R.H.I. Read online

  But the front was moving closer to where Isi and the children were staying, in Schreiberhau. Finally, H made his way there to help them pack—just the bare minimum. It was an abrupt decision. There would be a short stay in Berlin while they organised transport to Gotha and accommodation there in Isi’s grandparents’ apartment. They managed to procure some of the last available tickets to Berlin before civilian transport on that line was closed down.

  The intervening weeks were nervewracking for H. The bombings had been intensifying. He made the telephone connection as often as he could; but since Nissen’s Berlin office was closed he could no longer easily justify the trip. In the end there was as little reason to stay. His Czech colleagues were not showing up for work; everyone was simply waiting. H boarded the train, bringing everything with him in his case, ready to sit out the end in Gotha with his family. It was not, it had to be said, how he had expected to spend his fortieth birthday. The anniversary had little importance, of course, in the present circumstances; but the train journey’s pause allowed him to briefly reflect. His life measured the century, he thought, I wrote—not exactly, of course, but in its broad shape, up to this point. What a shape! If he had been only a few years older he might have fought in the first war. Now, the century seemed to offer only convulsions. His dreams—the houses, the sketches and plans and conversations—seemed at this point to have been nothing more than fleeting visions. The train seemed surrounded, not by land, but by a frozen ocean—frozen we might say in the moment of its chaos, and waiting only for some spark to thaw it and continue its rage. The hills, the cliffs on either side of the track, would pour down into the riverbed. The faces of the soldiers on the railway platforms were frozen into closed masks. They were fighting at gunpoint, fighting only because deserting would lead to a death more certain than the battle. No belief, no thought, animated them. And H? The thought that spurred him on (and even, it seemed, gave the train its own speed) was the thought of his family in Berlin. Hitler’s shunting of people here and there, his attempts to create new homes and destroy others, all this had turned into something else: great flights of people; a profound homelessness—

  But the train stopped. Berlin wasn’t far, and now that the train itself was silenced and its passengers slowly, one by one, stood and climbed down onto the tracks, an air-raid siren was audible from somewhere, from across the fields and gardens. The conductor made his way among the passengers. ‘We might be here for some time.’ He made no comment on the fact that they had left the train and lined themselves up for the view of the city—in fact, he eventually stopped and stood beside them. The noise of the alarm was quickly drowned out by another sound, a familiar one but heard now with the unfamiliar combination of distance and clarity: the rising tone of planes’ engines as they entered their dive. This, more than the sound of the bombs themselves or the anti-aircraft fire, was the noise that caused them—the watchers from the tracks, or anyone who heard it—to tense up the muscles of their chests and backs as if to hold themselves together. Then the other sounds punctuated it: plosives that also rose, not in tone, but in frequency, whether the deeper thuds of the bombs or the rapid bursts of ground fire. The planes were visible too, and now here and there a slow leap of flame. A base tone underlay everything, every sound, and even seemed to creep into the visual field as a blur, a vibration. It was a spectacle worse for their seeming safety from it—it couldn’t touch them, even though at times it was as if they might reach out and touch it, as they might touch an object at arm’s length. It was suspended in front of them. In fact everything was suspended, as the sounds repeated themselves, grew and faded in a structure that held time at bay, the score for a timeless present. ‘How can all the careful work of constructing machines translate itself into such fury?’

  It was a long time before they moved again. It had to be, H thought, a kind of final act. He learned later that it had been the heaviest bombing Berlin was to receive—a massive destructive effort. Isi and the children survived it, and the next day they would all make their way to Gotha. It was, H thought, a final act of the war; but wasn’t it up to them now also to make the bombing into a different kind of final act—a final act of the world that allowed such machinery?

  Eine Trennung von Materie und Idee. From Weimar, H travelled to Berlin. There was a sense of this as a ‘stepping out’, as if from a tunnel, as if the war were ending once more. To be sure, the end of such a war comes, not at a single moment, but repeatedly, in stages and sudden realisations. Each time he boarded the train for the capital there was another view of the changed-unchanged landscape: fields, like ‘always’, and a burned-out tank—such was the juxtaposition that the voyage presented. The train slowed for sections of track that were still damaged. It was, also, a rare and extended moment of solitude. Their household had grown into a small soviet of its own, a regimented chaos of children, relatives, friends and household help, all of whom needed accommodation. He would, of course, have preferred to live in Berlin for these years—but he had been persuaded to teach in Weimar and actively work with the students on building projects there.

