A Guide to Berlin (2 page)

The central heating was on and the apartment was cosy.

Cass placed her paper sheath of tulips near the doorway so she would not forget them. She loosened her scarf and removed her gloves and coat. This was the repetition that a European winter imposed, this on-again, off-again, this robing and disrobing.

Mitsuko, acting like a hostess, handed Cass the mysterious drink and led her with a delicate touch at the elbow into the sparsely furnished room. What struck Cass most were the empty walls and the pale squares and rectangles where once had rested paintings. Oblomov's disappeared images were now secretive shapes. There was a black leather lounge and two matching leather armchairs, but no coffee table, so that the drinks were served on the floor. There were two vintage standing lamps, of enamelled green metal, Venn-diagrammatically arranged to pour rings of light where a coffee table might have been. Cass recalled the squat she lived in when she had first fled home – sitting on the floor around candles in bottles and dope in plastic bags, and the queasy joy of having only a few books and a duffel
bag of scant possessions. She had followed a boyfriend to London and her parents and brothers had been scandalised.

Victor's geographical announcements, manic and apparently lighthearted, had been a sign of his nervousness. His voice was curiously thin, high and insistent. He had rattled on – listing cities, engaging in fanciful speculations. Now he sat himself down and prepared to speak in a more tranquil tone. Mitsuko and Cass sat with Victor on the lounge, Marco and Gino each had an armchair, and Yukio sat between them on the floor, his legs crossed like a buddha. It was not an arrangement Cass, in her forward imagining, had at all anticipated, sitting opposite Marco, faced with his inquisitive scrutiny.

‘We are grateful,' said Marco, ‘that Victor has agreed to be the first in our speak-memory disclosures. This cannot be easy.'

He nodded to Victor. ‘So, shall we begin?'

 

It was the simplest of commencements, no pomposity, no introduction.

Victor cleared his throat, a little too loudly, like a worried actor, warming up. Then he began. ‘So, here goes, kiddos.

‘I was born in New Jersey in 1952. Momma said I came out yawning, and liked to tell the story: “You came out yawning, little one, you came out yawning!” Like I was over it already and bored with the world. But she was wrong. I was never bored. I always wanted more and more world.

‘She was forty-two then, an old mother in those days, and I was to be their only child. My parents loved me in an impassioned way that I found embarrassing: Momma would
fuss over the smallest things – she was always tweaking my clothes, pulling at my sleeves, adjusting the cute bowties they inflicted on boys at that time. She was obsessed with cleanliness, spitting on her hanky and wiping away invisible smuts or blemishes; holding my chin with her thumb and index finger, tilting my face upwards, wiping and rubbing so that I imagined my face shone like a lamp. Her eyes would fill with tears at the slightest provocation: when I handed her a drawing, or recited some fragment in Yiddish, inept and stammering, or showed her a school certificate, given simply for attendance. I had a sense of power over her and my father, who was silent to the point of anonymity, a shade of a man who had left his full self behind him in Poland.

‘My mother stayed at home and took in ironing for better-off households, so that our front room was always filled with piles of clean washing, as if there was a huge population hidden away in our house, forever casting off their clothes. I loved pushing my face into the piles, like a housewife in a TV commercial. It was like a secret vice, I guess, because it seemed so womanly and so wrong.

‘My father worked in an umbrella factory – on Ferry Street, I think it was – doing who knows what, he never really told me. I was always asking him, “
Tateh
, what is it you actually do?” He would wave me away, so that I was left in the dark, contemplating the mysteries of making an umbrella. At school I told the kids that my papa was a cop; it sounded much nobler, somehow, and much more plausible.

‘But Papa gave me my first real sense of the mystery of
things
, specific things, how something ordinary might carry extraordinary detail. Once, when he'd become tired of the ignorance of my questions, he drew an umbrella and named
all the parts. There was the ferrule at the top, there was the open cap, the top notch, the ribs all joining at the rosette in the centre, there was the runner, the stretcher, the top and bottom springs. There was the shaft, the crook handle, and at the end of the crook handle there was the nose cap. Above was the canopy, that lovely shape, the dome some call the parasol. I remember him saying this in Yiddish, “
Some call this the parasol.
” He sat back in his chair, surveying his named umbrella, and this was the closest to contentment, even happiness, I'd ever seen him. He was transfixed by his own drawing, and by the modest vocabulary of his labour.

