple sleeping bag emerged from behind the flap of a tent. He strode towards Gino and held out his hand. They shook, then they embraced, and then they stood patting each other’s back, like old drinking buddies or revolutionary comrades. Cass was still, observing. She was in her new waterproof boots, she was warm and she was lucky.
Gino introduced Ahmed from Eritrea. He had come here via Libya and Italy. He had come, Gino added softly, via the island of Lampedusa.
Ahmed reached out from his sleeping bag cocoon and shook Cass’s hand. Cold stung at her eyes. Her chest felt tight and congested. She took the hand of the man who greeted her and wondered if she might be crying or if the nip of the cold had simply generated tears. There was such confusion in her response, such sensory and extra-sensory overload; and Ahmed did not seem to concede his sorry state, so that it was she who seemed pathetic, it was she who was floundering, and caught up in twisted emotions. Ahmed smiled broadly in welcome. His face reminded her of a kid she had known fondly when she was a child, a kid with a dazzling white smile in his open black face. If she had come earlier, Ahmed said casually, she could have met his wife.
‘Come again. You can meet her.’
Gino opened his wallet and emptied it into Ahmed’s hand.
‘Thank you, my brother.’
Behind him a man with matted blond hair was donating a crate of potatoes. Cass saw his breath in the air; she saw the slowed and deliberate motion of his half-frozen movements. In a few seconds he was gone, as if never having existed. Now, no other person was visible. The pall of snow fell between them all, damp and obscuring. Flakes settled in a delicate skull cap over Ahmed’s dark hair. Gino leant towards him, curled his bare hand to his ear and said something confidential. Ahmed replied in a whisper, ‘Yes, my brother, yes.’ They spoke briefly in Italian.
The others were all sheltered from the cold at some sort of meeting, Gino said. Wisely sheltered. The three stood still, in a moment of silence and social inertia. Then Ahmed stamped on the ground and pulled his sleeping bag closer. He announced, ‘Things to do!’ and turned back towards the tents.
Gino took Cass’s arm and led her away. He seemed almost happy now; his gaze was lit and he smiled with satisfied ease as he left behind the encampment of Oranienplatz. It had been such a small encounter, so modest and swift. But Cass felt that her chest was still tight and her feelings were still snarled.
Gino’s face was close. He hugged her arm as they walked. He said: ‘Now. Let me tell you now the historical marvel that tells of myself.
‘I’m very interested in Descartes. Everyone knows “I think therefore I am,” everyone knows of the Discours and the wax example, but he was much more interesting than that, and more philosophically strange. He was a mathematical genius, he wrote on psychosomatics, on passion, on meteors, on the weather. He wrote a treatise on snow and drew images of rare, twelve-sided snowflakes. And in 1633, at the age of thirty-seven, Descartes visited Rome. While in Rome he observed the phenomenon of parhelia, which is an odd optical effect in which there appear to be several suns in the sky. Descartes saw three. He did not panic, he did not lose his religion, he did not resort to lunatic theories or apocalyptic speculations. Instead he stood looking up at the sky, with its three bright suns, and knew how good it was to be a man, with his senses fully alive, his brain figuring out all the equations of angles and reflections. He was jubilant, he was curious. He was self-possessed.
‘Marco told me this story, but it has become my story. It has become the weather story that I most adore.’
They parted at Kottbusser Tor station, just as the snow at last began to ease. Gino borrowed his fare. He said, ‘When you tire of Marco, I wi
ll be waiting.’
Cass felt herself blush. It was a sensation of disorder, of unexpected feeling. She was both irritated and pleased at Gino’s presumption. He squeezed her hand, holding on a few seconds longer than he should. They stood awkwardly, awaiting separate trains. Before them, a young man collected beer bottles from rubbish bins and stowed them in his backpack. They watched his focused searching and his quiet desperation. Something stiff in his manner implied old age, but he couldn’t have been more than thirty, Cass thought, not much older than she. When her U1 train arrived she bid Gino a hasty farewell and sprang into the carriage without looking back.
