There was a pause—not an uncomfortable silence, and that represented a tick in his box. With some of the helpers I’ve had silence is a threat, something to ward off. There was a girl from Prague. She found it particularly challenging. She would fill up a perfectly lovely silence with chatter and inanity, emptying her impoverished mind into that beautiful silence, which I think she must have viewed as a chasm she might fall in unless she produced a clamour of words to grasp hold of. Silences with Defoe were enjoyable. So after a pause he asked what I would prefer to know about the Esmeralda: about her beautifully crafted figure head or her use as a prison ship in the years after Allende was despatched. Which did I prefer—and here he used my own words—how it presented itself to the world or the truth we would come to know about it? I thought it was possible to hold onto both ideas. There followed another silence. Actually, a quite lengthy silence. An erudite silence. At the end of which, he said, ‘Yes, I agree.’
We talked about the lungfish. There was his marriage breakup. From time to time he alluded to it. He got the news in the Antarctic. I’ll come back to that. On the subject of the lungfish he had interrupted a doctoral thesis to bring up a family. He worked in Fisheries; that’s what had taken him down to ‘the ice’, as he called it. The reason I mention the lungfish is the Esmeralda. At the zoo the conversation moved on. He talked admiringly of the capacity of the lungfish to hold two versions of itself. Apparently it can live in and out of water. Now he arrived at the question that interested him. At which point does it become the one thing and cease to be the other? In becoming that new thing how much does it retain of the other?
We moved onto cross-fertilisation. Something I happen to know something about. Genetically modified foods. And racial groups, a mishmash these days, a blend to which we applied the question asked of the lungfish, which brought us back to Ines. Those African features, described by Defoe, planted over a lighter skin. Skin the colour of potato peel. In that way a person carries her history. One of the ways, I should say. With Ines I never got further than that Liechtenstein place in Africa and I’ve since forgotten that information. One of the indignities of age is also an advantage. Any secret is safe with me because almost certainly it will be forgotten the next day.
Latency, that’s what we talked about. And more. Defoe gave me new fields to roam around in. I’d never met anyone who had visited the Antarctic. When he spoke of the trans-Antarctic mountains—that single phrase lifted the idea of Antarctica off that flat grid of ice which up until that moment was all I had imagined there was to it. Defoe’s area of expertise happens to be in fish quota management systems. That’s why he was down there. But he knew a lot more besides—had seen a great deal. He’d touched with his own hands a fossilised bit of beech. He said it had been part of the great central Antarctic beech forests several millennia ago. Extraordinary, at least I think so, to hold in one’s fingertips a remnant of a vanished world. And I said so, until he interrupted me to say it was wrong to think it had disappeared. The spore of the beech lay deep in the ice, beneath blankets of ice containing air breathed at the time of the Vandals and the Picts and long before. Beneath the ice lay a continent with the profile of another Europe: mountains, ridges, even lakes. He saw Antarctica in a form of preservation. For the moment comatose, but in a vigilant state of readiness for that time when mankind had spoiled every last clod of dirt and needed another continent to start over. Latency, you see. So I think I understand his interest in lungfish.
Ines was always within earshot of these conversations. We took her silence for granted. A form of acquiescence, yes, but remember, it was what she preferred. I for one would have been delighted had she waded in with an opinion about Defoe’s Esmeralda.
I don’t know if I have much more to add. I’m getting on. My memory is not the formidable warehouse it once was. It plays tricks on me. I will remember how I felt aged nine waking one morning in Rügen to sunlight spread over the Ostsee but I cannot recall waking up yesterday. Everyone says the same. I’m sorry. I am beginning to sound like an old bore.
For a year they were my closest companions. After they went, first Ines of course, and then Defoe, I was bereft. I felt disabled, helpless. I had been abandoned, stuck to the wall of the apartment, the lights switched off and the doors closed.
