A Guide to Berlin

by Gail Jones

  ‘I had a room to myself. Ours was a long house, raised on stilts, in which the rooms had once been wards, opening to a common verandah running along both sides. The rooms were not joined: one stepped out onto the verandah to enter another room. So I thought of this house as a flute, or a harmonica, or some yet unknown musical instrument, because the wind blew straight through it, making high, eerie sounds. At night, with doors at each end of the rooms left open in the heat, there was a pitch that could only have been human wailing, or someone lost in the dark calling to find their way home. Beyond this lay the sound of the waves and the Indian Ocean, pulsing and beating. So the air was full of ocean noise, and quasi-human voices. At least this is how I thought of it then, waves and voices. I was an imaginative child, burdened by vivid speculations.

  ‘Just as Gino described the resonant atmosphere in a cathedral, there was a peculiarity to the dark night air of my childhood, there was an amplification, and an immanent mystery. For most children, I suppose, the night is large in this way, framed and intensified by their own imagining. The night fills up with all they sense, but do not comprehend.

  ‘There was a lighthouse too, nearby, set high on a sand-hill. It flashed its stripe of white light directly over our house; it created an intermittent dark that I have never really known since. This other-world of night-time was my surest reality; I cannot tell you how profoundly it has left its mark. Nabokov describes a child’s night-train ride in this way: the world oddly rocking and swinging, images enlarging and speeding into vision, omnipresent shadows, presences half-seen, the silver coating to objects and the creepy moon-glaze that hangs over everything. As he falls asleep the boy fancies he sees a glass marble rolling beneath a grand piano. Somehow that mattered to me, that unconnected detail. And the train ride sounded so like my own childhood experience of night – of animation, and of ill-defined presences. And then waking mid-night from the current of sleep to find things slower and more visionary, the lighthouse blankly continuing, the walls sliding away, ordinary furniture, the little there was, made spooky and fantastical, discarded clothes on the floor looking like writhing monsters.’

  Cass checked herself. She was babbling, babbling aimlessly about the night. And she was sounding literary when she wanted to sound more straightforward. She’d not anticipated how easily one might become carried away, how the descriptive task dragged her narrative along an unexpected track. Opposite, Yukio, Marco and Gino were all staring at her. Mitsuko, sitting beside, lightly touched her hand. They might have been schoolgirls in the playground, sharing a confidence.

  ‘In daytime my brothers and I lived in a rough kind of utopia. We fished and swam, we rode through the bush on the back of a truck into the town to attend school. We were a gang, living apart, mostly running wild. Cricket, we loved cricket. I took my turn at the batting and my brothers indulged me with slow, easy bowls. I remember their bare legs streaked with red dirt beneath filthy shorts and their arms turning like windmills. Dust puffed from their heels as they skidded for the ball. They liked to leap up and shout “How’s that!” as if we composed a real team, with real opponents and serious scores, not just sibling mischief and fake competition. I wanted desperately to be a boy and tried hard to act as my brothers did, and to be tough and masculine. I was a very good fighter – even they conceded it – driven by the foolish need to prove myself equal. I loved to wrestle but never had the weight or the strength to win, so I developed a ruthless repertoire of dirty tricks. I was an arrogant child, clever and self-assured. And of course I was spoilt as the youngest and the only girl.

  ‘My defeat – at least this is how I thought of it then – came when at eleven I developed a bad case of ringworm. My skin flowered in repulsive circular lesions. My mother dabbed me all over with gentian violet and my head was shaven. I was forbidden to touch my family, and bound, like one guilty, to constant hand-washing. I was purple-speckled and bald, unrecognisable even to myself. Not a serious illness, of course, not disability or catastrophe, but simple humiliation, and a kind of disfiguring.

  ‘By that time my two older brothers had been sent south to boarding school, and Alexander, one year older than me, remained. He did not contract ringworm. I remember he looked at me with a faint expression of disgust, his face averted. I remember a kind of flustered pity.

