From there we circle the Reichstag, visit Museum Island, stroll Unter den Linden, where the evil one razed its eponymous trees the better to parade troops. There, in a guardhouse all its own, stands Käthe Kollwitz’s Mother with her Dead Son—the work of a woman who lost her boy to the First World War and a grandson to the Second, so I read from the guidebook. The mother enfolds the corpse in heavy arms as if her warmth might breathe life back into the body. We tiptoe around her bearing her grief, the three of us in the eye of it, silent.
Because a certain stopwatch has begun to tick: our stay is far too short, it dawns. He has rehearsals, he says—no mention yet of the girl, woman, he’d travelled with who recently left. He has meetings with immigration people, he tells us. Meetings with a manager, the son of a prince who once booked Bob Dylan’s tours, he says. There’s talk of a trip to Majorca. The band is a group of guys he met on Craigslist, upper-crust expat Brits. Wanted: guitar & keys player, backup singer. He’s applied for an artist’s visa, hopes to stay.
It’s a very long way from Halifax, garage rock in our basement.
As the sun sinks, we head back to the hotel to picnic on treats. I could hole up forever in this room. It has two of everything—queen-size beds, sofas, bathrooms—its luxury all the more luxurious because it’s not what we booked.
“Still have that Les Paul?” Chris asks Gil, cracking beers.
“Ever find out what happened to your Fender?” Chris’s favourite guitar, one Gil shipped that disappeared at a show but was mysteriously replaced by another worth three times as much.
“Like I told you, the room was locked.”
The talk darkens. We debate evil’s roots, as people can and do in a hotel room high above clean modern streets.
“Everyone has it in them to do like the Nazis did,” Chris says fiercely. Pointing out Al-Qaeda, Rwanda, Bosnia, what the Brits did to the Mi’kmaq and the Beothuks, for Chrissake. It’s not as if such madness has limits, what happened in Germany “just” a confluence.
“You’re right,” Gil hedges. “Plenty of Hitlers—history’s full of them. Look at Stalin.”
“But how could so many people follow such an obvious nutcase?” Ordinary, normal ones, I mean, not the Goebbels, Goerings, Eichmanns, Himmlers, and Speers.
“People will do whatever they have to, to save their own skin.”
He enfolds me in a hug before heading to the U-Bahn, bound for the drummer’s flat—the place that, for now, he calls home.
Chris is busy the next day. Gil and I stick together, our feet taking us along Zimmerstrasse, where we vowed not to go. The Stasi exhibition has acid-green rooms, a Cold War rolodex with hundreds of thousands of names, people tracked by the secret police, people executed for wanting to vote. One hundred and eleven kilometers of documents and 1.4 million photographs document the price of freedom to come and go, says the leaflet. Chills worm from my shoulders to my stomach, but with nothing but time we push on, passing a place that rents out psychedelic Ladas by the hour and another offering Die Welt balloon rides. Across from a block-long stretch of Wall grimly intact, we hurry through the Topography of Terror, then up Wilhelmstrasse past Goebbels’s two-thousand-room Ministry of Aviation, one of very few such edifices not razed after the war.
I need Tylenol and art, more art.
The afternoon crawls by. Finding ourselves in leafy, bourgeois Charlottenburg—where, according to Chris, no one goes—we enter a garden dotted with statues, the chill, gracious solitude of a house that would fit in the finest of Parisian neighbourhoods. The museum’s a monument to Kollwitz, champion of the proletariat, who gave her life to depicting poor parents—maker of pietàs and “degenerate” art, as Hitler called it—bereaved mother and wife of a Prenzlauer Berg doctor as working class as a doctor could be. Apart from a couple of women whispering in German, we’re the only visitors. The sketches and prints on the walls are one long tortured cry against violence and hate, the poverties of spirit that sever all physical bonds—yet the pictures whisper a hard, stoic love that outlives time, place, and gunfire.
We find that neither of us can speak. It’s never good tearing up, let alone weeping, in public, and we’re forced by genteel circumstances to flee. I’m no shopper but manage to buy a poster of The Sacrifice. Its desperate mother offers a newborn out of turmoil’s darkness into light—the child itself her only hope. A souvenir from this part of Berlin where, our child insists, artists never go.
