She began clearing away the soil with her hands. Once she had lifted the metal box out of the ground, Armin helped to clean off the dirt with a clump of hay quickly pulled up behind him. They kneeled on the grass and looked at the box in silence.
A breeze blew across the fields, lifting loose straws of barley and making them dance like upright figures across the soil. A crow sat on the roof watching them. The swing in the doorway of the barn was still moving back and forth in tiny, imperceptibly reducing degrees.
The lock was easy to break.
Inside, Lena found a leather pouch. The leather had gone white and dusty with mould. She opened it up and found a single item inside. It was a blue fountain pen. The metal parts were rusted. She unscrewed the cap and saw that the ink around the nib had coagulated and dried. The nib was broken. There was a tag attached by a thin string to the clip intended to hold the pen upright in a jacket pocket. The tag bore the name of a repair shop and had a comment written in pencil, hard to read with age but still legible. She handed the pen to Armin and he made out the tiny lettering in German – Feiner Bruch in der Hülle. He translated the words – hairline fracture in the casing.
Here they were, finders of the unexpected. They had unearthed something of no material value. They remained stalled in this moment of disillusion, too late by a century, holding the rusted evidence of some extraordinary event between two people in the past. Proof of their existence long after the people themselves had disappeared. A crucial artefact which had lain hidden from the world, waiting to be reimagined.
The landscape around them had become deaf. One of those instances in which the trees hold their breath, everything comes to a stop, a deer looks up, the crow watches. The only motion was the swing.
Holding this broken pen in her hand, Lena wondered whether they should put it back.
It seemed like an absurd question.
Now that this item had been extracted from the earth, it was impossible to put it back. It was like unremembering the people who had placed it there. Like returning all the ore of the world back to where it was found. Like dis-excavation, like reversing time, like undiscovering continents. Here was the pen used by Angela Kaufmann to write her letters to David Glückstein. The pen that leaked ink onto her fingers and made her laugh the night they first met at the theatre, when she left a blue thumbprint on the programme notes. The pen she used to begin writing her novel, even though there would be no publisher left in Germany to print it by the time she finished. Here it was, that defective writing implement she held so often in her hand and which left a deep blue stain in the lining of his jacket the day he carried it back with him to Berlin to get it repaired. He could have bought her a thousand new pens to replace it. He had the means to buy up several nib-making factories right across Germany, and yet he was more interested in preserving this faulty belonging of hers, the one she had used to write herself into the world. The son of a paper industrialist in love with a woman who was going to fill every blank page she could find. This was the only trace they left behind, the time between them kept safe in material form. Their story turned into archaeology. An artefact beyond use. An ending beyond ending. A cheap blue fountain pen with a tag from the repair desk to say it had served its purpose and could not be fixed.
An item so precious because it was so worthless.
Sounds that belonged to the world a hundred years back were coming from the landscape in delayed echoes. A locomotive shuffling along the edge of the fields. The clip of a carriage being pulled by a horse along those straight avenues lined with trees. Somebody whistling. A shout across the farmyard and a call coming back from one of the barns in an accent that had gone out of use.
And the illusion of a barrel organ.
Lena placed the broken pen back into the leather pouch. There was no time left for them to talk about what they had found and what should be done with it, because the sound of the living world had come back into being with a shock. The man who had been following them finally appeared in the open. His footsteps were coming along the earth. The snap of a twig.
It became clear how utterly powerless literature can be in a situation like this. How can a book give a warning? Where was the forest jay when you needed him? Even the screaming of a thousand pigs inside their enclosures was useless. It was the white noise of the fields that spoke loudest.
Out from behind the wooden barns he came walking across a stretch of open ground. He appeared at first to have come from the pig farm, like an employee sent to find out what was going on, why people were digging up the soil around here. The weight of his feet hitting the soft earth was warning enough.
Once he came close enough to be identified, it turned out not to be Mike after all. It was Bogdanov. He must have followed them all the way, by train, by taxi, right along their trail through the forest. He had waited in hiding long enough for them to unearth the past. As he strode towards them, he shouted a single word that sounded more like a handclap in the afternoon sunshine.
Fresser.
It’s a hard word to translate. Armin would need a moment to explain that it meant literally – somebody who eats like an animal. Somebody who stuffs his face. A hungry person who devours everything available, like all you can eat, with no concern for manners. A term the Nazis applied to people who were unwanted, an unnecessary burden on food supplies.
There was no time to speak. Lena looked around at Bogdanov as though it was her nature to face the attacker, perhaps to negotiate, but then she changed her mind and decided to go for safety. She picked up the leather pouch and threw everything into her bag, then she pulled Armin away by the elbow, running through the open door of the barn, past the swing, back along the empty water troughs.
