A Guide to Berlin (14 page)

On the day of her own speak-memory, Cass busied herself with chores and casual distractions. She washed her clothes in the bathroom sink, rolled them in a towel and hung them along the iron heater to dry, placing her socks just so, and spreading evenly her underwear. Across the back of a chair she draped her wrung jeans. Festooned in this way, the studio apartment looked even smaller and more cramped than usual. It was like being a student again, imagining the intermediate time before adult tidiness is obligatory, not having space enough for simple tasks, feeling temporary and derided and unimportant in the world. ‘Nessun Dorma' played a maddening riff in her head. Cass was surprised at how tenacious remembered musical interludes were, how they play and replay, how like madness or dementia the repetitions begin to seem. It was a fickle irritation, its jingle replay tormented her. She had a residual memory from somewhere, probably from television, of Luciano Pavarotti belting out the final ‘
Vincero!
', his mouth hugely open, hugely appetitive, as if he might gobble the entire world. She was more a Bach person, she reflected, less operatic,
more baroque. She would listen to the cello suites again, later on. She enjoyed a dilettante comfort, knowing little of music and unable, if pressed, to speak intelligently on the subject. There were many areas of knowledge in which she felt entirely a fraud. But the pleasure was definitive, it was incontrovertible. Against ‘Nessun Dorma' she pitched Brandenburg phrases and passing seconds of melody.

There was a knock at the door and Cass was startled. She saw the mess of her room, she was half-dressed and unfocused. She threw on her coat, hanging near the door, and drew it open to discover Karl.

‘I thought you might like to talk,' he said hopefully. ‘Coffee?'

He was unkempt, he looked bored, and his appeal, painfully tentative, was that of a lonely old man. Dimly, he seemed in the hall light to twitch and shuffle.

But Cass sent him away. She pretended she was dressing to go out, and knew now that she would have to dress and leave the apartment, because he would be watching and she must make her evasion seem true. How often she performed a quality of seeming, not being. The anticipation of her speak-memory was undermining her good sense; she was disproportionately tense and in a state of seizure and dread.

‘Come up for coffee tomorrow afternoon,' she said. ‘5.30 okay?'

Karl looked concerned.

‘17.30,' she corrected.

He beamed in return. ‘Kein problem!' He mopped his forehead with a handkerchief, as if he were ill or unseasonably hot, then turned away and headed slowly down the poorly lit stairs. Cass felt a twinge of guilt and the need
for female company, to be exempt from male demands and conversation. She needed to dissipate her nervousness with a walk in the cold air of the city.

 

When she stepped out into the street, she decided to ride the ring line. She passed the apartment that had been burnt on New Year's Eve, boarded up now, but not yet repaired, the paisley shape of smoke, immemorially delinquent, still defacing its surface. The streets were mostly dismal, abandoned and awash with black slush. On Martin-Luther-Strasse many shops were deserted, the large mattress shop on the corner was entirely empty, even the bakery, brightly enticing, had just a single customer. A few shoppers well-rugged in scarves came and went from the Turkish supermarket; this was where life was. Cass peered at the bulging plastic bags of non-European delicacies and found herself hungry for pita and something loaded with garlic.

From Innsbrucker Platz Station she headed east on the S42, sliding past the border where the Wall had once stood, then sliding back to the same side later on, finding in the train a calming rhythm and the slumberous satisfactions of automation, of being carried somewhere, of doors opening and closing, of the regular announcements and toneless instructions to depart on the left. It was a soothing circle, moving her in the legless fluency of a dream. She felt almost airborne. As she rode her thoughts drifted to celestial speculations – dust clouds from volcanoes, the multiplication of suns, the curious possibility of twelve-pointed snowflakes – and already she was considering how her new friends had changed her, what knowledge, explicit or implicit, they
had imparted. This was the kind of association she had often longed for: an avowable community and the trust of shared biographies, small stories offered as symbolic tokens.

Passengers stepped on and off the train in silence. Winter brought with it this dissolve of conversation. A man with a tattooed face and a German shepherd plumped down beside her, the dog stinking of rough nights and what might have been spilt beer. Both had glazed, hungry eyes and a fatalist passivity. She was relieved when they rose and disappeared at Wedding.

