A Guide to Berlin (18 page)

Victor was lying face up, a brazen corpse. This was the first surprise. Cass had somehow not expected to see his face. ‘Unblemished' was the word that sprang to mind, and
she hated herself for the instant comparison. Victor's head was ringed with blood, in a slick, bright halo, and his eyes were fixed open, snowflakes falling shallow inside them. Tiny crystals glittered there, giving a semblance of live alertness. Cass bent to her knees. She moved very near to his face. She closed the eyes with her hand as she had seen done in the movies. A gentle push at the eyelids was all it took, then a little more pressure, a calm resting of the fingers. The bushy moustache was also covering with snow; she wiped it away. Gino gave a little groan and rushed back inside. Karl and Marco lifted the body, Karl at the feet and Marco with his arms hooked under Victor's, while Cass continued to brush snow from his still-warm face, delicately, carefully, with her open palm. She was still brushing, as if it would make any difference, when Victor was lowered onto a blanket Karl had hastily spread on the floor of his room. Marco reached for Cass's hand and held it firmly, in silent command, to stop her brushing movement, then pulled one corner of the rug over Victor's face. Now that he was a shape, not Victor, it should have been easier. But Cass felt a rising, queasy, ungovernable panic. This was the second surprise. That it was the hidden face that truly panicked her.

In whatever madness they were enduring, Karl had taken over. He telephoned his son, Franz, speaking far too loud. There was a garbled conversation.

‘Truck … Now.'

‘No, now.'

‘Yes, yes.'

No one stopped Karl and called the police. No one wanted to be blamed, but all felt implicated and guilty. Later it would seem impossible, entirely inexplicable, that they
had become so passive and indecisive, that the repercussion of Victor's fall had made them all crumple like children, that without discussion or decision they had let Marco and Karl take control.

Gino was by now curled alone in a corner. Cass saw that he held Victor's spectacles; he must have found them in the snow. Mitsuko and Yukio remained together, facing away. Karl offered them all a shot of vodka, but only Marco accepted. They clinked glasses – a habit, surely, but a vile gesture in the circumstances – and drank. Cass saw the blood on Marco's hands and shirt and held up her own hands in a mute sign, like a Muslim blessing. Wash, she was signing.
Wash your hands
. She too had a tidying instinct, and wanted death cleared away, wanted it all put right, wanted the night to stop spinning.

It was Cass who offered to return upstairs and retrieve their coats and scarves. She found her own coat and put it on, drawing it close, then with the bulky bundle stood for a minute outside her door thinking what a comfort it would be, to have their warm clothes with them. The blast of freezing night air had seemed extreme, but it might have been shock, or the sensitivity of her nervous condition. She remembered how death changed everything, time and space, the significance of small objects and creature comforts. Death had its own weather. Death was uncontrollable as cyclones. She reeled a little, unsteady, as she descended the stairs. In those few moments alone carrying the coats, cautious and silent, relieved to have her own chore to perform, relieved to be active, not still, she experienced a sudden sense of her own life congealing. Alexander had also been wrapped in a cloth – not a blanket, but a curtain, pulled from beneath a
fallen window frame. Her father had lifted the heavy frame to extract it. She saw him now, pulling at the fabric carefully to keep it intact. Was he crying? He may have been crying. Her usually reserved father may have been crying. The curtain bore a decoration of autumn leaves of a kind she had never actually seen - European leaves of an unbelievable orange, regularly shed in unbelievable seasons. They matched her sense then of things misaligned and incredible. The shape of her beloved brother, wrapped in a decorative cliché that meant nothing; the expedient offence of it, the simplification.

