A Guide to Berlin (19 page)

When she walked into her studio, hardly vertical, completely exhausted, Cass saw that the glass doors to the balcony had been left open. No one had thought to close them. In the hectic aftermath of Gino's crime, they had all fled her room as though it was contaminated. Now weather had entered; the outside had swept in. Snow from the balcony had been blown in streaks across the floor and the edges of her little world had been made indistinct. She stood for a few seconds in rapt attention to this evidence of a new state: no geometry of flakes but a chaos of elements, no poetic impulse, but disgust and ruination. The tense shimmer, the snowy sky, was an unbearable thing.

The room was sub-zero. Her spirit was lost. Cass pushed the balcony doors closed and leant for a moment against them, as if holding back a still clotting darkness. Keeping her coat and scarf on, ignoring the mess of their meeting, and the puddles on the floor, she collapsed into her bed, made herself as warm as she could, and lay defeated, in a tired pile. She drew her body into as tight a shape as possible, abbreviating herself, becoming smaller and smaller. And
almost immediately, perfectly still, she fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.

 

Cass had kept Marco away, and insisted she could return alone to her studio apartment. But in the morning it was he whom she thought of first. Not Victor. Not Gino. Not the dark ceremony by the river. She wanted an explanation of the events of the night. Outside, the sky was white, but no snow fell. It was a dead-looking day. When she turned on her phone there were several messages waiting, flicked open in a radiant, expectant rectangle. ‘Come.' ‘Come now. Please.' These had been sent an hour ago. Cass wasn't ready for conversation, or the sound of his voice, so she messaged Marco simply, ‘I'm on my way.' She stayed in yesterday's clothes, not even bothering with fresh underwear, and drank a glass of water. She was not hungry. She was numb and feeling empty. She brushed her teeth and washed in haste, withdrawing from the mirror and the glimpse of her pale foreign face.

There was no sign outside the building. Karl had indeed cleaned away death. Cass looked discreetly as she left, seeking bloodstains or a dropped article, and wondered if he now watched her, half-concealed behind his window. She would not turn around to acknowledge him. At this moment he was someone whom it would pain her to acknowledge. Guided by Marco's message, driven in his direction, she felt again relieved to have a chore when all around her felt tumultuous.

Last night's snow was banked high along the streets. The roads were churning into black slush, and cars were
becoming smeared, but there was still a purity and cleanliness to the fallen drifts and mounds. A few children with sleds were playing in the park near the cemetery. There was just enough of a rise to give them the velocity of a slide. They shouted in high squeals and ran with the energy of small dogs. She saw them veer and twist and fall laughing from their sleds. They fell, and rose again. They chased each other up the inclines and then flew excited and atremble into the waiting arms of their parents. It was archetypal in its appeal, this liberated play, this return again and again to a loving embrace. Pock shapes of small footprints threaded up the slope, lovely in their regular spacing.

A snowman had been built. The simple white form, corpulent and skewed, stood in the centre of the park, commanding his own mini-kingdom. There were sticks for the fingers and a halo of stick rays springing from its head. It had a crucified shape, Cass thought, and then she reproached herself for so vulgar an exaggeration. It would be like this for a while; signs would correlate and extend, there would be a deathliness to ordinary bodies and a kind of pathology to associations.

Cass was walking north, in the direction of Marco's apartment, when she saw the U-Bahn sign of Viktoria-Luise-Platz. She was fond of the U4, a short, old-fashioned line, the station a slightly antiquarian monument in green and white tiles. Victor had loved it too. It occurred to her that she might ride the U4, change at Nollendorfplatz to the U2, then pay a quick visit to the aquarium before she saw Marco. It was already late enough, the aquarium would be open, and it was a way of thinking about Victor not within the confines of the group, but exclusively, as only she had
seen and known him. Victor was demanding attention, like Hamlet's father; he was ghosting her thoughts.

Cass entered the underground and was carried away. The ride was a blur. As she emerged at the busy Zoo station she was overcome with a clear sensation of retrieved affection, and the memory of waiting by the aquarium entrance with cold feet for Victor's arrival. She climbed the steps, bought her ticket and walked as if back in time through the glassy corridors.

