A Guide to Berlin

by Gail Jones

  ‘I wanted to flee, but had to stand there, watching Momma go crazy.

  ‘By the mid-sixties white people had largely abandoned our neighbourhood. The third ward, that’s what they called it. We lived in the third ward. Unemployment was widespread and people were unhappy. We were the only white family left in our block, and Momma gradually turned her scorn to the blacks. I never understood it. She shouted at them to get a job and clean up their children. Told them they had no souls, and they told her: “Fuck off, ole white lady, who you think you fuckin’ are, speak to us like that?”

  ‘There were race riots in sixty-seven – maybe you heard of them? The National Guard was sent in. Open gun battles in the street, dozens of buildings set on fire, twenty-six dead; hundreds, I dunno, maybe thousands, wounded. I remember the smoke and the scream of fire-engines and the sound of gunshot pinging outside our window, and I remember thinking: I really gotta get outa here.

  ‘Afterwards it seemed the streets were never cleaned up. Everything smashed up and broken. Whole buildings in ruins. They despised us, the third ward. I got nervy and weird. I used to chant “umbrella, umbrella” to help me fall asleep.

  ‘A scaredy-cat kid, that’s what I was: “umbrella, umbrella”.’

  Victor managed a tight sardonic smile.

  ‘Momma died later that same year, suddenly keeled over on the stairs. I was relieved, and I was destroyed … I had a chance, and I got away.’

  The body somehow knows when it is proper to punctuate.

  Victor leant into the crossed pools of light and poured himself another drink. He leant back, tilted his head and gulped it down. The room was silent, subdued. This was the hush of respectful listening. As if given permission, Gino took up the bottle, gestured an offering, and the others presented their glasses to be refilled. No one spoke. Victor had allowed himself to swerve away from his mother’s death. He had held his story steady.

  ‘Long story short: I was completely fucked up and went AWOL for a year, living rough in Brooklyn. But I was a good kid, with good manners, people saw that immediately. Too old-school to be a bum. Too young to be completely hopeless. A woman found me reading a book under a bridge and we struck up a conversation. She took me off the street, just like that; she took me off the street and decided to look after me. Leah Rabinovich. That was her name. Fed me baked ziti and German beer and supported my last year in high school, and after that my time in college – don’t ask me how. She was Russian, or at least she’d been born in Russia and she had an apartment in Brighton Beach, stuffed to the ceiling with books.

  ‘She rescued me, Leah Rabinovich, she was the one who saved me. Leah Rabinovich. A widow, no kids, it was just fate that we met. Russian fate, you know?

  ‘One day we were talking and I asked her about her childhood. She said a little, not much. I gathered she had left Russia when she was ten, in 1920. Then Leah went to her bookshelves and drew out the autobiography. I’d heard of Lolita, of course – everyone had – but I’d never read any Nabokov, and it was a charmed encounter. It was like entering the luminous room of an imagined Europe, seeing a prewar world intact, particularised, densely notated, that my parents, or my grandparents, or my aunts and uncles, might have known. And even though I knew this to be someone else’s world entirely, and nothing whatever to do with Poland, it served a deeply reassuring purpose. It was like something lost returning – all those detailed descriptions, all the colours and faces. Quirky visions, fancy words. Old things, long vanished.

  ‘You all remember it: the little boy Vladimir is scrambling on rocks by the seaside, muttering a chant in English –“childhood, childhood”. He is thinking of Robin Hood and Red Riding Hood, and the hoods of fairytale hunchback characters, he is peering at the tepid seawater glistening in the dimples of the rocks, he is watching his younger brother and their governess, in the far hazy distance, strolling hand in hand along a curved beach.

  ‘This was so familiar to me, this sense of solitude and observation, this longing for a pure and concentrated reality. The way stray words knit with specific moments. The intuition that this, more than anything, is our truest experience.

  ‘Outside it was all motherfucker and goddamn and don’t give a shit – excuse my French; it was Lyndon B. Johnson and the Vietnam War and Martin Luther King blown away; it was the Apollo program, Jimi Hendrix, sitcoms on TV. The world was crashing in. But I was a boy caught in the bubble of an enormous grief, equipped only for the past.

