A Guide to Berlin

by Gail Jones

  ‘I got rid of the ice,’ he said quickly, matter-of-factly, blurting out what he had waited all morning to tell her. ‘But I’ve left the heroin gear. So they can see it’s a suicide.’

  He must have registered only then her startled incredulity. He must have realised the shock to Cass, and how severe his announcement had been. This sudden news had sprung from Marco entirely unmediated and incautious. He was a man distrait.

  ‘Oh Jesus,’ he said, echoing Gino. ‘Oh Jesus, forgive me. I shouldn’t have called you.’ He took her hand and squeezed.

  ‘But here I am,’ she responded simply.

  The sky was falling in. Victor, and the night by the icy Havel, and now this. Now Gino. Cass must withstand this news or be annihilated. She willed herself to stay collected and composed.

  ‘No Franz.’

  ‘God, no. No Franz. I’ve called the police.’

  He went on to say that there had been no warning or indication. When they arrived home Gino had refused a glass of brandy and said that he just wanted to sleep. That they would talk in the morning. That he needed to lie down. It had been a relief, Marco said, that Gino didn’t wish to talk it through, that they didn’t say Victor’s name, not even once. Marco had taken a long shower, washed himself clean, then fallen into bed. Since Gino was silent, he assumed he was already asleep.

  ‘I didn’t check,’ he added, his lip and chin quivering. ‘I should have checked.’

  Marco’s face was now becoming rigid, like plaster. It was the cumbersome mask that grief had given him. She had seen this stiff mortification on the faces of her parents and her brothers. She had seen their features harden and intensify. Marco slowly removed Cass’s coat and hung it on a hook by the door. She was a comfort to him, being here, not falling apart. But now there was an agonising turbulence of thoughts to contend with.

  She was thinking of the brutality of last night, the dishonorable stupidity. How could they? How? What bond existed that had made them act in this way? What corporate thinking? She had been in a daze of believing the crime was hidden, gone, but in Marco’s words it had reappeared and cruelly increased. She looked away. She must fit her life into this collective drama again. She must tell Victor’s daughter, she must somehow help Marco. It was not over, she thought, and it would never be over. Perhaps she would be questioned by the police. Yes, we both saw him late last night. Yes, he was a drug user. Methamphetamine, heroin. Yes, he had overdosed in the past. (Had he overdosed in the past?) She began to frame fictitious answers to imagined questions. The lovers would have to be told. Gino’s sisters would have to be told: Marco would have to tell Gino’s sisters. Two deaths now, and the blunt force of grief.

  What followed was exempted from the new texture of time they had created the night before. Everyday principles, where one thing follows another, more or less with reason, where cause leads to effect, and where people behave, for the most part, sensibly and predictably - these had last night entirely disappeared. And yet now, in the quiet intermission in Marco’s elegant apartment, there was a human scale once more, and a sudden slowing to real solemnity. Both saw again how one thing followed another. Order, consequence. Laws of motion. And because they were just two, a controlled response was possible. When she was ready, only then, Marco led Cass into his spare room to show her Gino’s body.

  He was just as Marco had found him, turned towards the wall, curled with his knees bent up near his chest and his hands tucked between his thighs. A syringe and a length of black rubber lay on the bed. The room was tidy and quiet. There was no desolating inclemency. There was no Nabokovian speech from Marco. Cass heard her own body as it moved, infinitesimally sounding, in small careful steps towards the bed. She heard the beat of her own breathing, regular and shallow. Timidly, she leant over to kiss Gino’s forehead. His eyes were closed. His lips were pressed, like one petulant, or the way a child keeps a secret. He might have been fast asleep but for his bluish pallor. As snow shadows are blue, Cass half-thought. Snow shadows are blue. This principle she had learnt years ago in her painting class. She carried these stray associations, inappropriate, aesthetic, but no feeling response.

