Copyright
4th Estate
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This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2021
Copyright © Hugo Hamilton 2021
Hugo Hamilton asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Information on previously published material appears here
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 978-0008451660
Ebook Edition © July 2021 ISBN: 9780008451684
Version: 2021-06-03
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
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Author’s Note
Also by Hugo Hamilton
About the Author
About the Publisher
1
Here I am, stored inside a piece of hand luggage, being carried through the departure lounge at JFK airport. The owner of the bag is a young woman by the name of Lena Knecht. She is getting on a flight to Europe. Bringing me home, so to speak. Back to Berlin, the city in which I was written. Where I was first printed by a small publishing house almost a hundred years ago, in 1924. Where I was rescued from the fire on the night of the book-burning in May 1933. The city from which my author fled the day Hitler came to power.
My homeless author. My restless, refugee, itinerant, stateless writer on the run. Living out of a suitcase. Fleeing for his life.
His name – Joseph Roth.
The title – Rebellion.
I was born –
I came to life – between the wars. During the Weimar Republic – what they call the waiting room between the First World War and the Second World War. Between what was first thought to be the fields of honour and later became the fields of shame. A time of orphans and child poverty. Women running the cities while men were left behind on the battlefield. Defeated men who came back missing limbs and needed help to bring beer to their lips. Men with nightmares of decomposing hands emerging from the trenches. Cold winters they called God’s fist sweeping across from the East. And hunger in the blank expression of a tram conductor munching on a box of chocolates left behind by a passenger after the cinema.
A time of hardship and glamour. A time of revolution. Emancipation, cabaret – love and art without rules.
Everybody was in a club. Everybody wanted to belong to groups and social federations – chess clubs, dancing clubs, dog-breeding clubs, stamp-collecting clubs, orchid-growing clubs. Women’s fraternities. Gentlemen’s fraternities. Hunting clubs. Drinking clubs. Laughing clubs. Prankster clubs in which members challenged each other to look stupid and eat too much, or reward a passing pedestrian for permission to pour a bottle of wine into the pocket of his trousers.
Everybody was in a league or a trade union. The League of Blinded Warriors. The Association of Newspaper Vendors. The Central Association of German Watchmakers. The League of German Butchers. The League of German Brewers. The League of German Canteen Leaseholders.
Everybody was against something. Everybody had a manifesto. Right and Left. A time of envy and grievance and clubs with closed membership. When a book was no longer safe. When Hitler was already busy plotting to eliminate me and my author, and his people.
What does time mean to a book?
A book has all the time in the world. My shelf life is infinite. My second-hand value is modest. Some devoted collector might pick me up for a few dollars on eBay and keep me like a species gone into extinction. Rebellion – I have been reprinted many times. Translated into many languages. Scholars can find me in most libraries. Twice I was turned into a movie.
But here I am in person, first edition, slightly bashed up and faded. Readable as ever. A short novel about a barrel organ player who lost his leg in the First World War. The cover image shows the silhouette figure of a man with a wooden leg raising his crutch in anger at his own shadow.
Lena, my present owner, has the habit of throwing things into her bag in a congested heap – passport, purse, mobile phone, make-up, medical things, a frayed toy duck she’s had since childhood, along with a partially eaten pastry. Here I am, living in a dark sack with these fellow travellers, all hoping to be brought into the light of day when her blind hand comes diving down.
Mostly it’s her phone she picks out. How can a book compete with such an intelligent piece of equipment? It contains her whole life. All her private details, her photographs, her passwords, her intimate messages. It knows her mind and shapes her decisions. It does everything a book used to do. It behaves like an unfinished novel, constantly in progress, guessing her worst fears and her wildest dreams.
Her father was German, but he didn’t speak the language to her. He was a baker from East Germany who arrived in the USA after the Berlin Wall came down and denied his mother tongue, didn’t want to be known as German. His eyebrows were often covered in flour. He came home from work with white eyelashes. And white floury hands that gave him the appearance of a ghost, alive and moving, his inner being left behind in a country that no longer existed. Her parents became uncoupled when she was around twelve. Her mother went back to live in Ireland and Lena stayed with her father in a two-roomed apartment in a suburb of Philadelphia that smelled of yeast. Where I was kept in a bookcase by the door, unread, unborrowed, until I was handed over to Lena one evening when her father was dying of cancer. In a slow voice that held on to the accent of a lost country, he made her promise to take care of me.
