R.H.I.

by Tim Corballis

  The Yugoslav woman said, ‘That happens everywhere.’

  The man said, ‘Not everyone hates outsiders!’

  The Yugoslav woman said, ‘When I first got here, I couldn’t think what to do. I couldn’t speak German, and I had nothing. I missed home terribly. But my home was torn up and destroyed. All the empty spaces in this city seemed like scars to me, and just reminded me of the destruction at home.’

  The man said, ‘They are scars.’

  The Yugoslav woman said, ‘It was as if Yugoslavia had sunk into the waves, into the middle of the Atlantic. It had been flooded. People had drowned. I don’t know why it seems truer to say that than simply to say they were shot and bombed, that their bodies were torn to pieces, that the violence was caused by other people. It seemed to happen to us.’

  The German woman said, ‘To us, too.’

  The young writer said, ‘When the Russians arrived?’

  The German woman said, ‘Oh, that. And later.’

  The Yugoslav woman said, ‘But it’s false. We were also responsible. I think of people gasping for breath, and maybe it’s as if we had ourselves jumped into the ocean. But then, here it was so difficult. The Immigration Office was a terrible building. It’s a building like a brick. It’s nowhere—next door is a power station, and railway lines. It’s in a wasteland, so as soon as you arrive at the building you know how unimportant you are, how small. You are small, next to the railway yards and the power station, almost invisible—certainly invisible to the machinery that rules those places. You’re small next to the building itself, and to the queues that run out its door and stretch beside the building, onto the road. There is always a queue there, in the rain. You don’t even know whether you’re in the right place, standing in the right line. We were like cattle. The officers wouldn’t look up from their papers when they spoke. We had all become nothing: stamps, numbers, papers, cattle to be moved in. I had come from a sinking land and my past was obliterated even more in that building. I had no story there. Even when I later told my story to sympathetic Germans, it became like an application for something. An application for their sympathy, which was duly granted, stamped, signed. I’ve settled here for now but the place I’m from—Yugoslavia!—no longer exists. Maybe it was a brutal place. Like everywhere. Like here. But our homeland’s gone.’

  The man in uniform said, ‘I’ve seen how war churns everything up into mud. It leaves a right mess in its wake. Nothing is recognisable afterwards.’

  The Yugoslav woman said, ‘It left a mess everywhere, not just where the bombs were falling. It was a relief to escape. I don’t want to go back—there is nowhere to go back to but those new countries I don’t recognise, despite the familiar buildings and streets.’

  The writer said, ‘Everyone in Berlin is from somewhere else. Our home towns are all unfamiliar.’

  The Yugoslav woman said, ‘But you chose to come here.’

  The writer said, ‘Yes.’

  The Yugoslav woman said, ‘Berlin is divided between the people who choose to come here, and the people forced to.’

  The German woman said, ‘I’ve been here all my life. But yes, you’re my sister. My homeland no longer exists. Look here at this stationery shop: it’s just around the corner from where I lived. Follow me—here’s the front door to the building. I moved out ten years ago. The tram would stop in the middle of the street—they didn’t then have the platforms built for it. The stationery shop was the first one to come, early in 1990. It sold pens and paper and envelopes, like it still does. This shop changed everything, it promised so much, it offered so many kinds of paper and pens. If we went inside we would see a range of pens that I couldn’t have imagined. This was opportunity. But the women who worked in there, they were desperate, and they didn’t know what to do. They didn’t know how to serve the customers. My old boss Isabella from the clinic was one of them—I went in and saw her working there and I nearly died. This was the end of the world. The clinic had closed already of course, but my world ended when I saw Isabella working in the stationery shop. She didn’t last long—I didn’t see her in there after a year or so. I used to go in and talk to her, not to buy anything but just to talk to her. She had suddenly become nice. I was suspicious of her at the clinic, but she had become warmer. Warm, but with an amount of pain in her eyes that I couldn’t measure. When she stood across the counter from me in the shop it was nothing like being across her large desk at the clinic. She said that her boss came and observed her sometimes—I didn’t say, “Like you used to observe me”—and he would criticise her: she didn’t know how to talk to people. Isn’t that strange? Suddenly she did seem to know how to talk! Of course we couldn’t talk about the clinic—it didn’t exist anymore. Suddenly it had never existed. But she talked and talked about her life now, and I talked about mine. My husband had work still. But the clinic had never existed, and the state it was part of had never existed—it was all a collective hallucination, a dream, something we had woken from, a mistake, a terrible mistake! But it was our lives, so our lives up to now had been a dream and a mistake. So now, awake, and already old, we were told that everything had returned to normality. But it felt to us that everything had become strange. That’s what we talked about over the counter of the shop: the strange pens, the strangeness of living in a world that wasn’t ours. Our country hadn’t fallen—fallen was the wrong word, the wrong metaphor. It had been pulled out from under us. Another one had been inserted in its place. We found ourselves on foreign soil. We came from somewhere that had never existed. How do you account for that?’

