A Guide to Berlin (13 page)

 

When Marco left, Cass returned to the warmth of her bed. In the darkness her room had a violet sheen. Her insomniac mind wandered. She thought of Vesuvius and the deadly wallop of ash and stone from the sky. Catastrophe: the wracked scope of every history. She thought of Victor, alert, watching the unalert tortoise. She thought more generally, and yet again, of their visit to the aquarium. Almost asleep she saw anew the subdued world of sea creatures, alight in the dark and liquid corridors, drifting, on display, gleaming meekly and seeming – this was the trick, surely, of aquaria and zoos – to be prolonged, or even imperishable, in their own dwarf kingdoms. The paradoxical attraction was in their remove from the world, their apparent self-sufficiency. How safe they all were. Needing no true ocean and no true sunlight; needing no actual freedom.

In the underground station at Innsbrucker Platz, an old man was playing ‘Nessun Dorma' on a saw. It sounded Martian, thought Cass, like a Theremin whine, like the tune of titanium spaceships approaching in a dream. The bent-over musician looked Central Asian and poor. He wore an ill-fitting jacket that might have belonged to someone else, borrowed perhaps, or raided as a cast-off. His face was scabby and squashed and spoke of many hard winters. The saw was caught between his legs and he played it gently with a bow, lifting, lowering, lifting and again lowering. A saw, she thought. That a saw could sound so extraterrestrial. The musician did not look up; he was intent on his recital and in a world of his own. Some sort of quivering, ineluctable spirit contained him. In this drear and lurid tunnel, with its rushing commuters, he was seancing Puccini.

Cass and one or two others stopped in their tracks to listen. The passage between the U-Bahn and S-Bahn was a perfect chamber for music: the saw sounds reverberated loudly, rang in the concrete shadows, travelled paranormal
in thin waves through the dingy tubes. A concert audience of three. They each offered a few euros.

Gino was there to meet her, as they had planned. He stood at the exit, smoking. When he saw her approach, he dropped his smoke and cowboy-style, without looking, ground the butt with his heel.

‘What would Pavarotti think?' he said, as he leant to kiss her in greeting.

‘Or Joey Ramone?'

‘Both dead. Touché.'

It was a fatuous exchange, completely contemporary.

Gino's face was ice cold. Cass wondered how long he'd stood there, waiting for her to appear. He looked tired, she thought. His handsome features were drawn, his eyes were inflamed and baggy. Around him hung the fusty reek of too many fervid cigarettes. She wondered when last he had used.

‘Come,' she said. ‘I promised you good coffee.' Together they walked up Hauptstrasse and into the backstreets of Schöneberg; Cass led Gino into the pokey place she considered her local. They sat on uncomfortable chairs that indicated hip Berlin, and gazed in the direction of Apostle Paulus church. A light snow fell. Cass stared calmly out of the window as Gino fidgeted and stirred, touching at his clothes like a man who discovers he has lost something and immediately feels a wild need to locate it.

‘I've lost my wallet,' he confirmed.

‘I can pay, don't worry.'

‘No, I mean
really
lost. My credit cards, everything.'

He was ruffled by his misfortune. He stood abruptly, pulled upwards, and the wallet appeared as in a trick, fallen
in a plop from somewhere inside his jacket. There were tears in his eyes.

‘Jesus, I'm such a mess.'

Cass remained silent. She would let him recover his dignity, she would watch the snow. The windows were slightly fogged with damp, but there it was, still apparent, a pure-white scrim descending. Already the streets were halfway transformed, becoming crème-smooth and beautiful.

‘Don't you think,' she ventured, ‘that one of the effects of snow is to make everything, even people, appear almost motionless?'

Gino looked vacantly at her face as if not comprehending the question. Then he reconnected, and calmed.

‘Yes,' he said quietly. ‘Yes, almost motionless.'

After that, they could speak. Gino leant close so that Cass caught the scent of his masculinity intermixed with the tart cigarette smoke. He spoke, as Marco had, of their tight little group. Victor was inauthentic, he declared, but he was unable to explain why he knew this to be so. It was a feeling he had, a definite feeling. Victor was inauthentic. Yukio and Mitsuko were the real thing: they were true lovers who had found each other, they were a paradigm case, a rare modern example. Marco, well, he was Marco; he was the exceptional Marco.

