This has brought my travelling to an end. At the centre of a large exhibition space in Berlin, I now find myself lying on a small table. Next to it is a single chair. Every fifteen minutes, an actor comes to sit down at the table to read a random passage, lasting around a minute. Some well-known names from the theatre world have been taking part. Voices familiar from TV and cinema as well as some people from the music industry have freely given their time, building up quite a crowd around the table.
According to the exhibition notes, visitors are encouraged to sit down and read a passage for themselves. They are free to touch, feel, hold, read, examine the exhibits as they wish. One of them will occasionally pick up the blue fountain pen with the tag from the repair shop which lies on a separate table, next to the leather pouch and the metal box in which it lay hidden for so many years. Another visitor will go so far as to study the map at the back of the book and place a little finger into the small hole where the bullet entered. A circular wound at the tail end of the title, partially obscuring the final letter in the word – Rebellion. Held up to the light, they can see clean through to the exit wound at the back. As they leaf through the pages, they can follow the course taken by the bullet like the burrowing of a worm through the text. The aperture is quite small, nine-millimetre calibre, shot from a Glock handgun.
Another table has been set up with a white bowl containing human ash. Some of the media have referred to the exhibition as a funeral in art. A critic at the Morgenpost felt it was honouring the deceased by scattering the ashes in a metaphorical sense. Others have been critical of such a public display of human remains. A visitor can occasionally be seen picking up one of the three shrapnel fragments in the bowl, which is fine – the idea of placing an exhibit like this under glass or asking people not to touch the objects would make it meaningless. It is the artist’s intention to bring the viewer as close as possible to that invisible border crossing between life and death.
One of the walls carries a display of images, or screen grabs, taken from a piece of newsreel footage. The footage was shot by an Austrian television crew at the height of the Second Chechen War. It shows two children, a boy and a girl, at a hospital in the aftermath of a bombing which killed their parents. The girl is frightened. She cannot understand the sight of the wide stump of bandages where her leg has gone missing. Her expression is frozen in a prolonged state of shock, afraid to cry, looking around for her mother, waiting for somebody to explain the situation to her. She is being comforted by the nursing staff as best they can. Some of them are running along the corridor and there is a sense of panic in their faces because the bombing outside continues. They have no idea what part of the hospital might still be safe for them to take the children.
Visitors can find these scenes distressing to look at until they come to another set of photographic images showing the children in their adult years. Pictures of the brother and sister both laughing as he puts his arm around her and she shows off her prosthetic leg. Another image shows her wearing a swimsuit, standing in a lake north of Berlin on a summer evening with the sun behind her and the water reaching just above her knees. Her missing leg is concealed as though the lake from which she is emerging has found a way of undoing the bomb blast of her childhood in Chechnya, keeping the story of her life hidden underneath the surface.
The central piece in the collection displays a recent diagnostic image of the boy as a grown man, still carrying the injuries from that event in the war. The X-ray clearly shows three shrapnel fragments inside the body of a living person, which can then be contrasted to the fragments inside the body of the same person in the form of ash.
Going by medical evidence entered at the murder trial, the bullet hit Armin close to the heart. His lungs filled up with blood. He died of asphyxiation. The bullet could not be added as part of the exhibition for obvious reasons, because it became a key piece of evidence for the prosecution. It was described by ballistics experts in court as a high-quality round, enhanced with a toughened steel casing around the lead core. It had been reshaped, or misshaped, by contact with various obstacles on its way. It passed through the story of the man with the barrel organ without encountering any resistance, through the hand-drawn map at the back, roughly corresponding with the location near the oak tree where the body of the deceased man was ultimately recovered.
They had done their best to escape, running into the central yard past the pump with the cast-iron handle, past the derelict barn where the horses were once kept, out along the path where they were hoping to disappear into the forest, into that silent maze where trees duplicate themselves into infinity. Armin was carrying Lena’s bag and holding her hand as they ran. Then he let go and sank to the ground. Lena kneeled down by his side and tried to keep him alive, lifting his head and asking him questions to stop him losing consciousness. Did he still remember standing on the bridge with her, and the bar with the table made from a scrapped bumper car, and could he recall the fridge magnets, what was the one nearest to his heart, was it the bottle of Russian vodka? He did not respond to these questions, other than making a choking sound at the back of his throat. She continued speaking to him, even though it was clear that he could not hear her. She was saying his name, telling him that she would stay with him, she was going to call for help.
On the opening night the curator of the exhibition, Julia Fernreich, addressed the gathering of visitors and introduced Armin’s sister, inviting her to say a few words. Madina spoke about how she and her brother had come to Germany as children with the help of an aunt who employed traffickers. They had been brought up by a wonderful family in Frankfurt, she said with a wave – their adoptive mother was in the audience. Madina recalled how, as a boy, Armin used to tickle her missing foot. It was funny, she said, that whenever he tried to tickle the existing foot, the living foot, it never bothered her. He could go at it with feathers, forks, a toothbrush, the bow of a violin, the dried claw of a turkey their parents kept over the door in the hall, nothing would make her budge. She could have lain there with her arms folded for a thousand years, she said, and he would not even have made her laugh. It was only when he began to tickle the amputated foot that she was forced to screech. She would pull the missing leg away and hide it under the pillows, begging him to stop – no, Armin, not my gone foot, please.
She then picked up the accordion and sang an acoustic version of her song – ‘No Time for Bones’.
When Lena was asked to say a few words, she said that anything she had in mind was inadequate for the emotions she was feeling. She decided instead to read out a piece of text from one of the exhibits along the wall – a passage by Joseph Roth, in his tiny handwriting.
… it was not yet a matter of indifference whether a person lived or died. When somebody disappeared from among the living, that person was not immediately replaced, a gap remained, and those who knew, or even half-knew, the dead person went silent whenever they came across that gap. When a fire destroyed a house in a terrace of houses, the ruin was left empty for a long time. Builders worked slowly and thoughtfully, and those who passed by continued to remember the shape of the missing house. That’s how it was back then! Everything that grew needed a lot of time to grow; and everything that came to an end took a long time to be erased. Everything that existed once left its trace, and people lived by their memory, just as they now live in a rush to forget.