What?
Lena laughs.
It’s a German expression, he says. My mother said it from time to time. I suppose it comes from children using the household brush to pretend it’s a gun. You know, building a barricade of chairs in the kitchen and hunching down to defend their territory. It’s usually said as a warning, I think. Like, harmless things don’t stay harmless. If you pretend something is a weapon, sooner or later it might turn out to be one. Or maybe, if you imagine something bad, who knows, it might become what you imagined.
Shoot the brush, Lena says.
I’m not joking, Armin says. I’ve heard my boss say it recently. One of our colleagues was talking about his wife meeting her former husband for a drink, just to chat about the children from that earlier marriage. The boss told him to watch out, sometimes the brush shoots, but the man whose wife was meeting her former husband said – don’t worry, it’s me who’s holding the brush.
They come to a bridge and Armin leans over the wall to look at the water below. There are people sitting on benches along the bank, some still wearing light clothing in the sun, holding on to the summer. A child throwing stones into the water. Lena wonders if they should get on one of the boats and go up to the lake. She speaks as though this might be the last opportunity available. Like the world is full of shrinking possibilities, it’s their obligation to get the most out of it before everything turns into memory.
You could walk there faster, Armin says.
When they get to Lena’s studio, she takes me out of her bag and lies down on the bed. Behind her, over the bed, there is a skylight through which the light of the afternoon comes flooding down around her. She examines the map and wonders, as Armin walks around the room – is there something buried there, what do you think? Armin comes to lie on the bed beside her to have a look.
I am happy for them.
The room returns to stillness. As if they’re waiting for the red glow of the sun to fade and darkness to fall, before they can resume their lives. He tells her that he’s got to get a few things done before he goes on tour with his sister.
I need to get a new X-ray, Armin says.
What for?
They won’t let me travel without a certificate. The shrapnel, he says. Sets off alarms at the airport.
Armin tells her about a man he met some time ago who was turned back in mid-air with metal pins in his leg. He’s from Nigeria, he says. He had a gunshot wound in his knee and managed to make his way to Ireland, where he was operated on at one of the main hospitals. Then he found himself being deported back to Nigeria because he was unable to produce any evidence of persecution other than his injuries. A human rights lawyer took up his defence and argued in court that they had no right to deport him because the bolts and screws in his knee were the property of the hospital. Quite apart from their indifference to the man’s uncertain future, the lawyer said, the immigration officials were, in fact, committing an act of larceny by exporting hospital property without consent. On top of that, there appeared to be no medical experts in Nigeria qualified to remove the complex metal structures from his leg, so the man would have suffered for the rest of his life in terrible agony.
The judge rejected the plea and the deportation officers came to collect the man while he was still on crutches. An officer boarded the flight with him, that’s the way it works, Armin says, the deported individual has to be delivered into the hands of the police in the country to which he is being returned. In any case, Armin says, the Frontex flight was turned back over Algerian airspace. The immigration officials in Ireland were there to welcome him back just a couple of hours after he left. They had to wait for an appointment at the hospital before the bolts could be removed and he could be deported successfully.
In the end, Armin says, his lawyer in Dublin pursued a case against the state on his behalf and managed to have him brought back from Nigeria. He’s living in Ireland now. Eventually they gave him citizenship.
Through the skylight it is possible to see the clock tower, lit up as the evening light fades. The clock has a black face and gold-painted hands, no numerals. Armin stands up to look out and see what the time is.
Let’s go and eat something, he says.
The X-ray, Lena says. Could I have a copy of it?
What for?
Do you think they might give us a copy?
We can ask, he says.
It’s your body. You’re the patient, you have a right to demand it.
It belongs to the hospital, Armin says. Like the bolts and screws in my friend’s legs. My body is my copyright, but the radiology image is their property.
We’ll have to steal it, Lena says.
Why?
My art, she says.
You want to use it?
If that’s OK with you, Armin. I want it for my work. A life-size image is what I have in mind. Your X-ray will be the focal point, with all that shrapnel, jagged and black inside. The story of a man reconstructed from several locations.
Cool, Armin says.
Are you sure it’s OK with you?
Absolutely, he says. I’m with you all the way. You distract them and I’ll download a copy.
He laughs – don’t worry, they’ll give me the file.
Lena kisses him. They go out for something to eat and I hear the door closing after them. The room is silent. The city has come to life with the sounds of night and there is a yellow glow coming in through the skylight across the floor. The clock tower chimes. I have been left behind on a broad desk along with the pineapple and a small stack of books.
At the bottom of the pile, there is a book by a Russian journalist who was murdered for telling the truth. Her life had been in danger for some time and she had been subjected to many acts of intimidation and violence, even poisoned, even once put through a simulated execution when they brought her out on a pitch-black night and fired a rocket launcher directly over her head. All because of her reporting on the war in Chechnya. Despite those threats, she continued searching for the truth, bringing the facts to light in her articles for a free Moscow newspaper. And because the truth could not be silenced in any other way, she was shot in the elevator of her apartment block one day. It happened to be Vladimir Putin’s birthday. She was shot four times by a man who got into the elevator with her. Twice in the chest, once in the shoulder and once more in the head at point-blank range. It is assumed that her killing was carried out on orders from the top, for her outspoken work on the Chechen War, for speaking the truth about Russia, for not giving up.