Choosing what seems a gentler, friendlier route back to the hotel, we follow a green canal, then stumble upon what’s left of the last station many—most?—Jews saw before the one at Auschwitz.
Just before dusk Chris comes to take us on a stroll through Kreuzberg, in and out of tiny galleries teeming with all kinds of art from all around the globe. We sign petitions demanding Ai Weiwei’s release from a Chinese prison. A group swathed in red latex—red rubber Buddhas?—performs a silent outdoor dance, and around a pond near Oranienstrasse chestnuts bloom, wisteria and lilacs, and in the settling dark a sprinkling of tiny daisies makes a Milky Way of the grass. A form of resistance, the flowers’ quiet won’t be crushed. It’s cooler tonight. Carrying food from a Turkish grocer’s, we race back to our rooftop haven, keen to put our feet up. But a restlessness stirs in us—I can almost hear it—our time in Berlin half over and Chris soon departing, disappearing up Friedrichstrasse.
When Gil and I wake, it’s the sixty-sixth anniversary of the H-monster’s suicide deep inside the bunker buried now under a car park and some Soviet-era apartments. Blink and you’ll miss the sign giving its location—and we almost do. But could it be that evil’s molecules hang around, that the air the psychopath breathed still exists? What’s become invisible explains why my father’s generation crossed the ocean to fight this enemy. It’s my father’s face I see in Chris’s—especially in publicity shots he’s shown us, of the band wearing shirts and ties under their pricey coats. Let’s leave history buried, Gil and I decide, buying chocolate. It fortifies us for today’s walk to Prenzlauer Berg, where they rehearse.
Crossing Karl-Marx-Allée, lured by greenery, we get lost in an overgrown graveyard whose entrance is the only exit. All the headstones are dated 1945—the year the city surrendered to the Russians and Hitler ate cyanide, or whatever—and bear Jewish names and Christian crosses. Walking in circles, panicking, eventually we free ourselves in time to find Greifswalder Strasse and Chris waiting on a corner.
We’re all early, and stop to buy drinks to kill time in Berlin’s oldest park. Chris nudges me past the entrance—“You’ve got to see this, Mom”—to the Märchenbrunnen fountain where every imaginable fairy tale figure stands in pure white marble. Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Hansel and Gretel. Placed for the pleasure of children when typhoid and rickets ruled, these gentle creations survived endless bombings and Soviet rule. Just beyond them, we lie on the grass at the foot of a steep slope, sip and talk, and he and Gil doze. Like father, like son.
Volkspark Friedrichshain looks and feels like Central Park. But its hills—bunkerbergs—are made of rubble, all that was left of this city after the war.
Sitting up, Chris eyes his watch.
The rehearsal space is at the bottom of a gulag-style building, through an abandoned underground parkade and a barely lit warren of graffiti-tagged passages full of trash: signs of habitation, a squat? What interrogations happened here before the Wall fell, I wonder: not artistic ones. Through a series of steel doors we finally enter the studio’s antechamber, a tiny space with toilet, fridge, chairs and table, and a Rage Against the Machine poster with nuns pointing rifles. The inner sanctum is a cell jammed with gear, carpeting growing up the walls, dangling pipes and wires.
The guys are warming up. They’re sweet, polite, welcoming—even the wild-eyed upholsterer filling in for the bassist who’s taken a job in publishing. Chris plugs in. They’re practically reverential.
&n
bsp; When they play, the music blows the space apart, tears it open. It’s re-channeled, re-charged U2, well-seasoned and steeped in electropop. Don’t say it; keep the comparisons to yourself, Mom, say Chris’s eyes glancing up from the fretboard, ready to roll themselves at any second. Beyond commercially viable and tighter than Gil and I could have imagined, the song—“Why Am I So Holy?”—is all that’s tireless in this city, and burns through soundproof walls. Chris’s guitar makes it. We’ve heard him play thousands of times, of course; these guys have taken him on the strength of his earlier work. When they break, they make politely envious jokes about his youth, his skinniness.