Look after this book like a little brother, he said.
Is the past more childish than the present? Does history need to be kept safe like part of the family?
I have been defaced a little. Some annotations were written into the margins by my original owner, a Jewish professor of German literature at the Humboldt University in Berlin. His name was David Glückstein. He drew a map on a blank page at the back. It’s more like a diagram – half-map, half-illustration. No specific location given. It shows a bridge crossing
a stream. A path with an oak tree and a bench underneath. There is a forest to one side of the path and some farm buildings on the other. The shadows cast by the farm buildings have been sketched in as though you’d have to arrive there at the same time of day to recognize the place. It’s a private memory, drawn to remember a day on which the professor stood in the company of the woman he loved, and buried something precious under a sundial to keep it from falling into the wrong hands.
Needless to say, the map has nothing to do with me. It’s not part of the original publication. The sole purpose of a book is to live another day and tell the story ascribed to it by the author. In my case, the story of a man with a barrel organ who is down on his luck.
It could be said that I am lucky to be alive. On the night of the fire in Berlin, with a large crowd of spectators gathered on the opera house square to watch books being burned to death, I somehow managed to escape. While all those human stories were being disfigured by the flames and dispatched as smoke and charred remnants into the night sky above the State Library, the professor looked into the future and handed me over to a young student for safekeeping. The student was Lena Knecht’s grandfather. He kept me hidden inside his coat. That’s how I was rescued and passed down through the family into Lena’s possession, why she is now on a flight back to Berlin to find out where that map leads to.
2
For weeks I lay on the bedside table, silent and inconspicuous. Nothing more than a lifeless object in the room. I was quietly present at night while they lay stretched out, staring at the ceiling, getting their breath back. How can a book match the living? All a book can hope to do is imagine things in words that have once been true in life.
They are not long married – Lena Knecht and Michael Ostowar. Their wedding took place in Ireland. In a small hotel in Kilkenny, they held hands cutting the cake and smudged each other’s faces with a tiny dollop of chocolate as the bride and groom are sometimes expected to do. Their honeymoon kicked off on the west coast, where they stayed a few nights in a lighthouse on Clare Island, waking up to the waves crashing on the rocks below.
They have set up home in the Chelsea district of Manhattan. Lena is an artist and Michael works in cybersecurity. They talk about starting a family.
Let’s have a baby.
As if their lives, their happiness, their sense of belonging to the world, will always remain incomplete without some enduring family context going forward. A baby would give purpose to their emotions. It would turn the intensity of their joy into material evidence.
They’ve had all those ethical discussions about whether it’s right to have a baby at this time. What kind of world would they be sending their child into? What are things going to look like fifty years from now? They can be heard talking about the carrying capacity of the earth. They are fully aware – though he refuses to repeat it even as a joke – of the carbon footprint of a human child being compared to that of twenty-four new cars. They have read the book by Margaret Atwood and seen the TV series about the handmaids being confined as baby machines. They’re big fans of The Matrix. They love anything to do with space travel. Their favourite movie is called Annihilation, about a couple who need to fight through a translucent wall in order to find a way of getting back to each other again. They talk of having a child that might live for two hundred years, maybe longer, an eternal child that would never grow old.
A shout from the future.
On their honeymoon they went to visit art galleries in London and Madrid. It was Lena’s wish to stand in front of Picasso’s masterpiece – Guernica. At the Prado Museum they came across a disturbing painting of Adam and Eve prominently hanging in the main hall. It shows the Garden of Eden with the serpent in the apple tree turning into a smiling baby. What a thought! A human snake-child bringing an end to paradise. Neither of them would have much time for faith-based narratives. To Lena, these biblical tales are no more than a grain of truth turned into art. But she saw in this painting at the Prado some kind of premonition, as though they had been found out. The snake-child was calling time. It’s a cruel fact of life that ecstasy can only exist in the moment it comes to an end. Standing side by side, looking at the snake with the face of an infant grinning at them, they experienced those acute expulsion fears that all lovers go through. There was nothing they could do but talk about having a baby of their own. They would love it to bits and turn themselves into the most devoted parents.
Whenever these conversations take place, she tells Mike he will make a wonderful dad. She wants their baby to be a boy, just like him. But first, she needs to be herself. Her instinct as an artist is to convert everything into a visual story. The presence of a child right now might distract her from that goal.
