by Gail Jones
They had not yet managed a eulogy. Neither spoke in the conventional denuded forms: of what wonderful people the dead were, of what contributions Victor and Gino had made, of how much they were universally admired and loved. It would have seemed an obscenity to exchange these phrases, together or with strangers, when they knew so much more, and of what could never be spoken.
In the middle of the night, uncomfortable and overheated sharing her narrow bed, Cass woke with a start.
‘What?’ asked Marco, sounding bleary, unfamiliar. His head turned on the pillow.
‘I dreamt,’ she started slowly. ‘I dreamt that the balcony door was stuck open, and there was no protection against the weather. But we were hot, not cold; we two, you and I. We were steamy hot.’ She threw back her cover, exposing them both. Now they might shiver.
There was silence. The night grew huge and chilly around them. Cass thought that Marco had already slipped back into sleep. Alongside, she felt the regular rise and fall of his chest as he drifted away from her. Telling a dream, she reflected, beseeches a response. But then with the clarity and focus of one fully awake, Marco began to speak.
‘I’ve just remembered.’ He paused. ‘A little thing appeared in my dream that I’ve seen in museums in Rome. It’s a tear bottle. In ancient times mourners collected their tears in these beautiful vessels. Little pots, or glass vases, with stems that rested on the cheeks, beneath the eyes. I remember my mother pointing them out to me when I was a child. I remember thinking how ridiculous it was, in ancient Rome, to save one’s tears.’
Then again they were silent. Eventually, they both slept.
25
The morning was frosty but clear. A grey sky hung above and the temperature remained low. Outside they heard cars moving with a sound like splashing ocean through the icy slush, and they opened the balcony doors to check on the day. Peering down, still remembering and not-remembering Victor’s fall, they could see a few rugged-up people walking with care on the slippery pavements. In foreshortened perspective the walkers had the squat dimensions of fabled creatures: lumpish, with their faces obscured and their intentions unknown.
Further afield, four or five children were already running in the park, black shapes against the white, Breughel-like, and emblematic. The gasometer was hardly there, floating in the distance, but its insubstantial ring shape was what Cass most enjoyed of her balcony view. To Marco she pointed out the burnt apartment below, still unrepaired, the smoke-flare of darkness ever-rising above the boarded-up windows. Both saw but did not remark on the neat squares of the cemetery, picturesque compared to the melting, rough streets.
Had she been prepared to name it, Cass would have said ‘rising panic’. This was the first time she had stood on the balcony since Victor’s death and she felt in her stomach the shudder of that wicked act, one friend killed by another. It was lodged there in her gut. She retreated indoors. For a few moments longer Marco stood alone at the railing, scratching it with his fingernails.
Marco and Cass decided they would tell Yukio and Mitsuko together. Marco called, suggesting they meet at his place for a simple meal. For Victor, he told them. A memorial meal for Victor. He spoke as if their beloved friend had simply and gently passed away; and he said nothing about Gino, nor would they have guessed from his tone that there was a new devastation. They would come by at seven. It was a no-nonsense invitation like one in happy times, when what was anticipated was mutual pleasure and a few jokes, the clumsy telling of little tales over a meal and fine wine. Cass desperately hoped that Marco wouldn’t make a second speech. She wasn’t sure she could bear it - another set of pronouncements, another articulate statement invoking the inexpressible qualities of death, or of life. A Nabokovian cradle rocking above an abyss. A brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Now it sickened her, this degree of fluent abstraction, and the mendacity of words. Rhetorical flourish was Marco’s way, but it wasn’t hers.
When they left her studio, Marco to go home, then to work, she as an excuse simply to walk, or ride the trains, or look with time-wasting and anaesthetic distraction in shops, Marco swore that he saw Franz following at some distance behind them. Cass looked back and saw nothing but the bare freezing streets. There was a Turkish woman with a pram, who in her long coat and headscarf and confident stride appeared more persuasively solid and real than both of them. The Turkish mother turned into a side street and was gone.