 

When the truck arrived – old and rusty and rattling down the street – the man who climbed from the driver's seat looked a lot like Karl. He shook hands with Marco, only Marco, selecting him as the leader, or the one inherently blameworthy. Perhaps too, she thought later, Franz had been told about Marco, or perhaps he had come to help out of a brotherly instinct for the medical condition they shared. Perhaps Karl had bribed him in some way, or offered to pay for his assistance. Cass would never know. The handshake was like the clink of vodka glasses, unseemly and incongruous. Franz acknowledged the others only with a brief nod of his head. His manner was businesslike, gruff and dourly preoccupied. They all noticed he had the gait of an injured man, leaning to the right and slightly lurching.

For now, they piled in, Marco up-front next to Gino and Franz, she with Mitsuko, Yukio and Victor in the back. Seated with her back against the cold metal, her legs outstretched, it was Cass who held Victor. There, in the
trembling tray, surrounded by ropes and tackle and an indistinct smell of raw meat, she held the precious shape of his head in her lap. They pulled away into the night. They did not know where they were going. They did not know why they were in the truck, or what unspoken obligation bound them to this reckless response. Cass's last glimpse, before Franz lowered the metal roller door, was of Karl shovelling red snow into a plastic bucket, still busily tidying up the scene of the death.

The third surprising thing was that they had all accompanied Franz.

It would have made sense if they had dispersed, all gone their own way; it would have made sense, of course, if they had rung the police, and told a credible and exculpating story. But instead they consented without discussion to go together with a stranger, to who-knows-where, in the darkness, in a noisy old truck. Having no burden of consistency in their experimental community, they now slipped into a genre, into driven action, not reflection. They cancelled disquiet for deed; they wanted a procedure, a decisiveness that would take Victor away. In the future there would be no consoling explanation - in the disgrace of the event they were simply cowardly and passive. There will be fleeting moments in which they will consider otherwise, what might have happened if they had acted in a manner more responsible; but for now an irrevocable plot had taken over, now they were compromised, and submissive, and must pretend they knew what they were doing.

The cold metal floor of the truck was almost painful to sit on. The air was foetid, freezing and horribly closed and Cass felt woozy with dread and the weight of the death that she held. Mitsuko was quiet. Yukio was wide awake, but lost in the world of his own thoughts. Now and then light from outside entered the crack beneath the back door, but for most of the journey they were riding in almost total darkness. They did not say a word. They were still a group then; they were still hypothetically together. For all that it was a nonsensical circumstance and fate, they had without question and in unanimity joined forces with Gino.

The truck drove for too long. They felt it slow, start again, enter traffic, swerve away. They felt confined, like prisoners. There was no way of knowing where in Berlin they were heading. Blind journeying carried its own kind of fear and Cass was overcome by grim misgivings. When at last the truck stopped, she felt enormous relief. Now she would know what they were doing, what plan Franz and Marco had hatched. She heard the front doors creak open, then she heard them bang shut. The truck shuddered. Footfall, and then the unlocking of the metal door: Franz flung the door up into its roller with the emphatic gesture of a conductor at the end of a huge symphony. Marco and Gino were standing close, and each by prior arrangement took charge of the blanketed body. Neither spoke. They lifted Victor down between them, and only then did Cass and the lovers descend.

‘Where are we?' She needed to know.

‘It's the Havel,' said Marco, ‘the river. Near the canal.'

It was snowing densely but she made out the city lights in the distance. They were near the bank of the river in
what seemed to be a wild space of rubbish and dead wood, surrounded by sentinel, leafless trees. Franz switched on a torch so that she saw the swing of a yellow beam and stripes of snow flurry briefly aflame. But it was a mystifying dark they inhabited, away from street lamps, semi-erased, and full of slow-moving snow. There was the sense of texture around them, of drifting presences, as if the air was remade with another substance, as if the air itself was altered and atomically changed. And cold. Bitter cold.

In the distance the water shone with plates of ice, jagged near the shore. Further out lay a stretch of profound deep black. Something inside Cass crumbled, subsided and gave way.

‘Not here,' she said to Marco.

‘Further up. A clean space, I promise.'

Franz offered no help with the body, but seemed to be lugging over his shoulder a lump of iron – an anvil, was it? – attached to a soft-clinking chain.