‘Has he told you yet about Pliny the Elder?' Gino asked. ‘He has these points of obsession: the uncle who was really the father, the death of excessive poignancy as Vesuvius gushes fire, the encyclopedic, and scholarly, and finally futile life.'

Cass lied. ‘No.'

‘He knows a huge amount, really, but it's all self-referential.
History is full of allegories that he considers marvellously personal. Don't trust him, Cass. He has crazy theories about everything.'

Gino's face was close, insistent; he had the tone of a fanatic. For all the details Cass knew of them, Gino and Marco were still unknown to her. She ought to defend Victor, she ought to speak of her own judgements.

Instead she said, ‘And you? Is there some historical story you like to tell that is the marvel that tells you?'

They both sipped their coffee. Gino was moving a forkful of chocolate cake across his plate, without eating.

‘Later,' he said cautiously.

The café was full of mothers with hefty babies and hipster-cool men. Everyone was young, relaxed, leaning back in their chairs, talking in polite and respectful murmurs, charming each other, kindly amusing. Here they were, by contrast, mere faltering strangers. Cass wondered why Gino had felt it necessary to warn her off Marco. There was a secret somewhere between them, and a vague animosity. The snowfall outside was growing faster and more dense. Both paused and stared into its fluctuating and dimensionless depths. The church before them was disappearing, fading into white.

‘Me too,' said Gino, intuiting her thoughts. ‘I also love the snow.'

Conversation turned to politics. It was a relief to consider social meanings, to acknowledge real urgencies and those not their own. Gino was still upset, he said, by the mass drowning of African refugees, a few months back, off the island of Lampedusa. Cass knew the figure: 366 lives lost and not one child under twelve who'd survived.
She knew that the survivors were heading to Sweden. She knew some had burnt off their fingerprints with melted plastic bags so as not to be registered as refugees in Italy. Gino looked shocked at the details.

‘In Australia,' she added, ‘we have a government policy of hard hearts. In Australia we are meant to accept such calamities as inevitable. To enjoy our own good luck.'

She restrained herself. How national shame diminishes us all, she thought. How brutally the lucky country guards its unearnt luck.

Gino looked away.

‘Don't you hate luck?' she asked, in what must have seemed a somewhat perverse and irrelevant question. She was thinking of the German word:
glück
, luck;
glücklich
, happy. Such a sticky word.

Gino did not answer. Instead he seemed to drift off into private thoughts.

‘I had a holiday in Lampedusa only a year ago,' he said. ‘I swam in the sunshine at the beach where all the bodies were retrieved. When I watched the TV reports it was all so familiar – that bay, those rocks. I thought of this again when Yukio told us of seeing his subway on television as a child, how somewhere is stained with tragedy and becomes an intolerable memory. Those people, wanting escape. All those poor people, Jesus Christ …'

Gino pulled out his cigarettes. ‘Do you mind if I smoke?'

They left the warmth of the café. The heavy door did not smother or close away their feelings. Gino lit up immediately.

‘We can go to the Ramones Museum, or to Oranienplatz,' he said.

Ramones Museum? ‘What's at Oranienplatz?'

Now they moved together from single to communal stories. As they continued moving towards Oranienplatz, Gino explained that it was an occupied space. Refugees from Africa seeking asylum, seeking a warm, safe haven, had built there a shantytown of tents and shelters. There were ramshackle huts, stretched canvas beneath bare trees, there were signs that read: ‘
Kein Mensch ist illegal
'; ‘Refugees are welcome here; Deportation is murder'. It was a community, said Gino, an ephemeral community.

When they arrived the Platz looked almost deserted: few people were out and about in the cold. Snowfall lay heavy and threatening in the deep folds of the large tents, the sag and strain of the load looked fundamentally precarious. Snow was piled high on park seats and clung to a few stranded bicycles, and Cass could hear it being scraped away, somewhere nearby, the raw shivery grind of metal on a concrete path. It was an impediment now, and an inhuman threat. Some of the tents, Cass thought, would surely sink. She looked around her. On the corner stood a boarded-up building, so firmly closed, so untended and dead that it was hard to believe living people had ever been inside. Posters for yoga, cinema and punk bands were stuck haphazard across its walls, and everywhere lay strata of garish graffiti with impossible-to-read messages. High up, almost beyond sight, there was a sign in English: ‘Reclaim your city'.