Cass rode almost the whole circle before she alighted one stop from where she had begun. At Bundesplatz, under a darkening sky, she left the station and headed to a coffee shop to daydream and read. She would spend a few hours hidden away, waiting to speak and rematerialising after her wraith-like journey. She felt somehow tenuous and unbelonging; her riding was the symptom of absent centre and inexplicit purpose.

There was no snowfall now, but sharp frosty air and ice on the pavement in wafers, which cracked beneath her boots as she stepped. The afternoon was fading fast; the little daylight that thinly penetrated was already flowing away, disappearing into ‘
the dark backward and abysm of time
'. I must not quote Shakespeare, she thought to herself. I must be clear, and true.

 

In the former home of Kępiński, Cass faced the group, determined. Yukio and Mitsuko wore matching denim outfits, long and sculptural, and for the first time it occurred to Cass that they were probably rich. This was high-end fashion, not
mere costume; this was the casual exhibitionism of wealthy artists. They greeted her with embraces. Marco and Gino were both more formal; and Gino appeared unshaven and tired, as if he had not made it home after their excursion together and displayed the stale and bruised look of a sleepless night. Victor, playing the fool, was wearing his shapka inside. He alone seemed to be in high and robust spirits.

 

‘To be honest, I wasn't sure I could participate in your speak-memory. I have been surprised by the candour, and by how much trust has been established. I've not known anything quite like this before. And I guess I still feel like the newcomer, a little outside your circle. The kibitzer, you might say.'

The beginning, she told herself, would be the hardest part. Once she launched her voice into the group, it would take energy from their listening. It would be enabled.

‘I grew up in a remote part of Australia, in the north-west. So, like Mitsuko, I come from beyond a city, and am marked, I suppose, by a distinctive place. As I travel I begin to learn how cities govern our imaginations, how difficult it becomes to recover the humble place that has no special renown, or world-historical importance, but exists as a little constellation of lives, somewhere largely forgotten by the rest of the world. When Victor began with his magnificent list of cities, I thought, even then, as he spoke, of an alternative list, of places whose reality to others is more like Zembla – possibly fictitious, not wholly substantiated, too small or unremarkable to warrant outsiders' attention. In Europe, Australia is regarded as a fiction of beautiful lies.
It pleases me that this is so, and I can't really say why. But it is also a scattering of settlements, modest places that no one knows or cares about, where real lives happen, where there is a density to knowing and a quiet certainty to existence.

My parents, now retired, were both schoolteachers dedicated to working in small communities. I had three older brothers, two of whom are also now schoolteachers. So, I am the black sheep in the family, I am the one who left. I am the one who was captured and taken away by words.'

Had the others found it this difficult?

Cass realised that she moved habitually in the zone of her own allegiances, those things that were sensitive for her, and private, and without need of expression or exaggeration. When she spoke it was with an awareness of a kind of betrayal and a tendency to generalisation. There was no way she could speak in detail of her parents, modestly hardworking, serious and sane, living together in a tiny country town with a single store and a petrol bowser and a weatherboard town hall. Or indeed of her brothers, and their quiet integrity, and their meaningful, hidden lives.

‘The house I grew up in was once the hospital of a former quarantine station. It stood on a peninsula, beyond the north-west town of Broome, and had been a place where soldiers returning from the battles of the Second World War were sent to recover or die. These were men with fevers – typhus mostly, and dengue, and malaria. In our house they had seethed, or so I imagined, afraid and alone in the thrall of their tropical illnesses. They had called out in the night, they had suffered, seen ghosts,
had themselves become ghosts. I knew in my heart that our house was haunted. How can one live in a former hospital without imagining the deaths that might have occurred there? How is it possible to ignore remnant presences and the traces of suffering lives? I believed that I heard their voices. I believed that they called out to me. My brothers teased me and said I was crazy. But still I persisted in my childish belief.