She saw again how enticing were the windows of swimming creatures, how the chambers were shrewdly lit to suggest timelessness and drift, how the comedic element prevailed – the antics of miniature creatures, their circus-toned colours, the far-fetching and bemused look of some of the larger marine animals – how overall the blue light led to dreaminess and contemplation, and a wish to slow down and childishly dawdle. What was consoling here, she realised, was this eradication of history, this facile escape.

She was heading with a certain dread towards the tubes of jellyfish, wondering if she might lose control of her feelings, when a crowd of schoolchildren appeared and swept from behind her. She had been alone, in a kind of memorialising spell; now she was among chatty thirteen-year-olds guided by their ponytailed teacher. They were an anarchic group, uncontained by space or authority. None wore uniforms and all seemed to have multicoloured sneakers and scarves. They filed here and there, gathered for photographs, mucked about in rowdy and jovial groups. Three boys were pressing their lips against the glass, making human fish lips and obscene sucking sounds. The place was at once lively
and over-run. Victor would have loved this, Cass thought, all these kids, going mad. The world of selfies, bad jokes and impudent observations.

Cass saw ahead the tube of jellyfish and decided to wait until she was alone, until the crowd had moved on. It took a while – she began to worry Marco would think she was not coming – but then the children moved to other novelties and other misbehaviours. She walked up to the display of jellyfish and peered again into their world: the light-filled bodies, drifting and pulsating. Victor's lovely face was no longer there. It amazed her how quickly the faces of the newly dead faded, how within hours they were watery and cast away.

She stood watching what Victor had so recently seen, with his own alive eyes. She saw the loops of trailing tentacles and the perfection of jellyfish domes; as every being, after all, was entire and perfect. She noticed now how there were barely perceptible currents in the water, motes floating down as the gelatinous shapes pulsed up, the blooms of perpetual motion, the opening and closing of loose cavities. Vivacity, too; she noticed their bright vivacity.

Cass had not yet felt what she needed to feel. She stood vacant and quiet, afraid to feel anything. Practised at control and the suppression of disturbances, she remained fixed in a pointless stasis before the glass. But she must also move away and return to Marco. She must keep on moving. She would not look at Victor's tortoise, she suddenly decided. She would not remember last night, and would leave before what she suppressed could no longer be held down.
Now
. She would leave now. There was a precise anxiety that kept returning and flooding her thoughts: how could they
possibly tell Victor's daughter? Might she come to Berlin to seek her father?

 

On the U-Bahn, returning, Cass saw with new clarity the mortal faces of Berliners travelling alongside her, passengers all together, all moving in the same direction. Sweeping around the city without effort, skimming on silver lines. She listened to the voice over the loudspeaker, saying, ‘Exit left.' She watched people rise and leave, and others enter and take their places. A woman sat beside her who displayed the blue complexion of chemo. Around her head was a tight scarf, she wore an inaccessible look, she had the telltale sunken cheeks of one etiolated, slowly becoming skeleton. The woman stared directly ahead, not acknowledging anyone around her.

Two boys, about ten, flung themselves into the facing seats. The slighter of the two had Alexander's chin, angular, distinctive, and a tiny scab at his mouth. They had always been close, but after their brothers had left for boarding school, Alexander paid Cass more particular attention. He was determined, he said, to make her an A-grade cricketer. She remembered how he arranged her hands on the handle of the bat, his own knuckles shining, how he moved her legs into position and set her body at the correct angle. He liked to spit into his palms and rub them together; he liked to bowl with a kind of lazy, loping stride, as if spilling the ball rather than throwing it, as if it came whizzing with its own red life, extended from his arm. He loved the language of cricket: wickets, stumps, bails, fields, the innings, creases, overs and runs, and managed to use these terms to comment
wittily on everyday moments and situations. His ambition in life, his sole ambition, was to become a legendary wicket-keeper for the Australian team.

Cass watched the two boys sprawling in their seats. They were heedless of adults. They had their own business to attend to, their own busy lives. All at once she was overtaken by a powerful urge to tell someone, not of Victor's death and her own dreadful complicity, but the delightfulness of children, and the astonishing beauty of jellyfish.

 

When Marco opened the door Cass saw immediately that he had been crying.

