The catering was done by a Spanish restaurant. The wine was delivered by the usual Italian dealer, though nobody drinks very much at these meetings any more. Julia had decided against holding her book club at the Joseph Roth Café – it would have been too noisy. She had opted instead to hold it at the gallery, with a few comfortable chairs set in a circle, and soft lighting arranged around the room. In the centre she had placed a bouquet of flowers on a wide coffee table, along with a stack of books from previous meetings. The book club journal containing earlier entries was lying open on a new page.
The title had already been entered – Rebellion.
This was it – the psychoanalysis. The trial by book club. On the wall there was an enlarged projection of the first-edition cover with the image of a cripple waving his crutch at his own shadow. A photo also of Joseph Roth in his early days, wearing a cravat and an expression of amusement and curiosity, before he started drinking himself to death.
The guests stood around helping themselves to the food.
The servings were made appealing in tapas portions. There was a vegan platter with schnitzel made of aubergine as well as some dishes from a local Israeli-Palestinian restaurant with houmous and baba ghanoush. A further table laid with coffee and desserts, small slices of brownie and apple strudel.
Julia asked if anyone had seen the production at the Schaubühne theatre where the actor took off his clothes at the end of the play and turned himself into a human schnitzel, rolling around the stage in egg and flour and breadcrumbs – he left his underpants on, thank God.
Guten Appetit, she then added.
Lena is a New York artist on loan to Berlin, Julia announced to the book club members by way of introduction. Two of the other members couldn’t make it, so there was Sabina Wilfried, a schoolteacher from Stuttgart originally. Valerie Crosthwaite from the UK, now living in Berlin, running an online medical practice. Renate Frohn, an old friend of Julia’s from school, also working in culture management. Yanis Stephanopoulos, he moved to Berlin from Greece, Julia said, but don’t mention Greece, please, he hates anything to do with his own country. She put her arm around him and said – look at him frowning already. And finally, Jürgen Kohl, a psychoanalyst, Julia said, specializing in marriage counselling. His wife Zeta is Croatian, they have two of the most beautiful children you have ever seen in your life.
Julia took out her phone and showed Lena a photo.
Guess who that is?
It’s a grab from Spiegel TV, Julia said. October the ninth, 1989. Bösebrücke. The famous Berlin Wall crossing at the Bornholmer Strasse. That’s the bridge in the song by David Bowie – ‘Where Are We Now?’
Lena examined the photo. It showed a crowd of people on the move, making their way across the bridge for the first time, just after the Wall fell and the barriers were opened. The people are smiling, mostly young, eager, hopeful, everybody talking. There is a tall man among them, in his twenties, wearing a black bomber jacket and carrying a shoulder bag. He has a bottle of beer in his hand, turning back to say something to a border guard in passing.
Julia pointed to Jürgen. That’s him, right here, she said. He was the hundredth person to cross the bridge that night, am I right, Jürgen?
Jürgen nodded.
Lena smiled – yes, now I see the resemblance.
He’s a piece of walking history, Julia said. Look at the clothes, Lena. And the hair. What was it you were saying to the border guard?
I was telling him to get stuffed, Jürgen said.
Number one hundred, Julia said. Of twenty thousand. And how many millions more since then.
I’m sorry I wasn’t the first.
I love that photo, Julia said.
Once everyone was sitting down, Julia opened the meeting with a formal touch, naming the author and the book, still in print in multiple editions. While I was being passed around, hand to hand, she mentioned the fact that I had been rescued from the book-burning by Lena’s grandfather. Sabina asked if the swastika was from that time and Lena explained it was a recent addition, the page had been cut out.
The conversation stayed with the book-burning and Sabina mentioned a special collection of books housed at the university in Augsburg. After the war, a businessman had gone around spending his money buying books banned by the Nazis until his house was filled with them, and after he died the collection had been taken up by the university.
OK, Julia said. Let’s have a look at the contents of the novel first. Renate, would you mind.
Renate began to summarize the story of Andreas Pum. He has lost his leg in action during the First World War and finds himself in a military hospital in Vienna. I wasn’t sure it was Vienna, she added. Pestalozzistrasse is in Berlin.
Renate said the author seemed to have no intention of producing a realistic narrative – the story is more like a legend in which a law-abiding barrel organ player is the unwitting victim of intolerance on a tram. He loses his busking licence, causing his marriage to disintegrate. After spending time in jail, his only friend in the world, Willi, the former sausage thief, offers him a job as a toilet attendant in a fancy restaurant. He lives out his days in the men’s toilets with a parrot that says hello to all the customers coming in.
He dies in the act of rebellion. He declares himself a heathen. With nobody listening but the parrot, he makes a final speech to the empty cubicles, rebelling against the whole world around him – his country, the state, the nation, God, religion, politics, the war, the society for whom he lost his leg, everyone who has contributed to his undoing.