I always knew Ines’ whereabouts. I could tell where she was in the apartment. I mentioned this to her one day. After that she passed over the floorboards even more like a shadow. She was not completely successful. Then it troubled me that she would try to make such an effort. Why would she want to leave me in the dark as to her whereabouts? A blind man is already diminished, why seek to diminish him more? They were my steadfast companions. Ines and Defoe. I never pretended it to be an equal relationship. They could see me. I could not see them exchange glances, which brings us back to silences, and such moments didn’t always escape my attention. I could not tell what the exchange meant. I only knew that it had passed between them.
I remember the terrific explosions of New Year’s Eve. Rockets firing over the skies of Berlin. Drunk men toppling about in dresses, according to Defoe. A city bound up in red firework paper. A tide of broken glass around the city, again, according to Defoe. Well it was after that momentous occasion—some time in January, I would say—that I lay in bed listening to the methodical footsteps of Defoe in the room on the floor below progress up the stairs and across the landing. I heard the apartment door open and close. If treachery and betrayal are ever in need of a stock image then look no further than a door opening and closing in such a way. And then I heard Defoe’s footsteps trail off in the direction of Ines’ bedroom. There is not much more to say.
I felt threatened. I hadn’t felt that way in years. What if he took her away? I would be left alone again. I could always find a replacement, a new Ines, but I was comfortable with the Ines I knew. The trust—let’s be clear about that—we had in each other. I felt secure, very secure with her at my side as we strolled together through the city. On the other hand, if it came to that, perhaps I would find an even better Ines. So why did I feel this way? I think I was a little bit jealous. Yes. Just a little. Not so big a jealousy for it to be unseemly or grotesque. No. A small feeling that I contained.
From this point on I was aware of a new silence. A suspension of thought, such as the delayed conversation that holds two people in check until the child has been put to bed.
I began to feel in the way. I began to miss my wife. Nineteen ninety-seven is the last time I saw her. My eyes were already in a bad state but something strange and not altogether unpleasant began to happen. As my wife faded from view she grew younger. She liked to hear that. Later, as a matter of course, she moved back into such general terms that she could have been anyone. I could no longer see the small white fish-tail scar beneath her left cheek. She’d had it since childhood after falling off her bike. The scar made her self-conscious and the lengths she went to to conceal it made her all the more attractive. Hannah can be stern at times. The thing about the scar—it made her vulnerable. It was the only thing to have that effect. She was always looking in the eyes of someone she’d just met to see whether they’d noticed the scar. Well, I could not see it any more. I could not find it. With my fingertip I could. Scar tissue is smoother than skin, smooth as a cold pebble to touch, so I could always find her area of vulnerability. I could find it now, if she was to sit here beside me right at this moment I could reach across and find it. A bit like an old and familiar address. You don’t ever think about how you got there.
I still miss my wife. I miss the intimacy. I don’t mean what happens between the sheets. I am talking about the unspoken part that enfolds one life with another. With Hannah I had the feeling of us looking out the same window at a shared past, seeing the same things, the air of the world touching us at the same moment, so that you felt a coordination of response. I think for periods of our marriage, long periods, we became one person. Then, one day, it is no longer. We are no longer. The specialist
warned us it could turn out this way. The catastrophe of my blindness would affect the two of us. She calls me. We talk on the phone. She tells me about her life. But it is not the same. I cannot see it. I cannot see her. I used to think she would come back, just turn up one day, and nothing would need to be said. It would be as if she’d somehow lost her way home or was later than expected, and here she was unloading the shopping and so forth, and of course I’d welcome her in. I used to think we’d manage it to a certain point but not beyond, say, a well-mannered hotelier welcoming back a favoured guest. Things change. The bond shifts. Then you look around for the thing that shaped it, well that’s gone too, so there is only memory and no easy fit, nothing to pour yourself back into to make it work.
Back in the days when I could still see we would take the train up to Rügen. She liked Binz. She loved the boardwalk above the beach. We would walk up and down there in the evening. Whenever we stopped my eyes would go automatically to the horizon. There in the distance where all things merge and the boundaries are uncertain, there, I used to think, is a place I’d like to dwell.