  ‘And for this resurrection in formal prose, Russian-style. And for encountering a Europe my family might years ago have known. And for the novelty, above all, of unconventional seeing.’

  Victor paused again, as if noticing that he had entered a literary-critical speech.

  ‘I was a dumb fuck, I know it, but I was a dumb fuck with books. Excuse the French.’

  He took a swig of his drink.

  ‘I kid you not, kiddos,’ he said, opening up a nervous smile. ‘It was just like that. Like I could see a way forward. Like certain things made sense all of a sudden.

  ‘The umbrella and my wish to bury my face in fresh clothes. Momma shouting at that row of women in the hair-dressers. My papa in his own world, his own third ward, occasionally visible.’

  Victor held out his glass, Gino filled it. ‘Drink up!’ he instructed.

  They knew then that Victor had finished his speak-memory. For a few seconds they just sat, looking blankly at each other. Then Marco leant forward and shook Victor’s hand, as if congratulating a man who had just won a trophy. Gino mimed a toast. Mitsuko skipped up, like a child suddenly released from a tiresome duty, and almost ran to her backpack nestled by the door with the coats.

  ‘Snack time!’

  She extracted a green plastic box, which she snapped open with a flourish. In it lay rows of sweetened rice balls, sprinkled with sesame seeds and coconut. With a pair of chopsticks, she tweezered the rice balls onto paper plates and handed them around. They sat still in their small circle, the six of them, and in silence ate their modest snack together. It was almost infantile, the way they licked their fingers, the messy challenge of Mitsuko’s rice balls.

  Victor drank and drank again. He was a short man and more than usually susceptible to drink. They all watched as energetically he drank himself towards oblivion. Before long, Gino stepped onto the balcony for a smoke; they could see his shape outside in the cold night, behind the sweating glass, and the orange spotlight of his cigarette lifting and falling. Yukio and Mitsuko, their shoulders touching, began a low conversation in confidential Japanese. Marco was jotting something in a sky-blue notebook. Victor noticed Cass slightly apart, observing him.

  ‘The non-rhymers,’ he said. ‘We have to stick together. Right?’

  It was an attempt at a joke, but he sounded tired. Already his speech included a weary slur. But there was a mellow expansiveness, too, and a sudden affection. Victor was neither abashed nor emboldened by his disclosed story; instead, with generosity, he asked Cass about herself, how she was spending her time, newly arrived in Berlin. After a few blundering responses – having little to report – Cass was relieved when conversation moved to the topic of Nabokov’s short stories. They exchanged favourite titles and made a plan to visit the aquarium mentioned in one of the tales. Then came a moment in which Victor seemed to slump and melt away. Now, his story done, his strenuous memories rehearsed, he looked like a man ready for the luxurious and necessary forgetting of sleep.

  Cass felt the beginnings of a fondness for Victor; she would see later how swiftly their attachment arose. This had been the special effect of Victor’s speak-memory. How could one not care for this gentle man who had wanted someone else’s past and whispered ‘umbrella’ to the violent night to help him sleep? It was a feeling borne of respect for the story he had offered them. It occurred to Cass that he might have a history of confessions to a psychiatrist and that his storytelling was not an entirely new thing. Wasn’t this commonplace, almost a cliché, for New Yorkers of his age
and class? The bespectacled shrink, the overpriced quack? But quickly she dismissed her thought as stingy and suspicious. There was no sense of habit or repetition in what Victor had told them, nor of fabrication, nor hidden agenda. He had entrusted his sorrow. He had spoken of shame and grief. And it suited her to believe that this was a first disclosure. The slow drift of her thoughts wanted Victor protected.

  Heading to the U-Bahn, returning, Cass held her tulips to her chest. Her shield of organic life against the callous weather. They were damaged, she could feel it. Something loose, a few petals, moved in the triangle of paper. Animated by the evening, by literary oddity and the glimpsed inner life of Victor Edelman, she quickened her step, then almost slipped, and was required by good sense to slow down.