  Marco stood nearby but seemed not entirely present. There was a code to his limited gestures, and to hers. He tugged at the end of the bed as though correcting something. She smoothed the surface of the doona, her hand slow and lingering. Both pretended they were calm. Their fingers touched once, but neither wanted touch now, neither could bear to take comfort with Gino so close, and dead. They stared at his face, which evoked shame and love in equal measure. They had done the wrong thing, hiding Victor. For ever and ever. It would always be the wrong decision. And now, now this.

  Marco handed Cass a sheet of paper. On it was a handwritten message from Gino.

  Sorry Victor.

  Sorry Marco.

  Sorry Cass.

  Sorry Mitsuko.

  Sorry Yukio.

  Below, there was something scrawled in Italian, something just for Marco, or possibly written, and implicating, only for himself. There had been a moment last night, in the stillness of this room, when Gino had raised a pen, and written the simple word ‘sorry’. Not goodbye. But sorry. He had been alone in this room and thought of each of them in turn. Cass scanned the text, uncomprehending, and picked out single words: desolato. Then pietoso.

  She wept only then. The indirection of the Italian vocabulary had caught her entirely by surprise. Knowing no Italian, she saw only the English derivations there. And these words, Latinate, church-sounding, ringing with choral echoes and divine associations, seemed all at once to puncture and disable her. Marco stood apart. She felt tears stream down her cheeks for those she loved. And she loved them all: Victor, Gino, Marco, Mitsuko, Yukio.

  Alexander. How she had loved her brother, Alexander.

  She heard Marco clear his throat and shuffle out of the room, leaving her to the privacy of her grief, and carrying away his own.

  Cass stayed for a long time at Gino’s side. Not a body, but Gino. She stood looking down at him, caught in whatever turning vortex this loss truly was. She adjusted the doona once again, smoothing it once again, her fingers removing an imaginary piece of fluff. The feel of fabric beneath her fingertips was a comfort, and oddly precise. There was a ragged spot, tiny, but certainly there. She felt curiously both aware and unaware, like a child, or an animal, or a character in a book.

  At last her weeping ceased. She stood silently, her face wet, her mind misty and unfocused. There was a lamp beside the bed; she leant forward to switch it off. On a table nearby lay Victor’s spectacles. Cass took them and shoved them up the sleeve of her sweater. Then vaguely she considered whether it was proper, before the police arrived, to pull a cover over Gino’s face.

  24

  In the opening to Wim Wenders’ 1987 movie Wings of Desire, there are aerial views of Berlin in black and white that swing around in a slow, circular motion. From the point of view of angels, the city looks distant and dull, full of isolated individuals immured in their own unhappy thoughts. Some voice seems to say, There are many immurements here, many walls and separations. See how walled we are. See how alone. An early scene shows the broken-off spire of the Gedächtniskirche: a child looks up, mouth open, and sees an angel perched there. In another scene a man dies after a traffic accident. A Mercedes-Benz has hit a man on a motorcycle. He rests propped against the bridge that lies over the ring line in Schöneberg, guarded in his dying by a trench-coated angel. The man’s face is undamaged but for a trickle of blood beneath his nose. He is thinking first of anxious things: ‘Karin, I should have told you … I still have so much to do …’ but as the angel stays with him and holds his head, the voice in his mind begins gradually to recall sites of joy. A murmuring voiceover speaks of distant places and loved locations – the Far East, Stromboli, the Mississippi Delta; of loved names – Albert Camus; of loved visions – the morning light, a child’s eyes, the old houses in Charlottenburg. The camera sways gently side to side as the
actor looks upwards, seeing heaven. In cinematic terms it could have been a sentimental failure but for the restraint of the filmmaking, and the black and white of the scene, and the dignified, dreamy solitude shared and expressed by the angel.

  Cass thought of this movie as she made her way to Oranienplatz. She was thinking of the beautiful, soft-featured face of Bruno Ganz, his sweet, boyish smile and wistful stare. She was remembering the glide of the camera, with his voice, along the winter track of the S-Bahn ring line, with the lacey basket of the gasometer just visible on the left, and the leafless trees, and the curved line, and the railway bridge passing above, in an ominous dark shadow. She was thinking how good it was to glide, and how the sweep under and over walls, through the trembling visions of stations, past faces glimpsed for a moment and then gone forever, was so like acts of consciousness, the mergings and separations of daily thought and perception. She had the sense of being on the periphery of things, she was not central to anyone’s business, she was not of this city, or employed here, or with any particular purpose. She felt apart from things; she felt she was passing like a ghost.