‘This isn't right,' said Cass in a small voice. But Marco and Gino continued to walk ahead, disappearing into the dark, carrying Victor's body. As she watched them ignore her, she experienced a flash of outrage.

‘Stop!' she called out.

Their faint shapes turned. They all stopped. The anvil glinted on Franz's back.

‘This isn't right. We haven't discussed this. You're going to throw Victor in the river? Just like that, like garbage?'

A gash had opened in the night, an intimation of atrocity. Around them were the stiff shapes of bare branches and the night shadows of unfamiliar woods. There was something underfoot Cass couldn't name, something compressed and
uneven. She heard the chain metallically rattle as Franz moved his burden.

‘You don't understand,' Gino shouted. His voice was shattering in the cold night air. And they had already begun moving on, they were turning away from her.

‘Stop!' It was Mitsuko this time. It was Mitsuko who yelled her anxiety into the night, who wanted to halt whatever morbid plot was unfolding.

They saw the shadows of Gino and Marco halt. Franz swung the torch again; his yellow light faltered, as he did. They saw its dispersed beam concentrate and turn downwards, the cone focused brightly at his feet.

‘What are we doing here?'

‘What?' It was Gino again, sounding angry.

‘What are we doing here?'

Ahead, Marco and Gino lowered the body. Franz remonstrated. Cass heard the German word ‘hurry'. Gino stood his ground, but Marco was slowly approaching them.

‘Gino can't return to prison,' said Marco. ‘We must do this for him. We can't leave him alone to deal with this. We've come this far.'

There was no explanation of ‘prison'. He was speaking urgently and fast. But in the effort to sound reasonable his voice was almost tearful. It was overwrought with too much yet unexplained. What story was this they had entered, or failed to enter? What might both men be attempting to conceal?

Yukio called out, ‘Fuck you, Gino! Fuck you!'

His face was caught by the disc of the torch: Franz had returned without them noticing.

And then Gino, propelled with furious distress, sped
from the darkness and threw himself onto spotlit Yukio. It was a sudden rough tackle, a frightened will to hurt, so that Yukio fell backwards into the snow and the two men were rolling together. Gino was attempting ineffectually to pummel Yukio's face, lifting his fist, pushing wildly, heavily flailing. There were grunts and hard thwacks, but it was more a wrestle of two boys, with nothing much occurring but impotent rage. Within seconds, Gino had stopped. He was suddenly still, lying on top of his opponent, heaving, sobbing.

‘I'm sorry, Yukio,' he blubbered. ‘Sorry. So sorry.'

In a single move Franz had seized Gino's jacket and lifted him upwards, forcing him into a headlock and pulling down on his own wrist to tighten the pressure. Yukio clambered sideways to upright himself. Under his breath, he let out a curse in Japanese. Beside him, Mitsuko was brushing rapidly at his coat and flicking wet flakes of snow from his hair. As Franz loosened his grip, Gino sank groggy to his knees. Cass could not bring herself to comfort Gino; and now he wept without restraint, apart and undone. There was a slow settling down and a slower reunification.

They all stayed there looking downwards, seized in tense indecision.

‘We have to do this,' whispered Marco. ‘But it can just be Gino and me. You can all go now. You can wait for us in the truck.'

He spoke like one rebuked. They heard his uncertainty. Again, Gino sobbed. They saw that Marco was shivering. He paused to blow air into the shell of his cold cupped hands.

Mitsuko and Yukio were conferring in Japanese. Cass stood alone, stupefied. In the end a peculiar solidarity
overtook them. In the end they trudged together into the darkness with the body of their friend. Gino was hopelessly distraught so Yukio took over, carrying Victor with Marco. Victor made a neat bundle. Mitsuko and Cass flanked Gino; now they were holding his hands, almost pulling, in a half-dragging grip. Ahead, Franz walked lopsided, leading the way to a narrow path, and down to the water. His torchlight was pallid and skewed and let nothing in the world remain stable.

