by Gail Jones
A gash had opened in the night, an intimation of atrocity. Around them were the stiff shapes of bare branches and the night shadows of unfamiliar woods. There was something underfoot Cass couldn’t name, something compressed and uneven. She heard the chain metallically rattle as Franz moved his burden.
‘You don’t understand,’ Gino shouted. His voice was shattering in the cold night air. And they had already begun moving on, they were turning away from her.
‘Stop!’ It was Mitsuko this time. It was Mitsuko who yelled her anxiety into the night, who wanted to halt whatever morbid plot was unfolding.
They saw the shadows of Gino and Marco halt. Franz swung the torch again; his yellow light faltered, as he did. They saw its dispersed beam concentrate and turn downwards, the cone focused brightly at his feet.
‘What are we doing here?’
‘What?’ It was Gino again, sounding angry.
‘What are we doing here?’
Ahead, Marco and Gino lowered the body. Franz remonstrated. Cass heard the German word ‘hurry’. Gino stood his ground, but Marco was slowly approaching them.
‘Gino can’t return to prison,’ said Marco. ‘We must do this for him. We can’t leave him alone to deal with this. We’ve come this far.’
There was no explanation of ‘prison’. He was speaking urgently and fast. But in the effort to sound reasonable his voice was almost tearful. It was overwrought with too much yet unexplained. What story was this they had entered, or failed to enter? What might both men be attempting to conceal?
Yukio called out, ‘Fuck you, Gino! Fuck you!’
His face was caught by the disc of the torch: Franz had returned without them noticing.
And then Gino, propelled with furious distress, sped from the darkness and threw himself onto spotlit Yukio. It was a sudden rough tackle, a frightened will to hurt, so that Yukio fell backwards into the snow and the two men were rolling together. Gino was attempting ineffectually to pummel Yukio’s face, lifting his fist, pushing wildly, heavily flailing. There were grunts and hard thwacks, but it was more a wrestle of two boys, with nothing much occurring but impotent rage. Within seconds, Gino had stopped. He was suddenly still, lying on top of his opponent, heaving, sobbing.
‘I’m sorry, Yukio,’ he blubbered. ‘Sorry. So sorry.’
In a single move Franz had seized Gino’s jacket and lifted him upwards, forcing him into a headlock and pulling down on his own wrist to tighten the pressure. Yukio clambered sideways to upright himself. Under his breath, he let out a curse in Japanese. Beside him, Mitsuko was brushing rapidly at his coat and flicking wet flakes of snow from his hair. As Franz loosened his grip, Gino sank groggy to his knees. Cass could not bring herself to comfort Gino; and now he wept without restraint, apart and undone. There was a slow settling down and a slower reunification.
They all stayed there looking downwards, seized in tense indecision.
‘We have to do this,’ whispered Marco. ‘But it can just be Gino and me. You can all go now. You can wait for us in the truck.’
He spoke like one rebuked. They heard his uncertainty. Again, Gino sobbed. They saw that Marco was shivering. He paused to blow air into the shell of his cold cupped hands.
Mitsuko and Yukio were conferring in Japanese. Cass stood alone, stupefied. In the end a peculiar solidarity overtook them. In the end they trudged together into the darkness with the body of their friend. Gino was hopelessly distraught so Yukio took over, carrying Victor with Marco. Victor made a neat bundle. Mitsuko and Cass flanked Gino; now they were holding his hands, almost pulling, in a half-dragging grip. Ahead, Franz walked lopsided, leading the way to a narrow path, and down to the water. His torchlight was pallid and skewed and let nothing in the world remain stable.
What she would remember was the unusual clarity of the words and actions that followed. The snowfall had eased to an uneven sprinkle. In its place was scintillating night and a smothered calm. Now they heard the sound of their own footsteps, crunching the new snow, and the rasp and effort of their own frozen breathing. Somewhere a stream of traffic issued a blurry, murmurous hum, somewhere meaningful life was still going on, warm and oblivious. Cass thought of Victor’s flecked face, unblemished, his eyes wide open; she thought of Karl shovelling snow, of the drive closed inside the truck, and of the form, Victor’s form, resting in her lap. She thought only in questions of how the night had accelerated to this, this trudge into a death zone, this despicable trudge. Snowdrift was piled at an angle against what looked like the remains of a wall. What was it doing here, what purpose might it serve? Symbols resolved round her, the contraction of time felt like a noose.
