A Guide to Berlin

by Gail Jones

  Now Cass wanted above all the company of a Berliner. Not Karl, but others, of her own age perhaps, and wiser, and authentically of this place, who would explain and make intelligible her scrambled feelings. Residents here knew more, she told herself. Daily they dealt with historical gravity. Residents of Berlin might be born, she thought insanely, with an inbuilt capacity both to memorialise and explain. She needed explanations. She needed a dream of reason without any monsters. She wanted to sit down with a Berliner and find a conclusion. Cass was worn out improvising a functional self against all that had made her feel so dysfunctional.

  When she arrived at her building, Karl was waiting in the doorway. His bulky shape appeared before her, backlit and persuasive. She resisted moody and portentous film noir comparisons. Not again, she thought, oh no, not again. His knowledge of Victor made her cautious and a little afraid. Yet closer, in the half-light, Karl’s face was again friendly and kind. She saw that he wore a crimson-checked dressing-gown over blue-striped pajamas.

  ‘Coffee?’ he asked.

  And for some reason, she agreed. Again in his room, again surrounded by his knick-knacks, and his pride, and his native hospitality, Cass unwound her wound-up body into his capacious lounge chair and collapsed there, sad and floppy as an overtired child. She noticed Mitsuko’s origami snowflake displayed with his other treasures, set prominently in the centre of the small table that held his souvenirs. It was an anomalously frail thing, propped among the glass ashtrays and plaster curios of another kind of life. In demented tiredness, in quasi-Nabokovian thinking, in which inconspicuous objects found a capacity to startle, and coincidence everywhere appeared, and accumulated, and found novel expression, Cass thought of the paper snowflake as an asterisk for which some important meaning was missing. Magical thinking, literary thinking. There was a scent of coffee and another she’d not recalled from her last visit, of old wood, of furniture polish, of a close-by forest. ‘I found myself in a dark wood, for the straight way was lost.’

  Karl excused himself and returned with the coffee, which must have been brewing for some time. He added hot milk from a Turkish pan and handed Cass a mug she’d not seen before. It bore a miniature profile of Mozart and a pattern of musical notes. She sensed she was being honoured with his finest china.

  ‘I have spoken to Franz,’ he began, ‘and I know what he has threatened. But he will not do this, I have warned him. He will not tell anyone of your man’s crime.’

  ‘Marco. And it was not his or anyone’s crime. It was an accident. It was a terrible accident.’

  ‘Of course it was,’ said Karl. ‘But I am telling you that Franz underneath is a good boy and will obey his father. I am still his father.’

  The last sentence was spoken emphatically, as if it held the key to other certainties.

  ‘Yes,’ Cass said faintly.

  What could she say? Karl looked sincere and nodded to encourage her to drink up her coffee and believe. She heard him begin to ramble. She must not worry, no one would ever know. Bodies can vanish. Bodies in Berlin vanish all the time. Many visitors, from all over. Russians. Poles. They vanish all the time. He would be quiet as the grave, he said, and mimed zipping his own lips. The cliché appalled her.

  He looked at Cass with affection, perplexing after such a ghoulish and facile pronouncement. Bodies can vanish. She reminded him, he went on, of his own daughter, Katharina, who was long gone. He had again spoken his daughter’s name with no hint of emotion, or indication of the nature of her disappearance. Then, as he continued, Cass heard the word Japanisch and knew, only half-listening, that he was speaking of Mitsuko and Yukio. He would like to invite her friends to coffee in his room, she heard, they were a beautiful couple. Such a beautiful young couple. They were the future, Karl said firmly. The future, he repeated.

  By the end she had entered a state of inattentive passivity. It was too difficult to respond to what seemed almost jolly chit-chat. At last, Cass made an effort and stood up to depart. She felt so relieved to be going that she stepped forward and embraced Karl lightly. He was pleased, and grinned, his grey moustache flaring. He patted her back and let his hand rest for a second or two, as if in protection.

  With no idea what time it was, Cass hauled herself up the stairs. Though fizzing with caffeine she knew she must try to sleep. She would not permit herself to think of what had actually occurred; nevertheless the sense of exhaustion and grief was unendurable. And just as she had recalled the leaf-decorated curtain that wrapped the body of her brother, now she recalled that her father had scrabbled in the intermittent darkness to find a lamp. In the beam of the lighthouse she had seen him appear and disappear, appear and disappear. Then, bent over to shield the flame, he struck a match and, cupping carefully, lit a kerosene lamp. They were all contained there, father and mother and dead Alexander and herself, all contained in a weak circle of brassy yellow, lit to wait out the night.