‘I had a room to myself. Ours was a long house, raised on stilts, in which the rooms had once been wards, opening to a common verandah running along both sides. The rooms were not joined: one stepped out onto the verandah to enter another room. So I thought of this house as a flute, or a harmonica, or some yet unknown musical instrument, because the wind blew straight through it, making high, eerie sounds. At night, with doors at each end of the rooms left open in the heat, there was a pitch that could only have been human wailing, or someone lost in the dark calling to find their way home. Beyond this lay the sound of the waves and the Indian Ocean, pulsing and beating. So the air was full of ocean noise, and quasi-human voices. At least this is how I thought of it then, waves and voices. I was an imaginative child, burdened by vivid speculations.

‘Just as Gino described the resonant atmosphere in a cathedral, there was a peculiarity to the dark night air of my childhood, there was an amplification, and an immanent mystery. For most children, I suppose, the night is large in this way, framed and intensified by their own imagining. The night fills up with all they sense, but do not comprehend.

‘There was a lighthouse too, nearby, set high on a sand-hill. It flashed its stripe of white light directly over our
house; it created an intermittent dark that I have never really known since. This other-world of night-time was my surest reality; I cannot tell you how profoundly it has left its mark. Nabokov describes a child's night-train ride in this way: the world oddly rocking and swinging, images enlarging and speeding into vision, omnipresent shadows, presences half-seen, the silver coating to objects and the creepy moon-glaze that hangs over everything. As he falls asleep the boy fancies he sees a glass marble rolling beneath a grand piano. Somehow that mattered to me, that unconnected detail. And the train ride sounded so like my own childhood experience of night – of animation, and of ill-defined presences. And then waking mid-night from the current of sleep to find things slower and more visionary, the lighthouse blankly continuing, the walls sliding away, ordinary furniture, the little there was, made spooky and fantastical, discarded clothes on the floor looking like writhing monsters.'

Cass checked herself. She was babbling, babbling aimlessly about the night. And she was sounding literary when she wanted to sound more straightforward. She'd not anticipated how easily one might become carried away, how the descriptive task dragged her narrative along an unexpected track. Opposite, Yukio, Marco and Gino were all staring at her. Mitsuko, sitting beside, lightly touched her hand. They might have been schoolgirls in the playground, sharing a confidence.

‘In daytime my brothers and I lived in a rough kind of utopia. We fished and swam, we rode through the bush on the back of a truck into the town to attend school. We were a gang, living apart, mostly running wild. Cricket, we loved cricket. I took my turn at the batting and my
brothers indulged me with slow, easy bowls. I remember their bare legs streaked with red dirt beneath filthy shorts and their arms turning like windmills. Dust puffed from their heels as they skidded for the ball. They liked to leap up and shout “How's that!” as if we composed a real team, with real opponents and serious scores, not just sibling mischief and fake competition. I wanted desperately to be a boy and tried hard to act as my brothers did, and to be tough and masculine. I was a very good fighter – even they conceded it – driven by the foolish need to prove myself equal. I loved to wrestle but never had the weight or the strength to win, so I developed a ruthless repertoire of dirty tricks. I was an arrogant child, clever and self-assured. And of course I was spoilt as the youngest and the only girl.

‘My defeat – at least this is how I thought of it then – came when at eleven I developed a bad case of ringworm. My skin flowered in repulsive circular lesions. My mother dabbed me all over with gentian violet and my head was shaven. I was forbidden to touch my family, and bound, like one guilty, to constant hand-washing. I was purple-speckled and bald, unrecognisable even to myself. Not a serious illness, of course, not disability or catastrophe, but simple humiliation, and a kind of disfiguring.

‘By that time my two older brothers had been sent south to boarding school, and Alexander, one year older than me, remained. He did not contract ringworm. I remember he looked at me with a faint expression of disgust, his face averted. I remember a kind of flustered pity.

‘A feral cat had deposited a litter of kittens beneath our house and my mother said I had ringworm because I'd fondled them. It was true. I'd crouched in the shadows
and lifted the kittens to my face, kissing and playing and wishing them fat and adorable. I'd pushed them into my shirt, felt their silky small throb, and held them against my chest. Something in their fragility moved and compelled me. Their puckered faces. The squint of their newborn eyes. That squirming being, not yet fully extended into the world.