The Pages

by Hugo Hamilton

  A new customer enters the barber shop and sits down on the waiting bench beside Armin. He is in his forties. His leather jacket makes a squeaking noise as he grabs me out of Armin’s hands and begins leafing through the pages. He takes the money I’ve been storing and counts it, then he puts it away in the inside pocket of his jacket.

  What’s a Muslim doing reading a book in German?

  I’m not Muslim, Armin replies.

  You were born Muslim, the man says. Chechnya, right? You can’t just take it off like a coat. You can’t just leave it behind on the bus and say it’s not mine. You’re a Muslim until you die, my friend.

  I grew up here, Armin says.

  It’s in your shit.

  The man is clearly not a reader himself. He doesn’t even want to know what the story is about. The life of a barrel organ player is hardly going to interest him. He uses me to scratch his thigh.

  Tell your sister, he says, she’s a beautiful woman. I love her. I don’t even see what she’s missing. In all honesty, it’s not something that ever bothered me. A lot of other men wouldn’t want that.

  Armin makes no reply.

  Tell Madina from me, I’m the only man who loves her for who she is.

  Armin refuses to be drawn.

  It was me who set her up, the man says. Without me she would never have become a singer. I got her off the ground. Don’t let her forget that. Without me she is nothing.

  He stands up and reaches over to borrow a razor from the counter.

  Excuse me, he says to the barber. Just for one second.

  He begins neatly cutting out one of the pages from the middle of the story. The pain is something else. Now I know what it was like for Effi Briest. It happens to be the page where the barrel organ player gets in trouble on the tram. Where the businessman refuses to make room for him and he’s forced to fight his way on board, only to be called a faker. Where he’s called a Jew and immediately seen as the aggressor. A peace-loving man cast out of the community. For allowing his anger to show on the streetcar, for raising his crutch in retaliation, he will be charged with public disorder and forfeit his right to happiness.

  This page contains my author’s entire worldview on social injustice.

  The man folds the page he has just cut out and places it alongside the money in his pocket. A part of myself has been amputated now, like a severed limb. Any sales description would need to include my true condition. Slight water damage. A spot of thief’s blood. A trace of rat’s urine containing Weil’s disease. A hand-drawn map, as well as a wide selection of thumbprints, dead and alive. Not to mention that faint smoke inhalation from the night of burning books.

  And now, this vital page missing.

  Before he hands me back to Armin, a flyer falls out from in between my pages and he picks it up from the floor. He takes his time to examine it before he puts it back inside again.

  Gallery Fernreich is pleased to invite you to the opening of an exhibition of new work by Christiane Wartenberg. The collection is being launched by Tagesspiegel critic Ronald Kolterman. Auguststrasse 89. Mitte. Drinks – 5.30 p.m.

  He stands up and raps his knuckles on the wall behind Armin’s head. Armin sits in a dream, watching him stepping out into the street and going out of sight. One of the barber seats becomes vacant. The barber slaps the chair to let Armin know it’s his turn now to be a man.

  11

  We go in off the street through the courtyard. The sound of drumming can be heard coming from one of the apartments, followed by the explosive rip of an electric guitar and the howl of a mouth organ. A shuffle of notes blowing through the staircase in the house at the rear. On his way up, Armin is spoken to by an old man who says – this has got to stop, this noise. I have an underlying lung condition. Look, I work on a capacity of forty per cent, you probably have eighty per cent. I wear this oxygen generator all day. See this fucking tube, the old man says, if I didn’t have this under my nostrils I would collapse.

  They’re going on tour very soon, Armin says. They’re only in Berlin until Monday week.

  I can’t eat while this is going on.

  Why not?

  It’s too unsettling.

  The old man with his pulmonary condition is right. Music gets into the lungs. He’s got his own harmonica solo keeping him company day and night with a run of howling notes. I have the incessant wheezing of a barrel organ coming from inside my chest.