Yet there was no more protestation. They acted as one group. At the bank of what might have been the river or the canal, they looked over ice that lay unnaturally flat and shining on the water. Franz swung the anvil around his head and lobbed it onto the black ice. There was a sharp cracking sound as the ice plate broke apart. It broke as if a mirror, spiked and dangerous. Franz pulled back his missile, hauling it hand over hand as one would an anchor, then flung it again. It rose higher this time, a mean dangerous missile, and came down in the darkness with another loud crack. Then he instructed, ‘Now. Now the body can go under.’
They all paused. Gino had fallen silent. It was the moment in which they might all have come to their senses, but there was a drive now to completion, and a sense of inevitable mission. With bent, sorrowful heads Yukio and Marco weighted the body with Franz’s anvil. They wound the chain around the feet and rested the block of iron in the centre, on what was still his belly. Victor’s belly. Taking one end each they heavily swung, then swung again, and then let go. The body arced only a little and landed hard on the ice; and they all looked with alarm at what fell there but did not immediately disappear. Franz prodded a plate of ice with his foot, and they saw the form list slightly as the shelf tilted, then tilted a little more. Across the shine of angled ice, Victor slid into the water. There was less a splash than a sound like a mouth opening and closing. Then bubbles breaking at the surface, like evidence of posthumous words. Then nothing at all.
A little wind had risen, so the light snow began to turn. They were heading back to the truck, quiet, each enclosed in their own deep misery, when Marco asked them to stop. Franz kept on walking, his torch wobbling, insecure, and they watched as his swooping angles of light took him separately and further away. The friends stood in a circle, finding their night vision, so that they might look directly into each other’s funereal faces. They oddly resembled each other: Gino and Marco, Yukio and Mitsuko. In snowlight Cass saw that they were radically alike. Each had dark eyes that twinkled like aluminium foil; each the same pinched guilty face, tight and withdrawn.
Marco gave a little speech, absurdly formal in the circumstances. He said that the death of any human was without metaphor or likeness. The death of any human was incomparable. It was not a writerly event. It was not contained within sentences. It was not to be described in the same way as the beauty of an icicle, or three wrinkles parallel on the forehead of a remembered governess, or the play of shadow and light on a swimming body, or the random harmony of trifles that was a parking meter, a fluffy cloud and a tiny pair of boots with felt spats.
He said Victor’s name. Beloved Victor. He said, ‘Rest in Peace, Victor.’ They remained silent. No one else could speak. They were as specks in the dark of a shocking event. Then, in a tiny voice, Mitsuko said, ‘Umbrella, umbrella.’
Ferrule, Cass thought. The release of something deadly.
The headlamps of the truck flicked on and off, on and off, their sickly glow both faint and far-reaching. It was Franz, annoyed, signalling them to return. They stood a little longer, ignoring him, stuck in a star of five. Cass heard a low susurration that might have been a phantom whisper, but then realised, coming to her senses, that it was traffic, Berlin traffic, distant and mechanical and streaming away.
23
When she walked into her studio, hardly vertical
, completely exhausted, Cass saw that the glass doors to the balcony had been left open. No one had thought to close them. In the hectic aftermath of Gino’s crime, they had all fled her room as though it was contaminated. Now weather had entered; the outside had swept in. Snow from the balcony had been blown in streaks across the floor and the edges of her little world had been made indistinct. She stood for a few seconds in rapt attention to this evidence of a new state: no geometry of flakes but a chaos of elements, no poetic impulse, but disgust and ruination. The tense shimmer, the snowy sky, was an unbearable thing.
