Dark Lies the Island

by Kevin Barry

  BERLIN ARKONAPLATZ – MY

  LESBIAN SUMMER

  i

  SILVIJA TURNED TO me from the studio couch and said:

  ‘Patrick, I am going to teach you everything you need to know about the female genitalia.’

  I was at this moment twenty-one years old and coming to terms with the cold hard fact of my genius.

  ‘But I’ve got a terrible trembling sensation in my hands,’ I said. ‘I’m not sure now is the ideal time for genitals.’

  ‘Patrick,’ she said. ‘You are not going to be using your hands.’

  She sat on the couch, in her underwear, with a scarred Macbook perched on her strong, thin, walnut-cracker thighs. She smoked as only a Slav can smoke – devouring her smoke. She had a flicky fringe and superstar cheekbones. Technically, she was lesbian, but there appeared to be movement on the matter.

  ‘Patrick,’ she said. ‘Take your clothes off and get out of bed.’

  Even in early summer, the studio was cold as the steppe, and I would put extra layers on to sleep. Silvija was born in the teeth of the wind of an actual steppe and she did not feel the cold. She put aside the laptop, and she stood and eyed me derisively as I approached. With a thumb and forefinger she massaged a nipple. She had small tits but enormous nipples.

  ‘If you do okay, I will kiss you,’ she said. ‘But only once.’

  She turned out to be as good as her word on this, and the kiss was not the least of her gifts to me.

  ii

  By her own reckoning, Silvija was at this time the most brilliant fashion photographer in all of Berlin. This didn’t mean that she got paid. The magazines she worked for tended to fold after an issue or two. And Vogue wasn’t going to come calling anytime soon. Asked to photograph, say, a vampy spike-heeled ankle boot, Silvija would commit to print only the leather of its sole, and that blurrily, as some meth-thinned model, wearing latex knickers and a sneer, aimed a high kick at the camera, down some malevolent alleyway with gemstones of broken glass – Berlin diamonds – scattered to sparkle all around.

  ‘But you don’t really see the boot, Silvija?’

  ‘I do not photograph the motherfucking boot, Patrick. I photograph the motherfucking life!’

  Money was always tight, and we supplemented the magazine work by shoplifting, breaking and entering, and hiring out to the younger designers as they compiled their portfolios. The designers were routinely troublesome – I remember the schizophrenic Croat with his pioneering cutting technique, the polyamorous Frenchman who weighed about as much as a bag of feathers and was reinventing the frock coat, and the epileptic Tasmanian allegedly wanted in Australia for setting fire to a model during Melbourne Fashion Week.

  We descended the eerie stairwell from the studio. We emerged onto Arkonaplatz in the morning. The nicotine burn of her kiss was on my lips still. The sun had come strongly through; already the tables were full outside the cafés. We stopped for tiny smoking thimbles of black coffee at Niko’s, and I felt some prose coming on. Silvija shook her head in amusement at my lovelorn state.

  ‘There will be no honeymoon, Patrick,’ she said. ‘You did fine. And there will be further business between us. There will be instruction. But do you know how much it means to me?’

  She snapped her fingers to indicate the sheer nothingness of what had that morning occurred, and I nodded glumly in understanding.

  ‘Got it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Silvija snapped her fingers like this a lot. She allowed weight to nothing. All of life, she implied, was without meaning or lasting import, and in this way, I believe, she was teaching me how I should operate (and how I should think) if I truly intended to be an artist. We left the muddy remains of our coffees, stubbed our Marlboro Lights, and set out for a towerblock in the district of Wedding, there to photograph for the deranged Tasmanian model-burner a double-jointed Turkish neurotic capering with a string of anal beads.

  And a Rottweiler.

  iii

  The Berlin designers had until this time mostly lived and worked in Prenzlauer Berg. By 2005, however, the bohemian bourgeoisie from five continents were arriving for the quarter’s cut-price lofts and superb childcare facilities, and gentrification was fast spreading through the old tenements and squares.

  ‘Motherfucking breeders,’ Silvija called the new arrivals.