  Cass was aware that this was the first time she had remembered the lamp; the sharp hydrocarbon tang of it, her father turning the tiny notched wheel at its side to increase the flame, the way he appeared before them all, enlarged and drenched in yellow light. How in the past she and Alexander had loved it when the generator failed, and they had taken turns filling the kerosene and tending the lamp. How the night changed, held back and seemed under control.

  What else did she know? That her mother had not wept. That she had copied her mother. And that she had hated and admired her mother’s strength in staying calm and holding Alexander. The cats. This was why she had told the story of drowning the cats. To make her mother seem cruel. To separate and remove her. There was an implacable juvenile logic here: withdrawing the evidence of her own improper feelings, the selective forgetting, the determined self-centredness.

  The only exactitude was in her memory of her own physical sensations. There had been such a roar; the sky was one long terrific howl. Shifting wind pressure had caused a painful pounding in her eardrums, and her limbs were stiff with discomfort from so long beneath the table. What weird delight to hear tin sheets on the roof rip upwards and fly away, and the screech of wood cracking and nails pulling free, and the giant concussive whack as the side wall fell outwards.

  Afterwards, she had seen her parents’ faces, incandescent before her, fixed and stricken, but more clearly she’d seen the garland design on her cotton dress, a motif of green and purple flowers shaped like trumpets, running from her waist downwards in a regular print. The blink of the lighthouse that night had been a tormenting transmission, but her father’s lamp let them see a continuous world.

  This was the door opening that Marco had mentioned, the inexplicable return of memory that followed spoken words. She had always been deeply suspicious of these convenient theories, of instant recollection that made sudden sense, of puzzles at long-last given a vigorous explanation. But here was a girl she had forgotten, on the night of her brother’s death.

  At this stage of the night Cass no longer considered herself rational. She undressed in her chilly room shrinking away from her naked reflection. She showered, empty and detached, closing her eyes under the water. Unbidden, came the sensation of her open palm pressing on Victor’s eyelids, the downward sweep, the efficient closing up of his face. How had she managed it, to touch his dead eyes in this way, to act as a functionary, as a competent stranger? How soft he had been, how humanly warm. And what had he seen in the last seconds as his death sped towards him? It was a distressing question which, having been thought, she would never eradicate. And his daughter: how to inform his daughter? They were guilty of the death, she told herself, and they were guilty of making Victor into an object. They were guilty of panicking in the face of a life suddenly taken, and responding with thoughtless, collective, idiot haste. They were guilty of disposing of him crudely and in a manner untimely and botched, as if he were a mishap, a mistake, and not a man. They had assisted Gino without knowing what past story he was covering, or why he needed their help but was unable to let each
of them mourn. They had conspired so that Victor was a thing, unhallowed, a bundle heavy and impeding, to be thrown away into the night.

  And Gino, what private disaster had he been expressing? They had been tricked into believing that the speak-memories had told them everything, but in all that mattered, finally, there was no trustworthy knowledge there. The most earnest and open story still meant nothing assured. This was the surprise of other people: their wealth of remorseless secrets. And this was what she had learnt: the failure of any tale.

  Cass heard a rumble sound at the dark windowpane of the doors to her balcony. A truck passing, perhaps. But alone and addled, she thought this an uncanny omen. It seemed less glass-shudder than something outside and wind-borne; it was late shockwaves conveyed on the currents of the night. She felt inordinately heavy. She felt her own decrepitude. She yielded finally to all the violence that had occurred in the last two days, falling onto her bed in the arbitrary configuration of one suddenly surprised and shot dead.

  27

  How did it seem to her, the next, the final day? Cass will remember that when she woke, there was illumination again: daylight was snowlight. She had slept late, and overnight the snow had wondrously returned. It pleased her to see anew the draped quality in the air, the muslin white descending, the animation, the plenitude. The symbol suggested itself – that there might be a white-washing now, and a more complete covering over. Snow is consolation, she thought; snow is this padding and cladding, this lush erasure of signs. She was surprised at how rested and serene she felt. Watching from her window, with the room once again rising upwards, she resolved to speak candidly to Marco, to touch his face with her palm, to suggest that in the days to follow they might take things more slowly.

