What would he have done if she had not liked strawberries? He had ducked into the minimart, and they had seemed the most appetising and least threatening of offerings. Never go anywhere empty-handed, his mother always said. When he came out of the store, he had experienced a moment of brief panic: the bench was bare. Spotting her nearing the intersection, he broke into a jog, arriving at her side to discover that she did like strawberries, and that she was from elsewhere — Australia. Where the people were laid back and had no worries. She even used that phrase. When she had asked where the strawberries were from, he had not wanted to disappoint her.
He followed her now as she walked down Friedrichstrasse, her hands in her pockets, and her bag hugging her back. He felt a little miffed that she did not look around, even though she did not know he was there. At Checkpoint Charlie she glanced at the hoarding that surrounded the empty lots, but must have decided to ignore its multilingual tourist information and walk on.
He should just catch up to her and ask for her number. But that would mean admitting he had followed her this far. Instead, he slowed his pace and watched as she turned the next corner and headed into a bookstore.
She had seemed to concentrate when he had spoken, to wait with a vicious intent, and he had found his English deserting him. She told him that she had been watching his city all day; an architectural photographer, she saw the city in cubes and planes, shapes and shadows. He liked the idea of her watching his city unfold, being made new again. Envying her freedom to observe, he had wanted to assure her that he, too, was an outsider looking in.
‘Sometimes I like to just sit there and complicate the world.’ He had watched for her reaction.
Clare had laughed, throwing her head back in a pantomime of enjoyment. Would it annoy him after some time? Would he stop trying to make her laugh?
‘Complicate? You mean contemplate … but it’s very funny.’
He had laughed with her. It was a good choice. He had almost gone with compensate. Consummate. Concentrate. Consecrate. Complicate had definitely been the best choice.
Resigning himself to being late for his father, Andi now followed her into the bookstore. Clare stopped at a shelf of art books and dropped to a crouch. She pulled out a book, and he squinted to see. Egon Schiele. She put it back, stood and looked about, as though assessing the store. Andi seized a book and kept himself hidden behind a shelf, feeling as if he was in a British comedy. What would he say if she saw him? Pretend it was a coincidence, that this was his favourite bookstore?
Clare possessed her body as if she was the only person in the room. How was it that nobody else was staring at her? She dropped to the floor again; he was so close he could hear her knees click. They made a popping sound, like the snapping of fingers calling attention. Surely everyone in the store was tracking her every move? She pulled a book on Klimt from the shelf and sat on the carpet of the shop, legs crossed, flipping the pages and tilting them away from the glare of the lights.
Andi’s phone beeped. Its vibrations felt like a small animal impatiently pawing at his hip. He put the book down, still watching Clare, who was oblivious to the people who wanted to get past her. Again he almost stepped forward and asked for her number. He wanted to yell the request out at her, to see his words slam into her face and shake her from her reverie. But because he could not be sure that she would yell back, he left the store. He did not want to play with uncertainty.
As he walked to the restaurant, Andi wondered whether his father had missed the lecture on purpose. They had such different views of the past, particularly that of the GDR. His father saw it as something separate, another world that could not be understood by those who inhabited the present. Andi saw it as an extension of today: it could not all be shuffled out of sight, or forgiven. He had no idea what his mother thought of the past, if she thought of it at all.
Stepping into the fuggy air of the restaurant, Andi saw his father waiting for him at a table. Even when seated, he was a tall man. A man whose clothes floated about his body as though they were afraid to make contact, giving the impression of much broader shoulders — of much more man — than Andi’s father could lay claim to.
He wondered whether he would have liked his father if they had met as friends of the same age. Probably not. And yet they recognised themselves in each other. The same nose, the same mouth. Their teeth were disorderly, their top lips curled in a way that could be perceived as endearing or unkind. Years ago, his father would host study groups in their apartment, and Andi would watch the discussion, unnoticed as voices were raised, ideas volleyed about. He saw how his father could sneer in a manner that made students look away, or be so charming that some of them, women and men, would blush. Andi spent many hours trying to emulate his father’s magnetic scowl, but it always appeared self-conscious rather than disaffected. Somehow, this failure made him dislike his father and his easy manner all the more.
As his father stood, Andi was reminded how far into old age he had retreated. They muddled through their greetings, his father apologising again for missing the lecture as Andi awkwardly embraced him and sat down too quickly. They passed their conversation back and forth across the table, questions of work and study carrying them through to dessert. He found himself watching the clock on his phone, wishing his father didn’t always make him want to be somewhere else.
‘Your mother would like to see you.’ His father poured water into his glass as he said this, his eyes following the stream. Andi surveyed his cutlery. The stainless-steel cake knife had fine scratches all over its surface; sweeping lines from edge to edge. Cloudy marks hovered where the soapy water had dried, a snail trail of detergent.
‘Why?’ He watched the hurt trickle across his father’s face. Andi sighed. It was not his father he wanted to punish. But he was so easy to bruise; a word flung at high speed across the table, or even a lazy drop shot, was all it took.