  A silence.

  She said, ‘Yes, that’s how.’

  The Yugoslav woman said, ‘There’s something you’re not saying.’

  The German woman said, ‘Those in the western part of the city were bribed to be here. Money was thrown at the western part from the beginning, from the Marshall Plan onwards. The East wasn’t allowed to accept Marshall Plan money—and worse, it was forced to pay war reparations to Moscow. Money was being taken away from us even as it was being pumped into the West. That’s why people were leaving. That’s why they built the wall. They—we—needed people, but couldn’t afford the sort of bribes the West offered. What else was there to do? We were trying so hard to build a new society after the destruction of the last one. We had to believe in the society we were building. I suppose both sides had to. I chose to believe in it because I lived here. That sort of choice is harder for me now. After a while our choice seemed betrayed. You understand that?’

  The Yugoslav woman said, ‘Yes.’

  The German woman said, ‘It was imposed on us, but we also built it ourselves. We built it! We built that world, for all its faults, and we were proud of it—sometimes. At times we didn’t know what to think. When I was fifteen I heard about the Russian tanks on the streets—my father came in to tell me, but he wouldn’t let me go out and see. I don’t think there was anything to see on our street. He said that there was a curfew. I thought I could hear something: something muffled and confused, something hanging over the city, but different from the noises of construction. We’d been told about the strikes, and I suppose there wasn’t much construction anyway. “Us” was already divided into “us and them”. And it wasn’t just the city that was divided, but each of its citizens. We were weak, we’d been beaten down, and some of us believed that capitalism was Nazism under another name—but, being weak, like a younger sibling, we needed an authority figure, a parent, to take our side against the enemy. We looked to the Soviets, and to our own state. Sometimes they seemed to turn on us. But we needed to look to them to help us because we were the weak ones. I don’t know what I’m saying.’

  The Yugoslav woman said, ‘There’s something you’re leaving out.’

  The German woman said, ‘Should we have felt proud? Our committees were about educating our children, keeping people healthy, avoiding exploitation. Did we create it all? After a while it felt sour. We had to believe in it—but after a while we
just pretended to.’

  The city remained as it was: sunny, and streaked with cold, lifted here and there with a breeze that turned up collars or made walkers turn a shoulder against it slightly. Our small group was observing the city, outside it and within it. To look at, there was nothing divided about the city. The streets had a sheen, blinding the pedestrians who walked in its direction so that they fumbled and the colour of their eyes shone out. At a roadworks the road was blocked off and the cobblestones were pulled up, grey bricks the size of heads. Berlin was a contradiction of the weight of these stones, and a lightness, a glint off the buildings’ ceramic tiles. It was the lightness of drawings of itself, of architects’ plans. When faced with a building, glass-fronted and now old, and inside the building a light space unused and in the corner a neat pile of old furniture with its stuffing escaping from the faded orange fabric, and the white of the building’s side walls covered now with a tracing of green mould and streaks of orange from its ceiling, streaks and traces that outlined a relief mural showing men and women set within a geometrically composed sweep, their eyes focused on a future outside the frame—when faced with this emptiness, a teenager turned away from it.