But Marco was convinced and anxious. When they kissed goodbye at the steps of the U-Bahn, he looked around him with a darting glance, as one might look for a spy, and spoke to her in the agitated tone of a man who suffers delusions. Cass remembered ‘everything is a cipher and of everything he is a theme’. Nabokov. Again. A useful writer on paranoia. Yet now they both saw nothing. Marco became apologetic. Cass began her descent into the underground, Marco resumed walking. There was a slight stagger to his walk, she thought, as if he was about to stumble.
In the syncopation of afterwards, after Victor, after Gino, after the defeat of all they had artificially and actually established, the day simply passed. Cass had offered to buy some food and come early to Marco’s apartment. He would be home by six. She waited with her Kaiser’s bags of shopping in front of his building and reflected that she should have returned that day to Oranienplatz, to seek again the first Ahmed. But the impulse had gone: she might not return at all. Ahmed would never know. He would be protected from grief – if indeed it had been that kind of intimate friendship – and would think simply that his handsome and generous Italian friend had inexplicably disappeared. No doubt white men do this all the time - express goodwill, then disappear. Ahmed would probably expect it. Besides, she bore no genuine responsibility, she thought. What had Ahmed to do with her? It was a matter easily dealt with by the decision not to act.
Marco arrived punctually, looking harried and tired. He took the shopping from Cass and admitted her into his dingy lobby, checked his mail – nothing there – then led her slowly up the stairs. The suave Roman Marco had entirely gone. He had loosened his scarf before he reached the front door; his face seemed to drag as he spoke, with the features of a prematurely older man. Cass felt such tenderness then, seeing him undone in this way, and almost not coping. Although she would not have admitted it, she liked the fact that he needed her, that her careful, poised presence was ballast to his rocking self. Her instinct was always the same, to place her open palm against his cheek, to claim privileged nearness and access to his face. In all the complications of what had occurred, there was at least this understanding: that each now had permission to touch.
Mitsuko and Yukio arrived typically early. Both wore white – whether by design or accident Cass could not know – as if formally dressed for an oriental funeral. Subdued, glazed, they stood close together, now and then reaching for each other’s hands and the subliminal comfort of a glancing touch. Cass noticed that it was Yukio who seemed more competent in the aftermath of death. But there was no theatrical energy now, and a kind of empty politeness, distracted and depersonalised, had overtaken them. A few taut sentences were exchanged and Cass considered what effort it had taken to accept a dinner invitation.
Marco and Cass moved to the kitchen. The lovers stood watching them as they worked slowly, side by side, methodically preparing and chopping vegetables. Little was said; censorship and repression operated intuitively between them. Victor was not mentioned, and they had not yet asked about Gino, perhaps expecting him to be the last to arrive. They spoke of nothing in particular, but then Yukio announced that they had decided to leave Berlin early. They were flying back to Japan in two days’ time.
‘But we will keep in touch,’ Mitsuko said. ‘And you must come to visit us in Tokyo.’ It sounded fake and insincere. She did not want to see them again. She was attempting the protocols of routine and idiomatic conversation.
‘You can look at the images on my blog,’ Yukio added. ‘And on Facebook.’
So that was it: they had agreed to the
meal so that they could take their leave, say goodbye and fly away from deadly Berlin. Cass ought not to have been surprised, but she saw that Marco was, too; that he had also imagined they might support each other through the next days and weeks.
‘Gino has already returned to Rome,’ he said suddenly. He did not look at Cass.
‘Without saying goodbye?’ Mitsuko looked vague. ‘But, yes, I understand,’ she added. ‘We feel the need to get away, too. Did he seem okay?’ she asked blandly.
‘Yes,’ said Marco, ‘he seemed okay.’
Cass tried to catch Marco’s gaze, but he was staunchly alone. He would not be questioned or contradicted. The fiction had sprung instantly to life, and now seemed firm and undisputable. There was no hint of doubt or fabrication in his simple announcement: he spoke with easy conviction and assumed authority.
In the confusion that followed they reverted to insipid slogans: ‘You must give us his email.’
