It’s not a long journey, around two hours. When the train begins to cross the Elbe river, the passengers seem to be struck by the need to stand up, as if the presence of water beneath them has set off a biological sense of arrival. They get ready long before the train reaches the other side and the announcement is made that we will shortly be arriving at Magdeburg main station. Lena gathers up the crumbs of pastry and places them into a paper bag. She finds the refuse bin, then she folds up the newspaper and puts it away in her bag and stands up to get her case. Her uncle Henning is standing on the platform waiting.
He embraces her like a daughter coming home. He picks up her case and leads her out through the station hall.
In the car park in front of the station entrance, two police officers burst into a sprint and come running past. One of them is fitter than the other, holding on to the gun at his side as he leads the way. The less fit officer runs a couple of paces behind, taking off his hat as though it’s too heavy. They make it to the side entrance of the station and then come back moments later in no hurry, walking calmly side by side as though they’ve changed their minds. The faster officer is on his phone. The slower officer is putting his cap back on.
A man is seen walking away from the station holding a bunch of flowers upside down. Lena will mention this to Mike at some point later, how she has observed people in Germany holding flowers the wrong way round. It leaves her wondering if they have been taken straight from a bucket of water at the station flower shop and the idea is to stop the drip running into the sleeve, or is it to make sure the remaining sap flows to the flowers, keeping them fresh longer? Or maybe the bringer of the flowers only turns the display upright at the last minute, for the right person, the true recipient.
Henning’s voice is familiar. His words are old, full of authority and patience. They go to an Italian restaurant and Henning talks to her about the floods, when the Elbe rose one year and the restaurant they are sitting in right now was underwater up to the ceiling. Lena tells him about her life and how she has access now to a small studio in Berlin where she has begun to work on an art project. Henning wishes her the best of luck, encouraging her to go at it with great daring and confidence.
Strike another match, he says.
Another match?
Bob Dylan. Go start anew.
At the house, Henning brings her case upstairs and shows Lena to her room. She takes me out of her bag to show him. Then he gives her a tour of the library.
The books all begin cheering in a collective hum. It’s the greatest welcome you can imagine. Like the sound of a thousand monks or nuns in a monastery awaiting the return of one of their own. They call out my title – Rebellion. My author’s name – Joseph Roth. They have a place ready for me to fit back in among them. Their voices emerge from deep inside a prolonged silence, full of gasping and whispering. As if the outside world from which they were once forged has come back to revisit them. Home again. The familiar scent of other books, the static air, the tranquillity. This gathering of human insight. This sanctuary filled with an infinite volume of thoughts and segments of imagination. They break out in a moment of unrestrained joy. The arguments between them are put aside. They go back to being themselves again, giddy as children, cut off from the real world for so long they want to dance around the library in celebration.
They can’t wait to hear the news.
Things have changed beyond recognition, I tell them. People do most of their reading on phones now, in smaller instalments. Life is too short and books are too long, but they continue to be as relevant as always, I assure them, on the cusp of being rediscovered like an ancient archaeological find. The world is full of confusion and people need stories more than ever before.
They give me the latest news in Magdeburg. A man recently performed a re-enactment of the book-burning in public. On the main square, on the exact same spot where books were burned in May 1933, a hate-motivated individual took it upon himself to douse the diary of Anne Frank with petrol and set it on fire in front of a small crowd of like-minded supporters. It was reported in the paper. The police were said to be making enquiries. No arrests have been made.
The books are packed in floor to ceiling, spreading into further interconnecting rooms. There is a copy of Anne Frank’s diary on the shelves and it feels safe. No need for her to be hiding any more in an attic. She has sold many millions of copies around the world by now. The public burning of one single copy is not going to silence her.
Henning goes straight over to find Effi Briest. The book that became my protective cloak after the book-burning. Since then it has been reused as a disguise for a Russian novel which was in danger during the GDR years. At one point, he tells Lena, that Joseph Roth book you have in your hand was no longer banned, but this one was. He opens the copy of Effi Briest and shows her the hidden book inside. A slim volume called One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
It tells the truth about Stalin’s gulags, a story still not acknowledged in Russia, Henning says. He describes the scene in the Siberian camp where the narrator finds a fish eye in his soup and faces that moral dilemma, whether he should declare this great piece of luck and share it with the other inmates, or whether he should quietly eat the fish eye and keep that piece of glorious protein to himself.
