A Guide to Berlin (15 page)

‘I watched as my mother drowned the kittens in the laundry, in a hessian bag. I remember how the bag stretched and twitched with their thrashing panic, how she had to hold it down, how I wept and pleaded. It was a loss of power, I think, a loss of that sense of having one's own dominion. The kittens were killed and I looked hideous. I was confined, my parents were strict, Alexander was distant. As a child it is hard to believe the transformations of illness or injury will reverse. But somehow I knew then that things had irrevocably changed.

‘At twelve I was sent to a boarding school in the south, in the city of Perth. It was a kind of exile. I had been vain and self-centred, now I was ignored and punished. Possessing no girlish social skills and eccentric in my tastes, I was isolated and had difficulty making friends. I developed an interest in butterflies, which other girls ridiculed, preferring pop music and magazines. I thought myself a specialist in spotting the Amaryllis Azure, but more than anything I wanted to see the Ulysses butterfly,
papilo ulysses,
known to Vladimir Nabokov as the Australian swallowtail. It is startling in its beauty – iridescent blue, outlined in black. The drab underside is a furry brown. I copied images from books and went on spotting expeditions, climbing alone through the sodden, murky undergrowth along the banks of
the Swan River. You will know of course that Nabokov was a specialist of American ‘Blues' and spent almost two years classifying them on the basis of their microscopic genitalia. He also created butterflies. There is a fine drawing he did, as a present for Vera, which is derived from his knowledge of the Australian swallowtail.'

‘I have a photocopy of this image,' said Victor. ‘I can bring it next time.'

‘Mostly I saw Common Browns, those with marbled wings and eye-spots, or Monarchs, orange-brown, with distinctive white dots on the black band of their outline, and now and then a Painted Lady, a
Vanessa kershawi
, blown down from Indonesia – tangerine with black and white markings, white spots at the wingtips …'

‘Ocellated,' said Victor.

‘Thank you, yes – ocellated. It is hard to explain to you how completely absorbing this can be, how fastidious one becomes looking out for a passing fritillary, or the flit of a bluish wing, or eyespots flying, or the glimpse of some shape, yellow or cinnabar, suspended in mid-air, beating at the sky, jerking just beyond the reach of one's hands.'

‘I have also seen the Painted Lady, the
Vanessa kershawi
,' Mitsuko interrupted.

Cass halted, aware suddenly of how she had revisited her adolescent enthusiasms. What was it that made this artificial tale-telling, once begun, veer into flowery declarations and indulgences?

‘Most butterflies live only about two weeks. As a child this knowledge moved me as the scrawny kittens did … I wondered at the value of something so barely enduring. Or rather I wondered at a new idea of value itself.'

Cass halted again.

‘I'm not sure how to explain this.

The scrawny kittens.' The others remained silent, and waited.

‘Shadows of the chessmen,' said Yukio in a distant voice.

Her story was stumbling. She changed the subject.

‘I studied painting at first, then I studied literature. I wanted to be an artist. All that I saw and knew needed an analogy of some sort; I wanted the world fixed and intelligible, not flowing away behind me, not disappearing into “
the dark backward and abysm of time
”. I wanted images to stop, for my quiet inspection. I needed for some reason or justification to look more closely. I understand why serious collectors pin butterflies in trays and write tiny labels, why they range specimens carefully, one after another, in diminishing size. But I never did this, truly; I was never a collector.

‘At art school my eccentricities were valued for a time, but then I became tiresome to others, and to myself. I was a failed painter, bold but not remarkably talented. Self-portrait in purple speckles, that kind of thing. It embarrasses me now to think of it. I fled art school to London for six months, then returned, moved to Sydney and turned my attention to literature. I took a series of part-time unskilled jobs, and finally settled in a bookshop, a small independent bookshop, where I felt most at home. Then I left, I simply uprooted. Travelling revives the intensity of images. It recovers curiosity.

‘And now here I am.'

‘
How long is now
?' Gino asked.

She could not go on. Cass was aware that her story was thin beside the others'. It was secretive, almost sham.
The night was true: it had been just like that, the Australian Gothic house on stilts, exposed to winds from the ocean, wailing, hysterical. There had been relentless flashing light and the echoing of dead voices and oceans. It sounded invented, she knew, but it released her from speaking of more difficult things. What had happened to Alexander. It released her from speaking of the unspeakable Alexander.

