A Guide to Berlin

by Gail Jones

  Cass couldn’t be bothered responding. She politely drank the sour Pocari Sweat and made a pot of tea, setting her two teacups in the centre of her table. The lovers showed no signs of wanting to leave. Just as she was running out of conversation, when she thought that her headache was finally abating and she might have some peace at last, there was a knock on the door.

  Oh no, she thought, Karl. He stood in the doorway, smirking. He was unfazed by her visitors and shook their hands with vigour. Almost instantly he commenced his loud chat in German.

  ‘Japanisch!’ he exclaimed, genuinely impressed. He pointed at their suits.

  ‘Yes, also Japanisch,’ said Mitsuko. She translated for Yukio and soon the three, apparently, were talking about snow. Cass couldn’t entirely follow: Mitsuko’s German was excellent and far beyond her own level of competence. But she heard the name Ukichiro Nakaya once again and knew then that Yukio must be explaining the science of snowflakes to Karl. She made another pot of tea. Since she had only two chairs, Karl and Mitsuko sat on her bed, and Yukio and she drew up the chairs and pulled the small table beside them. Karl was enjoying himself hugely. His large hands clutched his knees. He looked ten years younger, altered by youthful company and Japanisch novelty. At some point in their conversation he excused himself, went back to his room and returned with an old book on natural science, full of tatty bits and pieces of bookmark. He proudly opened it to a few pages of snowflake sketches – exquisite prints in fine-point etching, dated 1905. He was saying something like ‘nature does not age’, he was expressing a naturalist’s delight. Cass was compelled to revise her knowledge of Karl: he was, after all, an educated man, and one with assiduous – bookmarked – intellectual passions. With Yukio he inclined his head over the images. Mitsuko leant forward, her vinyl suit creaking.

  ‘It is one of Yukio’s special interests,’ she explained in English. ‘When we first met it was in winter, and he liked to tease and call me the yuki-onna, the snow woman. She is a beautiful lady of mythology, but exceptionally dangerous. She kills men with her cold breath. She floats through the snow and leaves no footprints.’

  How enmeshed they all were. It was startling, Cass reflected, how they overlapped and repeated in their private fixations. They were a group of random foreigners, passing at this moment in history, through this specific city, and they were continually discovering symbolic convergences. Interpenetrating knowledge made their association unique. In their para-literary life of drinking and ritualised talking, outside usual social forms, a leisure class all of their own, they had discovered the gestalt of apparently shared perceptions. No footprints necessary to lead their way.

  ‘Let me show you something,’ Mitsuko said.

  She extracted a pile of stiff papers from her bag, pushed the teacups aside, and set about fussily manipulating a single square page. She said she was constructing an origami snow-flake. Her fingers fiddled at the sheet, pressing and folding, following crease lines, flattening corners with her fingertips, deriving a pointed star from an entirely ordinary plane of paper. With a slight bow of her head, she offered the shape to Karl. He received it with two hands, in a delicate gesture. Then Mitsuko bent again, and folded again. This time she folded into existence an origami butterfly. Her fingers pinched at the corners and pulled lengthwise at the paper body. She displayed the completed shape on her open palm.

  ‘It’s a female,’ she added, handing it to Cass with the same quiet formality. ‘The male is slightly different.’

  With the gentlest of pressures, Mitsuko urged Cass to open her hand and accept the butterfly. Cass had always thought it ingenuous, this playing with paper, and above all despised the decorative motif of butterflies that infested women’s scarves and bags and summer clothes, ubiquitous as the skull. But now she held the little object with new regard. Its combination of exactness and austerity moved her. Such a rational thing. Such a marvel of reconstruction. ‘Implicated’, that was the word, the mystery of folds. From a humble planar void, this 3D surprise. She glanced at Karl and was moved to see that he had tears in his eyes. He nodded politely. With endearing charm he held up his paper snowflake, swinging it from two fingers.