  The fashion crowd generally was in arch dismay at the intrusion, and had started to venture north from P’berg into the riskier neighbourhoods of Wedding. This was where most of the serious shoots happened that summer. We stopped at a corner shop on the way for some bottles of pils. I uncapped mine with the opener chained to the counter, Silvija hers with her teeth. We drank pils more or less constantly and ate very rarely. We crossed Bremenstrasse, dodging the ironically bearded cyclists on their high-nellies, and breathed in the petrol views. I lugged all the gear; Silvija strode. Inclined as always to be artistically late, we lay for a while on the scraggy hilltop in Mauerpark. We slipped in an earpiece each from my headphones and listened religiously to the Nina Simone version of ‘Lilac Wine’. We looked out across the city.

  ‘I give it six months,’ Silvija said, and spat dramatically.

  I was only a few months off the plane from Cork but Silvija had ten years of Berlin under her belt, and she allowed me to share the old-hand snootiness that those years granted; I had learned to affect the same languid woe as all the other old hands. A constant of hip cities is that much of the conversation centres around the fact the city is not as hip as once it was. In Mauerpark that morning, Silvija talked seriously for the first time of leaving Berlin behind, and I felt a terrible spike of nausea.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘Not for a while yet.’

  We flung our empty bottles and made for the shoot. She hoicked another of her awful thick green phlegmy spits and I tried not to notice. She was so lean, with a ferocious mouth, and XXX-rated eyelashes. I’d found her through a small ad – a share offered on a studio apartment. The sense memory of the morning’s events was still with me. First the mouth, and after a long time my hands had stopped trembling enough to be brought into play. She talked me through the operation. It was delicate stuff. My hands felt so heavy, but then she laid hers on mine to guide, and lifted the weight – everything was suddenly lighter.

  iv

  Wedding was a raw expanse of towerblocks, tattoo pits, kebab shops. Nogoodniks in mauve-coloured tracksuits decorated every corner. We had a properly respectful air as we passed through. This was how Berlin was supposed to be. We cut down a back way, for a while, to avoid the main drag, because the sight of the kebab gyros was sickening Silvija’s stomach, which was troublesome. The rearsides of the towerblocks loomed either side of a dirt pathway itchy with catkins beneath our sandals, and the word ‘proletariat’ rolled its glamorous syllables over my tongue. Silvija may have been lazy as a feline in her stride but she made as sly and sure-footed a progress. She wore black military fatigues cut off at the knee and a black vest a couple of sizes too small the better to ride sexily high on her waist. Just as we approached the tenement where the shoot would take place, Silvija received a call to say the Tasmanian had ‘technically died’ that morning but the show would go on.

  There were always such complications. The Tasmanian’s assistant, a serene Vietnamese, was instead in charge when we reached the old apartment where the shoot would happen. Politely, we asked after the designer.

  ‘At six a.m.?’ the Vietnamese grinned. ‘Clinical death! Now? Much improve!’

  The room was peopled with hipster flunkies, and the Turkish model was in place. She had a pair of recent stab wounds in her side and looked as if she had walked straight off a human rights-type poster about torture. Silvija began to set up – she would not go digital and used commie-era Leicas always. I attempted to calm the model who was mouthing vengeance of death against a two-timing girlfriend. The anal beads and the Rottweiler were introduced. Silvija declared that the dog lacked a sufficiently vicious mien and
she smashed a camera lens off the wall. She attempted to goad the dog to promote a viciousness but there was no response, and the shoot, as so often, broke down into a period of tense analysis. Pils was sent for to help smooth the debate. It went not well, even so, with Silvija questioning the talents of the absent Tasmanian.

  ‘Motherfucker calls himself a designer,’ she said. ‘And his autumn fucking accessory? Anal fucking beads! Once again with the anal fucking beads!’

  In my innocence, I did not know the exact purpose of anal beads, and I confided as much to the Turkish model.

  ‘Is sex toy,’ she said. ‘Lots and lots of glitter beads on a chain. These beads they get bigger in sequence. What you do with these beads …’

  I put a hand to my empty stomach, and pleaded.

