Berlin Syndrome

by Melanie Joosten

  When the timer goes off, she takes the cakes from the oven and leaves them to cool. She was surprised to find icing sugar when she hunted through the kitchen cupboards last week, and she mixes it with water, crushing the lumps against the side of the bowl. She slices the cake and arranges it on a chopping board. The two cakes did not rise the same amount, so she has to cut one down. It’s fiddly work, and she is running out of time — it all took a lot longer than she expected. When she starts applying the icing, she finds the cake crumbs get caught up in it. The cake looks nothing like the professional surfaces of her mother’s. She scoops on more icing, and it drips down the side of the cake, pooling on the board, but finally it is finished. Exultant, she places the cake on the dining table. She has achieved something at last; her day has been worthwhile.

  ~

  Andi’s weight lifted from the bed, dropping her deeper into the mattress. Shivering, she tried to move her body beneath the covers, but her arms were too heavy, they could not grasp the blankets, and she gave up, curling her body to warm herself. Her limbs were aching. She was so incredibly tired; she felt as though she had danced all night. Her head was soft, and still she could not open her eyes. She slept. When she woke she could hear Andi’s footsteps about the apartment, and she pictured him following close behind. Step, step, step. He opened the bedroom door.

  ‘Andi?’ Her voice did not sound like her own. ‘Did you leave the key?’ She felt his lips on her forehead; she supposed it must be a kiss and she forced her eyes apart, tried to find his face in the dull light.

  ‘Here it is.’ His face was closer than expected, and she pulled away as he flashed a silver key at her, putting it on the bedside table. ‘I will see you tonight.’

  Her mousetrap eyes snapped shut, and she tumbled back into sleep.

  When she woke again, her mouth felt chocked full of cotton-wool clouds. She must be coming down with something; she probably caught it in the rain last night. Coughing a papery cough she retrieved her knickers from the floor and pulled on one of Andi’s t-shirts. If she were a Hollywood star she would look fresh-faced and fabulous. The t-shirt would hang from her shoulders like haute couture. Instead, it looked large and misshapen. Her breasts lounged ungracefully without a bra.

  It was cold in the apartment, and she hunted out a pair of Andi’s socks, not wanting the uniform of her own clothes. The floorboards became a skating rink under her feet, and she glided easily across the hallway to the kitchen. As children, she and her sister had wanted to ice-skate, yet Australia was not a land for ice and snow. A rink was set up in a marquee by her town’s lake one winter, but it proved a grey, crowded disappointment. The ice was lost beneath a watery sheen, making the whole thing appear an oversized puzzle, and skaters moved about the rink stiff with awkwardness, trying not to see themselves in their neighbours’ discomfort. She and her sister had more fun at home slipping about on the polished wooden floor of their playroom in socks, yelling out ‘red’ or ‘green’ and trying to catch each other out as they stopped and started.

  Now the heft of her body tried to pull her to the floor, but she resisted. At the living-room window, she pressed her face against the cool glass. Below, the courtyard was unkempt, the concrete cracked and uneven. The veneer of the building opposite was crumbling. Andi had told her that the whole building was deserted — a property developer owned it and was planning on renovating it. The practical side of the apartments faced her, pipes like varicose veins and mean, frosted bathroom windows.

  The television tower rose above the city in a timeless parody of itself, unconcerned by gravity. It was one of those literal, concrete reminders of the past that she had been photographing, trying to capture within her lens the proud socialist hope for a future already lost. It reminded her of last night’s fun park — she would try to get some decent photographs there this afternoon. Reluctantly, she peeled her face from the windowpane. She felt rotten; she should shower. In the bathroom she was careful, as was appropriate in a stranger’s abode. She was learning the rules. She didn’t want to upend a bottle or let a jar go clattering loudly into the sink. She didn’t want to leave pubic hairs on the soap or a wet puddle by the shower. The water plunged from the shower rose, fat and dull, and the steam seemed to fill her as it expanded, pushing her unwilling mind against its peripheries.