  After she had stayed beside Gino, and in those concentrated moments had begun, only begun, to feel what she needed to feel, Cass waited with Marco for the police. Two polizei arrived, checked the body, took the gear and called an ambulance. Apart from taking down their names, there was no interview, as such, and no questioning other than the most perfunctory. The police officers, both junior and regimentally punctilious, seemed bored. A suicide was principally uninteresting to them: it meant paperwork, official statements, arrangements for a coroner’s report, but no crime to be solved and no criminal excitement. They took Gino’s passport and said that the embassy would be contacted. They asked Marco to sign a form, and then another. They moved in an aura of function and workaday vacancy. Cass saw that Marco managed well to disguise his distress: he spoke fluent German with little trace of a foreigner’s accent and sounded credible and trustworthy.

  When Gino was at last taken away, his body sheathed in black plastic, Marco slumped in his armchair. He held his face in his hands, lost in distracted sorrow. Cass put her arm around his shoulders.

  ‘I need to tell his sisters before they hear from the embassy,’ Marco said. ‘How will I tell them?’ He looked at his wristwatch, irrelevantly. He was no longer obliged to hold things together and make sense.

  And I need to tell Rachael, Cass thought.

  She did not reply. She made coffee for both of them and not long afterwards she left. She felt suddenly the need for clean clothes and something to eat. The events of the past hours had not ceased her body needing, and it seemed that now she must return more fully to the world. Karl had reminded her of this attitude, this getting on with business, being competent, not waiting to be instructed to put things back into order.

  With fresh clothes and new determination, Cass decided to revisit Oranienplatz, to see Gino’s friend Ahmed. Outside their circle this was the only friend she knew of, and now there seemed to her an urgent responsibility to speak of the death and not cover it over. She’d met Ahmed only the once, obliquely and swiftly – he might not even remember her – but still she felt the pressure and compulsion of a duty. It would be easier, she knew, than telling Yukio and Mitsuko, but it was necessary, honourable. And just as she had wanted on impulse to revisit the aquarium, so Cass thought it proper and fitting to make a second act of return. Repetition, after all, was a kind of memorialisation. Devotion to modest tasks, carrying the news, speaking in a low voice: somehow these suited her. Again, she needed a simple task; and in this day given over to the weighing of disaster, she was reluctant to stay in her apartment and sit quietly alone.

  At Oranienplatz, yesterday’s snow was muddied with shallow footprints and the busyness of the community. As she approached she saw many more people this time. They were coming and going from the tents; these were their homes, after all. Cass saw a few women, as well as men, and understood only now the nature of her presumption – that she was entering a private space and might be unwelcome or in trespass.

  She stood near the entrance to the encampment and patiently waited, not sure where exactly to locate Ahmed. She hoped she might spot him just walking by. A lanky girl of about twelve and wearing a hooded jacket far too large appeared before her and seemed to be sizing her up. She had a direct, penetrating stare and a confident manner. There was a tentative exchange of smiles. At length the girl walked forward, took her by the hand, and simply led her into one of the nearby tents. There were five people there, four men and one woman, sitting on wooden planks arranged around a camp burner. Cass saw five black faces all turn in her direction, and sensed again how living in a tent left the refugees open to endless intrusion. The canvas walls told outsiders that they were essentially impermanent and did not have control over their own lives or space. Their hands were cupped around hot drinks, and their bodies hunched downwards, as if to find warmth that way. A tiny camp burner was heating a saucepan of water. Weather was in here, Cass thought. These people lived in perpetual cold, and with the snow banking close by and the callous invasion of wind.

  The girl released Cass’s hand and said something in a language she couldn’t identify or understand. She pulled back the hood of her jacket to show intricate braids in her hair, displaying it for her, proud of her adornment. Cass resisted the impulse to run her hand slowly over the charming young head. She saw there plaits and ridges and complicated partings, painstaking hairdressing, neat and lovingly performed.