‘You’re her son, Andreas. She wants to see you.’
He thought about not even saying the words: his father knew what his reply would be. ‘I don’t want to see her.’
His father nodded. And they sat in silence until Andi gestured for the bill.
Clare’s left foot had gone to sleep. She closed the monograph and slid it back into its place on the shelf. Jiggling her leg until the numbness began to dissipate, she hauled herself up from the floor and looked towards the doorway. Night had completely fallen: she should head back to the hostel; she should get something to eat.
She wanted to do neither of these things; both seemed like insurmountable tasks. Sighing, she picked up her bag and left the store. She was tired of creating purpose for herself and ashamed at this tiredness. Could she not just enjoy this as a holiday? She walked a few paces towards Checkpoint Charlie, telling herself to join in, to queue in the gift store for an Ampelmännchen tea towel and fridge magnet, and to dash off witty postcards for friends back home. Instead she walked towards Potsdamer Platz, hoping the bustle and the shiny newness of it all would shake her out of her own weary mind. She wondered briefly what the man with the strawberries — Andi — was doing that night. She pictured him holding court in a bar, his audience’s rapt attention, much as she imagined his students behaving, hanging from his every word. It seemed admirably useful — teaching a language, enabling people to communicate. And though she knew that photography played a similar role, that images could parade truth in a way that words never could, her career still seemed so futile.
When she decided to take this trip, she had been overjoyed to put all of her commercial work on hold, had not even bothered to give her clients a date of return. She was tired of the smoke and mirrors or, more accurately, the mirrors and Photoshop of architectural photography. The way the architects who employed her insisted the images be more than each building was, or ever could be. That the hero shot must show the structure thrusting into the city skyline, as though it was tearing a ho
le in the atmosphere, despite architecture in Australia only ever being deserving of the term ‘tasteful’. Wanting to see buildings that were designed with purpose, she mapped out a trip through the former Eastern Bloc. In each city and town she found these buildings, most in a state of neglect, that spoke of the utopian future that never arrived. Strictly places in which to live and to work, they were designed as an extension of a collective, rather than a personal, identity. Yet she was under no illusions about the brutal nature of communism and its socialist sisters: she remembered watching the ABC news as a child, seeing people dancing on top of the Berlin Wall, wondering whether this was the same thing as the Iron Curtain, and knowing that a display of such joy could only mean that what had stayed hidden behind that wall was merciless.
Curious to see how a society driven by an unrelenting search for the ideal could become so invalid, she had packed her studio and house into a rented storage space. Made an agreement with a gallery for an exhibition on concrete-block housing and Soviet architecture, and signed a contract with a publisher for a coffee-table book on the same. Aware that this was a project tinged with schadenfreude, she was tempted to compare the photographs to the high-rise commission housing that was dotted around Melbourne’s inner suburbs. To foster a feeling of us and us, rather than us and them. But would anyone care? Did she? She doubted that the people who lived in the buildings would ever read her book — it was as much an exercise in futility as the buildings she tried to capture. She felt as though everything she attempted had been done before; her efforts to quell the emptiness just made apparent its existence.
Arriving at Potsdamer Platz, she almost laughed aloud. The entire complex was a hero shot. All soaring ceilings and polished facades, it was a tribute to capitalism and its ability to bring people together through consumption. She was almost twenty years too late and wondered if she was ever going to catch up.
When she thinks about growing old with Andi, she is happily resigned. She looks at his profile as he watches television. The newsreader is speaking too fast for Clare to understand, and she has given up trying to decipher the words. Instead she faces Andi and tries to see him as the stranger he so briefly was. She remembers an elderly couple she once photographed, their unsteady steps held on film forever.
It was the end of winter, and she had been sitting in one of Melbourne’s public gardens. The sun possessed the tiniest amount of heat as it fell through bare branches, alighting upon two men who were preparing a flowerbed for planting, arranging potted seedlings so that they fanned out from the central fountain like bicycle spokes. Lighting a cigarette, she had marvelled at the crispness of the unfurling smoke. She had been up all night working and was feeling fuzzy, yet the day placed everything sharply in focus. If ever a day was set for premonitions, this one was it. It was the sort of clear, overwhelming morning where bright-eyed people could see forever, and it was then that she decided she would leave Melbourne and see what life was hiding for her over the horizon.
The city’s buildings jostled behind trees, looking as though they had been cut out of cardboard and propped up for her amusement. From a rotunda the sound of two people rehearsing a song could be heard. An accompanying cello pulled their voices into the day, retreating every time they reached the end of the chorus and, with a pause, returned to the beginning.
The elderly couple had walked by, supporting each other, feet shuffling along the sandy path. They looked at the ground and measured each step, taking no notice of the bare flowerbeds, the stunted rose bushes. The man’s felt hat sat precariously on his head: ‘jaunty,’ women would have said fifty years ago. They seemed oblivious to the chill of the day, buttoned up in their long tweed coats.
