A Guide to Berlin Read Free

colonial mode, unformed and derivative. Or romping with childish fauna: koalas, kangaroos. Perhaps he thought her gullible and susceptible to old-world persuasions.
    She looked at his beautiful hands, fiddling with unconscious fussiness at a sachet of sugar.
    â€˜As a child,’ he went on, ‘I was fascinated by Australia. Two of my father’s older brothers emigrated there in the seventies, just after I was born. I never met them, but mymother has a cache of their letters which I used to read and reread. They are vivid letters, full of improbable information and naïve boasting.’
    Marco paused, halted before whatever came next in his story. Cass was too polite to ask what his father did, and too reticent to offer more details of her own. He drank his espresso in a single gulp and looked away. Some memory had captured him, some private recollection had pulled him inwards.
    And it was then, resting on the brink of disclosing conversation, that Marco changed the subject and told her of his group. He listed the names and offered a little information on each. He had known Gino for years in Rome – before he trained in real estate he’d been a literature postgraduate at La Sapienza with Gino. Though neither stayed there very long, they’d formed an enduring friendship. He’d met Victor only recently, helping him find an apartment. He was a college professor on a six-month sabbatical. A lovely man, Marco added. Very high-spirited, very funny. Yukio and Mitsuko, both writers, had stopped beneath his window, just as she had, to photograph the Nestorstrasse apartment. Yukio was a blogger in Japan of some considerable fame; Mitsuko was an essayist and English–Japanese translator.
    They all met as a group each week, sometimes twice in a week, inspired and compelled by a shared interest in the work of Vladimir Nabokov. They tended to make speeches, Marco said, often effusive and cluttered with personal symbols. It was a new kind of community, not academic, not social, but some new species linking words and bodies with an occult sense of the written world. Like the parasite, hesaid wryly, that Nabokov claimed spelt out the word ‘deified’ in the jelly substance of its cells.
    â€˜Victor hopes to confirm this,’ Marco added, ‘and presents us with images of organisms that seem to display cursive writing. Mitochondria. Golgi bodies. He hands around photocopies of images taken through microscopes.’
    Cass laughed. She couldn’t help herself.
    â€˜Yes,’ said Marco, ‘I know it sounds a little crazy. But what a beautiful idea, don’t you think? It’s in Ada , the tiny being with “deified” written inside its body.’
    â€˜Everywhere,’ Cass said, ‘there are signs and symbols.’
    â€˜So you must join us.’
    â€˜I’m not a joiner. Really, I’m not.’
    Marco was earnest in pressing his case.
    â€˜Consider how empty most social encounters really are; how nothing is revealed, or known, nothing is risked or truly given. The inner self is disqualified in the rough currencies of social commerce. Who cares about complication? Who cares about Nabokov?’
    â€˜Who indeed?’
    She saw now that she had slightly offended him. Marco looked down at his hands.
    â€˜Forgive me, I’m lecturing. I must sound like an old fogey. All we want is that our self in words be more precise, and mean more. Matter more, you might say. Make true connections.’
    Cass thought, Yes, he does sound like an old fogey. But she was also touched by the plea, and by the evident sincerity. Outside, a second fire-engine sped through the ash-grey streets, alarmingly scarlet and incongruously silent. Cassand Marco both noticed it, but neither commented. It fled past, a pale fire, into the frosty distance.
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    In the end he persuaded her. It may have been the sense of rare meeting or incipient sexual attraction. It may have been his