Contents
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Gail Jones
Title Page
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Acknowledgements
Copyright
Sixty Lights
Dreams of Speaking
Sorry
Five Bells
‘(What I hate) Folding an umbrella, not finding its secret button.’
Vladimir Nabokov, Interview, 1970
IT WAS MARCO Gianelli who spoke in the darkness.
When they were all standing together, shocked and numb, when they saw each other’s faces remade as rogues, pinched, white, shrivelled inwards with guilt, dull with logistics and the banal business of dragging dead weight, he was the only one among them who was able to speak. He raised his arm in the snowy air and with this gesture assembled them. He asked them to pause.
There was a moment in which all they did was wait. Snowfall enshrouded them. A feeble wind spun the flakes. They heard traffic in the night, muffled and distant, they heard the heave of each other’s raspy breath.
It was a formal speech, really, absurd in the circumstances.
Marco 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.
BEFORE THE SNOWS truly began, the city was a desolating ash-grey, and bitterly cold. Cass had never before seen such a grey city. It felt stiff and dead. There were the fleshless arms of cranes, slowly swinging, there was the rumble-slide of ubiquitous trains and trams, there were busy buses, skidding pedestrians, instructive red and green lights blinking their cartoon man, but still Berlin seemed to her collectively frozen. The white sky was menacing. The plates of ice on the Spree, uneven and jagged, resembled a spray of shattered glass after a wartime bombing. There must have been old people, she thought, gazing through the grime of an S-Bahn window, who looked down at the river and canals and recalled something blasted and asunder, piles of bricks, lives scattered, and a windowless episode in their childhoods. It would have been an easy connection, this shiny reminder of things broken, this pattern of severity and damage showing the forsakenness of the world. It was hard to imagine the icy water thawed and re-sealing, or the sky returning to a lively blue.
She had a sense of contraction, of huddling against the weather. Later, it figured in her mind as Stalinist classicism, the wind tunnel of the vast and inhuman Karl-Marx-Allee, and the shapes of people in padded jackets bending against the cruel air. A scene from Eisenstein, perhaps, with a gelid lens and the special effects of monumental vision, swollen by an aerial view and historical misery. Black outlines on white snow, impersonality, extinguishment. Exaggeration of this kind was irresistible.
In that early, fierce cold, Berliners coped better. They rode in sealed cars. They shut themselves in offices. Whole apartment blocks seemed to have not a single person about. In the city they dived into subways, seeking the shelter of corridors. There was an other-world of radiant bakery booths and the musty smells of takeaway food, of paper stands and convenience stores and stalls wholly of plastic and trinkets. Subterranean refuge was deeply appealing. There were tiny florists lined with clusters of unnaturally bright blooms – fuchsias, tulips, tropical orchids. Cass loved these above all: the tiny florists.
On the day of her very first meeting with the group, Cass bought ten tulips of startling orange, streaked with crimson. They appeared rare and magical. She bought them on impulse, attracted by their torrid colour. Near the exit to the U-Bahn stood rows of aluminium buckets stuffed to the brim with imported and hot-housed flowers. The Vietnamese florist, a sad-looking man with white hair, swept her choice from the bucket, shook it briefly, then laid the bunch on a metal table and swathed it in paper. His movements were swift and bored. Cass realised almost immediately that this was an untimely purchase. Now she would have to carry the tulips throughout the afternoon, guard them against bruising, hope the petals didn’t break, or crush, or freeze.
She rose up from the U-Bahn with her tulips wrapped in a flimsy paper triangle and saw the blue U sign curved above her, hung like a secret code. She slid escalated into frosty air and the noise of the street, generously surrounded in her loneliness by so many sights almost meaningful. A small crowd stood ahead, waiting patiently at the bus stop. She would have liked to join their implicit community, and for a moment considered jumping onto the bus and going wherever it took her. But she consulted her map and headed north, walking as quickly as she could.
Goethestrasse was easy to find. This was an area in which all the streets were named for writers or philosophers, as if they added an intellectual authority or value to property. Leafless trees lined the street, which must be attractive in the spring. Cass located the building, an elegant altbau with an art deco vestibule and a hairdresser occupying part of the ground floor. She scanned the names on its brass plate, then buzzed ‘Oblomov’, as instructed. Oblomov: Russian. It was a palpable, egg-like, literary name.