Gil is pale; he has to get outside, get some air, escape this subterranean place. The look in his eyes is all deer-in-the-headlights. He can’t speak. Normally an ambler, he marches in total silence all the way past the misbegotten graveyard, past Karl-Marx-Allée, barely nodding at more gulag-style buildings and happy-worker murals peeling from dead apartment blocks. It’s not till we’ve passed the Fernsehturm, that Soviet-style CN Tower, that words start to come, and not far from here, near a bend in the Spree, that we happen upon our second pietà. Nameless, she sits near the ruins of a church, her limbs ramrod straight, her son’s body laid over her lap: an intersection of hard lines that defy human comfort.
“Chris should be here,” Gil finally says. “He needs to be here, he needs to stay in Berlin.”
He invites us for drinks. The drummer and his girlfriend throw a dinner party in our honour. The talk is of childhoods spent in European boarding schools. The lead singer asks what we think of the latest royal wedding. They debate a new name for the band. Chris proposes The Junior Bengal Lancers, after the riding stable back home. They love it. Post-post colonialism at its best?
On our last day we meet again in Prenzlauer Berg. Another rehearsal. The band goes on tour tomorrow, a circuit of German cities. A photographer arrives to do a shoot; there’s a meeting with a videographer, talk of recording in London, a CD to be released in the fall—copies of which our son will deal like cards at the dinner table next Christmas. This time Gil and I are more composed. We listen coolly from the outer room, under the blank, identical faces of the gun-toting nuns.
Today’s music is loud, driving, and every bit as tight as yesterday’s. But there’s a sameness, I find, a tiredness even, that escaped me before, though it still sinks a now-familiar hook into my chest.
The Berlin spring turns cold that evening, a frigid wind driving the three of us to seek comfort food. Our last supper, who knows for how long? The restaurant, where sparkling wine was invented, has an unappealing menu, at least in translation: lukewarm potato salad, beef brisket. The kind of stuff that sticks in your throat. My wiener schnitzel blankets the plate, the size and shape of an Egyptian neckpiece like those in the Altes Museum. Chris’s guitarwork still sears my hearing. I have never tasted finer food, yet can barely swallow.
Don’t cry, don’t.
The hours, the minutes count down to goodbye.
Don’t waste them. Don’t.
Back in the hotel room, gathered around one TV, the three of us attempt the last-ditch, inane chitchat when there’s too much of one thing and not enough of another to say.
It is as if we’ll never see him again. As if the present, even as it’s happening, is remote from us, already irretrievable.
The only English channel, besides some porn ones, is rerunning a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame reunion, the stars of our youth—Gil’s and mine—taking the stage. Springsteen, Jagger, Crosby, Stills and Nash. Some are shipwrecks. Others have chins, arches, and other parts that haven’t quite so visibly gone south. Gil and Chris zero in on guitar makes. I fixate on the costumes, the makeup, the gaudy decrepitude: one way of warding off the evil tears.
Debonair, Jeff Beck rocks a muscle shirt, grandfatherly arms quivering with each vibrato—as Gil’s would, and mine too, if I played. But the rock in my chest is a bunkerberg, the sting behind my eyes pure pins and needles.
“Mutton dressed as lamb,” I say, strategically. This is what we do, fighting back.
“Saw him back in ’71,” says Gil. “Suffers from tinnitus, you know. Great guitar player, especially when he played with Clapton. Underappreciated, obviously. Loves his Les Pauls.”
“Remember the time some guy phoned looking for your Left Paw?”
Our ancient, foolproof joke falls flat. Chris just stares at the TV.
Next up is Black Sabbath, or their remains. Today is a black Sabbath; it couldn’t be blacker, says Gil’s look. Just as the tears tingle, Ozzy Osbourne’s doughy face fills the screen. “Let’s go fucking wild,” he screams, “go fucking crazy,” and launches into that troglodytic dirge of an anthem, “Iron Man.” The camera pans the shrieking, fist-pumping audience, then settles on him. With his dyed hair and eyeliner he looks for all the world like a woman you’d see back home at the No Frills, pushing a grocery cart full of squirming grandchildren. Out of my mouth this pops; judgmental, yes, but true enough to draw a chuckle. Chris shakes his head. Gil gapes at the screen. The bunkerberg in the room has taken on an icy form, large enough to sink something.
By now the tears are backing up, air bubbles in a hose. When they finally break loose they spill down—with glee. I’ve always hated metal, its mullets and wristbands, not to mention its sound. Laughter cracks me open. It cracks each of us open, a chain reaction. “That is how he looks.” Gil is choking.