Distances travelled in urgency can seem longer than those travelled at leisure. From an aerial point of view, the fleeing persons appear to make no ground because they move at the same speed as their pursuer. In theory that ratio might never change, unless Bogdanov was more athletic or had some other way of reducing the gap.
He ran into the barn without taking account of the swing hanging from the framework. Perhaps he hadn’t seen it with the angle of the sunlight. The two lines of rope merged in some hurried illusion with the lines of architecture. He ran straight into the swing as though he had every intention of using it, like a child trying it out on his belly. As he continued moving forward, the wooden seat of the swing rose up to meet his jaw with a slap. An insult to his intelligence. He shoved the ropes aside like a cobweb.
The delay allowed Lena and Armin to get out through a door on the far side of the barn. They ran into the central yard, where the disused tractor stood at a slight angle, parked on the edge of a dip where the pond had once been kept filled with water in case of a barn fire. Where the geese and ducks once splashed around. All dried out now. That sheltered space at the heart of the farm where the families had summer parties around a wood fire.
Where David and Angela Glückstein held their wedding reception, with tables and chairs brought out from the house and linen tablecloths pinned down in case there was a breeze. This is where they gave their wedding speeches and it seemed as though the barns were full of people clapping. A quartet of musicians positioned on the lawn playing Bach and the sound of the cello rising from under the earth. The guests sat until late in the evening with chilled wine and somebody stood up to sing a song about the Volga. Lanterns hung around the barns and they danced on a platform of boards laid out along the ground under the stars.
And the late wedding guests.
Cars arrived at the farmhouse with small clouds of summer dust swirling in the headlights. Men in uniform got out and left the engines running. They came walking straight into the inner yard as though they had been invited, ignoring the barking dog. The guests looked up. The music stopped and those who were dancing froze in their steps as the commanding officer stood by and said – don’t let me disturb you. Please,
continue. He gestured towards the quartet of musicians and told them to strike up again. He had no intention of bringing the festivities to an end, he was just there to congratulate the wedding couple. Keep the dance going, he said, it’s such a beautiful night – look at the stars. The musicians were forced to resume playing against their will. The people on the wooden dance floor carried on their agonizing movements with the stiffness of life-size puppets, dancing to the most melancholy score.
Professor Glückstein was led away to one of the barns nearby, where they sat him down on a wooden milking stool. They took his bride, Angela, to another barn on the far side. They were questioned through the night by the light of the lanterns. The quartet carried on playing for an hour or so into exhaustion, while the remaining officers searched through the farmhouse and the barns. It sounded as though a fox had got in with the chickens. Some of the animals were allowed to wander, the cows standing in the yard as though they had come out to listen to the music. The men were wasting their time. His wealth, his knowledge, her work, her ideas, their conversations, their happiness, the day they’d stood by the sundial and buried her broken blue fountain pen, even the elusive map he’d drawn at the back of a book – everything had been placed beyond reach. By morning, the farm had been turned upside down but nothing was found. The guests were still awake, standing in a silent group at the steps of the house as the professor and his bride were taken away, sleepless and defiant, never to see one another again. The wedding became their final night together. They were driven away in separate cars. A cavalcade of limousines moving slowly along the avenue of trees until they were gone out of sight.
47
This has brought my travelling to an end. At the centre of a large exhibition space in Berlin, I now find myself lying on a small table. Next to it is a single chair. Every fifteen minutes, an actor comes to sit down at the table to read a random passage, lasting around a minute. Some well-known names from the theatre world have been taking part. Voices familiar from TV and cinema as well as some people from the music industry have freely given their time, building up quite a crowd around the table.
According to the exhibition notes, visitors are encouraged to sit down and read a passage for themselves. They are free to touch, feel, hold, read, examine the exhibits as they wish. One of them will occasionally pick up the blue fountain pen with the tag from the repair shop which lies on a separate table, next to the leather pouch and the metal box in which it lay hidden for so many years. Another visitor will go so far as to study the map at the back of the book and place a little finger into the small hole where the bullet entered. A circular wound at the tail end of the title, partially obscuring the final letter in the word – Rebellion. Held up to the light, they can see clean through to the exit wound at the back. As they leaf through the pages, they can follow the course taken by the bullet like the burrowing of a worm through the text. The aperture is quite small, nine-millimetre calibre, shot from a Glock handgun.
Another table has been set up with a white bowl containing human ash. Some of the media have referred to the exhibition as a funeral in art. A critic at the Morgenpost felt it was honouring the deceased by scattering the ashes in a metaphorical sense. Others have been critical of such a public display of human remains. A visitor can occasionally be seen picking up one of the three shrapnel fragments in the bowl, which is fine – the idea of placing an exhibit like this under glass or asking people not to touch the objects would make it meaningless. It is the artist’s intention to bring the viewer as close as possible to that invisible border crossing between life and death.