‘Of course, yes. Of course.’
‘And keep in touch.’
‘Of course. You too. We’ll all keep in touch.’
So by inanities it was settled. By convention, they dispelled death. Cass felt ill, and stunned by the hasty preemption of Marco’s lie. There was no excuse of drunkenness, or desire, or the wish to protect; it was a simple expedience, so neither would have to say aloud the word ‘dead’, or speak Gino’s name in the past tense, or confront their crime against Victor, or contribute further to the brokenness of their group and of all they had shared. Mitsuko was rolling a tiny wheel of carrot beneath her fingertip, but Yukio looked directly at Cass, giving her the opportunity to contribute. None had yet spoken Victor’s name. None had been brave, or true.
The buzzer then sounded, and Marco answered it without thinking. He pressed the admission.
‘Right building, wrong apartment,’ he said. He resumed chopping a line of carrot, and scraping it sideways into a pot. The impetus for irrelevant conversation had left; they stood like statues with fixed expressions, stranded in remote disquiet.
When there was a knock on the door, each looked at it with concern. The four stood there, arrested, all waiting together. The knock sounded a second time.
‘Don’t open it,’ said Cass, already dismayed.
Marco hesitated, but then dashed forward and opened the door. It was Franz. Cass saw how large he now looked, taller than both Marco and Yukio, and how he loomed there before them, like a storybook tyrant exposed. In an atavistic act of courtesy he removed his cap and held it by his thigh, clenched in his fist. He looked fleshy and powerful, not the limping man in the shadows of two nights before, whose swinging torchlight seemed to hint at incapacity of some sort, alcoholic tremors or rotten, frayed nerves. Cass wanted to think Nazi, to make this man the guilty and responsible one. But instead, with a moral shock, she realised that his face reminded her of one she had seen in a photograph at the Topography of Terror museum. His was the face of a dissident, a Red, who had looked into the camera lens with an open, defiant stare. Cass had stood for some time before the portrait, taken from three angles, knowing that she saw something indefinable there, something that, ineluctably, refused to be cowered and captured. This was bravery, surely, to see death’s glassy stare and to stare right back at it. To know violence, and more violence, and still not flinch or withdraw. She had written the name in her notebook, but could not now recall it. She recalled only that he had died there, at that very place, in 1943. From the wall of faces, each in three versions, this was this one that had singly addressed her. Now clear under fluorescent light, fully visible for the first time, Franz carried the certainty of a martyr’s face.
They all expected physical violence to break the tension, but although Franz had entered the apartment, a few steps from the doorway, he was more interested in delivering a verbal threat. From what Cass could make out, he said he knew that Marco was a killer, and that he wanted €10,000 to stay quiet. He could tell the police at any time. At any time, he repeated. He could exchange information for immunity from prosecution, being an accessory to the fact.
Cass was struck by how smoothly Franz had rehearsed his crime-fiction scenario, how well the krimi genre worked, how it enabled him to find a role for himself and then to become the hero of his own story. To be the one, after all, who told the half-truths and one-and-a-half-truths. There was no caution in his voice: he knew his own terms exactly.
Marco invited Franz to sit down, but he adamantly refused. He was clever enough to know that kindly gestures would diminish his power. He remained standing, huge and strangely solidified, his cap still crushed in a purposeful, tight grip. In her revised imagining, Cass thought now of GDR monuments; she consigned Franz to some earlier era he seemed perfectly to represent. She saw too how closely he resembled Karl, and found herself disconcerted to see them so alike.
‘So?’ asked Franz.
Marco agreed to meet him the next day to discuss ‘terms’.
Yes, he would discuss ‘terms’. ‘Money,’ Franz said clearly.
Franz handed him an address on a scrap of paper. He spoke confidently:
‘You come where I say. Tomorrow, 16.00.’
Then, almost as abruptly as it had begun, the confrontation ended, and Franz turned away and was gone. They heard his echoing footsteps clump heavily down the stairs. Cass was thinking: this will never end; this will always follow us. Franz will always follow us.