The group’s meetings, she’d been told, moved around the city, as if necessarily furtive or vaguely illicit. It appealed to her, this idea of unsettled conversation. She climbed the three flights of stairs, cumbersome and oversized in her winter coat, and when she arrived knocked on the door with a tentative tap, then a second time, to be heard.
Marco appeared before her, pulling the heavy door open.
‘The Australian,’ he announced in English. ‘Our newest international. Here is Cass, from Sydney.’ He leant from the doorway and ceremoniously kissed her on both cheeks.
There was Victor from New York. Marco and Gino from Rome, Yukio and Mitsuko from Tokyo.
‘From Sydney,’ Cass repeated, embarrassed for no reason.
‘Four rhymers,’ Victor quipped, ‘and we two singular others.’ He extended his hand, and, following his lead, each shook hers in turn. It was a conventional beginning, as if they were all acting a part. Only Yukio seemed reluctant.
‘Sydney,’ said Yukio, joining the echo-effect of their self-consciousness. He could not meet her gaze, but stared at the floor behind the curtain of his asymmetrical fringe. Cass was distracted by his clothes, a version of faux-distressed street fashion from the 1990s, all dangling chains, ornamental tears and discordant layers. He wore a peace-sign on leather string around his neck. Mitsuko was also idiosyncratically outfitted: gauzy blue stuff had been stitched in a frill to the bottom of her jumper, she had badges and jewelled spots casually disposed across her chest, and threads of yellow ribbon entwined wormlike in her chemically pink hair. Cass judged them to be in their late twenties, about her age.
She glanced at the others, cautiously appraising. Victor looked his part, a literature scholar in his sixties, professionally nondescript and self-effacing in beige. He had a walrus moustache and slightly florid skin. Gino was handsome, generically so and therefore unprepossessing, impassive in a black turtleneck. Possibly thirty. Marco appeared suave and a little aloof. He was dark, eastern-looking and self-assured. Cass shyly turned away. Though not usually her type, it was Marco whom Cass thought distinctively attractive, and it had been at his invitation she had agreed to come.
The introduction acknowledged the prestige of their own cities, arrayed as exemplars. Victor, clearly the chatty one, was already inventing a joint future. They might be the beginning of a movement, a new form of literary devotion. He spoke as one who possessed a great fund of beneficence and fellow-feeling. There was a sense in which he simply assumed everyone was as visionary as he, and as bent on friendship and the artful sharing of literary adventures.
‘Now we need a Londoner, a Parisian and a Muscovite!’ Victor added. ‘Beijing, New Delhi, Buenos Aires, Madrid.’ He paused. ‘Oslo, Lisbon, Reykjavik, Jakarta … Dublin, we need Dublin.’
The others smiled indulgently at his imperial announcement. They each held a glass of something dark, and Cass guessed the drinking had begun some time before she arrived. On the floor stood a chunky squarish bottle, already empty, and another two in waiting. Mitsuko, clearly pleased another woman had been included in their group, was offering a glass. It was Russian, Cass learnt afterwards. Some kind of brandy tinged ferociously with fermented black plums.
Victor rambled on. Engrossed in his own vision, he enjoyed both the listing of city names and the ambition of global connection. There was something emphatically enthusiastic, American perhaps, in the scope of his imagining. Cass thought of the way children arrange coloured pencils, angling and aligning their sharpened tips to produce a peacock fan.
‘To world domination!’ he raised his glass.
But no one really believed it. Victor was a fantasist, it was clear in the optimistic tone of his voice. Somehow each knew, even then, that their number would be no more than six. Theirs were a few circumstantial spokes, faint rays going nowhere. They could not last. They were adventitious. They were constructed essentially by happenstance and would be destroyed a few weeks later.
ONLY YESTERDAY CASS had told Marco that she was not a ‘joiner’.