One of the walls carries a display of images, or screen grabs, taken from a piece of newsreel footage. The footage was shot by an Austrian television crew at the height of the Second Chechen War. It shows two children, a boy and a girl, at a hospital in the aftermath of a bombing which killed their parents. The girl is frightened. She cannot understand the sight of the wide stump of bandages where her leg has gone missing. Her expression is frozen in a prolonged state of shock, afraid to cry, looking around for her mother, waiting for somebody to explain the situation to her. She is being comforted by the nursing staff as best they can. Some of them are running along the corridor and there is a sense of panic in their faces because the bombing outside continues. They have no idea what part of the hospital might still be safe for them to take the children.
Visitors can find these scenes distressing to look at until they come to another set of photographic images showing the children in their adult years. Pictures of the brother and sister both laughing as he puts his arm around her and she shows off her prosthetic leg. Another image shows her wearing a swimsuit, standing in a lake north of Berlin on a summer evening with the sun behind her and the water reaching just above her knees. Her missing leg is concealed as though the lake from which she is emerging has found a way of undoing the bomb blast of her childhood in Chechnya, keeping the story of her life hidden underneath the surface.
The central piece in the collection displays a recent diagnostic image of the boy as a grown man, still carrying the injuries from that event in the war. The X-ray clearly shows three shrapnel fragments inside the body of a living person, which can then be contrasted to the fragments inside the body of the same person in the form of ash.
Going by medical evidence entered at the murder trial, the bullet hit Armin close to the heart. His lungs filled up with blood. He died of asphyxiation. The bullet could not be added as part of the exhibition for obvious reasons, because it became a key piece of evidence for the prosecution. It was described by ballistics experts in court as a high-quality round, enhanced with a toughened steel casing around the lead core. It had been reshaped, or misshaped, by contact with various obstacles on its way. It passed through the story of the man with the barrel organ without encountering any resistance, through the hand-drawn map at the back, roughly corresponding with the location near the oak tree where the body of the deceased man was ultimately recovered.
They had done their best to escape, running into the central yard past the pump with the cast-iron handle, past the derelict barn where the horses were once kept, out along the path where they were hoping to disappear into the forest, into that silent maze where trees duplicate themselves into infinity. Armin was carrying Lena’s bag and holding her hand as they ran. Then he let go and sank to the ground. Lena kneeled down by his side and tried to keep him alive, lifting his head and asking him questions to stop him losing consciousness. Did he still remember standing on the bridge with her, and the bar with the table made from a scrapped bumper car, and could he recall the fridge magnets, what was the one nearest to his heart, was it the bottle of Russian vodka? He did not respond to these questions, other than making a choking sound at the back of his throat. She continued speaking to him, even though it was clear that he could not hear her. She was saying his name, telling him that she would stay with him, she was going to call for help.
On the opening night the curator of the exhibition, Julia Fernreich, addressed the gathering of visitors and introduced Armin’s sister, inviting her to say a few words. Madina spoke about how she and her brother had come to Germany as children with the help of an aunt who employed traffickers. They had been brought up by a wonderful family in Frankfurt, she said with a wave – their adoptive mother was in the audience. Madina recalled how, as a boy, Armin used to tickle her missing foot. It was funny, she said, that whenever he tried to tickle the existing foot, the living foot, it never bothered her. He could go at it with feathers, forks, a toothbrush, the bow of a violin, the dried claw of a turkey their parents kept over the door in the hall, nothing would make her budge. She could have lain there with her arms folded for a thousand years, she said, and he would not even have made her laugh. It was only when he began to tickle the amputated foot that she was forced to screech. She would pull the missing leg away and hide it under the pillows, begging him to stop – no, Armin, not my gone foot, please.
She then picked up the accordion and sang an acoustic version of her song – ‘No Time for Bones’.
When Lena was asked to say a few words, she said that anything she had in mind was inadequate for the emotions she was feeling. She decided instead to read out a piece of text from one of the exhibits along the wall – a passage by Joseph Roth, in his tiny handwriting.
… it was not yet a matter of indifference whether a person lived or died. When somebody disappeared from among the living, that person was not immediately replaced, a gap remained, and those who knew, or even half-knew, the dead person went silent whenever they came across that gap. When a fire destroyed a house in a terrace of houses, the ruin was left empty for a long time. Builders worked slowly and thoughtfully, and those who passed by continued to remember the shape of the missing house. That’s how it was back then! Everything that grew needed a lot of time to grow; and everything that came to an end took a long time to be erased. Everything that existed once left its trace, and people lived by their memory, just as they now live in a rush to forget.
48
The assassin stood over his victim and picked up Lena’s bag. He pulled her away by the arm and she called on every self-defence move she had learned as a girl in Philadelphia until he raised his gun to her head. She thought of something else, calling out a random name to distract the attacker long enough that she could speed-dial for help on her phone.
The Pages Page 21