‘What will you do?’ asked Yukio.
Marco turned towards him.
‘I don’t know,’ he replied hoarsely. ‘I seldom know.’
All at once Cass saw Marco’s anguish displayed in the entire room, in the faces of Yukio and Mitsuko, both staring in his direction, in the sallow lamplight that had earlier cast a modifying gentleness, in the disarray on the kitchen benchtop, the scattering of meal preparations, the chopping knife to one side, the soft dribble of tap water she’d not noticed before. Unassembled, partial, incomplete signs. From the stairwell came the sound of the front door banging closed. Franz was limping away, triumphant, into the night. There was yet another distortion of time in which none of them moved or spoke, the vindictive atmosphere and Franz’s words still noiselessly hanging around.
There would be no meal and no fake memorial for Victor. Mitsuko and Yukio left soon after Franz. They made a poor excuse, but it was clear that they were afraid. As she embraced them both, in a melancholy goodbye, Cass considered that the lovers, of whom she knew such tender stories and modest reflections, might disappear completely, might with their Hagi histories and hikikomori pasts, with their Lolita affectations and affection for chess shadows, with whatever confessions or inventions they had sweetly offered to others, simply, snow-like, cease to be. The departure of friends carried an aspect of loss, but it was not simply that. In addition to Victor and Gino, it was the breaking down of their pattern, the rude crossing-out of what had held them all in a unique design. Carrying their stories, she was carrying their hazy traces; she thought them invisibly folded, somehow - voluted and convoluted into the texture of her own mind. Cass stood at the doorway and watched Yukio and Mitsuko move down the stairs, away into the darkness. Neither slowed, nor looked back. There was a dread finality to their leaving.
Cass moved shyly to Marco’s side. She reached out, the assertive one, and enclosed him in her arms. He was rigid for a time, then she saw his moistened eyes and lowered gaze and knew he could not bear her witness to his misery. As with the epilepsy, she reflected, this was the power of uncontrollable forces to take over a man, to cast him low, to require surrender to an archaic machinery once designated Fate. Of the body, of electrical flash, of the ignoble intentions of others, of the unfolding consequences of mistaken action. He shrugged, and touched her cheek.
‘Tomorrow,’ he said softly. ‘Let’s talk about it tomorrow. After I see Franz.’
A wave of muddled feeling flooded Cass’s release. She stepped away from Marco, relinquished her claim to his attention and quietly gathered her coat and scar
f. She saw a tremor ripple along his back and knew that he was crying. She felt she loved him most profoundly this moment, in which she was filled with a pity, much like a silent propinquity, that he wished her to leave unexpressed. She did not reproach him for his lie. She did not ask any questions. She left Marco to the solitude of his own burden, and his own justifications.
But the world continued to subside – with their joint indecency, perhaps, with their dishonesty and impassivity. There was a moment on the stairs when Cass misstepped and almost fell. In a vision she saw the lethal darkness surge and fly up at her; she saw the blunder that was a fall even further into loss. The fate of a coward: to plunge all the way to the basement in a chute of nothing. Then she caught the banister just in time, and just in time she saved herself.
26
As Cass returned to her studio in the dark, her thoughts were dismal and incoherent. In part her effort was to hold back images of Victor and Gino. Some process began in her mind that pulled Berlin sites into coalition, and expressed her sense that the world was altering, even as she considered it.
She was thinking of the roof of the Reichstag as the ribbed dome of an umbrella; that the Thälmann monument in Prenzlauer Berg looked remarkably like Franz; that the remnants of the Wall were an abomination. She was thinking that ghost stations in the U-Bahn still existed and were proliferating; she was thinking of a begging woman with a bruised face she had seen once at Kottbusser Tor; of the bleak museum called the Topography of Terror; of Nestorstrasse; and of Nabokov, writing under tulip lamplight at an old desk. She was thinking how strangers look at each other, without seeming to, riding opposite on a train; how randomly people gather, historical accidents merely, and how they are then broken, and pulled away, and possibly lost forever.