  Her head spun when she got out, and she let herself sink to the floor. Her eyes drooped of their own accord, and she sat on the bathmat in a cocoon of darkness, waiting. After a few minutes she pulled herself upright and, towel wrapped around, stumbled back to the bedroom. The sheets were cool as she fell into them, and for a moment she thought that might be enough to keep her awake, but then she pulled the blankets over her, drew her knees to her chest and let go.

  ‘Clare?’

  She rolled over to see Andi in the bedroom doorway.

  ‘Why are you still in bed?’

  Irritation dragged her away from sleep. His question made her feel like a posing teenager. ‘I was tired.’ She pushed the sheets away, the towel still clung damply to her. ‘What time is it? Did you come home early?’

  ‘No, it’s almost six. Are you okay?’ He sat on the edge of the bed. She watched him reach out to her and saw him hesitate. When he did touch her his hand was cool, like a doctor’s.

  ‘I’ve just been so tired. I think I might be getting sick. I haven’t slept that long in ages.’

  He tossed the towel to the floor and lay down. She experienced a disorientating moment of déjà vu. Had he lain down clothed beside her before? From here she could see only one of his eyes; it blinked rapidly as though wondering where its partner was.

  ‘It’s nice to come home and find you in my bed, Clare. It’s like a gift.’

  Watching his watching eye, she moved her face closer to his, kissed him on the lips. Lifting the blankets up, she let him into the bed and shifted her body around his. The cool of the outdoors drifted from the creases of his clothes, and she felt him shudder as she slipped her hand beneath his shirt.

  He appraised Clare’s body with his hands: they swept up and down her length. Like a store mannequin, her body dipped and curved into stillness. Her hot hands crept beneath his shirt, and it was the confirmation that he needed. She wanted him just as much as he wanted her. They tumbled about the bed, and her body seemed to slip through his fingers while her hands grasped at his clothes, simultaneously pulling them off and holding them tight as though she might drift away.

  Later they sat at the dining table, and he watched her eat, his own food lying untouched on the plate. He was holding her camera, and as he scrolled through her photos the buildings formed a flip book of Soviet history.

  ‘So did you go out at all today?’ He held his breath, waited for her answer, knew what she would say.

  She wrinkled her forehead at him, turned her attention back to her food. ‘No, I told you. I was exhausted. I slept all day.’

  She had decided not to leave. He continued scrolling through her photos. He was right.

  ‘Why buildings?’ he asked. He wanted to hear her voice, the unfamiliar accent rippling out across the table, filling the space of his apartment and reminding him that he was not alone.

  ‘Because buildings can lie. People think that they don’t — and that photography doesn’t lie. But they both do. They manipulate perspective, influence memory. They hide things in shadows, draw your eye away from detail.’ Her fork swivelled in her hand like a conductor’s baton, pausing to wait for the next beat to continue on.

  ‘You can only be in one bit of a building at a time and a person’s eye can only focus on one thing at a time. I like playing on these presumptions. There’s so much going on out of the shot, but people refuse to think about that. They think photography is the whole, captured truth.’

  Looking through the photographs of the buildings that skirted the cities of Riga and Vilnius, he was surprised by ho
w similar the setting of his own childhood seemed to these places. It was the level of decay more than anything, the crumbling frontages between the uniformly sized windows. These same buildings had already been renovated in East Berlin or were waiting to be revealed, hidden behind builders’ scaffolding, their facades being plastered over like the faces of ageing matinee idols.

  And then he saw it, why the images seemed like postcards from an indiscriminate time: there was evidence of human habitation but not a single person in any of the shots.

  ‘There are no people.’

  ‘Exactly!’ She put her fork down, pushed the bowl away. ‘Do you know how long I had to wait to photograph some of those places?’

  He scrolled back through the photos; his revelation had made them seem unsavoury, as though they were documenting something that was over, not a place where life was still happening.

  ‘But why? People live here. They use these buildings every day. That is what makes them important. Otherwise they are just shells.’