“You guys.” But Chris is laughing too.
The three of us sprawl in a slew of tears and delight and the whole crazy recognition of joy and grief, how tightly entwined they are, a tangled, messy dustball. I’ve always hated Ozzy Osbourne. But tonight Ozzy is king, Ozzy is spectacle: the god of rock and roll and all that matters, which right now is laughter, and more laughter. I could watch him for the rest of my life, letting everything in me spill.
We’re laid out by our laughter, helpless, a howling little trinity.
All too soon it’s over. Ozzy blows kisses: “I love you fuckers!” If he weren’t here beside me, I’d offer my child to Ozzy in thanks. If I could, I’d reach through the screen and squeeze his pudgy hand. But then he leaves the stage and the cheering fizzles, and it’s time.
We put our boy in a cab, blowing kisses. The paleness of his face, his palm raised in a wave, and the driver’s vague smile are what we carry with us to bed, and for months and months afterwards.
“Are they your parents?” the driver said.
We wake to the news that Osama Bin Laden is dead. My treasure in tow—the cheap, matted repro of Kollwitz’s Sacrifice—we catch our early morning flight to Rome.
The band records the last single of its career in Berlin that summer, a piece of Emo-electropop titled “Feet Won’t Touch The Ground.” Soon after, its members disband to “move in new directions”—and Chris returns in time for winter, to cool his itchy feet in Halifax before they take him off again, to Toronto this time: city of his birth, city of new dreams.
The song isn’t the music he made ages ago in our basement or at the Pavilion or the Rock Garden, or even in that gulag cavern in Greifswalder. The CD’s best feature is the cover art: a black and white photo of Chris from the neck down—white shirt, narrow waist, snake hips, impossibly skinny jeans, and boots—shot against a monumental emptiness.
It’s a runway at Tempelhof, he tells me: archetype of Nazi delusions, an airport terminal built in the 1930s to serve their “world capital”—the seed of Hitler’s wildest aspirations. Still one of Europe’s biggest buildings, abandoned just a few years ago, it was used by Berlin’s occupiers after the war to airdrop food to the starving, candy to children.
By a trick of Photoshop our boy levitates, hovering just above the surface of its infinite tarmac.
the Grotto
Brakes juddering, the coach lurched and swayed through sun-drenched streets, gears gnashing as it lumbered uphill. Stomachs swayed w
ith it, gazes leapfrogging, the view a dazzling terracotta blur: shuttered houses, flowers storming balconies. “Lourdes,” burbled the driver, throwing his weight behind the last syllable, “duh,” like a teenager would say. Tilley-hatted heads craned, Yankee accents yammered. So much easy-care polyester it wasn’t funny. Gulping bottled water, fighting nerves, despite the air-conditioned chill Arlene sweated impatience. Had Em been there (“duh!”) she’d have got them kicked off for making snide remarks—snotty Canucks!—this the only tour that would eventually, please, yes, take her to Font-de-Gaume.
Or so she’d understood it was—her French not up to quibbling with the ticket agent in Toulouse—till she found herself heading southwest, not northeast. But, everything being new, she told herself, it was all good. Except she only had the week, and now this useless stop before they looped back up to the Dordogne and the cave paintings she’d travelled all this way to see. A good four hours from where she wanted to be, the last place on earth she’d choose to visit, the very last, was a Catholic shrine—a believer’s Disneyland. “A place of miraculous cures,” said the guidebook. Not a crutch or rosary to be seen among her fellow passengers—this was one good sign, maybe the only one, a reassurance. Still the Beatles’s “Magical Mystery Tour” rolled through her head as they ground to a halt.
Everyone stood. Letting others push ahead, she watched them spill across the parking lot. Women, the odd husband in tow, reasonably hale for their age—and no obvious fanatics. Em, who dressed like the homeless, would’ve called her judgmental for that. But any self-reproach lifted as she waved someone on, a man she hadn’t noticed boarding. Where had he come from, grinning at her? But then she’d been a little distracted, agitated was more like it. “Age before beauty,” she heard. Not till they’d disembarked—the bus’s cool laced with a burning smell exchanged now for a slam of sticky heat—did she notice he had a walker.
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