On the bitter January morning, when ice on the pavements caused fractures and calamities to hundreds of toppling Berliners, so that fire-engines, as well as ambulances, were enlisted to pick up the injured, Cass photographed Vladimir Nabokov’s house at Nestorstrasse 22. Shivering, cold, suffering pathetically in a minor key of frozen hands and feet, she aimed her phone through the watery light at the disappointing building across the street, and a man appeared, standing silently beside her. Taking her to be an American tourist, he introduced himself in English: Marco Gianelli. He lived almost opposite number 22, he said, and kept an occasional vigil on weekends. From his window, where he liked to read, he could spot like-minded souls.
‘Souls?’ she had asked him.
‘“Let us speak frankly. There is many a person whose soul has gone to sleep like a leg.”’ Marco smiled.
Cass recognised the quote. He saw the spark of recognition.
‘You see? Like-minded. How many people do you know who might cherish and share those sentences?’
Before them stood the apartment block in which Nabokov had lived with his wife Vera from 1932 to 1937. Their son Dmitri, born in 1934, would have been an infant there. Now it bore a small commemorative brass plate – Cass hadn’t noticed until Marco drew it to her attention – and at street level was a restaurant, sombrely closed and unlit, Die kleine Weltlaterne: ‘the Little Lantern of the World’.
‘Only true devotees,’ he added, ‘bother to take a photograph.’
For a few seconds all she could think of was her frozen feet. Then Cass was aware of Marco’s visible breath, and hers, the way the rigour of the cold had brought their faces close, the sense of a deeper transaction and puzzling arousal. It was a pick-up line perhaps, but one superior and strategic: identifying a literary nerd, the assumption of shared experience, the seductive and insinuating facility of quotation.
Marco moved slowly and did not pressure or insist. He stood apart as she lingered, with nothing much to do or see, and when he proposed coffee in a warm place, Cass was grateful for the suggestion simply because it would release her briefly from the rude assault of the weather. A fire-engine sped by, to remind them of the danger of ice.
Later Cass would learn that Marco was considered the philosopher of the group. He seemed sensible, mature and level-headed. He knew the books but had committed only a few lines to memory. He knew Nabokov’s life, but mostly in a general outline. He was interested in the writing, he told them, primarily the writing, not in what he later called ‘our collective mania’.
In the unspoken consent of small groups, they saw him as their leader, even though Victor had the more obvious claim. Victor deferred – they all did – to Marco’s old-fashioned and serious manner. Marco talked quietly, with eloquence; he drank in moderation; he seemed the neutral, calm figure in their eccentric crew. He displayed a Roman sophistication they had seen in movies, a way of tilting his head back after the first listless drag of a cigarette, a habit of leaning towards women as he listened to them, implying automatic intimacy, a tendency to flick open the Corriere della Sera when he was bored with conversation. He wore citrus aftershave and expensive clothes. He liked to smooth his springy black curls with a gesture of his palm. Only Marco spoke English, German and Russian with equal fluency; this confirmed his access to extra levels of significance. It was as if he possessed a layered understanding of their lives in words, and as if only he, having contrived it, knew the true meaning of their intersection.
They walked together up Nestorstrasse, turned right, walked a little further, then entered a tucked-away bar. It was one of the few places nearby, Marco claimed, that served halfway decent espresso. Like Italians everywhere, he felt responsible for the quality of local coffee and obliged to apologise for the disgraceful variations that existed beyond his country.
Cass unwound her scarf and removed her gloves and coat in the shadowy bar. The heating was infernal and the air was foul. It was a grim interior.
‘I know,’ said Marco, catching her expression. ‘But the coffee is drinkable. Trust me.’
There were three stags’ heads, glumly staring, hung high along the wall. In an old mirror with faceted edges and a smattering of gold letters, she saw them both reflected as Marco helped her remove her coat. She retreated from the poor translation that was her German version. Around them beer posters announced inebriated excellence with rampant bears, winking lions and the stern command of Gothic type.
The grizzled bar owner hailed Marco – ‘Eh, paesano!’ – and they exchanged a few jolly words of Italian together.
It was hideous, really, the clammy air, the taxidermical decorations, the unripe banana stench of stale beer. The windows were wet with condensation and semi-opaque. There was an unhygienic, blurry light. Her own reflection had disheartened her, so pallid and barely there.