  Armin opens a door and the full volume bursts out like a physical assault. The musicians carry on playing while he goes over to kiss his sister, Madina. She is playing the guitar and doesn’t even stop for a second, talking to him without losing a beat. Keeping the rhythm going like two separate rooms in her head, one for music, one for language.

  The harmonica player has the lungs of a whale. He submerges himself into a recurring riff with his eyes closed. He seems to have no need to refill his lungs. He has the power of a dozen oxygen generators. He is like a diver who is able to reach inhuman depths underwater. Nowhere can you detect where he breathes in, as if his respiratory system replenishes the oxygen from an unknown source. In a further insult to the pulmonarily challenged man downstairs, he’s a smoker. And it’s clear why the old man with the tube in his nostrils is so upset. It’s lung envy. He wishes he could squander a breath, even one puff.

  The music stops. The musicians lay down their instruments like a ceasefire and go out for something to eat, leaving Madina alone with Armin. The man downstairs must be breathing like a whale. The silence spreads like clean, unused air down the staircase, out into the courtyard.

  I met him, Armin says to his sister.

  Uli?

  I paid him.

  Jesus. You should have ignored him.

  He follows me around.

  How much?

  It’s nothing, Armin says. All done now, you don’t have to worry.

  Madina sits down behind the drum set. She picks up the drumsticks and unleashes a sudden rage, lashing out in all directions, right to left and back again.

  The money has nothing to do with it, she says. He’s getting his revenge for me bringing this fucked-up relationship with him to an end. Like I’ve taken something from him that he owned. And you know what, this is the funny part, Armin. He’s married. I only found that out recently. He’s married with two kids. What does that tell you?

  She gives the bass drum a solid kick.

  He even got me to go for counselling, she says. I had to attend a group therapist, like it was my problem that his affair was not going well.

  Armin sits down on one of the speakers.

  It’s alright, he says. He’s been paid off.

  That’s what kills me, she says. I’ve already paid him back. I booked his flight to Warsaw. His hotel cost me a fortune, well over what he ever spent on that guitar.

  You owe him nothing, Madi.

  I don’t know who he met in Poland, she says, or what they put into his head. When he came back, his language was altered. Spouting all this stuff about white Europe, closing borders and not letting any more in. Migrants are only good for wiping the asses of an ageing population. I had to remind him that his own father was Russian – Bogdanov.

  That’s his pressure point.

  He started calling me his Chechen girlfriend. Chechnya. Where is that? We hardly know where it is, right. It’s irrelevant where I come from. He calls me his little migrant girl. His Muslim chick. Have you ever seen me pray, Armin? Have you ever seen me wearing a veil? We don’t know a word of the Koran, right?

  The drumsticks are threatening to go again. She does the initial click-click to signal another number coming up, then she holds back.

  He made me feel accepted, she says. Like some kind of endorsement. He was validating me, as an artist. As a human being. Made me feel I belonged here like everyone else. He was good at saying there was nothing wro
ng with me. Good at telling me that he loved me the way I was, you don’t notice anything missing when you’re in bed. You know what that is, Armin – controlling. Passive aggression. Humiliation by praise. Every time he overlooked my disability, every time he watched me getting dressed and said I was beautiful regardless, it was a punch in the stomach.

  Used to put on that song – ‘Perfect’. Like a joke.

  Then he wants a refund, she says. And now I find out he’s married. I got his phone one night when he was drunk. I had to check out who his new friends were.

  Madina drops the drumsticks and walks across the room to embrace her brother.

  I’ll pay you back.

  She picks up the guitar and begins to strum a steady rhythm. A single power chord over and over. Along with the beat, like a spoken lyric, she talks about their adoptive father in Frankfurt and how he used to tell her to put her anger into her art.

  12

  There is a photo of my author as a small boy, looking like a girl. Joseph Roth with dropping blond curls and a round hat on top of his head, a four-year-old cavalryman sitting on a wooden horse holding a stick.

