He likes watches. He cannot walk past a jeweller’s shop without stopping to stare in the window. He spends the money earned from writing newspaper columns on a new watch, then he goes for a drink to celebrate, proudly taking it out to make sure it’s still working. Then he brings it back to the hotel and takes it apart, just to see how it’s made.
Friederike observes him laying the microscopic parts out on the bed one by one. Each component placed in order on the white sheet like parts of his mind. The world reduced to these tiny metal fragments in a hotel bedroom next to the train station. The sound of a late train arriving from the East bearing the scars of giant hailstones on its roof. People with suitcases checking in downstairs. The rattle of a key in a door.
How is he going to put all those fragments back together?
He can read what’s coming.
There is a weakness in the people after the war. They are open to slogans. The boundaries between fact and fiction have become so dissolved it’s hard to tell the difference. As if people have now developed an appetite for dishonesty. The lies they like to hear. Rogue words to match their resentment. They want the blame for their losses to be placed on the vulnerable, the unwelcome, those from elsewhere.
He has been out collecting what he sees. The streets are filled with people like the organ grinder playing the national anthem on demand. Refugees in police stations needing help to fill in the forms. Paramilitary gangs fighting in the courtyards. The trial of the assassins who murdered the Jewish foreign minister Walther Rathenau. And the trial of the Munich Beer Hall Putsch, which has turned Germany into a carnival. The tomb of history, he calls it, out of which the dead have arisen and made their way into court to speak up for Hitler. A grotesque dream which the people have begun to accept with indifference.
On a train through the Ruhr Valley he meets a young black man with blond hair and blue eyes. Describing this tall, confident, half-French, half-African man is like describing a version of his own contradictions, a Jew born with blond hair and blue eyes. The passengers are perplexed by this paradox. The black man speaks fluent German, his mother tongue. To rub it in, the black man is a reader. A lover of German poetry. He reads passages of Goethe aloud to his friends. He doesn’t need blue eyes or blond hair to be German.
Never have people of difference been under so much suspicion. The language has become twisted. Everyone is either a friend or an enemy. People are waiting to see what will happen before they can decide what needs to be done. He will accuse the literary community of being submissive. What right do writers have to be any more reluctant to scream than ordinary people on the street? How can they be so passive now, so fearful of losing sales? He will say that never before have writers been as loud as they are now silent.
The public has been taken in by a new kind of impartial reporting in the media that gives falsehood equal billing. The balanced view. This is the era of distortion, when everything can be instantly refuted. A numbness has entered the vocabulary. All information has become unstable, as though everything contains an equal opposite. If something is said to be safe, then it must also be implied unsafe. The lie appeals to your fears. The truth is too much trouble.
Why am I so concerned about separating truth from lies? As a novel, I belong to the invented world in which you wish things to be true. It’s a little secret we keep, between me and the reader, we agree to suspend too much questioning. It’s like watching the scene in a movie where they never inhale the cigarette. Where a woman is seen pouring tea without steam. Where she holds the scalding teapot with both hands in such a way that would normally make her drop it and scream.
He spends hours putting the tiny parts together. Little by little, the cogwheels line up in a pattern that seems so arbitrary. He sees how beautiful and complex this is. Like trying to fit bits of memory together in a story that will spin again. The fragments make no sense now. The parts laid out belong to watches not even in the room. Mismatching components rolling off the bed, out the window, scattered throughout the city, on the streets, in bars, in silent rooms where people are afraid to sleep because they worry about waking up again.
Friedl watches him with love in her eyes. Her female conviction shines in a room full of chaos. He looks up in disbelief, as if the watch is made up of more parts than required. He is left over with a wheel that doesn’t belong. He sees missing fragments that no watchmaker has imagined.
She stands at the window and sees her reflection in the madness that has taken over the streets.
And then he suddenly has it. The watch is functioning again. Yelping like a boy, he holds it up and makes her listen to the ticking. It’s well past midnight. She kisses him. Her happiness is measured in hurried minutes. He lays her out on the bed like a disassembled watch.