‘Well done,' said Victor, determined to be supportive. The others murmured approval. Gino excused himself absentmindedly and rose for a cigarette. Marco was smiling warmly. Expecting them all to reassemble, Yukio and Mitsuko began laying a small collection of oriental snacks on Kępiński's table. Cass could not help it: she was disappointed in herself. She knew she had somehow not fulfilled the narrative contract; the others were all less reserved, more confiding and more open. She was provincial, she was a failure. She perceived a radical lack of clarity. In not producing a coherent story, she was not possessed of those properties of necessity and fullness that make a plausible self. And why had she mentioned the kittens? And gone on about the house? Why, though Nabokovian, had she described the butterfly spotting?

‘All good,' whispered Marco.

 

This time they stayed. This time all of them sat together around Kępiński's impressive oak table and continued to drink and to talk and eat tidbits with chopsticks, and gradually to recover a dimension of unselfconscious ease in their conversation. Victor did not remove the shapka, and in the vapid opulence of the apartment looked somewhat
droll and comically displaced. He was telling everyone in cheerful terms of the visit to the aquarium, how the ancient tortoise was very likely the one Nabokov himself had seen, how it had made eye contact with him, as if some glimmer of the distant past moved like electricity between them. A living creature, he said, still persisting, and
in situ
. Mitsuko and Yukio agreed that animals possibly apprehended time in ways unknown to humans. Gino scoffed, and raised his glass.

‘Here's to the superiority of non-human creatures! Who outlive us, and judge us, and know vastly more!'

Victor looked confused.

‘It was wonderful,' he continued. ‘It was really something, that tortoise.'

Talk ranged across animals and books and the harsh winter in Berlin. No one questioned Cass on the details of her speak-memory, or thereafter alluded to it. She was relieved by the return to relative impersonality.

Now that they had all performed their speak-memories, Marco suggested, they might next time talk of the city, and the ways in which they personally knew it. There was vague, muttered assent. It would be informal, he added, it would be much more informal.

Alcohol began muddling and tangling their conversation. Gino was retelling a short story by Italo Calvino. A man heads an agency that attempts to archive all the knowledge in the world. It is a mammoth, absurd task, and he inflects the data with banal and unregarded things, the dull things that make up the true texture of everyday being: yawns, pimples, obscene ideas, whistled tunes … These he folds into public knowledge in an act of subjective
subversion. What seems most untransmissable, said Gino, is what is most human. The story is finally about jealousy, he said; it is finally about evil and the wish to control.

Cass sat at the head of the table, as though the guest of honour at a ceremony. As she drank more, now both careless and relieved, she saw how strategic Gino's story had been. Here, in Kępiński's, he needed to remind them of the self-serving selection of remembrance. He needed to claim and to advertise his own right to record. They looked at each other. Gino paused in a sip of wine and offered a flabby drunken smile.

‘My version,' he said, waving a leather-bound notebook. ‘My own “Guide to Berlin”.'

She had wanted a day staying in, seeing no one, finding her independent shape. But as soon as she woke Cass remembered that Karl would arrive in the afternoon. She lay in her bed and was tempted to remain. The air in her small room was mean and chill; she would have to find her socks to go to the bathroom; she would need to rug up just to move the few steps to make coffee. It was a long time since she had felt so seriously hungover, and now she recalled Yukio and Mitsuko guiding her into a taxi, and Karl – could it have been Karl? – helping with huffs and puffs as she dragged and pulled herself up the stairs. That fuse-effect of drunkenness was something she'd rarely known, being a careful drinker, and judgmental of others, but now the night returned to her in the viscous form of bodies merging and imprecise recollection. She had sent both Marco and Gino away, this much she remembered. Victor, dear Victor, had passed out, at some stage. And yes, Marco and Gino had together carried Victor from Kępiński's. This morning they would all be feeling seedy and nauseous. They would all be trying to unfuse the united moments in which
their bodies and minds swum together, and they touched each other suggestively, and were given to rash declarations and smudgy kisses. She had slumped between Yukio and Mitsuko in the back of a taxi. Their faces had looked oily and gleaming.