What she would remember was the unusual clarity of the words and actions that followed. The snowfall had eased to an uneven sprinkle. In its place was scintillating night and a smothered calm. Now they heard the sound of their own footsteps, crunching the new snow, and the rasp and effort of their own frozen breathing. Somewhere a stream of traffic issued a blurry, murmurous hum, somewhere meaningful life was still going on, warm and oblivious. Cass thought of Victor's flecked face,
unblemished
, his eyes wide open; she thought of Karl shovelling snow, of the drive closed inside the truck, and of the form, Victor's form, resting in her lap. She thought only in questions of how the night had accelerated to this, this trudge into a death zone, this despicable trudge. Snowdrift was piled at an angle against what looked like the remains of a wall. What was it doing here, what purpose might it serve? Symbols resolved round her, the contraction of time felt like a noose.

Yet there was no more protestation. They acted as one group. At the bank of what might have been the river or the canal, they looked over ice that lay unnaturally flat and shining on the water. Franz swung the anvil around his head and lobbed it onto the black ice. There was a sharp cracking
sound as the ice plate broke apart. It broke as if a mirror, spiked and dangerous. Franz pulled back his missile, hauling it hand over hand as one would an anchor, then flung it again. It rose higher this time, a mean dangerous missile, and came down in the darkness with another loud crack. Then he instructed, ‘Now. Now the body can go under.'

They all paused. Gino had fallen silent. It was the moment in which they might all have come to their senses, but there was a drive now to completion, and a sense of inevitable mission. With bent, sorrowful heads Yukio and Marco weighted the body with Franz's anvil. They wound the chain around the feet and rested the block of iron in the centre, on what was still his belly. Victor's belly. Taking one end each they heavily swung, then swung again, and then let go. The body arced only a little and landed hard on the ice; and they all looked with alarm at what fell there but did not immediately disappear. Franz prodded a plate of ice with his foot, and they saw the form list slightly as the shelf tilted, then tilted a little more. Across the shine of angled ice, Victor slid into the water. There was less a splash than a sound like a mouth opening and closing. Then bubbles breaking at the surface, like evidence of posthumous words. Then nothing at all.

A little wind had risen, so the light snow began to turn. They were heading back to the truck, quiet, each enclosed in their own deep misery, when Marco asked them to stop. Franz kept on walking, his torch wobbling, insecure, and they watched as his swooping angles of light took him separately and further away. The friends stood in a circle, finding their night vision, so that they might look directly into each other's funereal faces. They oddly resembled each other:
Gino and Marco, Yukio and Mitsuko. In snowlight Cass saw that they were radically alike. Each had dark eyes that twinkled like aluminium foil; each the same pinched guilty face, tight and withdrawn.

Marco gave a little speech, absurdly formal in the circumstances. He said that the death of any human was without metaphor or likeness. The death of any human was incomparable. It was not a writerly event. It was not contained within sentences. It was not to be described in the same way as the beauty of an icicle, or three wrinkles parallel on the forehead of a remembered governess, or the play of shadow and light on a swimming body, or the random harmony of trifles that was a parking meter, a fluffy cloud and a tiny pair of boots with felt spats.

He said Victor's name. Beloved Victor. He said, ‘Rest in Peace, Victor.' They remained silent. No one else could speak. They were as specks in the dark of a shocking event. Then, in a tiny voice, Mitsuko said, ‘Umbrella, umbrella.'

Ferrule
, Cass thought. The release of something deadly.

The headlamps of the truck flicked on and off, on and off, their sickly glow both faint and far-reaching. It was Franz, annoyed, signalling them to return. They stood a little longer, ignoring him, stuck in a star of five. Cass heard a low susurration that might have been a phantom whisper, but then realised, coming to her senses, that it was traffic, Berlin traffic, distant and mechanical and streaming away.