  Silvija opened the scarred laptop and mailed the Tasmanian – he was apparently online even in intensive care – and sprayed some heavy snark about his autumn accessories. The Vietnamese clucked contentedly and went to the kitchen zone and stirfried some scallions and chicken gizzards. The flunkies lounged in hipster bliss, and then fizzed madly and loudly for a few moments – looking for knickers or garter belts – and then lounged some more. The Turkish model stroked the inside of my arm and said she was not exclusively homo and had always liked redheads. I was on a roll with ladies who liked ladies. Eventually some photos were taken. The Rottweiler took a dump in the middle of the floor. Silvija said:

  ‘Perfect! We use the shit!’

  This was the Berlin fashion scene, in the summer of 2005, in the district of Wedding. There was a lot of heroin and a lot of dog shit. Everybody was thin and gorgeous.

  And Jesus, did we smoke.

  v

  I was finding out how carelessly life might be lived. The people I met through Silvija were all addictions and stylish madness. Every other hour, there was a crack-up, or an arrest, or an abortion, or somebody jumped out a window, or fucked an Austrian heiress, and every deranged turn of events was so gladly met and swirled with. They were attuned to the wild moment, while I was yet nervous, careful, locked to the past. It seemed to me that they had all grown up godless and without foul repressions. They had not grown up sitting on three-piece suites of floral design in the beige suburbs. They had not come to adulthood in rooms laid with unpleasantly diamond-patterned carpets bought off the travellers at the markets of drab Irish towns. How can I begin to explain? Does it suffice to say that the olive oil in my childhood home was kept in the bathroom? It was bought at the chemist shop and drizzled mournfully onto my father’s problem scalp. Hair was never good for our people, generally, perhaps on account of the remorseless wind that assaults the sides of west Limerick mountains. It is no exaggeration to say that the male forebears of my clan – my father and his brothers – were scarred by wind. They all had the permanently startled look that comes from working outside in hard gusts, and something of it had been passed onto me, this look; even though I had never myself stood in the teeth of a force six gale wrestling a stuck cow from the boggy sump of a ditch; even though I spent my time writing lurid short stories and (increasingly perceptive and subtle) essays about the emergence of Italian Neo-Realism in the 40s, and the troubled legacy of the Nouvelle Vague.

  Silvija, of course, was fanatically well read. She read everything and in six languages. She had informed me quietly that I was a genius. She told me that I was the culmination of Irish literature. (She said it ‘litra-chure’.) It had all been leading up to me.

  She had such faith.

  vi

  The shoot broke down into the usual chaos. There were taunts and ultimatums. Silvija and I walked. We decided to go instead and rob some Americans. There was a roost of them in our building. They were on the floor directly beneath the studio. We could hear the insect trilling of their talk down there.

  ‘When the Americans appear,’ Silvija said, ‘it means that Berlin is officially over. May it rest in peace. Amen.’

  Daily, the gauche and Conversed hordes priced out of San Francisco and Brooklyn were arriving, with their positivity, their excellent teeth and their MFAs. They could be spotted a mile off in the clubs – their clothes were wrong, their hair was appalling and their dancing was just terrible.

  We rang the bell on their apartment. We listened. It was empty – they must have been out photographing the TV tower or taking rides in the tourist-rental Trabants. We went upstairs to our studio and shinned down from the studio balcony to theirs. We quickly made through the place. We found eight hundred dollars in the drawer of a vanity and two passports – Becky Cobb and Corey Mutz, in chunky retro eyewear both – and we took these also. There was a price to be had for American passports from the Ukrainians who drank at Dieter’s. We left the way we had come – Silvija climbed like a jungle cat; I laboured. But we made it, and we went and had us a royal day on the town.

  In a vast Old German-type trough, we stuffed ourselves with many potato-based dishes and many enormous sausages. We drank exquisite Burgundy and Bavarian whisky. And pils. We touched each other beneath the tablecloth. What Silvija could do with her toes was extraordinary. She taught me, phonetically, the choruses of some enchanting childhood songs of the steppe.

  ‘But what are these songs about?’ I asked.

  ‘Mostly they are about oxen and death,’ she said.