The room was sub-zero. Her spirit was lost. Cass pushed the balcony doors closed and leant for a moment against them, as if holding back a still clotting darkness. Keeping her coat and scarf on, ignoring the mess of their meeting, and the puddles on the floor, she collapsed into her bed, made herself as warm as she could, and lay defeated, in a tired pile. She drew her body into as tight a shape as possible, abbreviating herself, becoming smaller and smaller. And almost immediately, perfectly still, she fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.
Cass had kept Marco away, and insisted she could return alone to her studio apartment. But in the morning it was he whom she thought of first. Not Victor. Not Gino. Not the dark ceremony by the river. She wanted an explanation of the events of the night. Outside, the sky was white, but no snow fell. It was a dead-looking day. When she turned on her phone there were several messages waiting, flicked open in a radiant, expectant rectangle. ‘Come.’ ‘Come now. Please.’ These had been sent an hour ago. Cass wasn’t ready for conversation, or the sound of his voice, so she messaged Marco simply, ‘I’m on my way.’ She stayed in yesterday’s clothes, not even bothering with fresh underwear, and drank a glass of water. She was not hungry. She was numb and feeling empty. She brushed her teeth and washed in haste, withdrawing from the mirror and the glimpse of her pale foreign face.
There was no sign outside the building. Karl had indeed cleaned away death. Cass looked discreetly as she left, seeking bloodstains or a dropped article, and wondered if he now watched her, half-concealed behind his window. She would not turn around to acknowledge him. At this moment he was someone whom it would pain her to acknowledge. Guided by Marco’s message, driven in his direction, she felt again relieved to have a chore when all around her felt tumultuous.
Last night’s snow was banked high along the streets. The roads were churning into black slush, and cars were becoming smeared, but there was still a purity and cleanliness to the fallen drifts and mounds. A few children with sleds were playing in the park near the cemetery. There was just enough of a rise to give them the velocity of a slide. They shouted in high squeals and ran with the energy of small dogs. She saw them veer and twist and fall laughing from their sleds. They fell, and rose again. They chased each other up the inclines and then flew excited and atremble into the waiting arms of their parents. It was archetypal in its appeal, this liberated play, this return again and again to a loving embrace. Pock shapes of small footprints threaded up the slope, lovely in their regular spacing.
A snowman had been built. The simple white form, corpulent and skewed, stood in the centre of the park, commanding his own mini-kingdom. There were sticks for the fingers and a halo of stick rays springing from its head. It had a crucified shape, Cass thought, and then she reproached herself for so vulgar an exaggeration. It would be like this for a while; signs would correlate and extend, there would be a deathliness to ordinary bodies and a kind of pathology to associations.
Cass was walking north, in the direction of Marco’s apartment, when she saw the U-Bahn sign of Viktoria-Luise-Platz. She was fond of the U4, a short, old-fashioned line, the station a slightly antiquarian monument in green and white tiles. Victor had loved it too. It occurred to her that she might ride the U4, change at Nollendorfplatz to the U2, then pay a quick visit to the aquarium before she saw Marco. It was already late enough, the aquarium would be open, and it was a way of thinking about Victor not within the confines of the group, but exclusively, as only she had seen and known him. Victor was demanding attention, like Hamlet’s father; he was ghosting her thoughts.
Cass entered the underground and was carried away. The ride was a blur. As she emerged at the busy Zoo station she was overcome with a clear sensation of retrieved affection, and the memory of waiting by the aquarium entrance with cold feet for Victor’s arrival. She climbed the steps, bought her ticket and walked as if back in time through the glassy corridors.
She saw again how enticing were the windows of swimming creatures, how the chambers were shrewdly lit to suggest timelessness and drift, how the comedic element prevailed – the antics of miniature creatures, their circus-toned colours, the far-fetching and bemused look of some of the larger marine animals – how overall the blue light led to dreaminess and contemplation, and a wish to slow down and childishly dawdle. What was consoling here, she realised, was this eradication of history, this facile escape.