  When at last they all left, Cass realised that she felt both lucid and well. Her headache had gone, her laconic mood had disintegrated. Her body was no longer clogged with excess alcohol and toxins. Darkness had fallen very early, so she had no sense of the time, but when she looked at the clock she discovered it was nearly seven. She set about rinsing the teacups to make way for preparing her dinner. She felt a vast, dreamy ease, a sense of moving in a state of peace and equanimity in her room. Minutes passed unnoticed: she seemed to drift through absent time on shallow associations, the Japanese origami, the bookmarks in Karl’s book, the slow lamination of memories of the last few weeks, and of what she had said, and of what others had said, and of how there had been a hundred small intersections and correspondences; and how these had given her such subtle and unexpected pleasure.

  She was aware of a distant sound in the hallway as a door slammed below, and of footfall somewhere, and of the spooked quality of indistinct sounds in the stale air of the apartment block. She was aware of the warmth she now felt, and the enveloping comfort. Beyond the windowpane the darkness of Berlin was thickening. She pressed her face to the window. She held her breath, to see. Outside, streams of snow were swirling in nautilus curves. She watched them turn, the whorled shapes of a beneficent sky. It seemed too that she heard a faraway sound. Something like a phone disconnected, or the blurred hum in a seashell.

  19

  Now she returned to where the associations had begun, to Nestorstrasse, Wilmersdorf, 10711 Berlin. Vladimir Nabokov’s Nestorstrasse. Marco Gianelli’s Nestorstrasse.

  The message from Marco told her that Gino was staying for a few nights somewhere near Oranienplatz; would she join him for dinner? Cass all at once felt a kind of trepidation. It was serious now, now that she had spoken of herself, now she had exposed her eccentricities and her odd selection of tales. She must prepare for questions and curiosity and the seductive power of mutual confession. She thought of the curve of his bare back, and her own arms encircling. She thought of how sex both generalises and stipulates, how it was this all-purpose lust, vital and urgent, and this glimpse of an individual, singular spine.

  Cass buzzed ‘Gianelli’ and was admitted to the building. She found the light switch inside the doorway and illuminated the stairs. It was a shabby-looking lobby, stinky and dim, with paint flaking from the walls and a grimy stairwell. Four leaning bicycles crammed the hallway. She climbed nervously to meet him. Waiting in the doorway, Marco hovered above her. Cass looked up and saw his solicitous gaze, and the way he held the door open, bending slightly, and the calm contentment with which he awaited her. He kissed both cheeks, slowly uncoiled her scarf, lifted her coat from her shoulders and ushered her in.

  It was a relief to discover that the apartment was stylish and clean. The lobby had suggested depredation and miserable tenants, but Marco’s place was orderly, even expensive-looking, in its furnishings and arrangements. In the sitting room there was a wall of bookshelves, stacked full, to which Cass was immediately drawn, and beneath it a beautiful tan sofa and a beechwood coffee table. She stood scanning the titles of the books – a habit she always succumbed to – lost in hasty calculation of his intellectual tastes and predispositions.

  ‘Make yourself comfy,’ Marco said.

  ‘Comfy’: it was unlike him to sound so casual. On the wall she noticed a Rembrandt print of a small shell she had collected as a child: a cone, or was it perhaps a volute?

  ‘Not an original!’ Marco sounded happy. He ducked into the small kitchen and returned with wine and two glasses.

  ‘I was worried about you, after the speak-memory. We were all a bit drunk, I think.’

  ‘I was well looked after.’

  So they began. There were olives with the wine, a good Bordeaux, and the affable ping of lightly touched glasses. Each se
nsed a harmony descending, and a recovery of expanded time. Marco said he had returned late from work and apologised in advance, and unnecessarily, for the hasty simplicity of the meal. Cass stood beside him as he stirred a mushroom risotto, and spoke of how as a child he had liked to watch his mother cook.

  Their conversation settled, with relaxed irrelevance, around childhood matters. In response to a question about school, Cass told how often in her primary years they were given the plastic template shape of Australia to colour in, and how the fashion among kids was to outline the island in a fringe of blue. ‘The Island Continent’. Meticulously schoolchildren indicated feathery ocean, following the irregular coastline, making the island float. It gave her a sense, she said, of the Australian shape as a squat body, set adrift, lost, aimlessly floating. A country all alone. A body all alone. Marco was amused and encouraged her reminiscing.