She might have been swimming, or drowning, in a twilit aquarium. Stopped faces blinked by. The air seemed watery and blue. Her carriage contained her behind glass, less as a person than a notion; the particulars of her own life had fallen away. Prinzenstrasse, Hallesches Tor, the golden tiles of Möckernbrüke. Heading towards the west. In motion she felt bizarrely neutral, and disembodied.
Parhelia, a new word.
The sky was a white ceiling. Not even one sun, not one, was visible in the sky.
17
On the day of her own speak-memory, Cass busied herself with chores and casual distractions. She washed her clothes in the bathroom sink, rolled them in a towel and hung them along the iron heater to dry, placing her socks just so, and spreading evenly her underwear. Across the back of a chair she draped her wrung jeans. Festooned in this way, the studio apartment looked even smaller and more cramped than usual. It was like being a student again, imagining the intermediate time before adult tidiness is obligatory, not having space enough for simple tasks, feeling temporary and derided and unimportant in the world. ‘Nessun Dorma’ played a maddening riff in her head. Cass was surprised at how tenacious remembered musical interludes were, how they play and replay, how like madness or dementia the repetitions begin to seem. It was a fickle irritation, its jingle replay tormented her. She had a residual memory from somewhere, probably from television, of Luciano Pavarotti belting out the final ‘Vincero!’, his mouth hugely open, hugely appetitive, as if he might gobble the entire world. She was more a Bach person, she reflected, less operatic, more baroque. She would listen to the cello suites again, later on. She enjoyed a dilettante comfort, knowing little of music and unable, if pressed, to speak intelligently on the subject. There were many areas of knowledge in which she felt entirely a fraud. But the pleasure was definitive, it was incontrovertible. Against ‘Nessun Dorma’ she pitched Brandenburg phrases and passing seconds of melody.
There was a knock at the door and Cass was startled. She saw the mess of her room, she was half-dressed and unfocused. She threw on her coat, hanging near the door, and drew it open to discover Karl.
‘I thought you might like to talk,’ he said hopefully. ‘Coffee?’
He was unkempt, he looked bored, and his appeal, painfully tentative, was that of a lonely old man. Dimly, he seemed in the hall light to twitch and shuffle.
But Cass sent him away. She pretended she was dressing to go out, and knew now that she would have to dress and leave the apartment, because he would be watching and she must make her evasion seem true. How often she performed a quality of seeming, not being. The anticipation of her speak-memory was undermining her good sense; she was disproportionately tense and in a state of seizure and dread.
‘Come up for coffee tomorrow afternoon,’ she said. ‘5.30 okay?’
Karl looked concerned.
‘17.30,’ she corrected.
He beamed in return. ‘Kein problem!’ He mopped his forehead with a handkerchief, as if he were ill or unseasonably hot, then turned away and headed slowly down the poorly lit stairs. Cass felt a twinge of guilt and the need for female company, to be exempt from male demands and conversation. She needed to dissipate her nervousness with a walk in the cold air of the city.
When she stepped out into the street, she decided to ride the ring line. She passed the apartment that had been burnt on New Year’s Eve, boarded up now, but not yet repaired, the paisley shape of smoke, immemorially delinquent, still defacing its surface. The streets were mostly dismal, abandoned and awash with black slush. On Martin-Luther-Strasse many shops were deserted, the large mattress shop on the corner was entirely empty, even the bakery, brightly enticing, had just a single customer. A few shoppers well-rugged in scarves came and went from the Turkish supermarket; this was where life was. Cass peered at the bulging plastic bags of non-European delicacies and found herself hungry for pita and something loaded with garlic.
From Innsbrucker Platz Station she headed east on the S42, sliding past the border where the Wall had once stood, then sliding back to the same side later on, finding in the train a calming rhythm and the slumberous satisfactions of automation, of being carried somewhere, of doors opening and closing, of the regular announcements and toneless instructions to depart on the left. It was a soothing circle, moving her in the legless fluency of a dream. She felt almost airborne. As she rode her thoughts drifted to celestial speculations – dust clouds from volcanoes, the multiplication of suns, the curious possibility of twelve-pointed snowflakes – and already she was considering how her new friends had changed her, what knowledge, explicit or implicit, they had imparted. This was the kind of association she had often longed for: an avowable community and the trust of shared biographies, small stories offered as symbolic tokens.