A man wrapped in a purple sleeping bag emerged from behind the flap of a tent. He strode towards Gino and held out his hand. They shook, then they embraced, and then they stood patting each other's back, like old
drinking buddies or revolutionary comrades. Cass was still, observing. She was in her new waterproof boots, she was warm and she was lucky.

Gino introduced Ahmed from Eritrea. He had come here via Libya and Italy. He had come, Gino added softly, via the island of Lampedusa.

Ahmed reached out from his sleeping bag cocoon and shook Cass's hand. Cold stung at her eyes. Her chest felt tight and congested. She took the hand of the man who greeted her and wondered if she might be crying or if the nip of the cold had simply generated tears. There was such confusion in her response, such sensory and extra-sensory overload; and Ahmed did not seem to concede his sorry state, so that it was she who seemed pathetic, it was she who was floundering, and caught up in twisted emotions. Ahmed smiled broadly in welcome. His face reminded her of a kid she had known fondly when she was a child, a kid with a dazzling white smile in his open black face. If she had come earlier, Ahmed said casually, she could have met his wife.

‘Come again. You can meet her.'

Gino opened his wallet and emptied it into Ahmed's hand.

‘Thank you, my brother.'

Behind him a man with matted blond hair was donating a crate of potatoes. Cass saw his breath in the air; she saw the slowed and deliberate motion of his half-frozen movements. In a few seconds he was gone, as if never having existed. Now, no other person was visible. The pall of snow fell between them all, damp and obscuring. Flakes settled in a delicate skull cap over Ahmed's dark hair. Gino leant
towards him, curled his bare hand to his ear and said something confidential. Ahmed replied in a whisper, ‘Yes, my brother, yes.' They spoke briefly in Italian.

The others were all sheltered from the cold at some sort of meeting, Gino said. Wisely sheltered. The three stood still, in a moment of silence and social inertia. Then Ahmed stamped on the ground and pulled his sleeping bag closer. He announced, ‘Things to do!' and turned back towards the tents.

Gino took Cass's arm and led her away. He seemed almost happy now; his gaze was lit and he smiled with satisfied ease as he left behind the encampment of Oranienplatz. It had been such a small encounter, so modest and swift. But Cass felt that her chest was still tight and her feelings were still snarled.

Gino's face was close. He hugged her arm as they walked. He said: ‘Now. Let me tell you now the historical marvel that tells of myself.

‘I'm very interested in Descartes. Everyone knows “
I think therefore I am
,” everyone knows of the
Discours
and the wax example, but he was much more interesting than that, and more philosophically strange. He was a mathematical genius, he wrote on psychosomatics, on passion, on meteors, on the weather. He wrote a treatise on snow and drew images of rare, twelve-sided snowflakes. And in 1633, at the age of thirty-seven, Descartes visited Rome. While in Rome he observed the phenomenon of parhelia, which is an odd optical effect in which there appear to be several suns in the sky. Descartes saw three. He did not panic, he did not lose his religion, he did not resort to lunatic theories or apocalyptic speculations.
Instead he stood looking up at the sky, with its three bright suns, and knew how good it was to be a man, with his senses fully alive, his brain figuring out all the equations of angles and reflections. He was jubilant, he was curious. He was self-possessed.

‘Marco told me this story, but it has become my story. It has become the weather story that I most adore.'

They parted at Kottbusser Tor station, just as the snow at last began to ease. Gino borrowed his fare. He said, ‘When you tire of Marco, I will be waiting.'

Cass felt herself blush. It was a sensation of disorder, of unexpected feeling. She was both irritated and pleased at Gino's presumption. He squeezed her hand, holding on a few seconds longer than he should. They stood awkwardly, awaiting separate trains. Before them, a young man collected beer bottles from rubbish bins and stowed them in his backpack. They watched his focused searching and his quiet desperation. Something stiff in his manner implied old age, but he couldn't have been more than thirty, Cass thought, not much older than she. When her U1 train arrived she bid Gino a hasty farewell and sprang into the carriage without looking back.

 

She might have been swimming, or drowning, in a twilit aquarium. Stopped faces blinked by. The air seemed watery and blue. Her carriage contained her behind glass, less as a person than a notion; the particulars of her own life had fallen away. Prinzenstrasse, Hallesches Tor, the golden tiles of Möckernbrüke. Heading towards the west. In motion she felt bizarrely neutral, and disembodied.

Parhelia, a new word.

The sky was a white ceiling. Not even one sun, not one, was visible in the sky.