Berlin Syndrome

by Melanie Joosten

  She lets out a little sound — it could be a guffaw or a gasp, but he doesn’t want to ask.

  ‘Apparently, it’s quite easy to play, and I got some books, there are some different ones, and you can try and see how you go.’ His words jump on top of each other in his rush to get them out. He stands up, takes a step back.

  She crouches down, runs her fingers over the grille, traces the diamond shape printed on the closed bellows. ‘It’s beautiful, Andi.’

  He lets go of his breath. She edges closer and lifts the accordion from its case. He reaches down to pass the leather strap over her head, and she bends to let him before standing back up.

  He found it in a second-hand market weeks ago and kept circling back to the stall, trying not to show too much interest, lest the woman refuse to haggle. His desperation must have still been obvious though, because he ended up paying more than it was worth. But it was just so beautiful and — in the way its purpose and workings were so visible — captivating.

  Clare undoes the leather belt that holds the bellows together, and the accordion sighs open. Tentatively pressing down on the keyboard, she draws the ends apart, a wheezy note leaking out into the apartment.

  ‘Oh, Andi, it’s so funny. It’s like an animal. It sounds like it’s snoring!’ She presses the bellows together, pulls them apart, the notes mangled but somehow kind.

  ‘I only wish my snoring was so musical.’ He is so pleased she likes it, so relieved he got it right. His mother used to play the piano accordion. She would squeeze out nursery songs and folk tunes, his father looking on bemused. Andi had always been enchanted by the instrument, but when he tried to play it, his arms would get tired so quickly that his mother would work the bellows, tell him which keys to press to eke out a tune.

  Clare cannot manage to draw anything recognisable from it, but she does not seem to care.

  ‘It’s such a beast, Andi!’ She strides around the room, dragging miscellaneous notes from the instrument and laughing at her own incompetence. ‘But so fun. Thank you!’

  And when she reaches up to kiss him, the accordion asserts itself between them, digging into his ribs. It’s just like hugging his mother.

  She is used to waiting. When studying photography, she had become adept at setting up lights, redirecting glare. Making one time of day into another. When she began photographing buildings, it was entirely different, because they want to be lit by the sun. And so she would wait: for the sun to appear, to disappear. For clouds to lighten or darken the sky. For the contrast, the heaviness in the air. She would wait for the buildings’ lights to come on as dusk fell, revealing everything within.

  And now she waits again, trying to catalogue the minute changes that distinguish one day from the next. With nothing else to spend her time on, she cashes it in. What she would have once given for this time! She disposes of minutes and hours with abandon, and in return she acknowledges two distinct phases: when Andi is at home; and when he is not. There is no motion. Time no longer passes, it just changes from one present to the other. She feels guilty. She had always been taught that time is precious; it is not to be wasted and cannot be hoarded. It is something that everyone must attend to and nobody can escape from. It favours no one, holds no vendettas. And now, all of these truths have ceased to be.

  In the beginning (that has a mythical resonance, it makes her feel she is living within a tale), she tried to enforce time. But then, realising that there was no end point and that she did not know what she was counting towards, she stopped. Now she attempts to track the passing of space. She moves objects about the apartment, tries to see if they will take up more or less space if they are upside down or in the opposite corner of the room from where they began. She stacks books into towering ziggurats and waits to see if they will fall.

  She becomes intensely aware of movement as she is the only source of it. This makes her uneasy, surrounded by things that will not move without her intervention. She watches the plant for hours, trying to see the moment that it grows, or whether it will acknowledge her in any way. But it does not reach out to embrace her with its leaves; instead it stretches towards the window, as intent on escape as she knows she should be. For company she leaves a record spinning in its final groove, the speakers hissing quietly. She becomes afraid that without time, and without movement, she will freeze. She cannot sit still: her right foot develops an insistent jiggle. It jiggles of its own accord, and she watches it jerking away at the end of her leg and wonders if it is really a part of her.

  Is time a dimension or a state? It seems important to clarify these things, now that she knows they can cease to exist. She longs for the World of Science encyclopaedia her father gave her on her tenth birthday. It held so many answers. Time is … Space is … It would give units, definitions, parameters. It would take the questions out of her hands and make them the prerogative of someone more able. Andi is … Clare is … She tries to compose definitions that adequately explain her current situation, but she cannot settle on even the most basic of certainties. Does he love her — is that why he has done this? — or does he hate her? But she dismisses the question as soon as she asks it; the matter of Andi’s love is an illusion, a red herring that steers her away from any useful conclusions about her situation. She cannot ever know the answer, cannot know what occurs in his mind, any more than she can be certain of what happens in her own. She certainly doesn’t love him, but does she hate him? Neither word seems to describe the situation as it is. Every thought is so influenced by the locked door, a definite that she cannot change, that they do not seem like her own. They are constructed thoughts, made by her body to pass the time, to function throughout the day in this small space, but they do not belong to her.