Passengers stepped on and off the train in silence. Winter brought with it this dissolve of conversation. A man with a tattooed face and a German shepherd plumped down beside her, the dog stinking of rough nights and what might have been spilt beer. Both had glazed, hungry eyes and a fatalist passivity. She was relieved when they rose and disappeared at Wedding.
Cass rode almost the whole circle before she alighted one stop from where she had begun. At Bundesplatz, under a darkening sky, she left the station and headed to a coffee shop to daydream and read. She would spend a few hours hidden away, waiting to speak and rematerialising after her wraith-like journey. She felt somehow tenuous and unbelonging; her riding was the symptom of absent centre and inexplicit purpose.
There was no snowfall now, but sharp frosty air and ice on the pavement in wafers, which cracked beneath her boots as she stepped. The afternoon was fading fast; the little daylight that thinly penetrated was already flowing away, disappearing into ‘the dark backward and abysm of time’. I must not quote Shakespeare, she thought to herself. I must be clear, and true.
In the former home of Kępiński, Cass faced the group, determined. Yukio and Mitsuko wore matching denim outfits, long and sculptural, and for the first time it occurred to Cass that they were probably rich. This was high-end fashion, not mere costume; this was the casual exhibitionism of wealthy artists. They greeted her with embraces. Marco and Gino were both more formal; and Gino appeared unshaven and tired, as if he had not made it home after their excursion together and displayed the stale and bruised look of a sleepless night. Victor, playing the fool, was wearing his shapka inside. He alone seemed to be in high and robust spirits.
‘To be honest, I wasn’t sure I could participate in your speak-memory. I have been surprised by the candour, and by how much trust has been established. I’ve not known anything quite like this before. And I guess I still feel like the newcomer, a little outside your circle. The kibitzer, you might say.’
The beginning, she told herself, would be the hardest part. Once she launched her voice into the group, it would take energy from their listening. It would be enabled.
‘I grew up in a remote part of Australia, in the north-west. So, like Mitsuko, I come from beyond a city, and am marked, I suppose, by a distinctive place. As I travel I begin to learn how cities govern our imaginations, how difficult it becomes to recover the humble place that has no special renown, or world-historical importance, but exists as a little constellation of lives, somewhere largely forgotten by the rest of the world. When Victor began with his magnificent list of cities, I thought, even then, as
he spoke, of an alternative list, of places whose reality to others is more like Zembla – possibly fictitious, not wholly substantiated, too small or unremarkable to warrant outsiders’ attention. In Europe, Australia is regarded as a fiction of beautiful lies. It pleases me that this is so, and I can’t really say why. But it is also a scattering of settlements, modest places that no one knows or cares about, where real lives happen, where there is a density to knowing and a quiet certainty to existence.
My parents, now retired, were both schoolteachers dedicated to working in small communities. I had three older brothers, two of whom are also now schoolteachers. So, I am the black sheep in the family, I am the one who left. I am the one who was captured and taken away by words.’
Had the others found it this difficult?
Cass realised that she moved habitually in the zone of her own allegiances, those things that were sensitive for her, and private, and without need of expression or exaggeration. When she spoke it was with an awareness of a kind of betrayal and a tendency to generalisation. There was no way she could speak in detail of her parents, modestly hardworking, serious and sane, living together in a tiny country town with a single store and a petrol bowser and a weatherboard town hall. Or indeed of her brothers, and their quiet integrity, and their meaningful, hidden lives.
‘The house I grew up in was once the hospital of a former quarantine station. It stood on a peninsula, beyond the north-west town of Broome, and had been a place where soldiers returning from the battles of the Second World War were sent to recover or die. These were men with fevers – typhus mostly, and dengue, and malaria. In our house they had seethed, or so I imagined, afraid and alone in the thrall of their tropical illnesses. They had called out in the night, they had suffered, seen ghosts, had themselves become ghosts. I knew in my heart that our house was haunted. How can one live in a former hospital without imagining the deaths that might have occurred there? How is it possible to ignore remnant presences and the traces of suffering lives? I believed that I heard their voices. I believed that they called out to me. My brothers teased me and said I was crazy. But still I persisted in my childish belief.