  ‘But they’re not. Buildings make us do certain things. I wanted to cut out all the people so the viewer can’t humanise the buildings.’

  ‘What is this one?’ He passed the camera to her. It looked like a manipulated photograph, a stately nineteenth-century building framed by a black border with letters cut out of it.

  ‘It’s the Terror Háza in Budapest. A museum for victims of fascism and communism. It’s not for the exhibition, but it’s kind of interesting, don’t you think?’

  She described how the black blades cantilevered out from the building’s roof to form a verandah, and how the sunlight fell through the letters, casting the word ‘terror’ across the museum.

  ‘The Nazis and the Soviets used the same building to torture and imprison their enemies. Don’t you think that’s strange? Buildings matter more than we know.’

  ‘They have them here, too,’ he said. ‘The former Stasi offices, the prison in Hohenschönhausen, they are all memorials now.’

  ‘What I love about buildings is that they signal civilisation. When they’re standing, all is well, and when they’re destroyed, it’s the end. Knocking them down is a way of deleting history, so those very buildings that people were terrified of at one stage become the ones people visit to face their fears. Have you been to the prison?’

  He shook his head. He had never contemplated going to Hohenschönhausen. It was another world, another time. It did not belong to him. Clare frowned at him. He had disappointed her.

  ‘You know what’s fascinating? Every city throughout the former Eastern Bloc seems to have them. Museums of terror, of occupation, of genocide, of deportation. And they are often in the very building where the KGB had their offices. Even when the people are gone, the buildings remain. It’s sad that these places exist, but necessary, don’t you think? So that people know?’

  He could hear the urgency in her voice, the ownership, and something about it put him on edge. ‘But don’t you worry that it’s not your story to tell?’ It was not her history. ‘You can exhibit your photos, put together your book, but it’s not your story, you were not there.’ He watched the hurt spread across her face. This is what he wanted. Because he felt like she was lecturing him — she did not know what it was like. She knew nothing about him.

  ‘I’m not trying to make it mine, Andi. I’m just taking the photos and putting them out there. I don’t want to speak for anyone — I don’t think I am.’

  ‘The buildings will not tell you anything, Clare. It was the people inside who were responsible. People did things then that they would not usually do. You’ll never know what it was like.’

  She shrugged. ‘People can do terrible things to each other. We’ll do it again and we’ll use the same buildings to do it in. I guess I just want the buildings to tell their story, that’s all.’

  He focused his attention on the screen, scrolled on through the images. ‘There are no photos of you.’

  He lifted the camera and pointed it at her, pressed the button. Captured her in that moment just before she smiled, as though her expression was waiting to be issued the command to show him happiness.

  ‘Why don’t you have any tattoos?’ he asks her.

  He runs his fingers across her back as they lie in bed, marvelling at the foreverness of her skin, so white and pink. Not pink — beige. No, it is something else, a white over red, her greedy skin hoarding the red pumping moistness of what lies beneath. White with a blush, like that of a pig’s carcass hanging from a butcher’s hook. He pictures a fluorescent pink stamp marking her, stating what she weighs, how much she is worth.

  ‘Because everyone has tattoos.’

  ‘And if everyone says the sky is blue, do you say it is red?’

  She furrows her brow at him, purses her lips. ‘And tattoos always fade and bleed into blurriness,’ she says, refusing to bite. ‘Why don’t you have any?’

  He watches his own hand stroking her back. When he spreads out his fingers, he can cover quite a bit of her. He could draw a line around his fingers, tattoo his handprint onto her skin, where it would wave at her in the mirror every time she undressed for a shower.

  ‘I don’t know.’ He pictures the tattooist, a stranger, holding his skin taut. ‘I have always been too worried that I wouldn’t love the design forever. Imagine waking one morning and realising you hate it but you are stuck with it for the rest of your life.’

  ‘It’s like cattle branding, isn’t it?’ she says. ‘A way of identifying who owns what.’