  Cass opened her phone to discover messages from Mitsuko and Marco. Mitsuko had sent her an image of a gingko leaf, which resembled a butterfly. The message was simple and sweet: ‘I shall think of you when I see a high brown fritillary.’ Marco’s first message was practical: ‘5 pm, outside Wittenburg Platz U-station, church end, right side.’ A second message said: ‘I’ve found Gino’s “Guide to Berlin”.’ She turned away from the snow view, carrying a word that had bubbled into her head: convolvulus. This was the name of the flower in the garland design she had seen printed on her dress. Cass dismissed the word. She willed it forgotten once again. She dressed without haste, then drank a glass of warm water.

  The day dragged and became dull. Cass filled up her time reading newspapers online. She searched initially for some account of a discovered body, name unknown, surfacing with morbid resilience in the icy Havel. An anonymous body. Foul play. Clear criminal involvement.

  There was nothing. Her nervous and wandering attention turned to impersonal stories. Berlin was experiencing its coldest winter in many years. North Korea had announced its possession of nuclear weapons. There was a civil war in Syria, suicide bombings in Afghanistan and landslides in China. Capitalism was facing a fiscal crisis, in which the poor and meek would be savagely crushed. There were fires in Tasmania and floods in Queensland. There were refugees everywhere, forming drifts of miserable humanity, moving in tired, desperate clusters all over the globe. Cass glanced at celebrity tales, full of the deplorable zest. She read a book review or two, and saw nothing that aroused her interest. The world of reading and writing appeared stupid and cynical, keyed to trends of the marketplace and the flat world of known stories. She resolved not to read any more newspapers in her currently vulnerable state. Too much weltschmerz and failure of humanity. Too much tyranny and comprehensive disappointment. She closed her laptop as one might close a coffin, repulsed, sealing the sight and the stench of decay.

  When Cass left her studio it was with a heavy heart and a racing mind. Already she was considering if she would stay in Berlin until spring as she had planned. She had paid the rent in advance, and could not afford to lose her deposit. This worry had already lodged with immoral primacy in her jumbled thinking. She wondered too what extra doom or shock might await, what further convulsion beyond this ruined present. It had been only seven weeks since she’d first met Marco in Nestorstrasse. She could not have conceived then how layered their association might be, how their satellite lives would mimic and consolidate, would form their own peculiar entity of feeling and words. And it might not yet be over, this patterning, or this ruin. Though she could not imagine more waste, there was a kind of fear in her now, a new insecurity, and a loss of composure. Fundamentally – this was it – the future had been spoilt. All was aftermath now. Afterwards and aftermath.

  Cass rose up from the stifling carriage, and rode the escalator at Wittenbergplatz. She moved through the reconstructed deco hall, over which a four-sided clock hung, then stepped out into fresh air and sparkly light. Here were tourists and Berliners with neon-lit faces; here the shine of stores, ornamental in the dark Saturday evening. There were streams of busy people flowing by in waves. The half-destroyed church was a block ahead of her. The gigantic department store, glamorous and transnational, devoured shoppers whole. Yet the night had a translucent, winking quality. She was pleased to be en masse, to feel so impersonal and indefinite.

  From the edge of the platz Cass could see the U-station building from a distance. It was not clear whether Marco’s ‘right side’ meant facing towards or away from the train station, so she triangulated her vision so as not to miss him. On one side was a memorial plaque: ‘Places of terror we should never forget’: a grim list of twelve concentration camps in yellow paint on a black surface. She glanced away. On the other side, conspicuously halted when all around him moved, stood a young man huddled against the cold, smoking a cigarette. He appeared to be Gino Scattini, returned from the dead. Gino Scattini. Cass stared, captivated, at the intimation of afterlife. The posture was the same. The slightly nervy carriage. The tilt of the head. In a gesture she saw as deeply cinematic, the man raised his arm slowly to inhale, then, just as slowly, lowered it to his side. He might have been an actor staging Gino. He might have been rehearsing a resurrected life. But then the man turned more fully towards her and she saw his irrefutable singularity. He would not be made into another fateful sign. He was autonomous and securely outside her knowing. With surprising liveliness, the young man suddenly flicked his butt into the snow, turned on his heel, tossed back his scarf and sped beneath the bright archway of the station.

  As Cass stood still in the moving crowd, she felt the dark cold enter her chest. She stamped her feet on the icy pavement. Frosty air entered her lungs and she drew her coat more tightly. She adjusted her scarf, rubbed her stiff hands, squeezed in her shoulders, as dogs do when truly cold. The blink of the green man and the red man went on and on, the mazing heave of the crowd advanced and receded. For a while she thought of nothing but this daze of waiting. Then she noticed a triple arrangement of globed lamps that reminded her of Gino describing parhelia. She turned the word in her mind. How lovely it was: parhelia.