  The German woman said, ‘What am I leaving out? It was here not far away where I met with three people from the Ministry for State Security and signed their document. There’s the building, but I couldn’t say which window it was behind. It was about a colleague at the clinic.’

  ‘What did you tell them?’

  She said, ‘It was the old story. I told them that my colleague was thinking of leaving for the West. I don’t remember why—I think she said she could earn more money there.’

  ‘Why did you tell them?’

  She said, ‘Because they asked me. I didn’t know what would happen. I still don’t know what happened to her. She kept working there for a while, I think. Then she left. I don’t know.’

  ‘You told them just because they asked?’

  She said, ‘Remember, we were weak! We needed these people. That’s what I thought.’

  ‘Once, when I was a child, I saw someone smash the window of a shop. It was our shop, the one my family went to, and the people behind the counter knew my name. The man had a brick or a large stone—I don’t remember—and he threw it through the window. I have no idea why anyone would have done that. He ran. I remember his shoes on the road: the sound of them, their squeak, and just the visible sight of the contact. I don’t know how old I was, but I was scared. I suppose I hid. I told my parents—I also told the police. I described the man and what he was wearing.’

  She said, ‘Yes. It’s just like that. It was as if my colleague was threatening to break something—something valuable. I couldn’t face her on my own. I needed help. Of course, I tried to argue with her. I don’t remember the argument, or the conversation I had with the security men. Or even, whether they were men—there might have been a woman with them. Was I wrong? It was early, and the state was still young, and at least some of us were excited.’

  ‘Would you do the same thing now?’

  She said, ‘We are told now that our beliefs led to disaster. I don’t know. I’m only ever resigned these days. We’re told not to believe, but just to enjoy ourselves. I try! I even bought some of the pens. Mostly now I just feel like a fool. Of course I wouldn’t do the same thing.’

  Rinnsale. But I had already written about the city as if it were the inside of H’s own mind, his own head; as if the structure of the mind might be present here in the city itself, or at least in those parts of the city on which he had left his mark. Walking the length of the former Stalinallee, I had the sense that I was following H, I wrote. I walked westwards in the direction of Alexanderplatz. It was possible to walk through the archways into the green spaces behind the ‘Stalinist’ neoclassical buildings. The green strips by the road itself were dry and partly overcome by weeds. The city was still poor. After Stalin’s death the possibility of a reunited Germany was finally abandoned once and for all—the Soviets never raised it again. The fountain at Strausberger Platz was not working, and after that point, the street bent towards the centre, running alongside Scharoun’s buildings, among others. Which direction was this, then? Forwards or backwards? Finally Alexanderplatz—broad and chaotic with renovation work, as if the rebuilding after the war continued, still, even now. Finding one’s way across it, or under it into the U- and S-Bahn station, we tripped over wooden boards or were diverted by the fenced- and boarded-off areas where paving stones were ripped up or where infrastructure of this or that nature was being renewed in trenches. The open space, the expanse of the place, bordered by its streets and buildings, contained a shifting maze. Nearby, the People’s Palace was still standing, in the place where the old Palace had been—but it was a shell of bronze glass, steel and asbestos, occupied only now and then by art installations. The city was too poor to rebuild the old Palace. But also, we had already passed the Teacher’s House and the Congress Hall, forgetting to look up at them as we walked by.

  H said, ‘Keep those ones. Those are the ones I’m proud of.’

  We said, ‘Not Strausberger Platz? Frankfurter Tor? Even Weberwiese?’

  He laughed. ‘No. Tear them down.’

  ‘They’re very sought-after apartments, still.’