  Then the city—its vast, cleared-out centre, from the Palace and around Alexanderplatz, east towards Friedrichshain. The two Mayday parades since the end of the war had filled part of this space with bodies and their solidarity, with a great moving sense of what might be done. Now, however, many streets were still impassable by automobile, and only the rough edges of the destruction had been cleared away. He took turns around it, trying to feel the enthusiasm, even to evoke the spirit of the crowds as a feeling within himself. Salvageable bricks stood in neat piles; rubble was more coarsely piled elsewhere; and he traced the routes around these monuments, where a slow labour was taking place every day—bricks lifted, barrows pushed here and there. The noises of this work—engines and shouts, the clatter of materials—failed quite to fill the space between and among the piles, the remaining buildings, and the low autumn sky. Dust, crime, the latter present to view only as a scowl or rumour. He stopped and shared words with one of the supervisors, a weary Red Army soldier. But how he wanted to lift it all up! The difference between the body of the people massed there for the parades and his own, single body was something he felt painfully at times such as these. He wanted to make a great gesture (but held himself back) as if his arms might move brick or (better) erect concrete or, though this was an uncomfortable feeling, direct all that activity of clearing and stacking of the people around (here, prisoners mostly) upwards to some more permanent edifice than a stack of building materials. A stupid feeling, it was the reason he felt better surrounded by people—his colleagues, students and family—and could, with them, simply take part in the movement around him, lead it and be led by it.

  The palace itself stood half destroyed, its central yard full of great pieces of shattered stone, useless and immovable for the time being. Only at one end did it apparently stand complete. He crossed the river towards it, and at the entrance leaned a tall sign announcing the official exhibition, its title revised (he noticed) to promise only a ‘first report’ on the city’s rebuilding. Inside, the heavy walls and the height above street level insulated against the noise and activity. The room had been transformed, a room-within-a-room, and this further moved the senses away and inward, giving the impression of a space floating separate, its own world. However, this sense itself was betrayed by a closer look: the ceiling was lengths of thin material stretched between temporary wooden panels, and showed gaps here and there and already small stains where drops of rain had come through the palace roof. The architects hadn’t expected anything different—in fact, they had left panels off the temporary walls where some natural light could enter and where a view could be obtained, through the framing timber, of the hall itself, where one could see its windows and, even without quite craning one’s neck to peer upwards, get a sense of the great height of the hall’s ceiling above that of the exhibition.

  There, looking through one of them, was a woman who met
his eye. Was there some recognition between them? Only, perhaps, when considered in retrospect.

  He said, ‘Hello!’ Then, ‘You prefer to look out the window, rather than at the exhibition?’

  ‘I like the perspective—’

  But here was Scharoun. H drew his breath in, keeping the woman’s eye for a second, before stepping away to meet the other man a few paces back through the first section of the show.

  Scharoun said, ‘Well?’

  ‘Oh, I’ve hardly had a chance to look.’

  ‘Well, good. Let me take you through it.’

  They walked back to the beginning. People stood here and there, singly and in groups, reading the information on the walls and on panels set out into the room.

  H said, ‘It will take me a long time to absorb all of this!’

  ‘You know it all already.’ A smile. ‘Don’t you?’

  ‘Of course I’ll report back on it to my students.’

  And they turned so that Scharoun could lead him through the exhibited material, section by section.

  ‘No,’ said H, ‘you have assembled so much data here. It’s very impressive.’ A wall, in fact, of data, one whose worth was unarguable. But H wondered how the people here—non-experts, people off the street—would respond to it. Could they reach into it, take the information and make it theirs, dig it and mine it? The other people in the exhibition were largely silent, and H felt that he would rather talk to them than to Scharoun, however much he liked his fellow architect. Here: the history of plans for the city, the difficulties of establishing them in the face of technological development, the introduction of automobiles and trains; population, with men of a certain age now clearly under-represented; the degree of destruction; the need for housing; waste; infrastructure …

  ‘Already,’ said Scharoun, ‘the city is being divided into its sections as people make do. There is no reason to come to the centre—well, it is hardly possible, in many cases, with the roads and trains as they are. That’s the condition on which we have to build.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Putting people near their places of work, near their sources of food and the means of waste treatment—decentralising it all.’

  ‘Of course. It’s a good, established idea—’

  ‘And one that is being put into place spontaneously.’

  ‘Then it is just our job to take charge of that?’

  Scharoun stopped walking. ‘Well, the scavenging, the making-do—it’s hardly a city yet. No, there’s plenty to do.’

  ‘Plenty to do!’

  They both laughed.

  ‘Along,’ said Scharoun, ‘with a redesigned traffic system—’

  ‘—and so forth.’

  ‘Yes.’

  The new city, in fact, was mapped, its buildings sketched in and presented in models. The woman was no longer at the window, and H couldn’t locate her in the room. The exhibition was impressive and thorough, even if, H thought, something was missing. It was certainly impressive for one thing: its picture of a city united, a picture that was, in principle at least, officially accepted by all four occupying powers. It was a picture that presented the fight between those powers RESOLVED, indeed forgotten. It was a picture of the city raised up, and it gave H a small dose of the thrill he had wanted outside, amongst the weight and dust. A picture, only—but at least that, at least something light. Pictures, thought H, I wrote, are necessarily light. Why was he still looking around for the woman? In fact, was he? Again it is possible that he only remembered the visit to the exhibition afterwards as if he had been looking around for her, which is to say remembering it with the knowledge of what would come next. Did anything come next? Actually, thought H, I wrote, the image of the city was, so to speak, a resolution, in the imagination, of any number of conflicts. The Soviet side represented LABOUR, the others CAPITAL. These were loose, symbolic associations, but firm enough. And here, here was the problem with weightlessness.