She had waited for them to pass before standing on the path and photographing them as they shuffled away. It was a lazy shot, but when she developed it later, she could see it was better than anything she had done in a long time.
Looking at the walls of Andi’s apartment, she wishes that they were covered with proper family photos, framed and legitimate, a lifetime of memories.
‘Do you look like your father?’ she asks him. She wonders who Andi might become as he ages.
‘I guess so.’ He glances up from the television. ‘We are both tall.’
‘What about your mother? Do you take after her?’
‘No.’ He switches off the television with the remote. ‘Why do you want to know who I look like? I look like me.’ He reaches over to her and tugs at her arm. She moves along the couch, rearranges herself to lean against him.
‘Do you have any photos of them?’ She wants to see his resemblance in somebody else. He doesn’t answer her. ‘Andi?’
‘No, no photos.’
‘Are you close to your parents?’ She feels his body stiffen.
‘Close enough. I see my father sometimes.’ He nudges her away, stands up from the couch. ‘Are you hungry? I might make something to eat.’
As she listens to him clatter about in the kitchen her appetite deserts her. She has not seen either of her parents in such a long time; the homesickness settles in.
~
The second time Clare left Andi, she hoped that he would follow. She had spent the morning photographing the Palast der Republik, the building dwarfed beneath the cranes being used to dismantle it. While the palace’s bronze-tinted glazing remained, there was no sign of the bowling alley, the parliament rooms or the spectacular foyer dripping with one thousand bauble light fittings — nicknamed ‘Erich’s lamp shop’, the guidebook had told her. It was the last building on her Berlin itinerary, but she wasn’t quite ready to leave the city. Retracing yesterday’s steps, she found herself back in the bookstore, where she squeezed past the Sunday readers perusing cookbooks and headed straight to the art monographs.
And there he was, bent over the very Klimt book she was coming to buy, his lips pursed in concentration and his shirt tag poking out, beckoning to his dishevelled hair.
Put the book down. She willed him to turn around and notice her, but he continued to read. Put it down. She loitered by the nearby shelves, noisily picking up and replacing a book. She was not sure what she would say if he glanced her way, but in a city of strangers she was determined to make some kind of connection. Since meeting him yesterday, she had been unable to eject him from her mind; her daydreams knew no bounds. It was just a kiss. She was lonely. But surely loneliness is as good a reason as any to talk to someone? Not quite. In need of pretence, she stepped behind him, reached for his tag and tucked it inside his jumper. Her hand brushed his neck. He turned.
‘Your tag,’ she said, by way of excuse.
Andi’s forehead creased: the international sign for confusion. Or anger. Facial expressions are perplexingly duplicitous. She reached to her own neck, pulled at her own tag by way of demonstration.
‘Ah, thank you.’
She thought he would put the book down, but he just turned back to the table. Did he not recognise her? Her face burned: the international sign for embarrassment. She wanted to tear the book from his hands, to keep its pristine pages closed against the light. She wanted to have the composure of Klimt’s women and their lack of dimension. She wanted to be painted in gold leaf and empty her eyes until there was nothing left to be read in them.
‘That’s my favourite,’ she said. Adele Bloch-Bauer, her gloves drawn up over crippled hands.
He was silent, flicked the page. A customer squeezed behind Clare, and she found herself pressed up to Andi. Sandwiched, she waited as the customer pulled a book from the shelf then stepped away. Instead of stepping back, Clare remained pressed against him, her hands resting on his shoulders. Could he feel her heart beating?
She stood behind him for almost five minutes. She said nothing. He said nothing. The moistness of her breath caught in his clothes and clouded back at her. She could feel every part of her body where it touched his. The book and Andi were
both things she could obtain, she was certain of this. Yet as the minutes passed and he did nothing to acknowledge her presence, her certainty waned. The heat of him crept through his clothes like an invitation. Her breasts perched neatly beneath his shoulder blades. The left blade poked her left breast each time he reached for a page. Her breast and each page moved in perfect unison. When he reached the end of the book, he went back to the front and began flipping the pages again. She wanted to know whether he was smiling. She stepped back, waited for him to turn to her. When he did not, she walked away.
Engulfed by her palpitating heart and racing mind, she left the bookshop, breaking into a run as she crossed the street. What had she been thinking? Why did she not act like a normal person and just say, Hello, how are you? But the world was ambivalent to her private anguish. The sun was setting behind clouds, shop signage asserted itself from the dusk, and the dark lifted up from the asphalt road. Unsure where she was going, she slowed to a walk. The tree-lined street soon passed parkland, and she contemplated waiting out her flush of emotions on a bench. She looked back the way she had come. Did she hope that he would follow? Or did she just want a fast escape? Envious of the cyclists who flew by, their wheels skimming the road, she fantasised about knocking one to the ground, swinging her leg over the saddle and pedalling far away. Why didn’t he say anything to her?
Berlin Syndrome Page 2