  We left the restaurant and went to Dieter’s. It was a low bar on Schönhauser Allee, and there we had more pils and a rendezvous with the scarred and mysterious Hoods of Kiev. These were among the characters lately populating my stories but I could get them only palely. There was no way to render with a still-callow pen the force of intrigue stored in the black heat of Victor’s eyes, nor the sexual languidity in the way that Xcess (as she styled herself) drained her glass, nor the … I just couldn’t get it down right. We made another two hundred euro from the passports. We left the bar and walked down the street – the plan was to buy some new and impractical shoes. There was the rumble above us of the elevated trains. I complained at the lack of true lustre in my stories. Silvija sighed and stopped up on the pavement and she took hold of my elbow. She gave me one of her statements or manifestos, then, one of her great orations on the Nature of Art:

  ‘When you are worried, that is when you are working. When you are doing nothing, that is when the work is happening. It does not happen in the front section of the brain, Patrick. It happens in back section. Here is the subconscious level. This is the place the story come from. You just have to let it happen. Liberate yourself! If it is going to come, it will come. You just make yourself available and open to it. If it comes good, some day, it comes good. Champagne! But you have no power over it. It is all involving luck. When it feels like nothing is happening, that is when it is all happening. And remember that when you are worried, you are working.’

  Still I search for a more succinct explanation of how it all occurs, but I know I will not find one.

  vii

  It was in odd scraps and rags that Silvija’s own story came through to me. Mostly in the small hours, when deep in her cups and whuzzled from the hashpipe, when in that borderland between wakefulness and sleeping, with her eyes half closed, wrapped in blankets against the night chill, this is when she would tell me of the viking-level horrors she had witnessed and been a part of: the rape, the pillage, the evil marauding. War-lands I could not imagine. And Silvija as a scared child among it all – Silvija scared was even harder to imagine. Such a story I had in my selfish way yearned for – maybe I could steal it, and recast it, and it would lend my work the gravitas it lacked; writers are such maggots, especially the young ones – but as she fed it to me in these night-time crumbs, I could not even begin to process the detail. I have made myself forget most of it. I know that she had as a kid dispensed blow jobs for soup money. She had been tied up in a facility once and brutalised with a broom handle. She had escaped but only to long broken years trailing madly through the squats of Barcelona (held captive once by a Sudanese in El Born, she had been made to eat catfoo
d) and then there was a period of homelessness in Genoa (she cracked up and became obsessed with reading the words of the streetname signs backwards – Via Garibaldi … Idlabirag) and it was Berlin before she recovered, it was Berlin where she found her talents and the balance of her humours and the makings of a hard shell.

  Nights at the studio she would go to the bathroom and spit blood in the sink. She would wash it away but I would find on the porcelain smeared traces in the mornings.

  viii

  The summer deepened, and our days became toned with sadness, and other, unnameable things. I sat up in bed one morning, smoking. I tapped the ash into an empty pils bottle. Silvija squatted on her heels on the couch, in her underwear, battering the laptop – she had a wide circle of acquaintance, 80 per cent of which she was feuding with at any given time. The light poured in from the climbing sun, and caught her bare, brown muscles. The windfall from the Americans and the passports was long since consumed and we were again in the depths of poverty, but we looked pretty good poor. The Wedding scene was slow, due to the season and the usual inclemence of luck that afflicted the fashion people: the arrests, the random plagues, the near-death experiences. This particular morning, there was something like shyness between us. Briefly, in the night, Silvija’s strict no-penetration dictat had been lifted. I knew even at the moment it was a mistake, despite the luxuriousness of the sensation. I could feel the scaredness in her. I knew that it would never happen again. And I knew in my heart that I just wasn’t working out as a lesbian. I was too clumsy and knuckly.

  Not that she didn’t walk with me the hot summer streets of noon, and not that she didn’t teach me, and not that she didn’t give me something, just a tiny sustaining something, of her great aura.

  I believe it was that same day, in the beer garden on Kastanienallee, that she turned the camera on me, there beneath the chestnut trees in full leaf, and I was shy of the lens and awkward but she told me what to do.