Victor.
Her first thought was that Marco had revisited Victor in his own way, lost his sense of impunity, acknowledged in a quiet moment the horror of what they had done. His face was distorted and his eyes were red. He had taken on that childlike look adults acquire in the business of serious weeping. At least, unlike her, he had changed his clothes: there was no blood, no evidence. He clasped at her tightly, and held her very close and still. His mouth was warm against her hair.

‘It's Gino,' he whispered. ‘Gino has gone.'

‘Gone?'

‘Dead. Gino is dead.'

Cass drew back and stared at his face, which quivered with emotional saturation and strain.

‘I got rid of the ice,' he said quickly, matter-of-factly, blurting out what he had waited all morning to tell her. ‘But I've left the heroin gear. So they can see it's a suicide.'

He must have registered only then her startled incredulity. He must have realised the shock to Cass, and how severe his announcement had been. This sudden news had sprung from Marco entirely unmediated and incautious. He was a man distrait.

‘Oh Jesus,' he said, echoing Gino. ‘Oh Jesus, forgive me. I shouldn't have called you.' He took her hand and squeezed.

‘But here I am,' she responded simply.

The sky was falling in. Victor, and the night by the icy Havel, and now this. Now Gino. Cass must withstand this news or be annihilated. She willed herself to stay collected and composed.

‘No Franz.'

‘God, no. No Franz. I've called the police.'

He went on to say that there had been no warning or indication. When they arrived home Gino had refused a glass of brandy and said that he just wanted to sleep. That they would talk in the morning. That he needed to lie down. It had been a relief, Marco said, that Gino didn't wish to talk it through, that they didn't say Victor's name, not even once. Marco had taken a long shower, washed himself clean, then fallen into bed. Since Gino was silent, he assumed he was already asleep.

‘I didn't check,' he added, his lip and chin quivering. ‘I should have checked.'

Marco's face was now becoming rigid, like plaster. It was the cumbersome mask that grief had given him. She had seen this stiff mortification on the faces of her parents and her brothers. She had seen their features harden and intensify. Marco slowly removed Cass's coat and hung it on a hook by the door. She was a comfort to him, being here, not
falling apart. But now there was an agonising turbulence of thoughts to contend with.

She was thinking of the brutality of last night, the dishonorable stupidity. How could they? How? What bond existed that had made them act in this way? What corporate thinking? She had been in a daze of believing the crime was hidden, gone, but in Marco's words it had reappeared and cruelly increased. She looked away. She must fit her life into this collective drama again. She must tell Victor's daughter, she must somehow help Marco. It was not over, she thought, and it would never be over. Perhaps she would be questioned by the police. Yes, we both saw him late last night. Yes, he was a drug user. Methamphetamine, heroin. Yes, he had overdosed in the past. (Had he overdosed in the past?) She began to frame fictitious answers to imagined questions. The lovers would have to be told. Gino's sisters would have to be told: Marco would have to tell Gino's sisters. Two deaths now, and the blunt force of grief.

What followed was exempted from the new texture of time they had created the night before. Everyday principles, where one thing follows another, more or less with reason, where cause leads to effect, and where people behave, for the most part, sensibly and predictably - these had last night entirely disappeared. And yet now, in the quiet intermission in Marco's elegant apartment, there was a human scale once more, and a sudden slowing to real solemnity. Both saw again how one thing followed another. Order, consequence. Laws of motion. And because they were just two, a controlled response was possible. When she was ready, only then, Marco led Cass into his spare room to show her Gino's body.

He was just as Marco had found him, turned towards the wall, curled with his knees bent up near his chest and his hands tucked between his thighs. A syringe and a length of black rubber lay on the bed. The room was tidy and quiet. There was no desolating inclemency. There was no Nabokovian speech from Marco. Cass heard her own body as it moved, infinitesimally sounding, in small careful steps towards the bed. She heard the beat of her own breathing, regular and shallow. Timidly, she leant over to kiss Gino's forehead. His eyes were closed. His lips were pressed, like one petulant, or the way a child keeps a secret. He might have been fast asleep but for his bluish pallor. As snow shadows are blue, Cass half-thought.
Snow shadows are blue.
This principle she had learnt years ago in her painting class. She carried these stray associations, inappropriate, aesthetic, but no feeling response.