A character rebelling against his own author?
He turns down an offer of a plush job in heaven and says – give me hell.
The suggestion was made by Yanis that Samuel Beckett might have written something like this. A toilet attendant growing old overnight in the company of his parrot.
Some of them had seen the movie version made by the Austrian director Michael Haneke, in which the organ grinder is played by an actor who has a cast in his eye. This makes him look tragic, more like a helpless boy. A prison scene shows him walking around the exercise yard with chickens pecking at the ground as though they were fellow inmates.
Jürgen went to the table to refill his plate.
Valerie said she felt the story was trapped in a male viewpoint.
It was written a hundred years ago, Yanis said.
Lusting after women with big breasts and wide hips.
What’s wrong with that? Julia said.
Jürgen turned back from the table and said – men rely a lot on visual stimulation.
It’s all so dead white male, Valerie said.
Jewish, on-the-run-from-the-Nazis, dead white male, Yanis reminded her.
Look, Valerie said, it’s a nice book. I hate running it down. But I have issues with the male character being cast out by the woman. She’s to blame for his downfall. That’s a misogynist view, I’m afraid.
I’ve been kicked out by a couple of women over the years, Julia laughed.
It’s all men alone, Valerie continued. Men on trial. Men in graveyards. Men looking at the human condition as though it’s the woman’s fault.
Look at his masterpiece on the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Valerie continued. The Radetzky March. A young cadet, Trotta, seduced by the sergeant’s wife when he’s fifteen. She unbuttons his tunic and pulls him into the bedroom, kicking the door shut with her foot, as I remember it. It’s a good scene, but it all goes back to that basic witchcraft view of a woman’s power to corrupt.
There was a silence.
Could I make this point, Jürgen stepped in. He returned to his seat in the circle and held a piece of sweet potato up on his fork like a microphone. In my view, he said, it may have less to do with gender difference than with a more fundamental mismatch of human expectations.
I have it all the time in my practice, he said. I deal with a lot of male dysfunction. Lots of control freaks. Men full of narcissism. Men full of regret. Men who get blamed for not initiating. Men whose performance can be undermined by a sigh. The wrong word at the wrong time. I’m not breaking any confidentiality here. I had a man the other day who left his wife and child stranded on the autobahn for something she said about his dick. I have another man who claims his partner checked her phone during sex. I have a client who came home last week to find his ex-wife having sex with a man on the living room floor – that’s ten years after they got divorced, she still had the key.
I’m getting sidetracked here, Jürgen said. What I’m saying is that sometimes male inadequacy leads to aggression. Other men just bottle it up.
Renate said – please, Julia, take away those cashew nuts. Once I start eating them, I can’t stop.
They took a moment to praise the food. Yanis said he never imagined houmous would go so well with calamari. I am going to hand it to you, Julia, the food is amazing. They got swept away into a further discussion about favourite restaurants. Sabina asked if anyone had been to the Russian restaurant near the Gendarmenmarkt, it’s quite spectacular.
What is this, a foodie club? I wanted to ask.
Sabina followed on from the Russian restaurant and said – let me tell you something about my husband. Klaus. I drove him mad this morning. I made the coffee and forgot to put the pot underneath the spout. It leaked across the kitchen counter. I thought it was funny. It was so stupid I started laughing. I even took a video of the coffee dripping down onto the floor and sent it off to my friends.
Klaus lost his cool. What are you doing? he said.
His seriousness made me laugh even more, Sabina went on. I couldn’t help it. It was his birthday yesterday, Sabina said, so we had a lovely time, out for dinner in that Russian restaurant. And then I did such a stupid thing this morning. Like the intimacy between us, that bubble we were in last night, she said, was suddenly destroyed.
Oh my God, Sabina said, I can’t believe I’m telling you all this. What I wanted to say was just – how easy it is to be misunderstood.
You know – it happens every time. I cry afterwards and then I go into a swirl of giddiness the following day. They shouldn’t let me drive the car. Do not operate heavy machinery. My head is in a complete daze, it’s unreal. For him it’s different. He goes into a deep sadness. He’s like a blackbird gone silent. He puts on all this sombre music. Something hopelessly dark and tragic. Usually it’s Mahler. Or Górecki. Guess what he put on this morning, she said, full volume. It was that song about a woman getting shot by the river. Down by the river – I shot my baby, she said, quoting the lyrics of the song. I know it doesn’t mean he literally shoots her. I completely get it. It’s just the way a man thinks about love, like it becomes weaponized. Maybe I’m reading too much into this. But still and all, she said – shot her dead.
Nobody knew what to say.
They sat for a moment without anyone speaking. Each one of them reflecting. Some of them stood up to get coffee and dessert. Julia asked if they would like the strudel heated up – I have some fresh mint leaves if anyone wants tea.