  She harbours a growing suspicion that the loss of her own thoughts, her inability to track time, and her vague experiments in the existence of space are all going to have a negative effect on others. Space and time are absolutes that one is not supposed to question, let alone neglect. She is sure her skewing of their existence will have consequences and she wants to be prepared. She supposes that her lost thoughts must be out there somewhere, being had by somebody else. Thoughts on photography and architecture, identity and purpose. All of those thoughts that she once knew so well, that she has carried with her throughout her life, but which have been displaced by current circumstances. She was not made for thoughts of confinement and escape, inadequacy and fear — she was never supposed to be in a place like this.

  Is she going mad? She asks the question of her reflection in the mirror, but it does not answer, it just repeats her question like a schoolyard bully. ‘Am I going mad?’ it mimics, and she turns away, goes back to tracking space and making movement. If she is asking the question, she cannot be going mad. She is just suspended. Time stands still when you are in love, that is what the songs say, and her new hijacked thoughts tell her that this is true. As the turntable turns and the ziggurats fall, she waits for Andi to come home.

  ‘I think you would like my father,’ he says.

  His own words surprise him, but as he says them he acknowledges their truth. His father would like Clare — it would be nice if they could meet.

  ‘You should invite him over,’ she says. She lunges forward and folds towards her feet.

  He waits until she is upright before he answers. ‘You know I can’t do that.’ He wishes she wouldn’t make him spell things out. He doesn’t like telling her what they can and cannot do.

  She shrugs, twists on the balls of her feet and lunges again. He had bought her a book on yoga positions, and it is open on the windowsill in front of her.

  Last night, when he met his father for a drink, he had almost mentioned Clare. He was trying to think of ways to describe her when his father pulled a piece of paper from his pocket and laid it on the table. His mother’s name and a phone number were scrawled in blue ink surrounded by cubes and hatched lines —
his father’s familiar scribbles.

  ‘She wants to see you, Andreas. She asked for your details, but I didn’t give them to her. I told her that you would phone.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have.’ Thoughts of Clare had fled his mind. He put his beer glass down on the note; condensation soaked the paper and made the ink bleed.

  His father tutted in disapproval and retrieved the paper. ‘She’ll be here in summer. You can’t avoid her forever.’

  ‘Why not?’

  His father drained his glass and stood up. ‘Because nothing lasts forever. Why do you have to make things more difficult than they already are?’ He held the piece of paper out to Andi and, when he refused to take it, placed it on the bar. ‘She had her reasons, Andi. She was more sensitive than most. She couldn’t tolerate the way things were.’

  ‘Everyone else could.’ He could not understand why his father had capitulated so easily.

  ‘Just because some people — some of us — accepted the way things were, it doesn’t mean it was the right thing to do. Your mother had principles. She couldn’t take the easy option.’

  ‘She left!’ Andi was astounded. ‘She didn’t have to deal with it anymore. How was that not easy?’

  His father shook his head. ‘You have no idea what it was like. Call her. You’ll regret it if you don’t.’

  Andi opened his mouth but had not said the words. He watched his father prepare to leave the bar, all elbows and edges as he put on his coat. He knew all about regret.

  ‘If things were different you could meet him,’ he tells Clare. ‘It’s just a little difficult right now.’

  She does not answer, and he wonders whether she is counting under her breath, making him wait. At times like this, he is affronted by her immediacy, the way everything in the room seems caught up with waiting for her to say or do something.

  ‘Do you think about me when I’m not here, Clare?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  The word pops up from between her legs, and he catches it gratefully. ‘Only sometimes?’

  She straightens up, lifts her arms. ‘Only sometimes.’

  ‘What do you think about me?’

  This time she does not pause before answering. ‘The usual things. I wonder what you think of me. What you were like as a child. When I will see you next. How we met.’

  He nods, pleased with this. Sometimes he feels as though she is his imaginary friend. That she appeared from some other realm and lurched into his life. They know none of the same people, nothing of each other’s worlds before they met; they know each other only through the stories they tell. And she could be lying to him, she could be making it all up. He would never lie to her. But he has no one to check her identity with — she could be anyone.

  ‘I think of you all the time,’ he says.

  She does not answer, sits herself on the floor. He can see a faint flush of bruise across her lower back, almost like a tan, and he knows it is from doing sit-ups on the wooden floor. It is as though she is becoming an overly mature fruit, too sweet and about to turn. It excites him that he is the only person who will see her body change like this.

  ‘I know you do.’ She nods as she says this.

  He does think about her all the time. He worries that she will not be there when he returns, though every time she is, it reminds him of what a huge mistake he has made, one he can never rectify. By the time he reaches the bottom of the stairs each morning, he is worried about whether he remembers her correctly.

  ‘What about your mother?’ She balances on one foot, trembling with the effort, the other leg stretched in front of her. ‘If things were different could I meet her, too?’

  ‘I don’t think you would like her,’ he says. He cannot quite imagine how that meeting would go.

  ‘Why not?’

  He tries to explain the way things are. ‘She’s not very nice.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Clare has stopped her stretches.