  ‘Yes, but,’ said Scharoun, ‘there is a lot that can be done immediately. See, again, a lot of people are sleeping in their allotment sheds—they are substantial in some cases and will be expanded and converted to permanent housing, so that the allotments become new garden settlements.’ Then, ‘You might like this: the people, and the state, working together to build their city. The people have already started.’

  H did like it. He laughed and put a hand on Scharoun’s back. Yes, here was the pressing need: people, without homes, without a city; the sheer need for housing and for food. Scharoun stepped back, faced him, took his hand.

  ‘Enjoy the exhibition.’

  ‘Thank you. I will also walk to Unter den Linden …’

  ‘Ah, good.’

  Then H was alone.

  Or, well, not for long. She said to him, ‘You’re someone important.’

  She had surprised him. They were in a side room of the exhibition now, a gallery of the original palace whose ceiling and window were exposed.

  She said, ‘Sorry …’

  He said, ‘No, for nothing.’ He introduced himself. ‘Currently,’ he said, ‘Professor of Architecture at the Weimar Academy.’ She hesitated before giving him the name, Anita R. Then they stood for a while. They were facing a row of models—different forms of prefabricated stand-alone house. Absently or nervously (which?) she reached out to one that had a circular floor plan and nudged it so that it spun around. He said, ‘They mounted it on a turntable.’

  ‘Yes. And see—’ She pressed a button next to another of the models, so that it lit up inside. Her gestures had a throwaway quality to them, as if she were only half interested, or regarded them as a parent regards a child’s toys.

  He said, ‘I want to know what you think.’

  ‘Why? I’m …’

  ‘It is important to me to be talking to everyone. To the people, the workers.’

  ‘Ah.’ She smiled, then her face became serious. ‘That’s good.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘I don’t know what to think. I really am no expert.’ She shook her head, a gesture that stopped his protest. ‘I know what you are going to say. All right, yes. My opinion is important.’

  It was, H thought, I wrote, more than that—more than some genuine need to talk to people in general. What was it? Her gaze out the window, when he had first seen her, stayed with him. There was nothing melancholy about it; she had stood as if poised for flight, but looking intently, maybe at something.

  ‘It’s the third time I’ve been in to this exhibition,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, you’ve looked through it all … ?’

  ‘No, not all. I looked at a lot of it, read a lot.’

  He paused. ‘I also find the perspective interesting.’

  ‘The—?’

  ‘You said, when I spoke to you before, that you like the perspective. When you were looking out the window.’

  ‘Oh, oh. I meant that there’s a good view out.’

  ‘I know.’

  She laughed. ‘Out from that strange room. It’s like a tent. Isn’t it? I hope you don’t mind me saying that. As if someone has pitched a tent inside this great, old building, and there, you could look out of the tent, out of the building, out to that.’

  ‘Why would I mind?’

  ‘And then all the maps. It’s a nice city they’ve imagined. I think.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ he said. ‘And then there’s that.’

  She looked at him.

  He said, ‘I’m going to go to the other exhibition too, if you want to join me.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Oh …’

  ‘Because my opinion is important.’

  A laugh. ‘Yes.’

  They walked out together. She hesitated before the archway to the street. There was something of the stray about her. Was that it? She seemed furtive, outside. The window, thought H—the window and the tent, the sense of being wrapped in room inside room—all this had given her a haven and a view from it. The woman seemed to contain lessons about
layers and walls, about how structures interact with people. A lot of people, he thought, must have this furtiveness, nothing other than a need for shelter. The sky pressed. He understood the terror of bombs, of course. The world’s presence, the sky, everything that was missing from the maps.

  He said, ‘What about your work?’

  ‘Bricks.’ She showed him her hands. ‘Not here—in Friedrichshain.’ Then: ‘Can I say something? Every time I pick up a brick, pass it along the chain, or knock mortar off it, or add it to a stack—every time, I start to think about who owns that brick, or who used to own it, or who is going to claim it.’

  ‘They are only bricks. Now more than ever—building material.’

  ‘The Americans and the Russians are already arguing over them, aren’t they? Who can claim the bricks, who owns the plots of land we are clearing. When I first started, it seemed wonderful to do this work, physical work! It seemed then as if the bricks were just bricks. Not now.’

  She no longer seemed furtive.

  ‘That’s why I like the exhibition. But it’s also—that city, those maps. They’re so clear. Everything seems obvious. The room is clear, the tent!’

  He laughed. ‘Is it false?’

  ‘Yes. All this out here—’

  She was telling him that there was motive, there was interest, there was something hidden, something sly about every surface and every object.

  She said, ‘I won’t come in with you. To the other exhibition.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘You don’t need to hear more.’

  ‘I do!’

  ‘But wait, listen. Can you help me?’

  ‘Yes.’ Could he? ‘What help?’

  ‘You’re someone important.’ She was speaking more quietly now. ‘It’s not work, not that. I don’t mind the work. I’m no different from all the other women.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I can’t say.’

  A pause. ‘You’re afraid of something.’

  ‘Yes.’ Then: ‘I don’t know anyone in a position of authority.’