‘When the factory closed down in the early sixties, and he was dying of some unknown illness that made him even less substantial and more withdrawn, Papa one day, out of the blue, entered a kind of confused monologue, mixing Yiddish and English, about the bits and pieces of umbrellas. I understood then that he probably made the springs by hand. He'd been a watchmaker before the war, and it made sense to me then, that he might find a more simple expression of the skill his eyesight no longer enabled. He had a contempt for newer umbrellas with metal shafts and mass-produced springs, and owned a stick umbrella from the olden days, beautifully fashioned, a pointy miracle, which stood propped like a kind of furniture by our front door. I never saw him use it. I don't know where it came from. I know only that the old umbrella was his single treasure. When I popped it open after his death, the canopy was torn in two places. He must have known this, but kept it still.

‘Other boys had basketball pennants in their rooms, and baseball cards and posters, especially after the Mets
started in sixty-two. Other boys had small metal toys, cast-iron cars and tanks, and plastic figurines of cowboys and Indians. I had just a few books and my dead father's useless umbrella.

‘My parents, Solomon and Hanka, later Solly and Anna, were Polish survivors of the Holocaust. I know very little of their story and they evaded my few questions. But at some level, too, I was guiltily incurious. I was a pretty dumb kid when it came to family, I can tell you.

‘I know they were from Warsaw and had been in the ghetto. And I know they were both in Auschwitz, because I saw the numbers tattooed on their forearms. I have no idea of their actual experiences, or how they were taken, or when, or how each of them managed to survive. Even now, mostly when I'm watching movies or documentaries on TV, I feel a kind of despair that arises from knowing so little. I look for their faces in photographs and grainy footage. I think for a second:
Hey, that's my father!
But it never is.
Hey, that's my mother!
But no, not once.

‘So every torment is possibly theirs, and nothing wholly is; I insert them into any memoir, anxiously imagining, then have to remove them again. Their lives in Europe are remote and obscure and their times in the camp are appallingly
generalised
. It pains me now to know so little. And it astonishes me how well we all avoided the topic.

‘What I know of their story only starts after they were released. This much I know. They were two years, three maybe, in a displaced persons camp run by the Soviets, and this was where they met. Momma once told me they refused to be repatriated back to Poland because they'd heard there had been executions of those on the Left, and
of participants in the uprising. Some had survived the camps, only to be killed when they arrived home. So they held out, waiting and waiting, hoping to get a passage to Palestine. When this didn't happen, they settled for America. On the boat they already heard about Newark, New Jersey.

‘Newark, New Jersey, they heard, was a paradise for Jews.

‘I think it was very hard when they first arrived. My mother spoke a little English, she had been well educated, and came from a middle-class family. My father spoke not a word and was reluctant to learn. A welfare agency set them up in two rooms with a few possessions, and not long afterwards Papa started at the umbrella factory. When I came along, they must have been mighty surprised – there were times when they looked at me as if I'd arrived from Mars.'

 

Here Victor halted. The group remained silent, wondering if his story was over. Mitsuko was examining her fingers. The men were all looking down. Cass was conscious of Victor sitting beside her – she'd entered the dreaminess of his story, she'd let it dissolve her Berlin surroundings into his New Jersey past – but now she was aware of him physically, the way he hunched over in his telling, the way he fiddled with his watchband, all the small giveaway signs that spoke of the effort of revelation. Marco looked up and caught her glance, but then looked away almost immediately and did not speak. Someone would soon pour another glass, say something trivial, and make time move again, back to the present, in this room, in Oblomov's room, on Goethestrasse, in freezing Berlin. Just as the strain of this quiet indecision took hold, Victor recommenced.