  The streets were black and shiny with ice. Gravel had been cast on the pavements, but walking was still a difficult and treacherous enterprise. Cass followed the trails of dark gravel and now walked with care. She hardly noticed where she was going, carried on pale streaming lights, stiff and tranced with the cold, alcohol-affected. But somehow, by random instinct or luck, she managed automatically to retrace her steps. The streets bore an unreal gloss and unfamiliar names, but still she managed.

  Then there were wheels, and noise, and something brash bearing down on her. A double-decker bus thundered close, its interior a jaundiced yellow, its patrons held high above, framed as silhouettes. She jolted away. In retreat, the bus resolved to a lucid vision. She might so easily have fallen beneath it, this seeming premonition.

  Cass reached the steps to the U-Bahn, trembling with delayed alarm. She sensed wordless, deep in her nerves, how near to her end she had been. How near to absolute nothing. She grabbed at the railing like a falling woman. Her gloved hands were hard and clawed, her steps were uncertain.

  5

  When Cass opened her eyes, the first thing she saw was the tulips. It was true: they were the light of another, warmer world, their candle heads streaked with red, still bright and aflame. She was reminded of the Nabokovian regard for the weird vibrancy of things, the writer’s capacity for relish and glorification. Tulips might be joyful or troubling objects; they might carry any meaning. Now they bowed limply in an almost human posture. More petals had detached. There was no vase in the cupboards, so the tulips stood in a milk carton, propped against over-balancing. It was an ugly vessel, but nevertheless served.

  Fond of symbolic markers of time, Cass had arrived in Berlin on the first day of January. She expected New Year splendour, but walked into a mess. Her unremarkable street, spiked with leafless trees, was strewn with blackened debris and the curly innards of dead fireworks. Beer bottles and scrunched paper lay on the pavements and in the gutter. Everything was closed up, locked down, and vaguely shoddy. One or two weaving cyclists braved the ice on the streets, precariously atilt, but Berliners of all ages must have been sleeping it off, after so wild a party.

  Her block, number 50, faced a cemetery. It looked plain and forlorn. At least it would be quiet, she thought. At least she might work here. Write here. Find a foreign sense of purpose. In a building further down the street, an apartment on the second floor had burnt out. Above each window was a residue of black smoke, rising up in a blurred paisley. The caretaker, Karl, who handed over the keys – looking blurred too, but from vodka, judging by the sour smell, and bent with the evidently sore joints of his seventy-plus years – announced in English that she had missed all the New Year’s fun, that the fireworks were fantastische and the fire-engine had stayed for two hours. He’d glazed a little, trying to find the vocabulary for pyrotechnical dazzlements, then slipped without noticing into rambling German. All she heard among the clotted consonants was feuerwerk, blitz.

  Karl’s bloodshot eyes were unfocused and weepy. He turned away and led Cass slowly, almost creaking, up three flights of stairs. She felt sorry for this man, too apparently tired to be dealing with strangers, too ruddy with drink and seasonably undone. Her single suitcase seemed impossibly heavy, but she watched his labouring back and couldn’t ask for help.

  When Karl stood aside, puffing with his own exertion and leaning on the door frame, Cass saw that the studio was small, unadorned, painted in dove-grey, a pokey rectangle but for its balcony that jutted out into the wider world. A white door, which stood ajar, led to a tiny shower room. There was a miniature fridge, rumbling, and on the kitchen bench a set of knives plunged into a wooden stand. Two coffee cups were visible, and an electric jug. Against the wall was a bed, a little larger than a single, but not quite double, with two pillows and a new-looking doona folded neatly at its end. Two chairs, chrome and formica, seventies vintage, stood at a matching table so narrow it might have been fashioned for a child.

  She liked the place immediately. This was the promise of an austere, uncomplicated existence. This was the empty single room in which she might recover her own presence.

  From the balcony Cass saw the cemetery, walled and peaceful, and beside it a small park. She was high enough to peer over extensive graves; they were set in a neat geometry, their headstones marked with bare vines and spots of brown moss. She would discover later that a few pedestrians used the cemetery as a shortcut, but they only took the central path, never deviating among the plots, so it retained an untouched air of self-containment and enclosure. In the distance the lacey ring-shape of a gasometer seemed almost to float. As industrial relics go, it was charming, even ethereal. So here, up high, there was a kind of German romanticism: sky, distance, relic, memento mori. It was an unanticipated pleasure that the studio faced a space, and not a building, that it had a view not to other windows and balconies and furtively glimpsed lives, but to weather and perspective and poetic conceit.