Behind the window, snow was lightly falling. How pure it looked, and how unsullied. Cass put her head beneath the pillow and tried to return to sleep, but wondered now what she had said, and how she had acted, and if she had managed to disgrace herself by an irretrievable word or action. Unaccountably, she recalled some words of Nabokov: when he dreamt of the dead, he wrote, they always appeared silent and bothered and inexplicably depressed, quite unlike the bright selves they had expressed alive. Her sense of the night before was like this – that her friends had shed their bright selves and were in the shadows of another state, bare and intangible, as in a dream existence. There was a slightly sinister bend to her post-drunken recall.

At last she rose. She saw her bag on the floor and her scarf and coat discarded. She must have flung herself into bed; she must have been out of it.

Cass spent the morning reading, battling a headache. She read a detective novel, trashy and ham-fisted, then flicked in a casual way though a guidebook to Berlin. Recommendations for clubs and decadent nightlife seemed to predominate. One club offered ‘post-human pleasuring', another had erotic booths and blue movies as sidelines to the dance floor. The young music scene was impressively huge. Techno, house, remix, rasta. Rap, electronica, funk, hip-hop, soul, punk, gangsta, electro-pop … Her tastes were antique, she knew; she was outside her own generation. She vaguely noted the
names and location of a few famous clubs, but was essentially uninterested. There were the expected photographs: the Reichstag, the Brandenburg Gate, the silver spear of the Fernsehturm. And there were any number of outings – a world of non-conformist restaurants, minimalist or maximalist concerts and gleefully perverted art galleries. Museums of every kind offered sober histories, of the wars, or the Wall, or Germanic triumphs and failures. So much theatre, high culture, so many memorials. Dutifully, Cass noted a few ‘attractions'. She had been merely a woman riding on the U and S-Bahn, observing ordinary Berliners. She was both democratically curious and committed to her own inclinations; she was clearly a failure as a tourist.

When Cass stood she felt ill; when she sat or lay, her head throbbed. It was a wasted day. At some point the buzzer rang and she heard Yukio's voice echo in the resonating space of the lobby: it surprised her that they had visited without prearrangement, and she felt sacrificially unprepared and murderously antisocial. Hastily, she tidied. When she opened the door Yukio and Mitsuko looked flushed with good health, and were again dressed in garments of distinctive and showy uniformity. Beneath their coats they wore matching suits of navy vinyl. Yukio handed Cass a plastic bottle of Pocari Sweat.

‘Hangover cure,' he said.

‘We travel with our own pharmacopoeia.' Mitsuko explained. ‘Pocari Sweat is for
veisalgia
. Ion supply.'

Cass invited them in. Each had snowflake traces clinging to their hair. They disappeared as she looked at them.

‘Snowing again, yes? All those hexagons.'

She was trying hard to be social and entertaining, though she wished them gone. They would see her facile indifference and her lack of engagement.

But Yukio was immediately and enthusiastically responsive.

‘I know that English word:
hexagon
. It was a Japanese man, Ukichiro Nakaya, who wrote the first real scientific study of snowflakes – in the 1930s. I read it in my
hikikomori
days. Nakaya knew how crystals form and why no two snowflakes are the same.'

Cass couldn't be bothered responding. She politely drank the sour Pocari Sweat and made a pot of tea, setting her two teacups in the centre of her table. The lovers showed no signs of wanting to leave. Just as she was running out of conversation, when she thought that her headache was finally abating and she might have some peace at last, there was a knock on the door.

Oh no, she thought, Karl. He stood in the doorway, smirking. He was unfazed by her visitors and shook their hands with vigour. Almost instantly he commenced his loud chat in German.

‘
Japanisch
!' he exclaimed, genuinely impressed. He pointed at their suits.