  At that moment, Cass made two lucid decisions – that she would return to Oranienplatz and find the first Ahmed; and that she would locate Victor’s daughter, Rachael, and fabricate an honourable tale about her father. It would be untruthful, necessarily, but she might construct a fiction that would serve as a refracted or substitute truth; just as there only exists one sun, but it may, in a natural deception, appear as three.

  Marco had chosen this place because it had an absorbing anonymity. He also liked to move en masse, obscured by others. He liked big-city bustle and the camouflage of populations. It was half an hour, then an hour, and Cass at first wondered if she had missed seeing him, or mistaken the time. She stood vacantly waiting. But at some point, sombre and sure, she realised that Marco was not coming. She looked through the night for his face and knew, without a doubt, that he would not arrive. Marco had left Berlin. She was all at once utterly certain. He had returned to Rome, or gone further - perhaps fleeing like a fugitive to North Africa. There was no phone message – she checked – no excuse, or explanation. There
was only her waiting and her freeze-frame emptiness, full of unanswered questions.

  Cass rode the S-Bahn ring line, just to ride. She needed the gentle thrumming, the clockwise or anti-clockwise lapse and elapse, the repetitions, the orderly movement, the comfort of going nowhere. A sequence of mobile images attended her travelling: umbrellas, teacups, chessmen, pietàs. The memories of others had infiltrated and become her own; they exerted their influence as planets might, pulling time and space, oscillating in and out of far visibility, changing how the world itself appeared, and all that was inside it. Snowfall glistened and the sky outside sped away. The snow appeared as a maze of minuscule stars.

  The S-station names: Storkower Strasse and Frankfurter Allee. Ostkreuz, Treptower Park, Sonnenallee. So like a poem.

  There was a boy once who whispered ‘umbrella’ into the night and sought in stories frail hints of his disappeared family. Another who saw in a cathedral the horror at an explosion, and found himself, ever afterwards, exploding inside. There was a girl who smelt history, and loved the pottery of her father. There was a boy who noticed the tiny shadows cast by chess pieces, and grew to know both isolation and the promise of release. A child in Rome lost his father and sent a fictional envoy to find him, then fell in fits that expressed what his mouth could not say. And there was she, meaninglessly riding on a train through the night. Her mournful self, second-hand, carrying other peoples’ images. Her self lovelorn, and sorry, and now simply sliding away.

  Acknowledgements

  This novel was written during an ‘Artist’s Fellowship’ year, hosted by DAAD in Berlin, for which I’m enormously grateful. For advice, support and stimulating company I wish to thank Katharina Narbutovic, Laura Munoz-Alonso, Susanne Fladt-Bruno, Susanne Kalbanter, Lars Eckstein, Anja Schwartz, Mattias Fredrich-Auf der Horst, Helga Ramsey-Kurtz, Frances Calvert, María del Rosario Acosta, Chris Eagle, Janne Teller, Sarah Burnside, Beatrice Fassbender, Eliot Weinberger, Jennifer Wawrzinek, Heidi Kuhles, Bettina Fishcher, Susanne Becker, Walter Kaufmann, Hannah Boettcher and Gerrit Haas. Fellow DAAD writers, including Anjtje Krog, John Burnside, Pierre Char-Naudé, Helon Habiba and Dorothea Rose Herliany, offered solidarity and fine conversation. Martin Chalmers generously imparted invaluable advice, and I mourn his passing. My very special gratitude extends to Esther Kinsky, Priya Basil and Doris and Christian D’Cruz-Grote, who each shared more than can ever be expressed here. Thanks too to my German publisher, Hanna Mittelstädt, and to her wonderful team, and to my translator, Conny Lösch; to Banff, and especially to Dionne Brand for walks and timely ideas; and to dear friends who corresponded. I particularly thank Mireille Juchau for her thoughtful reflections on Berlin. I’m indebted to Professor Ivor Indyk for offering support at an awkward time; and to colleagues at the Writing and Society Research Centre at the University of Western Sydney. Thanks to Meredith Curnow and Catherine Hill, ever patient and professional, at Random House Australia. Kyra Giorgi and Robert Podbereski were immensely inspiring companions, last but not least.