  ‘I suppose it is nice to belong to something.’ He lies down beside her, pulls her body to his as he nuzzles into her neck. She does not resist — she is a rag doll. ‘Isn’t it?’ he says.

  He had wanted a tattoo for a long time. The same permanency that attracted him made him afraid to commit. He recalls sitting in a park, eating an egg sandwich, mesmerised by an elderly man’s tattooed feet. At the time, he was studying in London, always amazed as the office workers stripped their clothes off in the public gardens, worshipping the weak sun in their lunch hour. The man’s suit jacket was discarded beside him on the grass; his shoes were unlaced and placed neatly together, the socks laid on top. His feet were almost luminescent in the sun; the blue ink of the tattoos seemed to have melted into all of his crevices. It had taken Andi some time to figure out what the two figures — one on each of the man’s feet — were. A rooster and a pig. He had been fascinated: the age of the man, the unexpected discovery of his decorated feet. Later he found out that they were sailors’ tattoos, mired in superstition. A pig on one foot and a rooster on the other was a guarantee of a sailor’s life: both animals feared drowning so much that they would ferry the sailor to shore as quickly as possible, if only to save themselves.

  The more he discovered about sailors’ tattoos, the more he wanted one. The anchor that marked a voyage across the Atlantic, the shellback turtle that indicated a crossing of the equator. Twin swallows on the shoulders that told of the crossings of the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. He did go to a tattoo parlour once, determined to get a swallow tattoo of his own. Desperate with homesickness in the droning buzz of London, he had thought it particularly pertinent. Swallows always come home. But sometimes people do not. In the end, he learned so much about the tattoos that he respected their meaning too much to get one. He was not afraid of drowning, but it seemed like tempting fate.

  ‘Maybe we should get tattoos,’ he whispers into her ear. There’s no longer any fate to tempt. For a long moment she does not answer.

  ‘There was a couple I knew,’ she says, finally. ‘They each had a star tattooed onto their wrists, with a tail trailing behind. When they held hands, it looked like the stars were jumping from one arm to the other, round and round in circles like they were being juggled.’

  He skims his hand up her arm, sees a jet stream in its wake. ‘I have a better idea.’ He g
oes into the hallway and comes back with the satchel he takes to work and searches around in it until he finds a pen. ‘Now, don’t move.’ She is lying on her stomach, and he sits astride her, smooths his hand over her lower back.

  ‘Oh god, not there!’ She tries to roll over, laughing, but his weight is too much. He feels her squirm but sits firm, pinning her to the bed. ‘I could never get one there! It would be like getting two dolphins swirling around my belly button.’

  ‘Ah, the ironic tattoo position? Hmmm …’ He reaches behind, grabs her calf. ‘What about here?’

  She kicks her foot. ‘No!’

  ‘I know.’ He grabs her hand and holds it above her head. Straightaway she seems taller. The hair beneath her arms is strawberry blonde, a washed-out version of the hair on her head. Still straddling her and holding her hand aloft, he begins to write, just below her arm, towards her back.

  Her skin gives beneath the pen; he has to press down to get the ink to catch. She doesn’t move — is she holding her breath? Meine, he writes. It looks like a tattoo immediately, apart from the inky blob on the tail of the final ‘e’. The ink takes and holds: it looks like it is embedded within, rather than written on, the skin. He should have done it in red pen, like a meat stamp. Meine liebe.

  ‘What is it?’ She squirms about, impatient.

  He lets go of her hand and throws himself back onto the bed. Spread-eagled, he stares at the ceiling. Happy. This is what happy is. His face feels flushed, his palms are sweaty. He forms the words silently, in English, hoping that she is looking at him. He feels how first his front teeth touch his lower lip, and then his tongue touches his front teeth. Then his lips close and seal shut, before bursting open: I feel happy.

  She is sitting up in the bed, her arm in the air, trying to see the tattoo. She tries to pull her breast out of the way with one hand, the other dangling uselessly in the air.

  ‘What does it say?’

  He says nothing.