‘Yes, also
Japanisch
,' said Mitsuko. She translated for Yukio and soon the three, apparently, were talking about snow. Cass couldn't entirely follow: Mitsuko's German was excellent and far beyond her own level of competence. But she heard the name Ukichiro Nakaya once again and knew then that Yukio must be explaining the science of snowflakes to Karl. She made another pot of tea. Since she had only two chairs, Karl and Mitsuko sat on her bed, and Yukio and she
drew up the chairs and pulled the small table beside them. Karl was enjoying himself hugely. His large hands clutched his knees. He looked ten years younger, altered by youthful company and
Japanisch
novelty. At some point in their conversation he excused himself, went back to his room and returned with an old book on natural science, full of tatty bits and pieces of bookmark. He proudly opened it to a few pages of snowflake sketches – exquisite prints in fine-point etching, dated 1905. He was saying something like ‘nature does not age', he was expressing a naturalist's delight. Cass was compelled to revise her knowledge of Karl: he was, after all, an educated man, and one with assiduous – bookmarked – intellectual passions. With Yukio he inclined his head over the images. Mitsuko leant forward, her vinyl suit creaking.

‘It is one of Yukio's special interests,' she explained in English. ‘When we first met it was in winter, and he liked to tease and call me the
yuki-onna,
the snow woman. She is a beautiful lady of mythology, but exceptionally dangerous. She kills men with her cold breath. She floats through the snow and leaves no footprints.'

How enmeshed they all were. It was startling, Cass reflected, how they overlapped and repeated in their private fixations. They were a group of random foreigners, passing at this moment in history, through this specific city, and they were continually discovering symbolic convergences. Interpenetrating knowledge made their association unique. In their para-literary life of drinking and ritualised talking, outside usual social forms, a leisure class all of their own, they had discovered the
gestalt
of apparently shared perceptions. No footprints necessary to lead their way.

‘Let me show you something,' Mitsuko said.

She extracted a pile of stiff papers from her bag, pushed the teacups aside, and set about fussily manipulating a single square page. She said she was constructing an origami snow-flake. Her fingers fiddled at the sheet, pressing and folding, following crease lines, flattening corners with her fingertips, deriving a pointed star from an entirely ordinary plane of paper. With a slight bow of her head, she offered the shape to Karl. He received it with two hands, in a delicate gesture. Then Mitsuko bent again, and folded again. This time she folded into existence an origami butterfly. Her fingers pinched at the corners and pulled lengthwise at the paper body. She displayed the completed shape on her open palm.

‘It's a female,' she added, handing it to Cass with the same quiet formality. ‘The male is slightly different.'

With the gentlest of pressures, Mitsuko urged Cass to open her hand and accept the butterfly. Cass had always thought it ingenuous, this playing with paper, and above all despised the decorative motif of butterflies that infested women's scarves and bags and summer clothes, ubiquitous as the skull. But now she held the little object with new regard. Its combination of exactness and austerity moved her. Such a rational thing. Such a marvel of reconstruction. ‘Implicated', that was the word, the mystery of folds. From a humble planar void, this 3D surprise. She glanced at Karl and was moved to see that he had tears in his eyes. He nodded politely. With endearing charm he held up his paper snowflake, swinging it from two fingers.

 

When at last they all left, Cass realised that she felt both lucid and well. Her headache had gone, her laconic mood
had disintegrated. Her body was no longer clogged with excess alcohol and toxins. Darkness had fallen very early, so she had no sense of the time, but when she looked at the clock she discovered it was nearly seven. She set about rinsing the teacups to make way for preparing her dinner. She felt a vast, dreamy ease, a sense of moving in a state of peace and equanimity in her room. Minutes passed unnoticed: she seemed to drift through absent time on shallow associations, the Japanese origami, the bookmarks in Karl's book, the slow lamination of memories of the last few weeks, and of what she had said, and of what others had said, and of how there had been a hundred small intersections and correspondences; and how these had given her such subtle and unexpected pleasure.

She was aware of a distant sound in the hallway as a door slammed below, and of footfall somewhere, and of the spooked quality of indistinct sounds in the stale air of the apartment block. She was aware of the warmth she now felt, and the enveloping comfort. Beyond the windowpane the darkness of Berlin was thickening. She pressed her face to the window. She held her breath, to see. Outside, streams of snow were swirling in nautilus curves. She watched them turn, the whorled shapes of a beneficent sky. It seemed too that she heard a faraway sound. Something like a phone disconnected, or the blurred hum in a seashell.