  He came from a place in the East where the Austro-Hungarian cavalry frequently rode through his town. A place called Brody, close to the Russian border. He kept the sound of hoofs in his head. His childhood landscape was like a Chagall painting, with fiddle players and weddings in the sky. Old Jewish men with beards and black coats. Men selling roasted chestnuts on the corner. The moon looked in the window at night and laid snow out on the roofs. A cold hand on his mouth as he went to school. The window frames shrank and swelled with the seasons, letting in the heat in summer and the ice in winter. The lives of people living indoors was not unlike the lives of people on the move. They boiled potatoes in the fields every autumn and ate strawberries with mud on them in spring.

  Juice and mud, exploding in his memory.

  In his own words, he grew up with the Gypsies of the Hungarian Puszta, the sub-Carpathian Hutsuls, the Jewish cab drivers of Galicia, the Slovenian chestnut roasters from Šipolje, the Swabian tobacco growers from Bačka, the horse breeders of the steppe, the Ottoman Siberians, the traders from Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Hanakian horse dealers from Moravia, the weavers of the Ore Mountains, the millers and the coral sellers of Podolia.

  An unusual child?

  The only son of a single mother. Not much of an athlete, more bookish. He kept pet spiders in his room and fed them flies. Going to sleep, he imitated the sound of hoofs. His fingers were covered in ink. His handwriting was tiny, like needlepoint. At school he got the better of his classmates by copying out an entire poem by Schiller on the back of a postage stamp. He told them his father was good with horses. Fabrication became necessity. He needed a story to go out the door with and so he became the boy novelist who told them his father was a horseman, a cab driver, a Polish officer, a drunkard, a thief, a vagrant, a madman.

  Seventeen different versions, they counted.

  The truth was that he never met his father. Maybe that’s what happens to all men, he must have thought growing up: they fall in love and go insane. After love there is nothing but fatal illness and death. The loss of his father would become a hidden story, stitched into his characters, writing as his own form of love-madness.

  His mother sang sad Ukrainian songs. Dependent on the help of relatives, she pinned her hopes on this gifted child and loved him like an overheated room. A son to compensate for lost dreams. She kept him to herself inside the parameters of a legend, never allowing anyone to come and visit. He loved walking along the wall by the graveyard, looking at the tombstones, but she wanted him to stay at home.

  My author has her in his books – a mother who conceals her scheming in tiny complaints about jam. Crystals of sugar starting to form over winter storage. She begins a curse that she cannot allow herself to finish. Her sorrow spreads in hardened glucose across the bread in the morning. Rooms with withered violets and sputtering candles. The manure of horses in the street. Pedlars coming to the door with rain in their coats. A landscape of brown leaves that turns to snow and mush and spring again. Time to go searching for strawberries, even though the foresters will chase the women away and overturn their baskets and stamp the gathered fruit of the empire with their boots. But the forests are so full of strawberries that nobody can stop fresh jam appearing on the table.

  A mother who wears a monocle hanging from her waist and puts it up to her eye in silent accusation, giving her access to his boyhood desires. His thoughts of escaping on the back of one of those cavalry horses off to some distant fringe of the empire. She drops the monocle as though she has seen something unspeakable in his thoughts that cannot be put into words.

  A mother who inhales and sighs.

  A mother who sits down at the piano to play Chopin. Her face lights up like a young girl’s in the candlelight, but when her kind white hands hit the keys, there is no music. The piano remains silent. He raises the lid to look inside and finds the strings have been removed.

  A mother who wants to possess her son like a cashbox and thinks all other women are thieves trying to steal him from her. She will never give her consent for him to love another. He will say that his mother was the only source of happiness he ever knew, but still he runs away to Vienna. He volunteers and goes to war.

  He witnesses the body parts of men distributed around the fields. He comes back to report on the half-men, the men who only partially return, still wearing their military overcoats for warmth, a brigade of beggars and street musicians that look like bits of fog moving through the city.