  ‘Ahmed,’ Cass announced. She felt foolish and out of place. ‘I am looking for Ahmed.’

  She heard the name repeated. The woman stepped forward and offered her a cup of hot water. Cass waved it away, but the woman gently lifted her hand and placed it around the cup. She felt moved by this spontaneous inclusion and hospitality. Everyone watched quietly as she took a sip. When a man stepped in behind her, she sensed him and turned.

  ‘I am Ahmed,’ he said. ‘From Ethiopia.’

  He was the wrong Ahmed. This man had an aquiline nose and slightly slanted eyes. He wore a mustard-coloured woollen cap pulled tight over his ears.

  Cass said, ‘Is there another man with your name? From Eritrea?’

  ‘Today he is in Hamburg. The other Ahmed.’

  This man was very tall, she noticed, and proud in his bearing. The girl with the braided hair was now holding his hand. Families, alliances, the linking of one body with another. This tall dark man and this silent child. Cass was unable to deliver her message. She looked into the pool of her drink and felt inept, redundant. Noble intentions and explanations were subsiding away, and in the brief time of her visit Cass saw that her motives were impure. It was for herself, not Ahmed, that she had returned to Oranienplatz. She had needed something to do; and she needed to pretend that she was doing good. It was then, when she looked up again, that she noticed the mattresses. There were two, propped upright in daytime, for protection against draughts of wind.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, handing back the cup. The woman placed it on the ground near the burner, ready for the next drinker. Then Cass reached into her bag and drew out her purse. She stretched over and softly took the hand of the woman – as hers had been taken, with polite insistence – and emptied her purse of its contents. There was a look of surprise, but the woman did not refuse. She nodded a gracious thanks and turned away.

  So money, the most crudely efficient of all signs, easily replaced the missing words. Cass was not given the opportunity to feel that she owned the news of Gino’s death, that she had control, or that she might so easily gain absolution, or relief. Or just distraction, pure distraction, by passing on Gino’s story.

  By the time she arrived back at her studio, Cass was weak with fatigue. It was perhaps five in the afternoon and already dark, and there stood Marco, smoking alone, in the murky shadows outside her building. They embraced but had no need to explain their day to each other. Marco slowly followed Cass upstairs. He could not
stay in his apartment tonight, he said. It would be difficult to return there, where Gino had died.

  ‘Difficult here, too,’ Cass replied.

  Victor: why could they not yet speak of Victor?

  When they entered her apartment neither had the spirit for conversation. Neither said they felt contagion, a sense of things tainted and base. Both were depleted, as true mourners are, hollowed by all that had been scooped away. A distance lay between them. Cass wondered what it was in Marco’s past, and his past with Gino, that had enabled him, or compelled him, to wish to dispose of Victor. What might each or either have done? What crime had sent Gino to prison? She was almost afraid, but not quite, since Marco was smaller now; he was in some way less a presence and less a man. Still, she could not quite bring herself to ask. She was overcome with questions, but could not give them voice.

  In darkness they lay close together, unsexual. Neither mentioned the loss of their friends or their unholy leaving. It was a temporary forgetting and another collusion. They talked in subdued voices of this or that. Marco began describing the trends in Berlin real estate and Cass understood that this was his form of abstraction and a way to avoid all feeling. She barely listened. Prices, places, what had these to do with her? Berlin as a marketplace, Berlin bought and sold. Prices were rising, apparently. Berlin would boom. Cass heard in Marco’s voice the pitiless tone of real-estate evaluation.

  When at last he fell silent, she told him of her visit to Oranienplatz, and of the missing Ahmed, and her confused reactions.

  ‘There was a pretty girl, there,’ she said, ‘with braided hair. She took me inside. And mattresses, there were old mattresses leant against the wall of the tent.’ Her telling was full of holes and incidental details. Now, in her conversation, there were more absences than presences.

  ‘Lampedusa,’ said Marco gloomily. ‘Gino told me about Lampedusa.’