  ‘A feral cat had deposited a litter of kittens beneath our house and my mother said I had ringworm because I’d fondled them. It was true. I’d crouched in the shadows and lifted the kittens to my face, kissing and playing and wishing them fat and adorable. I’d pushed them into my shirt, felt their silky small throb, and held them against my chest. Something in their fragility moved and compelled me. Their puckered faces. The squint of their newborn eyes. That squirming being, not yet fully extended into the world.

  ‘I watched as my mother drowned the kittens in the laundry, in a hessian bag. I remember how the bag stretched and twitched with their thrashing panic, how she had to hold it down, how I wept and pleaded. It was a loss of power, I think, a loss of that sense of having one’s own dominion. The kittens were killed and I looked hideous. I was confined, my parents were strict, Alexander was distant. As a child it is hard to believe the transformations of illness or injury will reverse. But somehow I knew then that things had irrevocably changed.

  ‘At twelve I was sent to a boarding school in the south, in the city of Perth. It was a kind of exile. I had been vain and self-centred, now I was ignored and punished. Possessing no girlish social skills and eccentric in my tastes, I was isolated and had difficulty making friends. I developed an interest in butterflies, which other girls ridiculed, preferring pop music and magazines. I thought myself a specialist in spotting the Amaryllis Azure, but more than anything I wanted to see the Ulysses butterfly, papilo ulysses, known to Vladimir Nabokov as the Australian swallowtail. It is startling in its beauty – iridescent blue, outlined in black. The drab underside is a furry brown. I copied images from books and went on spotting expeditions, climbing alone through the sodden, murky undergrowth along the banks of the Swan River. You will know of course that Nabokov was a specialist of American ‘Blues’ and spent almost two years classifying them on the basis of their microscopic genitalia. He also created butterflies. There is a fine drawing he did, as a present for Vera, which is derived from his knowledge of the Australian swallowtail.’

  ‘I have a photocopy of this image,’ said Victor. ‘I can bring it next time.’

  ‘Mostly I saw Common Browns, those with marbled wings and eye-spots, or Monarchs, orange-brown, with distinctive white dots on the black band of their outline, and now and then a Painted Lady, a Vanessa kershawi, blown down from Indonesia – tangerine with black and white markings, white spots at the wingtips …’

  ‘Ocellated,’ said Victor.

  ‘Thank you, yes – ocellated. It is hard to explain to you how completely absorbing this can be, how fastidious one becomes looking out for a passing fritillary, or the flit of a bluish wing, or eyespots flying, or the glimpse of some shape, yellow or cinnabar, suspended in mid-air, beating at the sky, jerking just beyond the reach of one’s hands.’

  ‘I have also seen the Painted Lady, the Vanessa kershawi,’ Mitsuko interrupted.

  Cass halted, aware suddenly of how she had revisited her adolescent enthusiasms. What was it that made this artificial tale-telling, once begun, veer into flowery declarations and indulgences?

  ‘Most butterflies live only about two weeks. As a child this knowledge moved me as the scrawny kittens did … I wondered at the value of something so barely enduring. Or rather I wondered at a new idea of value itself.’

  Cass halted again.

  ‘I’m not sure how to explain this.

  The scrawny kittens.’ The others remained silent, and waited.

  ‘Shadows of the chessmen,’ said Yukio in a distant voice.

  Her story was stumbling. She changed the subject.

  ‘I studied painting at first, then I studied literature. I wanted to be an
artist. All that I saw and knew needed an analogy of some sort; I wanted the world fixed and intelligible, not flowing away behind me, not disappearing into “the dark backward and abysm of time”. I wanted images to stop, for my quiet inspection. I needed for some reason or justification to look more closely. I understand why serious collectors pin butterflies in trays and write tiny labels, why they range specimens carefully, one after another, in diminishing size. But I never did this, truly; I was never a collector.

  ‘At art school my eccentricities were valued for a time, but then I became tiresome to others, and to myself. I was a failed painter, bold but not remarkably talented. Self-portrait in purple speckles, that kind of thing. It embarrasses me now to think of it. I fled art school to London for six months, then returned, moved to Sydney and turned my attention to literature. I took a series of part-time unskilled jobs, and finally settled in a bookshop, a small independent bookshop, where I felt most at home. Then I left, I simply uprooted. Travelling revives the intensity of images. It recovers curiosity.