  ‘I can’t explain that.’ Then: ‘Yes, I can. They were nice to live in. Isi and I spent most of our lives in them, after the war. But tear them down—then there will be a chance to start again. Isn’t this a new millennium?’

  We said, ‘You found an apartment at Strausberger Platz for Anita R.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are the modernist buildings so important?’

  He said, ‘No, tear them down too. Why not? I only like them because I won something, some long, long argument. I never, not for a second, gave up fully on modernism. But I’m not even sure—if Stalin had lived another decade, what victory would there have been for me?’

  ‘But didn’t you win, earlier? You were chosen as Chief Architect.’

  ‘That was a loss disguised as a victory.’ But he was looking back, up at the Teacher’s House. A mosaic frieze by Womacka ran around the building’s four walls, a few stories above ground height. The building wore this pictorial skin like—but, of course, unlike—the way the Weberwiese block and the Berlin House at Strausberger Platz wore their poems by Brecht. The combination continued to promise something: art and building; idea and life, unified. No—though he didn’t say it to us—keep it standing, after all. And, pleasingly, no one seemed to want it demolished.

  He said, ‘Well, enough about me.’

  We looked at him.

  ‘What about all your digging, your poking around?’

  We said, ‘I suppose I’m trying to build something too.’

  He looked sceptical.

  We said, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing.’

  He said, ‘I don’t believe that either.’

  We said, ‘Oh, no. I don’t know what I’m doing here, so far away from my own home.’

  ‘Homesick!’

  ‘Not that, either.’ What was he getting at? We were here until the money ran out; we were here, but, after all, we had a sense that we might be anywhere in the world. Our stay would come to an end, it would be interrupted by the WORLD. It was, wasn’t it?, fortunate that we’d run into H. What were we doing but trying to let the place, the city where we had found ourselves—trying to let it impact on us, on our senses? To let its walls become part of us? Looking around, at the city—no, no wider than the city … looking around at the world in which we found ourselves—. Were we trying to design a registering apparatus for our own lack of control? A collection of evidence for the world, for ourselves, for the mismatch between the two? A composition that failed in the perfection, the mathematics of its form—failed because of the world’s weight on it, and so felt the world as part of itself? Was that a worthy task? A possible task? It was one, we thought, without saying it, that H might (though we didn�
�t ask him) appreciate.

  No. Surrounded by the traffic and the noise of rebuilding, H wondered not what had become of his buildings, but what had become of the city itself. Berlin? No—the other city, the one that had briefly appeared, in glimpses. It was the city that made all of the collapsing worthwhile, that finally seemed to give meaning to the destruction of the first half of the century. It was the city that meant that victory and defeat would become, after all, meaningless ideas. What else was worth doing? We shrugged. It wasn’t an easy question—and without that question, the destruction, the collapse, seemed to be nothing but entropy, a physical process, one that took people up in its momentum and made them its agents or its victims, or both at once. What, H wondered, had become of time? It seemed to flow in confused rivulets, now forward as that city lifted itself up off the ground, as it promised something and became something, then backwards again as the city slumped back and became only its buildings—threadbare ones at that. It flowed in different directions in different parts of the city, in different parts, we might say, even of the world—time as a tangle, unsure of itself and its sense of direction. This was the story: the story of no story, the story of a story’s attempt to tell itself. There was something comic about it, about its reversals, its buildings built and taken down and rebuilt, its visions, its visions and again, still new visions. We turned to him, but he was nothing but a glimpse, a vague outline. Certainly the sort of thing you wouldn’t hold a conversation with.

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks to my friends, family and others who have offered comradeship and conversation during the years it took to write R.H.I. I would especially like to mention Creative New Zealand, for supporting and funding a year in Berlin on the Berlin Writers’ Residency; the archives of the British Psychoanalytical Society, for access to their Joan Riviere material; everyone at Victoria University Press, for being a pleasure to work with; and Sally-Ann Spencer and Anne Siebeck, for their close consultation about the German headings in the H section.