Her name is Anna Politkovskaya. The book is called A Small Corner of Hell.
Her first-hand account of the conditions during the Second Chechen War describes the country as a commercial concentration camp. Villages are locked down. Children become mute after bombings. The Feds, as the Russian troops are known, will not even let people out into the woods to collect wild garlic, their only source of vitamins. The inhabitants of these poor villages pay ransom fees to have their loved ones released from the pits in which they are kept by the military. People go around collecting money to save a neighbour from being killed. A woman is asked for fifty thousand dollars before a surgeon will agree to operate on her injured husband. His skull is an open wound. She has no money. She is forced to look for a friendly taxi driver who might bring him into Grozny. The capital is blockaded, nobody can move. Every morning women stand outside a detention centre to plead for their loved ones. Each one of them is given a price to pay for the release of her husband. If she doesn’t pay, the figure goes up, because the price of a corpse is higher in Chechnya than the price of a living person. She describes a group of women gathered around a table, sitting out the curfew through the night, listening to the sound of distant shelling.
The women at the table do not cry, although they would like to. You rarely hear crying in Grozny. They’ve all cried their eyes out long ag
o.
And the children’s hospital.
In the words of the head doctor, Ruslan Ganayev –
As soon as the blockade started, the parents grabbed their children and tried to make their way to the villages to hide from the shooting and the purges. They even took some kids from the resuscitation wards. They simply took out the tubes and carried them away. We had a girl with infantile cerebral paralysis in traction – they took her off it. The only patient we have left in the whole hospital now is a three-month-old, Salavat Khamikov from Alkhan-Kala.
40
The catering was done by a Spanish restaurant. The wine was delivered by the usual Italian dealer, though nobody drinks very much at these meetings any more. Julia had decided against holding her book club at the Joseph Roth Café – it would have been too noisy. She had opted instead to hold it at the gallery, with a few comfortable chairs set in a circle, and soft lighting arranged around the room. In the centre she had placed a bouquet of flowers on a wide coffee table, along with a stack of books from previous meetings. The book club journal containing earlier entries was lying open on a new page.
The title had already been entered – Rebellion.
This was it – the psychoanalysis. The trial by book club. On the wall there was an enlarged projection of the first-edition cover with the image of a cripple waving his crutch at his own shadow. A photo also of Joseph Roth in his early days, wearing a cravat and an expression of amusement and curiosity, before he started drinking himself to death.
The guests stood around helping themselves to the food.
The servings were made appealing in tapas portions. There was a vegan platter with schnitzel made of aubergine as well as some dishes from a local Israeli-Palestinian restaurant with houmous and baba ghanoush. A further table laid with coffee and desserts, small slices of brownie and apple strudel.
Julia asked if anyone had seen the production at the Schaubühne theatre where the actor took off his clothes at the end of the play and turned himself into a human schnitzel, rolling around the stage in egg and flour and breadcrumbs – he left his underpants on, thank God.
Guten Appetit, she then added.
Lena is a New York artist on loan to Berlin, Julia announced to the book club members by way of introduction. Two of the other members couldn’t make it, so there was Sabina Wilfried, a schoolteacher from Stuttgart originally. Valerie Crosthwaite from the UK, now living in Berlin, running an online medical practice. Renate Frohn, an old friend of Julia’s from school, also working in culture management. Yanis Stephanopoulos, he moved to Berlin from Greece, Julia said, but don’t mention Greece, please, he hates anything to do with his own country. She put her arm around him and said – look at him frowning already. And finally, Jürgen Kohl, a psychoanalyst, Julia said, specializing in marriage counselling. His wife Zeta is Croatian, they have two of the most beautiful children you have ever seen in your life.
Julia took out her phone and showed Lena a photo.
Guess who that is?
It’s a grab from Spiegel TV, Julia said. October the ninth, 1989. Bösebrücke. The famous Berlin Wall crossing at the Bornholmer Strasse. That’s the bridge in the song by David Bowie – ‘Where Are We Now?’
Lena examined the photo. It showed a crowd of people on the move, making their way across the bridge for the first time, just after the Wall fell and the barriers were opened. The people are smiling, mostly young, eager, hopeful, everybody talking. There is a tall man among them, in his twenties, wearing a black bomber jacket and carrying a shoulder bag. He has a bottle of beer in his hand, turning back to say something to a border guard in passing.
Julia pointed to Jürgen. That’s him, right here, she said. He was the hundredth person to cross the bridge that night, am I right, Jürgen?
Jürgen nodded.
Lena smiled – yes, now I see the resemblance.
He’s a piece of walking history, Julia said. Look at the clothes, Lena. And the hair. What was it you were saying to the border guard?
I was telling him to get stuffed, Jürgen said.