  ‘I love these details,’ he said. ‘These past intensities.’

  In his primary school – and in Gino’s – they were given the shape of the Coliseum to colour. The Ring, they called it. Every Italian child was required to colour the Ring. Marco said he remembered the fearful pleasure of gladiatorial stories, their atrocity and splendour. He remembered the musky smell of pencil shavings and the dank interior of his oak desk.

  ‘Children love stationery,’ Marco went on. ‘Coloured pencils, with tiny golden writing at one end, the oblong eraser, the little zipped pouch for odds and ends. The metal pencil sharpener, what a brilliant invention …’

  Cass imagined his curly head bent very close to the paper, colouring with special care within the lines, then pausing only to change pencils, or earnestly to sharpen. The avid hand of a small Roman boy, filling the Colosseo with colour.

  Soon they were laughing together. Trivial childhood details blazed carelessly between them. It was all so much easier now, buoyed by their unimportant stories, those that needed to fit no community or explanation.

  Only later, much later, did they speak of difficult matters. Marco asked why in her speak-memory Cass had not named her brothers, but for Alexander, and why too she had described herself in such negative terms. She paused before she answered, partly returned to inhibition. Marco did not press or hurry her. Yet when she responded it was easy, and without the anxiety of performance. It occurred to her that she had waited for just this opportunity, to speak at last of her secret, to find relief in the tender satisfaction of telling a single person.

  ‘My brother Alexander was killed,’ she said clearly and in a steady tone. ‘He was killed in an accident just before I left the north.

  ‘I was twelve, he was thirteen, we were both about to leave at the end of summer for boarding school. There was a cyclone, a fierce one, which swung in from the ocean.’

  ‘I see,’ said Marco.

  ‘We were inside with my parents, crouching under the kitchen table, which was bordered with mattresses. We could hear our dog, Nip, barking frantically outside. Nip was running in circles, going completely crazy, and would not be commanded or whistled in. Alexander lunged from our shelter and rushed out into the storm to retrieve him. That’s all. That was it. He just ran out into the storm. A falling tree struck him on the side of his head. My father struggled through dangerous winds to locate him, then returned within minutes carrying his wet, bloody body. Together we pulled him beneath the table. We sheltered against the roar of the wind and the shaking of the house.’

  Here Cass halted, her voice thinning.

  ‘Blood was draining from Alexander’s head. He rested in my mother’s lap and I watched her skirt soak red. He was dying then, I know that now. But I felt nothing, really. Not grief, not understanding. I had no sense of consequence, then.

  ‘It took hours for the cyclone finally to pass. When it did, it was dark. We crept from our shelter to find the house half-blasted away. I remember there was a full bright moon, fantastically shiny, and the lighthouse still shone, entirely unharmed, so that in its intervals we could see that everything was wet and shattered, everything was strewn about, everything was destroyed. And everything was beautifully glistening, like polished silver.’

  It had been a vision, an anomalously charming vision. Cass knew that this too was part of her shame, that she had found the wreckage alluring.

  ‘My older brothers, Michael and Robert, came back for the funeral, but somehow we didn’t dare speak of the cyclone. We didn’t speak of Alexander, or of what we had all lost. My parents implicitly prohibited it.

  ‘I chose not to mention the death in my speak-memory, because I was afraid I would cry. And because, during the storm, I had felt such shameful excitement. And because I have never told anyone before, anyone at all.’

  She might have been humiliated telling him, or simply relieved, but it was some other kind of feeling – a listlessness, an exhaustion. Soon after she must have fallen asleep, because when she was next conscious, she was in darkness and Marco was snoring beside her. His body seemed to emit an extraordinary heat. His arm was flung heavily across her chest and she experienced a sense of suffocation. She lifted the arm and slid from the bed, making her way to the kitchen, where she switched on the light and filled a glass with water from the tap. Marco’s apartment was warmer than hers, and much more comfortable. She stood naked, thin and hard as a candle, wondering how long it would be before she began to shiver.