Imagine waking up each day and not knowing where everything is—well, that’s the place I ended up in. Am I complaining? I hope not. My situation is not a suffering. It is a frustration. You find yourself forever arriving late to the joke. People around you—at the tram stop, say—are laughing. What can they be laughing at? You find your face shifting to join the laughter but you must wait. You must wait for a clue and go from there. You might hear someone say ‘I thought she would catch the dog.’ So, it involved a dog, whatever it is; it is now a past event. This is how you exist in the world. Playing catch-up.
For how long, I wondered, had this been going on between Defoe and Ines? What had I missed? I felt foolish. I felt as though I had relinquished something. I could not have described what. Perhaps part of it is revealed when I say what happened next. I began to take them to new places. Places which on their own might not mean much but were reliant on me to illuminate. To the cemetery at Dorotheenstadt. This is a world I know intimately. I knew every headstone, the story of every life. That cemetery is an amazing burial ground of old enmities, love affairs and political jealousies. I am surprised that the egos of the dead allow them to lie at rest. I am surprised that personalities indignant about being stripped to mere bones don’t erupt from the graves and begin shouting for the world’s attention. Of all the personalities buried there we might be prepared to forgive Hegel, but his is one of the quieter ones. So we would visit the cemetery and walk about the headstones.
Bertolt Brecht is buried there. I was amazed. Neither of them had heard of Brecht. In Ines’ case I could understand. But Defoe? An educated man, a man who had visited Antarctica. Incredible. I wanted to shout up at the treetops—I am with two nincompoops. Idioten. I was so happy! In light of those footsteps I heard almost nightly between the landing and Ines’ bedroom, in light of that trespass on my good will, I was all the more derisive. Until the silence I heard was that of a hermit crab recoiling and wriggling deeper into its shell. Then of course I felt bad. I had gone overboard. So, I recalled Defoe’s lungfish, its dual capacities, and drew Defoe’s attention to the fact that while Brecht was a committed Communist he did not belong to the Party. Silence. Well, perhaps it was a long bow. Or perhaps he chose to punish me by pretending he didn’t get it.
I pointed out Helene Weigel’s grave. She lies head to toe with her husband, Brecht. Here lies another tale of twin capacities. Their marriage and Brecht’s affairs. But no one played the role of mother better than Helene Weigel in Mother Courage. I got Defoe and Ines to orient me around to the house at the side of the cemetery. It used to be Brecht’s house. After his death in 1936 Helene continued to live there. I haven’t been there for years. An old friend, Suzanne Zimmer, used to lead tours of the house. I made them leave me on a bench and told Defoe to take Ines for a tour. I instructed him to ask for Suzanne. They came back thirty minutes later with the news that she had died five years earlier. No one had told me.
The next time Hannah called, as she did in those days fairly regularly, I asked why she hadn’t told me about Suzanne Zimmer. I reminded her, I may be blind but I’m not yet dead. We argued, of course. Anything for an argument. But later we remembered a picnic with Suzanne in the Tiergarten. She was seeing a theatre lighting expert, Hans, actually quite famous in his field. We all got a bit drunk on champagne and sunshine and high spirits. Hans ended up wading across Neuer See. Suzanne had to fish him out.
So. Ines didn’t have much to say about the tour. I asked her if she had seen the large sunny room at the rear of the house with all the desks. Defoe had to answer for her. Each writing project had its own desk. Brecht would wander from one to the other, from a desk with song lyrics, to one with a draft of a poem, to another with a longer prose work. Each desk, I suppose, representing a different part of the brain. And suddenly we were back with lungfish. It was as if Defoe had been waiting for his opportunity. The desk, different capacities, the muse exacting different forces, even the house with its different air can work on an imagination. Different women have the same effect. Which of course used to be Brecht’s defence for his affairs. His grand rationale. He needed to sample new fields, to widen his knowledge of the human condition. Regardless of all the women he had, come their moment on stage they were dressed in Helene’s costume, and presented in her voice and personality. The other women were just wheat and maize. This line of argument never failed to ignite my tour groups. If they had been silent, they were no longer. Husband and wife fought with one another while I slipped away to the next headstone.
