There was nothing more I could do with Linter for the moment.Let him think about what I’d said.Perhaps just knowing it wasn’t only the ship that thought he was being foolish and selfish would make some difference.
I got him to show me around Paris in the Rolls, then we ate – magnificently – in Montmartre, and ended up on the Left Bank, wandering the maze of streets and sampling a profligate number of wines and spirits.I had a room booked at the George, but stayed with Linter that night, just because it seemed the most natural thing to do – especially in that drunken state – and anyway it had been a while since I’d had somebody to hug during the night.
Next morning, before I set off for Berlin, we both exhibited just the right amount of embarrassment, and so parted friends.
3.3:Arrested Development
There is something about the very idea of a city which is central to the understanding of a planet like Earth, and particularly the understanding of that part of the then-existing group-civilization [*5*] which called itself the West.That idea, to my mind, met its materialist apotheosis in Berlin at the time of the Wall.
Perhaps I go into some sort of shock when I experience something deeply; I’m not sure, even at this ripe middle-age, but I have to admit that what I recall of Berlin is not arranged in my memory in any normal, chronological sequence.My only excuse is that Berlin itself was so abnormal – and yet so bizarrely representative – it was like something unreal; an occasionally macabre Disneyworld which was so much a part of the real world (and the realpolitik world), so much a crystallization of everything these people had managed to produce, wreck, reinstate, venerate, condemn and worship in their history that it defiantly transcended everything it exemplified, and took on a single – if multifariously faceted – meaning of its own; a sum, an answer, a statement no city in its right mind would want or be able to arrive at.I said we were more interested in Earth’s art than anything else; very well, Berlin was its masterpiece, an equivalent for the ship.
I remember walking round the city, day and night, seeing buildings whose walls were still pocked with bullet holes from a war ended thirty-two years earlier.Lit, crowded, otherwise ordinary office buildings looked as though they’d been sandblasted with grains the size of tennis balls; police stations, apartment blocks, churches, park walls, the very sidewalks themselves bore the same stigmata of ancient violence, the mark of metal on stone.
I could read those walls; reconstruct from that wreckage the events of a day, or an afternoon, or an hour, or just a few minutes.Here the machine-gun fire had sprayed, light ordinance like acid pitting, heavier guns leaving tracks like a succession of pickaxe blows on ice; here shaped-charge and kinetic weapons had pierced – the holes had been bricked up – and sprayed long rays of jagged holes across the stone; here a grenade had exploded, fragments blasting everywhere, shallow cratering the sidewalk and spraying the wall (or not; sometimes there was untouched stone in one direction, like a shrapnel shadow, where perhaps a soldier left his image on the city at the moment of his death).
In one place all the marks, on a railway arch, were wildly slanted, cutting a swathe across one side of the arch, hitting the pavement, then slanting up on the other side of the alcove.I stood and wondered at that, then realized that three decades before some Red Army soldier had probably crouched there, drawing fire from a building across the street I turned, and could even see which window
I took the West-operated U-bahn under the wall, cutting across from one part of West Berlin to the other, from Hallesches Tor to Tegel.At Friedrichstrasse you could quit the train and enter East Berlin, but the other stations under East were closed; guards with submachine guns stood watching the train rush through the deserted stations; an eerie blue glow lit this film-set of a scene, and the train’s passing sent ancient papers scattering, and lifted the torn corners of old posters still stuck to the wall.I had to make that journey twice, to be sure I hadn’t imagined it all; the other passengers had looked as bored and zombie-like as underground passengers usually do.
There was something of that frightening, ghostly emptiness about the city itself at times.Although so surely enclosed, West Berlin was big; full of parks and trees and lakes – more so than most cities – and that, combined with the fact that people were still leaving the city in their tens of thousands each year (despite all sorts of grants and tax concessions designed to persuade them to stay) meant that while there was the same quality of high capitalist presence I’d been immersed in in London and sensed in Paris, the density was much reduced; there simply wasn’t the same pressure to develop and redevelop the land.So the city was full of those shot-up buildings and wide open spaces; bomb sites with shattered ruins on the skyline, empty-windowed and roofless like great abandoned ships adrift on seas of weeds.Alongside the elegance of the Kurfustendamm, this legacy of destruction and privation became just another vast art work, like the quaintly shattered steeple of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, set at the end of the K-damm like a folly at the end of an avenue of trees.
Even the two rail systems contributed to the sense of unreality the city inspired, the sense of continually stepping from one continuum to another.Instead of the West running everything on its side, and the East everything on its, the East ran the S-bahn (above ground) on both sides, the West the U-bahn (underground) on both sides; the U-bahn served those ghostly stations under the East and the S-bahn had its own tumbledown, weed-strewn stations in the West.Both ignored the wall, indeed, because the S-bahn went over the top of it.And the S-bahn went underground in places.And the U-bahn surfaced frequently.Let me labour the point and say that even double-decker buses and double-decker trains added to the sense of a multi-layered reality.In a place like Berlin, wrapping the Reichstag up like a parcel wasn’t even remotely as weird an idea as the city was itself.
I went once via Friedrichstrasse and once through Checkpoint Charlie, into the East.Sure enough, there were places where time seemed to have stopped there too, and many of the buildings and signs looked as though a patina of dust had started settling over them thirty years ago, and never been disturbed since.There were shops in the East where one could only spend foreign currency.Somehow they just didn’t look like real shops; it was as though some seedy entrepreneur from a degenerate semi-socialist future had tried to create a fairground display modelled on a late twentieth-century capitalist shop, and failed, through lack of imagination.
It wasn’t convincing.I wasn’t convinced.I was a little shaken, too.Was this farce, this gloomy sideshow trying to mimic the West – and not even doing that very well – the best job the locals could make of socialism?Maybe there was something so basically wrong with them even the ship hadn’t spotted it yet; some genetic flaw that meant they were never going to be able to live and work together without an external threat; never stop fighting, never stop making their awful, awesome, bloody messes.Perhaps despite all our resources there was nothing we could do for them.
The feeling passed.There was nothing to prove this wasn’t just a momentary, and – coming so early – understandable aberration.Their history wasn’t so far off the mean track, they were going through what a thousand other civilizations had gone through, and no doubt in the childhood of each of those there had been countless occasions when all any decent, well-balanced, reasonable and humanely concerned observer would have wanted to do was scream in despair.
It was ironic that in this so-called Communist capital they were so interested in money; at least a dozen people came up to me in the East and asked me if I wanted to change some.Would this represent a qualitative or quantitative change?I asked (blank looks, mostly). ‘Money implies poverty,’ I quoted them.Hell, they should engrave that in stone over the hangar door of every GCU.
I stayed for a month, visiting all the tourist haunts, walking and driving and training and busing through the city, sailing on and swimming in the Havel, and riding through Grunewald and Spandau forests.
I left by the Hamburg corridor, at the ship’s suggestion.The road went through villages stuck in the fifties.The eighteen fifties, sometimes; chimney sweeps on bikes wore tall black hats and carried their black-caned brushes over their shoulders like huge sooty daisies stolen from a giant’s garden.I felt quite self-conscious and rich in my big red Volvo.
I left the car on a track by the side of the Elbe that night.A module sighed out of the darkness, dark on dark, and took me to the ship, which was over the Pacific at the time, tracking a school of sperm whales directly beneath and plundering their great barrel-brains with its effectors while they sang.