  It was almost frightening to have spoken of the family secret. Perhaps her parents had felt responsible; perhaps this was why they wanted never to acknowledge or speak of it. Perhaps they had loved Alexander best of all their children – she had often thought this, intuited it, even as a child. Standing at the sink, lonesome in the night, Cass was confronted by the question of what is at stake in staying silent or in speaking; by what intimacy with Marco she had created or supposed. She recalled, vividly now, that Alexander’s face was unblemished. He had lain in her mother’s lap with his eyes placidly closed. They were so still together, mother and son, so apparently eternal. Now, simply remembering, she felt what she had never remembered feeling before. Now she felt ill.

  From the kitchen window there was a clear view of Nestorstrasse. Across the road Nabokov’s building looked undistinguished. It was a blank façade, stern, with a metallic lunar glow. Like many buildings in Berlin it was possibly a reconstruction, an address, rather than the walls that had actually held him. There was no snow in the sky to entertain or to distract. No cars passed by on wet pillars of light, and there were no clip-clopping pedestrians, abroad so late. Cass saw only the bareness of the night and its ghastly stillness.

  In her half-awake reverie, caught by the flowing past, she began to think of Vladimir Nabokov’s brother, Sergei. Eleven months younger – as Cass was to Alexander – he had been the doomed, the unsuccessful son. Afflicted with social awkwardness, physical frailty and an incurable stutter, which worsened as he grew, Sergei was also homosexual and an embarrassment to his brother. Vladimir considered him indolent and hedonistic. He despised his bowties and his make-up and his handsome boyfriends, but loved him too, with an inadmissible, furtive affection. Vladimir was safe in America, on a butterfly-hunting expedition, when Sergei died in the Neuengamme concentration camp, just outside Hamburg, in 1945. By all accounts the younger brother, the awkward, the frail, the incurably stuttering brother, the brother who was always slighter and much less successful, exhibited extraordinary bravery during the time of his imprisonment.

  Standing at the kitchen window, staring into the night-chasm of Nestorstrasse, Cass in her nakedness began quietly to weep. It may have been self-pity. She was not really sure for whom she wept. Alexander and Sergei conflated into one abstract cause. It was an affectation, or something like it, to mourn a historical figure, brother of a writer, a man famous for his family connection. But looking at the blind windows opposite, and imagining the Nabokovs living there, this amorphous double grief was a convenient displacement. She had sat with Alexander’s body, beneath the table, in the roaring wind, and felt an indecent se
nse of adventure. She had refused with a lazy soul – an indolent and hedonistic soul, perhaps – to imagine him truly and permanently gone. Now it was easier to attach to a remote historical example. Poor Sergei Nabokov, poor gay war hero. Dramatically taken by the Nazis and killed in 1945.

  20

  The plan was to meet again at Kępiński’s.

  After the drunken conclusion to Cass’s speak-memory, the group had met in twos or threes to recalibrate their links to each other. Apart from the meeting with the lovers and Karl, and her night spent with Marco, Cass met Victor at an English language bookshop in Prenzlauer Berg. He was still talking of the aquarium: for some reason it had become the ever-ready answer to his directionless search for meaning. He said yet again that he loved the jellyfish as well as the tortoise; that he had sensed the presence of the master; that he had seen in the fluid bluish light some kind of mesmerising confirmation. Did she know that Nabokov had proposed marriage to his seventeen-year-old girlfriend, Svetlana, at the aquarium, in 1923? It was a place of ardour. Ardour, he repeated, tapping the side of his nose like a comedian. For Victor, idiosyncratically fixated, all Berlin turned in a gyre around the liquid centre of the aquarium.

  They sat together on a freezing bench not far from the Watertower. Cass had complained to Victor of the macabre element in Nabokov’s work, and he responded simply by declaring that it was the joy he read for. Look at the stories, he said, there are murders and deceptions, there are grotesques and mistakes, but there is also humour, a theme of happiness, and the great adventure of being. Victor had quoted one or two of his favourite passages, then Nabokov’s aphorism: ‘We are the caterpillars of angels.’

  ‘Corny,’ said Cass.