  ‘And now here I am.’

  ‘How long is now?’ Gino asked.

  She could not go on. Cass was aware that her story was thin beside the others’. It was secretive, almost sham. The night was true: it had been just like that, the Australian Gothic house on stilts, exposed to winds from the ocean, wailing, hysterical. There had been relentless flashing light and the echoing of dead voices and oceans. It sounded invented, she knew, but it released her from speaking of more difficult things. What had happened to Alexander. It released her from speaking of the unspeakable Alexander.

  ‘Well done,’ said Victor, determined to be supportive. The others murmured approval. Gino excused himself absentmindedly and rose for a cigarette. Marco was smiling warmly. Expecting them all to reassemble, Yukio and Mitsuko began laying a small collection of oriental snacks on Kępiński’s table. Cass could not help it: she was disappointed in herself. She knew she had somehow not fulfilled the narrative contract; the others were all less reserved, more confiding and more open. She was provincial, she was a failure. She perceived a radical lack of clarity. In not producing a coherent story, she was not possessed of those properties of necessity and fullness that make a plausible self. And why had she mentioned the kittens? And gone on about the house? Why, though Nabokovian, had she described the butterfly spotting?

  ‘All good,’ whispered Marco.

  This time they stayed. This time all of them sat together around Kępiński’s impressive oak table and continued to drink and to talk and eat tidbits with chopsticks, and gradually to recover a dimension of unselfconscious ease in their conversation. Victor did not remove the shapka, and in the vapid opulence of the apartment looked somewhat droll and comically displaced. He was telling everyone in cheerful terms of the visit to the aquarium, how the ancient tortoise was very likely the one Nabokov himself had seen, how it had made eye contact with him, as if some glimmer of the distant past moved like electricity between them. A living creature, he said, still persisting, and in situ. Mitsuko and Yukio agreed that animals possibly apprehended time in ways unknown to humans. Gino scoffed, and raised his glass.

  ‘Here’s to the superiority of non-human creatures! Who outlive us, and judge us, and know vastly more!’

  Victor looked confused.

  ‘It was wonderful,’ he continued. ‘It was really something, that tortoise.’

  Talk ranged across animals and books and the harsh winter in Berlin. No one questioned Cass on the details of her speak-memory, or thereafter alluded to it. She was relieved by the return to relative impersonality.

  Now that they had all performed their speak-memories, Marco suggested, they might next time talk of the city, and the ways in which they personally knew it. There was vague, muttered assent. It would be informal, he added, it would be much more informal.

  Alcohol began muddling and tangling their conversation. Gino was retelling a short story by Italo Calvino. A man heads an agency that attempts to archive all the knowledge in the world. It is a mammoth, absurd task, and he inflects the data with banal and unregarded things, the dull things that make up the true texture of everyday being: yawns, pimples, obscene ideas, whistled tunes … These he folds into public knowledge in an act of subjective subversion. What seems most untransmissable, said Gino, is what is most human. The story is finally about jealousy, he said; it is finally about evil and the wish to control.

  Cass sat at the head of the table, as though the guest of honour at a ceremony. As she drank more, now both careless and relieved, she saw how strategic Gino’s story had been. Here, in Kępiński’s, he needed to remind them of the self-serving selection of remembrance. He needed to claim and to advertise his own right to record. They looked at each other. Gino paused in a sip of wine and offered a flabby drunken smile.

  ‘My version,’ he said, waving a leather-bound notebook. ‘My own “Guide to Berlin”.’