He fears that her creative pursuits might take away those maternal instincts. He usually rounds off the argument by saying, with a touch of irony – if you want to save the planet, Lena, if that’s your main concern, to make a contribution to this earth, then you better get pregnant right now, don’t waste another minute, because our baby is going to be the next Einstein, or the next Rosalind Franklin, it’s going to be so cute and so clever, it will fix everything.
To which Lena replies with a laugh, tapping her belly – let’s wait a bit. All right with you there, Einstein?
One night, while they lay uncovered on the bed, she became aware of me on the bedside table.
The book, she said, as though there was somebody else in the room. It made her self-conscious, seeing me right beside her like a human presence listening in. An intruder. A watcher. The snake-child.
She picked me up and looked at the image of the shadow man on the cover with his crutch raised in the air. Pulling the duvet around her legs, she sat up and ran the flat of her hand over my face. She read out the title printed in Gothic font, more like handwriting. Die Rebellion – Joseph Roth. The edges scuffed and worn. Faint thumbprints left behind by readers long disappeared from the world. She was unable to read the text of the book in German, but she had already managed to find a translation in the library and read the story of the barrel organ player in English. As she began leafing through the pages, she came across the speck of a mosquito printed like a capital letter in a top right-hand corner. A summer’s day begging to be remembered. The scribbled annotations in the margins made no sense to her. She was more intrigued by the hand-drawn map at the back and allowed her finger to cross the landscape as though she’d entered a fairy tale.
Look, she said, this must be a forest of pine trees. She pointed to a wooden shrine with a pitched roof to shelter the icon from the weather. She found an oak tree and a bench. And here, she wondered – is that a monument of some sort. A sundial, maybe?
Mike became a little irritated by the fact that her mind was elsewhere now, as if a book could have the power to come between them.
There’s something in it, she said.
As she continued studying the map, she was aware of the duty imposed on her by her father. She made up her mind, there and then, to go to Berlin. She had an uncle living in Germany, in the city of Magdeburg. Her father’s brother. He might be in a position to shed some light on that map.
Mike didn’t like the idea of her going. His protest came in the form of praise, reminding her how well her career was going. New York was the place for a young artist like her. It was a mistake to move out of that circle. She told him she needed new energy, new raw materials. This would give her a vision to follow – the life story of a book.
I’ll miss you, Mike said.
In artistic terms, Lena Knecht would describe herself as a thief. Her work makes use of images selected at random from other media. She has been inspired by the famous final frame of a Truffaut film in which a boy runs away from a detention centre. When he reaches the sea and turns around, his static face in that long final shot captures an entire life, all his optimism and all his pain. She looks for those lived expressions online. Her breakout cam
e with a collection called Misfortune – a series of images sampled from minor domestic calamities posted on YouTube. Funny scenes of dogs running into doors, people falling off bikes, children crashing into each other. She picks out the expressions of surprise. By slowing these private moments down into stationary images, she removes the comic element, creating something that is both endearing and grotesque at the same time, what some art commentators have described as the inner despair of a world laughing at its own misfortune.
On the day before her flight to Berlin, she managed to find time to visit MoMA. She stood before a painting by Rothko as if she needed to say goodbye. When they say a piece of art speaks to you, it is understood that some visual energy has been transferred from the work to the viewer. And in reverse, a tiny part of the viewer is transposed into the painting. That Rothko painting must have soaked up a million hearts by now. Just as I have accumulated the inner lives of my readers. Their thoughts have been added in layers underneath the text, turning me into a living thing, with human faculties. I have the ability to remember. I can tell when history is in danger of repeating itself.
3
The mood on the flight is full of optimism. The catering trolley is on its way. Lena’s voice can be heard over the hum of the aircraft. She has fallen into one of those random in-flight conversations with a passenger sitting next to her. They have strayed onto the subject of insects. Driving up from Princeton, the woman beside her says, she arrived at the airport parking facility and was surprised to find there were no insects on the windscreen. She can remember driving home at night with her father and the headlights shining through a cloud of insects. As a child, the woman says, she loved the job of cleaning the car, hosing off the dried flies and moths. Often you had to scrape them off with a stick.
To reciprocate, Lena tells the woman about a time she was on holidays in Ireland, when she left the bedroom window of the cottage in Cork open and woke up in the middle of the night with the room covered in bugs. She had left the light on and by the time she awoke the whole room was moving. All kinds of bugs on the walls, swirling around the light bulb.
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