  ‘Well, for example, when I was five years old she left me at childcare … I loved going there. To me, an only child, it was such an exciting world of friends and games. But one day, my mother was late and I had to wait with the receptionist, who was annoyed at having to stay back. I really needed to go to the toilet and finally I couldn’t hold on anymore and I wet myself. The receptionist didn’t even say anything, she just stared at me.’

  Clare sits cross-legged on the floor, listening. ‘What did your mother say?’

  ‘Nothing. My father came eventually and he went to lift me onto his shoulders to carry me home, but then he realised what had happened. I remember so well that walk back to the apartment. I had to run to keep up with my father and my trousers chafed at my legs. All I could smell was urine and I thought everyone was laughing at me. I was so angry at my mother for leaving me there.’

  ‘But that was years ago. And I’m sure she didn’t mean for that to happen.’

  ‘But it still did.’

  Clare stands, lifts both arms then bends to touch her toes. ‘She probably had a reason for being late.’ Her voice is muffled against her knees, and when she stands her face is flushed. ‘I’m sure she didn’t just forget you.’

  Of course she hadn’t forgotten him. Perhaps it would have been easier if she had.

  ‘Her grandmother was ill. She had taken a train to Hanover to visit her.’

  ‘To the West?’ She stops stretching. ‘I didn’t think you could just leave like that.’

  The West. It still sounds like a make-believe faraway place, somewhere that no one ever actually got to, and no one ever returned from. Why did he think Clare would be able to understand what it was like back then?

  ‘Some people could. It wasn’t so hard. It wasn’t how you think, Clare. People went to the West and came back all the time. It wasn’t a prison.’

  As soon as the word is out of his mouth he wishes he had not used it. But she doesn’t say anything, just salutes to the window and bows before the television tower.

  ‘I have two things for you today, Clare.’ He comes in from the hallway, his hands behind his back.

  ‘Only two?’ She is getting frustrated with his gifts. She has been hoping that he will tire of her. That their relationship will become like any couple’s — that they will grow apart, differences irreconcilable. And he will unlock the door. But his enthusiasm for the situation shows no sign of waning. It has become almost a teasing joke between them. When will you open the door? When you are ready to leave. So now she answers with a note of contrariness and waits to see what will happen.

  ‘Clare, you’re such a pessimist. Most people would be happy if someone brought home two presents a day.’

  ‘Most people would be happy if they were not locked in an apartment all day.’

  Annoyance crosses his face, but he banishes it, and she is relieved. Some days a comment like that will make him so angry that he will stop speaking to her, pretend she is not even in the room. It is not nice to be invisible to the only person you ever see.

  ‘We’re not going to keep talking about it. You know it’s better this way.’

  She stares at him, daring him to look away, but when he readily does so, her frustration flares. Does he not see her?

  ‘So, left or right?’

  She hesitates. She does not care. ‘Right.’

  ‘Good choice.’ He hands her a paper bag and she sits at the table to open it. Inside is a book of paper models. Great Buildings of the Communist Era. She flips through the book to see that each building has been rendered flat so they can be punched out of the card and built, a little city of aspirational architecture.

  ‘Andi, it’s incredible.’ She cannot contain her delight. Some of these buildings she has seen — her favourite television towers amongst them — others she has never heard of.

  ‘Loo
k at this.’ She points out the Wedding Palace in Tbilisi, Georgia. Its walls curl in on themselves while maintaining a vertical line and somehow it suggests worship, without indicating of which god, or whether any is necessary at all. ‘And this one’s like a concrete game of Jenga.’ She shows him the Roads Ministry stacked on the banks of the Mt’k’vari River.

  ‘I thought you might like it.’ He smiles at her. ‘It even has the Palast der Republik.’ He takes the book from her and flips through the pages until he finds the one he is looking for and hands it back.

  She recognises the building immediately, its tinted windows reflecting nothing, looking more like sheets of copper than glass. She wonders whether it has been completely dismantled by now. It takes her back to the day after she met Andi, the day she had decided it was time to leave Berlin.

  ‘What was in the other hand?’

  He stoops to where he has put the other bag and gives it to her.

  It’s heavy for its size — it feels like a grenade. It’s a bizarre association because she has never seen a grenade, let alone held one, but that is the object which comes to mind, and she wishes for a moment that this is what he is giving her: a way out for both of them. Would she? But when she opens the bag, she finds a tin of leatherwood honey and knows that even if she lobbed it through the living-room window, the most damage it would do is broken glass, perhaps a sticky mess in the courtyard below.

  ‘Where on earth did you get this?’ She rolls the tin in her hand. The paintwork, with its red and yellow lettering, is so familiar to her. She remembers the honey from childhood breakfasts — it has such a distinct taste. ‘They only make it in Tasmania.’

  He shrugs. ‘I found somewhere that would order it for me. Can I taste it?’

  She feels like her childhood has caught up with her and she does not know what this crossing of timelines might mean. Andi returns from the kitchen with a teaspoon and prises open the lid. The smell is immediately recognisable; she takes the spoon from him and digs it in. The honey has a creamy consistency, almost buttery. It wants to be spread, not drizzled, and as she licks it from the spoon she is transported back far away and long ago.