‘I was a clever student, impeccably behaved, and I managed in grade school to blend in and seem like one of the others. But high school was a nightmare. I was fourteen when my father died and I felt ashamed of my stricken mother, and our lack of family, and our obvious poverty. No amount of lying disguised it. No amount of academic success. Everyone I knew had aunts and uncles, grandparents and cousins, and we had no one. The rabbi visited once or twice, when I quit Hebrew classes and refused to take my bar mitzvah, but otherwise I can't remember a single caller to our apartment, apart from clients dropping off and picking up their ironing. Momma had no friends to speak of and said Americans had no souls.

‘After Papa's death, she underwent a bewildering change; only in adulthood I realised it was a kind of breakdown. She lost it, completely lost it. She began casually to insult people on the sidewalks and in supermarkets. They understood nothing, she said. That was her line.
They understood nothing.
They played golf and had swimming parties, the women baked each other cakes and took their children to Dairy Queen and pizza bars, and all this seemed to her frivolous and a spiritual dereliction. She especially resented the wealthy Jews who lived on Keer Avenue, with their free-standing houses and their Cadillacs and their thin strips of emerald lawn. She resented their American speech and their extended families.

‘I remember once we were walking together and she stopped before the window of a hairdressing parlour – this was in the days when women sat for hours under those metal hoods that looked like the heads of aliens – and she just started berating them, gesticulating and shouting loud
insults in Yiddish. I could see the women, all in white capes, all in a row beneath the metal heads, turn towards her in unison. All together, like automatons. They looked stunned at first, at this crazy foreign lady shouting at them from the pavement, but then one began to giggle and the others followed suit. It shocked her, their jollity. It made her shout even louder. I'm guessing she never went to a hairdresser once in her life. She had grey hair, even when I was born, always bound in a loose bun; something from the old world, maybe, something from before the war.

‘I wanted to flee, but had to stand there, watching Momma go crazy.

‘By the mid-sixties white people had largely abandoned our neighbourhood. The third ward, that's what they called it. We lived in the third ward. Unemployment was widespread and people were unhappy. We were the only white family left in our block, and Momma gradually turned her scorn to the blacks. I never understood it. She shouted at them to get a job and clean up their children. Told them they had no souls, and they told her: “Fuck off, ole white lady, who you think you fuckin' are, speak to us like that?”

‘There were race riots in sixty-seven – maybe you heard of them? The National Guard was sent in. Open gun battles in the street, dozens of buildings set on fire, twenty-six dead; hundreds, I dunno, maybe thousands, wounded. I remember the smoke and the scream of fire-engines and the sound of gunshot pinging outside our window, and I remember thinking: I
really
gotta get outa here.

‘Afterwards it seemed the streets were never cleaned up. Everything smashed up and broken. Whole buildings
in ruins. They despised us, the third ward. I got nervy and weird. I used to chant “umbrella, umbrella” to help me fall asleep.

‘A scaredy-cat kid, that's what I was: “umbrella, umbrella”.'

Victor managed a tight sardonic smile.

‘Momma died later that same year, suddenly keeled over on the stairs. I was relieved, and I was destroyed … I had a chance, and I got away.'

 

The body somehow knows when it is proper to punctuate.

Victor leant into the crossed pools of light and poured himself another drink. He leant back, tilted his head and gulped it down. The room was silent, subdued. This was the hush of respectful listening. As if given permission, Gino took up the bottle, gestured an offering, and the others presented their glasses to be refilled. No one spoke. Victor had allowed himself to swerve away from his mother's death. He had held his story steady.

‘Long story short: I was completely fucked up and went AWOL for a year, living rough in Brooklyn. But I was a good kid, with good manners, people saw that immediately. Too old-school to be a bum. Too young to be completely hopeless. A woman found me reading a book under a bridge and we struck up a conversation. She took me off the street, just like that; she took me off the street and decided to look after me. Leah Rabinovich. That was her name. Fed me baked ziti and German beer and supported my last year in high school, and after that my time in college – don't ask me how. She was Russian, or at least she'd been born in Russia
and she had an apartment in Brighton Beach, stuffed to the ceiling with books.