She was heading with a certain dread towards the tubes of jellyfish, wondering if she might lose control of her feelings, when a crowd of schoolchildren appeared and swept from behind her. She had been alone, in a kind of memorialising spell; now she was among chatty thirteen-year-olds guided by their ponytailed teacher. They were an anarchic group, uncontained by space or authority. None wore uniforms and all seemed to have multicoloured sneakers and scarves. They filed here and there, gathered for photographs, mucked about in rowdy and jovial groups. Three boys were pressing their lips against the glass, making human fish lips and obscene sucking sounds. The place was at once lively and over-run. Victor would have loved this, Cass thought, all these kids, going mad. The world of selfies, bad jokes and impudent observations.
Cass saw ahead the tube of jellyfish and decided to wait until she was alone, until the crowd had moved on. It took a while – she began to worry Marco would think she was not coming – but then the children moved to other novelties and other misbehaviours. She walked up to the display of jellyfish and peered again into their world: the light-filled bodies, drifting and pulsating. Victor’s lovely face was no longer there. It amazed her how quickly the faces of the newly dead faded, how within hours they were watery and cast away.
She stood watching what Victor had so recently seen, with his own alive eyes. She saw the loops of trailing tentacles and the perfection of jellyfish domes; as every being, after all, was entire and perfect. She noticed now how there were barely perceptible currents in the water, motes floating down as the gelatinous shapes pulsed up, the blooms of perpetual motion, the opening and closing of loose cavities. Vivacity, too; she noticed their bright vivacity.
Cass had not yet felt what she needed to feel. She stood vacant and quiet, afraid to feel anything. Practised at control and the suppression of disturbances, she remained fixed in a pointless stasis before the glass. But she must also move away and return to Marco. She must keep on moving. She would not look at Victor’s tortoise, she suddenly decided. She would not remember last night, and would leave before what she suppressed could no longer be held down. Now. She would leave now. There was a precise anxiety that kept returning and flooding her thoughts: how could they possibly tell Victor’s daughter? Might she come to Berlin to seek her father?
On the U-Bahn, returning, Cass saw with new clarity the mortal faces of Berliners travelling alongside her, passengers all together, all moving in the same direction. Sweeping around the city without effort, skimming on silver lines. She listened to the voice over the loudspeaker, saying, ‘Exit left.’ She watched people rise and leave, and others enter and take their places. A woman sat beside her who displayed the blue complexion of chemo. Around her head was a tight scarf, she wore an inaccessible look, she had the telltale sunken cheeks of one etiolated, slowly becoming skeleton. The woman stared directly ahead, not acknowledging anyone around her.
Two boys, about ten, flung themselves into the facing seats. The slighter of the two had Alexander’s chin, angular, distinctive, and a tiny scab at his mouth. Th
ey had always been close, but after their brothers had left for boarding school, Alexander paid Cass more particular attention. He was determined, he said, to make her an A-grade cricketer. She remembered how he arranged her hands on the handle of the bat, his own knuckles shining, how he moved her legs into position and set her body at the correct angle. He liked to spit into his palms and rub them together; he liked to bowl with a kind of lazy, loping stride, as if spilling the ball rather than throwing it, as if it came whizzing with its own red life, extended from his arm. He loved the language of cricket: wickets, stumps, bails, fields, the innings, creases, overs and runs, and managed to use these terms to comment wittily on everyday moments and situations. His ambition in life, his sole ambition, was to become a legendary wicket-keeper for the Australian team.
Cass watched the two boys sprawling in their seats. They were heedless of adults. They had their own business to attend to, their own busy lives. All at once she was overtaken by a powerful urge to tell someone, not of Victor’s death and her own dreadful complicity, but the delightfulness of children, and the astonishing beauty of jellyfish.
When Marco opened the door Cass saw immediately that he had been crying.
Victor. Her first thought was that Marco had revisited Victor in his own way, lost his sense of impunity, acknowledged in a quiet moment the horror of what they had done. His face was distorted and his eyes were red. He had taken on that childlike look adults acquire in the business of serious weeping. At least, unlike her, he had changed his clothes: there was no blood, no evidence. He clasped at her tightly, and held her very close and still. His mouth was warm against her hair.
‘It’s Gino,’ he whispered. ‘Gino has gone.’
‘Gone?’
‘Dead. Gino is dead.’
Cass drew back and stared at his face, which quivered with emotional saturation and strain.