Marco seemed at home and stood by quietly, waiting to pull out her chair. He ordered the coffees, making a joke, which was met with a gruff laugh from the patron, now invisibly busy behind his crowded counter. Then Marco leant across the table as if confiding.
He had studied literature at university, he said, but was now working as a real estate agent, catering mostly to wealthy Italians who wished to buy a pied-à-terre in Berlin. Short term, he insisted; writing was his true vocation. His aim was to save enough to retire at forty-five to write his family history. He was thirty-nine, he had three sisters and an elderly mother with arthritis.
It was a life summary of poignant or wary concision. No wife was mentioned, no adoring girlfriend.
Cass, habitually reserved, was taken aback by Marco’s disclosures. Was she expected to reciprocate? Should she confect a mini-biography? She was not sure why he’d told her of his literary ambitions and family. She responded simply. This was her first trip to Berlin, she had once studied in art school, then at university, and now worked part-time in a small bookshop in an inner suburb of Sydney. She too hoped one day to become a writer, but considered it unlikely.
‘Everyone wants to write,’ she said softly. ‘It’s a universal affliction.’
She felt suddenly exposed, having proclaimed incompetence. When her cappuccino was placed before her she recklessly filled it with sugar.
‘Nabokov,’ Marco returned to their shared subject, ‘lived in ten different apartment houses here in Berlin, often renting just a room, sometimes only for a month or two. The Nestorstrasse place was unusual because it was more truly a home. Five years, a long time. He knew few Germans and lived almost entirely within the Russian émigré community.’
Cass nodded, wishing for something spongy and buttery to soak in her gritty coffee. She was overcome by discomfort, as if her attraction to Marco seemed suddenly to place her at a disadvantage.
‘But you knew that, of course.’
He was testing her, she was certain. He was intrigued by her nationality and for some reason especially pleased that she was not English or American. Australians were inessential; that might be the key. Perhaps he imagined her in some bucolic or colonial mode, unformed and derivative. Or romping with childish fauna: koalas, kangaroos. Perhaps he thought her gullible and susceptible to old-world persuasions.
She looked at his beautiful hands, fiddling with unconscious fussiness at a sachet of sugar.
‘As a child,’ he went on, ‘I was fascinated by Australia. Two of my father’s older brothers emigrated there in the seventies, just after I was born. I never met them, but my mother has a cache of their letters which I used to read and reread. They are vivid letters, full of improbable information and naïve boasting.’
Marco paused, halted before whatever came next in his story. Cass was too polite to ask what his father did, and too reticent to offer more details of her own. He drank his espresso in a single gulp and looked away. Some memory had captured him, some private recollection had pulled him inwards.
And it was then, resting on the brink of disclosing conversation, that Marco changed the subject and told her of his group. He listed the names and offered a little information on each. He had known Gino for years in Rome – before he trained in real estate he’d been a literature postgraduate at La Sapienza with Gino. Though neither stayed there very long, they’d formed an enduring friendship. He’d met Victor only recently, helping him find an apartment. He was a college professor on a six-month sabbatical. A lovely man, Marco added. Very high-spirited, very funny. Yukio and Mitsuko, both writers, had stopped beneath his window, just as she had, to photograph the Nestorstrasse apartment. Yukio was a blogger in Japan of some considerable fame; Mitsuko was an essayist and English–Japanese translator.
They all met as a group each week, sometimes twice in a week, inspired and compelled by a shared interest in the work of Vladimir Nabokov. They tended to make speeches, Marco said, often effusive and cluttered with personal symbols. It was a new kind of community, not academic, not social, but some new species linking words and bodies with an occult sense of the written world. Like the parasite, he said wryly, that Nabokov claimed spelt out the word ‘deified’ in the jelly substance of its cells.
‘Victor hopes to confirm this,’ Marco added, ‘and presents us with images of organisms that seem to display cursive writing. Mitochondria. Golgi bodies. He hands around photocopies of images taken through microscopes.’
Cass laughed. She couldn’t help herself.
‘Yes,’ said Marco, ‘I know it sounds a little crazy. But what a beautiful idea, don’t you think? It’s in Ada, the tiny being with “deified” written inside its body.’
‘Everywhere,’ Cass said, ‘there are signs and symbols.’