Number one hundred, Julia said. Of twenty thousand. And how many millions more since then.
I’m sorry I wasn’t the first.
I love that photo, Julia said.
Once everyone was sitting down, Julia opened the meeting with a formal touch, naming the author and the book, still in print in multiple editions. While I was being passed around, hand to hand, she mentioned the fact that I had been rescued from the book-burning by Lena’s grandfather. Sabina asked if the swastika was from that time and Lena explained it was a recent addition, the page had been cut out.
The conversation stayed with the book-burning and Sabina mentioned a special collection of books housed at the university in Augsburg. After the war, a businessman had gone around spending his money buying books banned by the Nazis until his house was filled with them, and after he died the collection had been taken up by the university.
OK, Julia said. Let’s have a look at the contents of the novel first. Renate, would you mind.
Renate began to summarize the story of Andreas Pum. He has lost his leg in action during the First World War and finds himself in a military hospital in Vienna. I wasn’t sure it was Vienna, she added. Pestalozzistrasse is in Berlin.
Renate said the author seemed to have no intention of producing a realistic narrative – the story is more like a legend in which a law-abiding barrel organ player is the unwitting victim of intolerance on a tram. He loses his busking licence, causing his marriage to disintegrate. After spending time in jail, his only friend in the world, Willi, the former sausage thief, offers him a job as a toilet attendant in a fancy restaurant. He lives out his days in the men’s toilets with a parrot that says hello to all the customers coming in.
He dies in the act of rebellion. He declares himself a heathen. With nobody listening but the parrot, he makes a final speech to the empty cubicles, rebelling against the whole world around him – his country, the state, the nation, God, religion, politics, the war, the society for whom he lost his leg, everyone who has contributed to his undoing.
A character rebelling against his own author?
He turns down an offer of a plush job in heaven and says – give me hell.
The suggestion was made by Yanis that Samuel Beckett might have written something like this. A toilet attendant growing old overnight in the company of his parrot.
Some of them had seen the movie version made by the Austrian director Michael Haneke, in which the organ grinder is played by an actor who has a cast in his eye. This makes him look tragic, more like a helpless boy. A prison scene shows him walking around the exercise yard with chickens pecking at the ground as though they were fellow inmates.
Jürgen went to the table to refill his plate.
Valerie said she felt the story was trapped in a male viewpoint.
It was written a hundred years ago, Yanis said.
Lusting after women with big breasts and wide hips.
What’s wrong with that? Julia said.
Jürgen turned back from the table and said – men rely a lot on visual stimulation.
It’s all so dead white male, Valerie said.
Jewish, on-the-run-from-the-Nazis, dead white male, Yanis reminded her.
Look, Valerie said, it’s a nice book. I hate running it down. But I have issues with the male character being cast out by the woman. She’s to blame for his downfall. That’s a misogynist view, I’m afraid.
I’ve been kicked out by a couple of women over the years, Julia laughed.
It’s all men alone, Valerie continued. Men on trial. Men in graveyards. Men looking at the human condition as though it’s the woman’s fault.
Look at his masterpiece on the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Valerie continued. The Radetzky March. A young cadet, Trotta, seduced by the sergeant’s wife
when he’s fifteen. She unbuttons his tunic and pulls him into the bedroom, kicking the door shut with her foot, as I remember it. It’s a good scene, but it all goes back to that basic witchcraft view of a woman’s power to corrupt.
There was a silence.
Could I make this point, Jürgen stepped in. He returned to his seat in the circle and held a piece of sweet potato up on his fork like a microphone. In my view, he said, it may have less to do with gender difference than with a more fundamental mismatch of human expectations.
I have it all the time in my practice, he said. I deal with a lot of male dysfunction. Lots of control freaks. Men full of narcissism. Men full of regret. Men who get blamed for not initiating. Men whose performance can be undermined by a sigh. The wrong word at the wrong time. I’m not breaking any confidentiality here. I had a man the other day who left his wife and child stranded on the autobahn for something she said about his dick. I have another man who claims his partner checked her phone during sex. I have a client who came home last week to find his ex-wife having sex with a man on the living room floor – that’s ten years after they got divorced, she still had the key.
I’m getting sidetracked here, Jürgen said. What I’m saying is that sometimes male inadequacy leads to aggression. Other men just bottle it up.
Renate said – please, Julia, take away those cashew nuts. Once I start eating them, I can’t stop.
They took a moment to praise the food. Yanis said he never imagined houmous would go so well with calamari. I am going to hand it to you, Julia, the food is amazing. They got swept away into a further discussion about favourite restaurants. Sabina asked if anyone had been to the Russian restaurant near the Gendarmenmarkt, it’s quite spectacular.
What is this, a foodie club? I wanted to ask.
Sabina followed on from the Russian restaurant and said – let me tell you something about my husband. Klaus. I drove him mad this morning. I made the coffee and forgot to put the pot underneath the spout. It leaked across the kitchen counter. I thought it was funny. It was so stupid I started laughing. I even took a video of the coffee dripping down onto the floor and sent it off to my friends.
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