Berlin, Winter 2009

 

    You cannot judge a man for what comes automatic to him, but you can rest assured that later, years after you leave, he will judge himself, and once the judging starts, it will never end: it too will be automatic. So it has been of that period in my thirties when I took to the habit of frequenting the brothels clustered in the old Art Nouveau commercial district of Berlin where the women and girls, mostly Persian and Eastern European, would serve me tea in a tulip-shaped cup. For reasons inexplicable, my thoughts had become increasingly distracted and disturbed by the slightest sensation as I grew older, and I would find myself repeatedly in these quarters when the weather turned cold and the cobblestones were slick with a mixture of rain and oil that created rivulets of colour that recalled spotted koi I had once seen in a Japanese reflecting pond surfacing as if to kiss the air. As I remember it now, I would arrive at their draped windows, often forgetting why it was I had come and sometimes just as I laid my finger to the doorbell I would recall, as if the sound had bounced the memory back to me, I had left with the intention to purchase some eggs and a newspaper around the corner. Or sometimes I would stand discombobulated, suspecting some stranger — perhaps a hungry child or a mail carrier with a package under his arms — had rung my door. And then water tapping my shoes, the curtain pulled aside by an elegant hand with red nails, my gyroscopic brain would regain its momentary orientation and balance and I would proceed into a perfumed world of muted voices. The books and paintings I had studied through the years led me to imagine these interior rooms were filled with Pre-Raphaelite consumptives lounging beneath blue lampshades of long flowing tassels that reminded me of jellyfish floating up through the dark sea borne aloft on their own interior luminescence that divers everywhere associate with poison. And no matter how many times the image was dispelled, it would return as I walked down the narrow hallway as its six doors fell closed in succession like a row of dominoes. I turn to this subject now, because I recall how for my thirty-third birthday I sat in an alfresco café in Charlottenburg that had once been a planetarium bombed during the war. The seats still encircled the rusted insectlike projector perched on spindly legs in the centre as if sending invisible beams of Orion and the Great Bear that I contemplated on the cracked, eggshell dome above the tuxedoed waiters when a woman’s calling card mysteriously dropped from the sky like a piece of wartime propaganda and landed on the fish skeleton stretched across my plate. I plucked it just as the server, as if protecting me, I later thought, snatched the dish with a gloved hand. I recall the card’s tawdry insignia of a fanged serpent coiled around a heart-shaped apple was one as a nine-year-old boy in the orphanage I had spotted in a street parade decorating one side of a fighter plane’s nosecone, the other, a buxom girl in white shorts on a swing whom I stared at as I scampered along the perimeter of the silent crowd. Back then, the twin images had seized my attention because the night before I had woken from a reverie in which I was trailing a shirtless old man walking along a road abutted with abandoned four-story apartment buildings, formerly proud emblems of the bourgeoisie, now eaten away by years of sniper fire. Riddled with holes, the buildings loomed like huge termite mounds, unpainted, the walls dun and dust, whorls of wind reverberating in their empty casements and colonnaded verandas where women — mothers and daughters — once stood in colourful dresses to survey the world as they gradually dissolved into nothingness. As the wind began to blow a little harder from the east, the air was so dense with particulate matter that to see in my dream I was obliged to close my lids and run my young fingertips in the ruts on the colonial wall that seemed to go on forever. The body of the dreamer is paralyzed by a chemical the brain releases, though in the somnambulist it is missing, so his imagination is free to wander. I have often felt this condition has seized me even in my waking state, my eyes filled with the fogged-over look one sees in others filing out of a theatre in a single stream under a marquee of yellow bulbs befitting another era, and into the sudden overexposed light of midday. The mere recrudescence of a sign is no reason to ascribe it meaning and the recurrence of patterns of behaviour is, I feel, thoroughly arbitrary in most instances. Even my memories are not repetitions so much as reenactments forming new clusters at each moment of recall. The chamber music, I remember, was barely audible above the chirping yellow parakeet neurotically scratching the bars of its elaborate Victorian birdcage, which seemed a replica of the Palm House in the Royal Botanic Garden. While this rather attractive courtesan in furs — I will call her Ms. M. — with her hair behind her ear like a ribbon of light began to politely enquire what my name was, why I was there, what my tastes were, if I were single, I peered around the room, noting its small details knowing someday they would come back to me: a Chinese vase with a blue floral and dragon glaze, a map of East Germany in a state of advanced deterioration, and a black-and-white security monitor on a bookshelf filled with VHS tapes whose labels I was straining to decipher when I began to bleed rather heavily and for a sustained period from both nostrils.