Peter Nadas - A Book of Memories

Neither his gesture nor his expression could remain unnoticed by the people they were meant for; all the same, his unabashed openness and falseness — because more than at any other later time when lulling my own jealousy I would believe him, at this moment I felt his confession was false — his brusqueness, crude interference, and betrayal made a very unfavorable impression, yet strangely I had neither the strength nor the emotional wherewithal to reject his unbecoming and unethical confidence but I sat there numb and rigid, disgusted by my position, pretending to be looking at the stage but in fact glancing to the left and to the right, like a thief, to see how much of this the others might have noticed, yet truth to tell, enjoying the riskiness of our situation.

My guilty conscience was whispering to me that were I to take seriously his silent communication I'd be stealing him from two people, from someone I didn't know and from someone I'd be deceiving despicably in the process, and my anxiety swelled into alarm — needless, because the Frenchman couldn't have noticed anything, he was leaning forward with his chin on the velvet-covered banister, watching the noisy audience below, and as for Thea, even if she did see Melchior's hand on my knee, she couldn't have found it significant; only Frau Kühnert's look issued a kind of warning: I could go ahead and do what I would, there was no way to escape her watchful eyes, she was there to protect Thea's interests.

Traces of Melchior's smile and grimace stayed with me while I also leaned forward in my chair, wanting to move away from both of them, and put my elbow on the banister; I didn't want to feel the emotional confusion radiating from the warmth of his body, to think he had addressed me with real words in a real voice; his voice seemed to be lost in some echoing space, swirling in a vast, dark, empty hall.

The applause first broke out in the upper gallery, then directly above us, and became thunderous when the conductor appeared in the little door leading to the orchestra pit, sweeping over the orchestra seats, reaching all the rows, and just then the lights went out in the huge crystal chandelier hanging from the heavily ornamented domed ceiling.

His voice was familiar, warm and deep, suggesting strength and self-confidence but also knowing not to take itself seriously, to be playful— not for the purpose of putting on a false front, but to keep a sensible distance — deepening to a good-natured growl; I had no idea where I knew that voice from, and I didn't bother to search my memory or explain why it felt so familiar and close, yet it kept streaming and swirling inside me, ringing, rising, grumbling as if testing its pitch and various ranges within, trying to find its place in the grooves of my brain, looking for the very spot, the nerve cells, the tiny space where its previous utterances were stored, a carefully sealed and, for the moment, inaccessible compartment.

When I had first arrived in Berlin, about two months before this performance, a room had been rented for me near the Oranienburg Gate, in the first corner house on Chausseestrasse, a tiny sublet on the fifth floor of one of those hopelessly grim, gray, and ancient apartment buildings; of course there was no city gate anywhere near, the name alone remained from an old city map, the name of something that history quite literally swept away, knocked off the table and cast into the fire, and if I say grim and gray, I haven't said much, because in that part of the city, at least in the sections where the ravages of war had not destroyed reminders of things as they once had been, this was how all the houses looked, grim and gray, but not without style, provided we do not limit style to mean conventionally decorative but allow that every human construct carries in itself and absorbs into its image the material and spiritual circumstances of the act of building; that is the style of any structure, that and nothing more.

And style includes destruction as well — like building, destroying also forms a continual chain in human history, and wartime destruction, in this district at least, was not quite so complete as in others, where nothing remained standing and where between the brand-new buildings only winds of emptiness blew, since here the cracks could be filled, the skeletons of fire-gutted houses could be fleshed out with new walls, enough stones were standing to offer crude shelter and protection from inclement weather, so it made sense to pile new stones on them, enough remained of the pre-destruction foundations, which were familiar, reliable, and therefore most attractive, and though the walls raised on them, patched up and reinforced, could not duplicate the prewar look, the old streets and squares kept their spatial configurations, the city's former layout, its spirit, was somehow carried over, even if nothing but mere traces could be detected of its lively, ostentatious, at once frugal and lavish, frivolous and grave, energetic and voracious style.

The guts of the old style, the principles of yore, the dead visage of the old order showed through the new style of the façades.

The intersection of Hannoverstrasse, splendid Friedrichstrasse, Wilhelm Pieck Strasse (formerly Alsatian Strasse), and Chausseestrasse, which once had formed a pretty little square, was now in this sad resurrection more dead than alive, nearly always deserted and lifelessly silent, an empty hull of different times piled one on top of another, with only a streetcar rumbling through now and then, in the middle of which an advertising pillar stood, left over from the old days, its belly ripped out by shrapnel; in the filthy plate-glass shop windows, blinded by dust, you could see the clock on the pillar top reflected; its glass cover long smashed in, it defied time by not showing it, or more precisely, it showed time arrested, since it clung to the half past four of a long-ago day.

And down below, under the pavement's thin crust, subway cars rumbled past at regular intervals, their clatter heard and felt under our feet, roaring in and out, their rumble dying away in the deep tunnel, but one couldn't get to these trains, since the stations that had escaped destruction were walled off; in the first few days I didn't know what to make of these unused stations on the little traffic islands along Friedrichstrasse, until Frau Kühnert was kind enough to enlighten me: this particular line, she said, connected western sections of the city and didn't belong to us, that's how she put it, so there was no point looking for them on the new maps, they weren't there; I didn't understand, and Frau Kühnert offered to explain, if I'd be willing to listen: Suppose I lived in West Berlin, I was a westerner, all right? say I got on the train at the Kochstrasse station, the train would pass under here, there was a station right under us; it would slow down, but couldn't stop, and simply pass through this part of the city and wind up in the so-called western sector, where I could get off at the Reinickendorf Station — it was that simple, did I understand better now?

It's our own city that we truly understand; in a strange city, even with the finest sense of direction and a thorough topographical knowledge of the place, street names and locations like east and west remain abstract, the street names conjuring up no images or the images lacking lived experiences, but I did understand — for that I didn't have to be a native — that something was under the streets that really wasn't, or rather, we had to pretend it wasn't, there, something allowed to live only in memories of the city as it used to be, yet part of the entire city's lifeline even today, which meant that it did exist, but only for those on the other side, who couldn't get out at the heavily guarded walled-up stations, if only because phantom trains have no stations, and in this way these people were at least as nonexistent for us as we were for them.