  Everywhere, that asthmatic whine of the barrel organ.

  And Friederike.

  He meets her in a café in Vienna. She’s eighteen. She’s with a friend. After an exchange of jokes, he runs out into the street after her to get her name – Friederike Reichel. Her laughter is infectious. Her dark hair is cut short, dropping in a straight fringe across her forehead. Her eyes are full of provocation. She has already promised herself to another man, but that will not stop her changing her mind.

  She’s afraid to tell him that she is Jewish, in case he might not like her. He tells her nothing about being Jewish either, until he finally meets her parents, then he calls them his mother and father.

  He goes to see his own mother, dying of cancer in a Viennese hospital. Surgeons have removed her uterus and she is in extreme pain, but she notices that his shirt is torn and gets up to mend it. She wants him to look right. When she’s finished, she climbs back into bed and dies. Once her body is taken away for burial, he learns that the medical staff have kept her uterus for examination, so he wants to see it with his own eyes. He stands there saying goodbye to his mother’s womb in a kidney-shaped dish.

  His Jewish place of origin, with lovers flying over the rooftops and strawberries bursting with mud and potato fires burning in the sky and the roast chestnut vendor arriving in town with his dog-drawn cart.

  They will call him a perpetual traveller. His letters reveal how frequently he can cross the city like a bird. He avoids public transport and prefers to walk so he can talk to people in the street as if the world is full of relatives. He is more at home in hotel rooms now, with a small suitcase by the door containing the most essential things – some clothes, cravats, a notepad and a dozen sharpened pencils.

  He loves Friederike like no other.

  Frieda.

  Friedl.

  There is little time left. They must live urgently. A quiet Jewish wedding – Joseph and Frieda – in happiness beyond imagining. He takes her to Berlin. They stay in hotels and eat out in restaurants, like a honeymoon for eternity. She accompanies him on assignments. Sometimes he leaves her alone in her room and comes back late. There is something fragile about her health that is like a forecast of the time they live in. Like some unknown illness spreading through the streets.

  In a letter to his cou
sin, she writes to say that she’s been having some trouble with her arm. My arm got very bad, she writes, and hurt a lot. The swelling has begun to go down at last. She still has a cough and takes a hot bath, aspirin, gets into bed to sweat it off. She’s worried about him. He’s gone out to the theatre. It’s already twelve midnight, she writes, and he’s not back yet – what do you think of that, shocking!

  13

  He likes watches. He cannot walk past a jeweller’s shop without stopping to stare in the window. He spends the money earned from writing newspaper columns on a new watch, then he goes for a drink to celebrate, proudly taking it out to make sure it’s still working. Then he brings it back to the hotel and takes it apart, just to see how it’s made.

  Friederike observes him laying the microscopic parts out on the bed one by one. Each component placed in order on the white sheet like parts of his mind. The world reduced to these tiny metal fragments in a hotel bedroom next to the train station. The sound of a late train arriving from the East bearing the scars of giant hailstones on its roof. People with suitcases checking in downstairs. The rattle of a key in a door.

  How is he going to put all those fragments back together?

  He can read what’s coming.

  There is a weakness in the people after the war. They are open to slogans. The boundaries between fact and fiction have become so dissolved it’s hard to tell the difference. As if people have now developed an appetite for dishonesty. The lies they like to hear. Rogue words to match their resentment. They want the blame for their losses to be placed on the vulnerable, the unwelcome, those from elsewhere.

  He has been out collecting what he sees. The streets are filled with people like the organ grinder playing the national anthem on demand. Refugees in police stations needing help to fill in the forms. Paramilitary gangs fighting in the courtyards. The trial of the assassins who murdered the Jewish foreign minister Walther Rathenau. And the trial of the Munich Beer Hall Putsch, which has turned Germany into a carnival. The tomb of history, he calls it, out of which the dead have arisen and made their way into court to speak up for Hitler. A grotesque dream which the people have begun to accept with indifference.