  Cass offered Karl money but he refused with an indignant huff. He looked disappointed – she had somehow insulted him. She watched as he withdrew gingerly down the stairs. He did not look back as she called out a second thanks, but lifted one arm in acknowledgement, then clutched again at the bannister, gripping hard, like a man who has foreseen his own death at the bottom of the stairwell.

  Cass closed the door behind him and stood for a moment, once again simply looking outside. Cemetery, gasometer, louring sky. Bed, fridge, a narrow table with two chairs. She dragged her heavy suitcase to the centre of the room. On the sink behind her was an upturned glass. She ran the tap for water and drank too quickly.

  On that first day, newly arrived, she saw briefly beyond her own exhaustion. But with the door closed, a warped temporal order overtook her – the airline spin around the globe, the desultory hours in bright airports, the grumpy queues, the uniformed staff, the lunacy of long-haul travel. The spiritless after-effects crumpled her where she stood. She took off her shoes, stretched on the bed, and immediately fell asleep.

  Now Cass looked back on her arrival and considered how swiftly she had entered their circle, the five international others. How helpful Karl had become, how unlikely a support. She had spent the first week in Berlin aimless and uncertain. She’d bought a bulky down coat so that she might survive the cold. She’d tasked herself with exploring the city, and made excursions here and there, visiting places that might suggest centrality or importance. But her movements were aimless, half-hearted and largely without motivation. The cold seemed to her extraordinary: surely an extreme. The vistas, for the most part, were grievously bleak. The entire centre of the city appeared to be a building site, spoilt brutally and with the air of an abandoned film set. It had been a mistake, Cass told herself, to arrive at the beginning of winter. There were omens even then of sorrowful times to come, there were obvious symbols of disrepair and ruination. At home it was summer, thirty degrees in Sydney. Here she shivered in Europe’s ostentatious reversal.

  At the end of her first week in Berlin she had stood before the Nestorstrasse apartment, taking a photograph with her phone, and meeting Marco Gianelli. He was charismatic, she realised, in an anachronistic way – this was what had attracted her. She saw in his neat clothes and tactful ma
nner something she’d rarely met in the men she had known at university, with their practised uncouthness, their masculine argumentation, the way they assumed ownership of the women they lassoed into their grasp. She had endured them, her series of clever boyfriends, who expected her to pick up their towels and edit their poor prose. They had all exemplified the modish paranoias of their age. They were conceited over-achievers and smugly privileged. It had been a relief to fly away, saying the word ‘Berlin’ and implying, even to her brothers, that she might never return.

  All Europe was fundamentally exotic to Cass. Berlin was exotic. Marco was exotic. There was the moment on the street in which he drew her attention to the Nabokov plaque. There, he said, there is the textual evidence you need. He stood back, he was patient, he was uncondescending. He did not have a thesis to write, not anymore. She held up her phone and snapped the plaque and wondered why, of all the possible sights, she might want this dull place stored in her repertoire of images.

  It had been January 6th, the day of their first meeting. The temperature, glistening in illuminated lime numbers hung high above a chemist, read –4°. As she walked away from the dingy bar with the excellent Italian coffee, she saw Christmas trees, one after another, discarded on the pavement verge. They lay on their bellies, a sorry sight, their cone shapes squashed.

  One bore a handwritten sign Cass translated to herself: ‘Now, I am useless.’

  She could not remember noticing discarded trees on Nestorstrasse. It troubled her that Christmas decorations, both frivolous or sacred, still appeared here and there throughout the city. There were festive snowmen still on Ku’damm, metal snowflakes and Bethlehem stars remained strung high over Alexanderplatz, and some shops persisted with dimly luminous displays, askew trees with empty boxes, looped tinsel, dangling baubles. It was difficult to resist the conclusion that she was surrounded by untimely signs, that ordinary numbers, January the 6th, –4, were the registers of a fake or redundant knowledge.