Johannes Becher, Heinrich Mann, Herbert Marcuse, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who made self-consciousness his subject, pegged it down to a social phenomenon. One cannot be self-conscious before a rooster or a tree. It requires another who sets limitations of self. Here Defoe interrupted. He said he had once felt self-conscious in front of a dog. ‘Really?’ I asked. What on earth had he been doing to make himself feel self-conscious before a dog? He wouldn’t say. Then I heard Ines make a sound. A snigger or muffled laugh, and so I knew what Defoe was hinting at, and I laughed. I joined in, and Defoe began to laugh and Ines, who I had never once heard laugh before, began to make a sound like the hiccups. We were laughing so much we had to sit down. What was there to sit down on but tombstones? Defoe sat down on Hegel. Author of The Phenomenology of Spirit. Died of cholera.
Well, that set us off again. Tears were rolling down my cheeks. I asked Defoe who he was sitting on now. He answered, Günter Gaus. ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘a very important man.’ More laughter. Ines? She had sat down on Anna Seghers. That was the only time I can recall laughter, helpless laughter between the three of us. Suddenly I had to urinate. All that laughter. My prostate is a worn thread. So Defoe led me to the nearest place. I had no idea where. My only concern was that I would not be seen. He gave assurances. Then, unfortunately, I heard a particular striking sound. So I knew immediately I was urinating on a tomb. Of course, I could not stop, not now that I had started, and, as well, I was interested to know whose tomb I was urinating on. I had to ask Defoe. ‘Hanns Eisler,’ he said.
He was still laughing. Perhaps I was smiling. If so, it vanished the moment he said Hanns Eisler. He let me urinate on Hanns Eisler, student of Arnold Schönberg. I fell quiet. I heard his footsteps on the landing again, those deliberate footfalls in the direction of Ines’ room, and the laughing inside of me, helpless a moment ago, subsided to the resentment of earlier. We pressed on, more solemnly now, in an air of restraint—Ines on my elbow, Defoe hovering over my right shoulder—until the silence built up around me, and soon it was occupied by a wind. I could hear the leaves rustling on the trees. Only leaves rustling and nothing else. We could have been in Tibet.
Then it was Ines who spoke. A conciliatory tone, as I recall. She broke that beautiful silence with ‘Please, I would like a heisse schokolade.’ A heisse schokolade, she said. That brought us crashing down to reality. After all, what co
uld be more important than a heisse schokolade? I am not being facetious. I mean this. I must confess it hadn’t occurred to me until Ines spoke up. I can laugh now. At the time though I felt very differently. I will admit—I felt more alone than ever.
part three: Defoe
fourteen
A little push this way or a nudge that way, and I would be writing a different version of my time in Berlin. Or more likely I wouldn’t be writing anything at all.
An odd couple at first glance—Ines, young, African, and Ralf, old, white, stooped shoulders of dependency. I was gazing down at them from the top of the escalators at Zoologischer Garten. I don’t think I would have noticed either one had they stood apart, but together—the white and black of them—they caught the eye. Ines, I should say, caught my eye.
She glanced up and finding me at the top of the escalators she smiled. She did not smile and look away, which frankly is what I would have expected. She kept smiling. Of course she’d mistaken me for someone else. It can happen easily enough. I imagine now I measured up to whoever they were expecting in a general sort of way—white, male, fortyish. I looked away. Outside the station the city lights were coming on, one at a time, floor by floor. As the crowds pushed out the exit doors they turned into shadows. I looked back and there she was, the African face, smiling confidently up at me. This time I smiled helplessly back. And with that I stepped onto the escalator. She held my eye all the way down. It was as though I had won something. All I had to do was push through the crowd to collect my prize. As I drew near she held up a sign: Room available in exchange for light domestic duties.