Henning tells Lena that, during the GDR times, after the Berlin Wall went up, her grandfather used to receive books from the West through friends. The parcel would always be opened and checked at the border, but sometimes a banned book would get through without being noticed. Possibly, Henning tells her, because the title had not yet been placed on the banned list, or because the customs officials didn’t read books and thought any book by a Russian author had to be OK. Or maybe they were more interested in consumer goods.
As you know, Henning says, your grandfather was a schoolteacher, liable to have his personal library examined at a moment’s notice every time a banned book or record was found among the incoming parcels. He occasionally forgot himself and mentioned some literary detail in school which a clever student then reported to a parent, drawing suspicion. He once recited a section of George Orwell’s Animal Farm – that got him into trouble. He was not a member of the party. He was active in other ways, running athletics clubs, chess tournaments, drama groups that gave him a status within the community.
Rebellion, he says, taking me into his hands and leafing with affection through the pages. A century old. We should have a birthday party with a cake, one candle.
What about the original owner? Lena wants to know.
Professor Glückstein.
My father didn’t tell me a whole lot, she says.
We don’t know what became of him, Henning tells her. Your grandfather made repeated attempts to find out. He was unable to travel once the Berlin Wall went up, so he got his friends in the West to investigate for him. Nothing. The Glücksteins disappeared like so many other Jewish people. There was no mention of their names on the register of camps, he says, and no evidence of them having emigrated.
If only books could speak.
If only I could tell them what I know, what I witnessed. David Glückstein was a good cyclist. On weekends he could travel up to two hundred kilometres, right across Brandenburg, up to the lakes of Mecklenburg. Some weekends he went all the way to the Baltic coast. In his mid-forties the journeys got even longer. He cycled to Breslau. He cycled up to Kiel.
I was with him one day when he cycled out towards the Oder river. He was going to visit his fiancée, a young woman by the name of Angela Kaufmann. She had studied philosophy in Jena. They had met at the theatre in Berlin, after The Threepenny Opera, and she had told him that she was interested in writing. He was cycling out to visit her on the farm where she lived with her brother and her mother. Glückstein was up early that Saturday morning in April, before the city began to wake up. It was still cold out, but he soon got warm from cycling. He had me in his pocket, so I could feel the rhythm of his legs pumping up and down. I could hear his breathing. I could measure his heart rate gradually slowing down whenever he stopped to have a drink of water.
This was before the map was drawn. My last pages were still blank, as they were when I was first printed.
He cycled along the straight avenues with the trees lined along each side, planted to shelter horse-drawn carriages from the winds across the open fields. He got to the farm and met his fiancée. He was invited for lunch. They served Gulasch. For dessert it was coffee with Streuselkuchen, followed by a single praline each and a small glass of liqueur.
After lunch they walked around the farm together. Angela brought him into the walled orchard, where the apple trees were in blossom. They went to one of the farm buildings where a swing had been erected in the doorway for the children when they were small. He watched her swinging like a child. They walked as far as the bench under the oak tree and sat down.
He noticed that she had ink on her fingers. She told him that she had been trying to write a novel but that there was more ink on her thumb than any paper. He asked her what she was writing about.
She said she was working on a novel about the woman who smuggled Chopin’s heart from Paris back to Warsaw underneath her dress.
She laughed and said she sat down to breakfast one morning with a blue ear.
My author would have described her laugh as something that flew up into the trees. Perhaps a pair of colourful things with a swift flight that didn’t stay too long in one place.
Glückstein then took me out of his pocket and placed me into her hands as encouragement.
You’ll love this book, he said to her.
Rebellion.
It has a new tone of urgency, he said. What other writer would have thought of making a barrel organ player his central character?
I can’t wait to read it, she said.
When it was time for him to go, they returned to the house. He stood in the hallway while she went to her room to get a letter that she asked him to post for her on his way. She wrote the address of her aunt in Prague on the envelope with a blue fountain pen, but the nib was broken. He took out his own pen and gave it to her. He told her to keep it while he got the nib on her pen replaced.
Oh – thanks, she said.
He examined her pen and said there was something aeronautic about the blue design, as if it could take off and fly like a rocket.
That’s a cheap pen, she said. Be careful it doesn’t ruin your jacket.
She walked him to the farm gate, where his bike was leaning against one of the red-brick pillars. After they embraced and he set off on his journey back to Berlin, she sat down right away in the living room to begin reading. Her mother could be heard speaking to the dog on the doorstep and the chickens came running across the yard for food. Her brother walked in after dark and put some wildfowl on the kitchen table. The light was left on in her room until late.