  18

  She had wanted a day staying in, seeing no one, finding her independent shape. But as soon as she woke Cass remembered that Karl would arrive in the afternoon. She lay in her bed and was tempted to remain. The air in her small room was mean and chill; she would have to find her socks to go to the bathroom; she would need to rug up just to move the few steps to make coffee. It was a long time since she had felt so seriously hungover, and now she recalled Yukio and Mitsuko guiding her into a taxi, and Karl – could it have been Karl? – helping with huffs and puffs as she dragged and pulled herself up the stairs. That fuse-effect of drunkenness was something she’d rarely known, being a careful drinker, and judgmental of others, but now the night returned to her in the viscous form of bodies merging and imprecise recollection. She had sent both Marco and Gino away, this much she remembered. Victor, dear Victor, had passed out, at some stage. And yes, Marco and Gino had together carried Victor from Kępiński’s. This morning they would all be feeling seedy and nauseous. They would all be trying to unfuse the united moments in which their bodies and minds swum together, and they touched each other suggestively, and were given to rash declarations and smudgy kisses. She had slumped between Yukio and Mitsuko in the back of a taxi. Their faces had looked oily and gleaming.

  Behind the window, snow was lightly falling. How pure it looked, and how unsullied. Cass put her head beneath the pillow and tried to return to sleep, but wondered now what she had said, and how she had acted, and if she had managed to disgrace herself by an irretrievable word or action. Unaccountably, she recalled some words of Nabokov: when he dreamt of the dead, he wrote, they always appeared silent and bothered and inexplicably depressed, quite unlike the bright selves they had expressed alive. Her sense of the night before was like this – that her friends had shed their bright selves and were in the shadows of another state, bare and intangible, as in a dream existence. There was a slightly sinister bend to her post-drunken recall.

  At last she rose. She saw her bag on the floor and her scarf and coat discarded. She must have flung herself into bed; she must have been out of it.

  Cass spent the morning reading, battling a headache. She read a detective novel, trashy and ham-fisted, then flicked in a casual way though a guidebook to Berlin. Recommendations for clubs and decadent nightlife seemed to predominate. One club offered ‘post-human pleasuring’, another had erotic booths and blue movies as sidelines to the dance floor. The young music scene was impressively huge. Techno, house, remix, rasta. Rap, electronica, funk, hip-hop, soul, punk, gangsta, electro-pop … Her tastes were antique, she knew; she was outside her own generation. She vaguely noted the names and location of a few famous clubs, but was essentially uninterested. There were the expected photographs: the Reichstag, the Brandenburg Gate, the silver spear of the Fernsehturm. And there were any number of outings – a world of non-conformist restaurants, minimalist or maximalist concerts and gleefully perverted art galleries. Museums of every kind offered sober histories, of the wars, or the Wall, or Germanic triumphs and failures. So much theatre, high culture, so
many memorials. Dutifully, Cass noted a few ‘attractions’. She had been merely a woman riding on the U and S-Bahn, observing ordinary Berliners. She was both democratically curious and committed to her own inclinations; she was clearly a failure as a tourist.

  When Cass stood she felt ill; when she sat or lay, her head throbbed. It was a wasted day. At some point the buzzer rang and she heard Yukio’s voice echo in the resonating space of the lobby: it surprised her that they had visited without prearrangement, and she felt sacrificially unprepared and murderously antisocial. Hastily, she tidied. When she opened the door Yukio and Mitsuko looked flushed with good health, and were again dressed in garments of distinctive and showy uniformity. Beneath their coats they wore matching suits of navy vinyl. Yukio handed Cass a plastic bottle of Pocari Sweat.

  ‘Hangover cure,’ he said.

  ‘We travel with our own pharmacopoeia.’ Mitsuko explained. ‘Pocari Sweat is for veisalgia. Ion supply.’

  Cass invited them in. Each had snowflake traces clinging to their hair. They disappeared as she looked at them.

  ‘Snowing again, yes? All those hexagons.’

  She was trying hard to be social and entertaining, though she wished them gone. They would see her facile indifference and her lack of engagement.

  But Yukio was immediately and enthusiastically responsive.

  ‘I know that English word: hexagon. It was a Japanese man, Ukichiro Nakaya, who wrote the first real scientific study of snowflakes – in the 1930s. I read it in my hikikomori days. Nakaya knew how crystals form and why no two snowflakes are the same.’