‘So you must join us.’
‘I’m not a joiner. Really, I’m not.’
Marco was earnest in pressing his case.
‘Consider how empty most social encounters really are; how nothing is revealed, or known, nothing is risked or truly given. The inner self is disqualified in the rough currencies of social commerce. Who cares about complication? Who cares about Nabokov?’
‘Who indeed?’
She saw now that she had slightly offended him. Marco looked down at his hands.
‘Forgive me, I’m lecturing. I must sound like an old fogey. All we want is that our self in words be more precise, and mean more. Matter more, you might say. Make true connections.’
Cass thought, Yes, he does sound like an old fogey. But she was also touched by the plea, and by the evident sincerity. Outside, a second fire-engine sped through the ash-grey streets, alarmingly scarlet and incongruously silent. Cass and Marco both noticed it, but neither commented. It fled past, a pale fire, into the frosty distance.
In the end he persuaded her. It may have been the sense of rare meeting or incipient sexual attraction. It may have been his charming appeal to an inner self, so primly defended. Nothing much at this time merited her full attention. The city was mysteriously closed in hibernation, and somehow inaccessible. Her vantage was one of ignorance, and her intuition was that whatever was concealed would take time to unconceal. She had come to Berlin to write, an ambition as vague as it was hopeful, verified only by her saying so. There was no evidence of her writing, for she had not yet begun. Her torpor would eventually – necessarily – lift. But she was a kind of tourist, after all, and bent on swift amusements. The weather oppressed her. She sensed herself frozen inside. She was like one of the ubiquitous cranes located high on building sites in Mitte, a stiff shape merely, stuck mechanical in mid-air.
Cass wondered what happened at the meetings, sometimes held in coffee shops, sometimes in empty apartments to which Marco had access. She was without friends in this city, aimless and contingent: why not follow the possibility of a literary fellowship? Marco said that the meetings so far had been rather anarchic; they were all a little odd, he declared honestly, and none of them were really ‘joiners’. At the next they would begin a ‘speak-memory’ game, in which each would introduce themselves with a densely remembered story or detail. They had made a kind of pact, a narrative pact, to speak openly and freely. There was no compulsion, Marco insisted. No pressure or obligation. But each would try to speak with candour in whatever manner or genre they chose. Victor had offered to go first.
Outside the bar, on the footpath, they murmured shy farewells. Marco scribbled an address on a piece of paper.
‘Oblomov,’ he said.
Cass had no idea what he was referring to.
‘Five pm, tomorrow. Please join us. Please.’
He seemed reluctant to leave. They stood motionless for a few expanding seconds. Cass half expected another fire-engine to appear and zoom past, since the world was like that now: Berlin was already declaring itself in replications and convergences. Blue U and green S signs seemed everywhere suspended, faces were not entirely distinctive, the same yellow bus roared everywhere between orange LED-lit signs. Colour drew her attention; any interruption to the overall grey caught her gaze. She had noticed too the surreal apparition of fibre-glass bears − life-sized and brightly decorated, standing in erect human postures – a ubiquitous public art of comic-book taste.
Prone to awkwardness in these situations, Cass spun on her heel with what might have seemed a decisive impertinence. She pushed away from Marco into the freezing air, feeling the turbulence, and the faint thrill, of scarcely admissible feelings.
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 freestanding 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.
‘She rescued me, Leah Rabinovich, she was the one who saved me. Leah Rabinovich. A widow, no kids, it was just fate that we met. Russian fate, you know?
‘One day we were talking and I asked her about her childhood. She said a little, not much. I gathered she had left Russia when she was ten, in 1920. Then Leah went to her bookshelves and drew out the autobiography. I’d heard of Lolita, of course – everyone had – but I’d never read any Nabokov, and it was a charmed encounter. It was like entering the luminous room of an imagined Europe, seeing a prewar world intact, particularised, densely notated, that my parents, or my grandparents, or my aunts and uncles, might have known. And even though I knew this to be someone else’s world entirely, and nothing whatever to do with Poland, it served a deeply reassuring purpose. It was like something lost returning – all those detailed descriptions, all the colours and faces. Quirky visions, fancy words. Old things, long vanished.