A Guide to Berlin Read Free Page B

had been scandalised.
    Victor’s geographical announcements, manic and apparently lighthearted, had been a sign of his nervousness. His voice was curiously thin, high and insistent. He had rattled on – listing cities, engaging in fanciful speculations. Now he sat himself down and prepared to speak in a more tranquil tone. Mitsuko and Cass sat with Victor on the lounge, Marco and Gino each had an armchair, and Yukio sat between them on the floor, his legs crossed like a buddha. It was not an arrangement Cass, in her forward imagining, had at all anticipated, sitting opposite Marco, faced with his inquisitive scrutiny.
    â€˜We are grateful,’ said Marco, ‘that Victor has agreed to be the first in our speak-memory disclosures. This cannot be easy.’
    He nodded to Victor. ‘So, shall we begin?’
    Â 
    It was the simplest of commencements, no pomposity, no introduction.
    Victor cleared his throat, a little too loudly, like a worried actor, warming up. Then he began. ‘So, here goes, kiddos.
    â€˜I was born in New Jersey in 1952. Momma said I came out yawning, and liked to tell the story: “You came out yawning, little one, you came out yawning!” Like I was over it already and bored with the world. But she was wrong. I was never bored. I always wanted more and more world.
    â€˜She was forty-two then, an old mother in those days, and I was to be their only child. My parents loved me in an impassioned way that I found embarrassing: Momma wouldfuss over the smallest things – she was always tweaking my clothes, pulling at my sleeves, adjusting the cute bowties they inflicted on boys at that time. She was obsessed with cleanliness, spitting on her hanky and wiping away invisible smuts or blemishes; holding my chin with her thumb and index finger, tilting my face upwards, wiping and rubbing so that I imagined my face shone like a lamp. Her eyes would fill with tears at the slightest provocation: when I handed her a drawing, or recited some fragment in Yiddish, inept and stammering, or showed her a school certificate, given simply for attendance. I had a sense of power over her and my father, who was silent to the point of anonymity, a shade of a man who had left his full self behind him in Poland.
    â€˜My mother stayed at home and took in ironing for better-off households, so that our front room was always filled with piles of clean washing, as if there was a huge population hidden away in our house, forever casting off their clothes. I loved pushing my face into the piles, like a housewife in a TV commercial. It was like a secret vice, I guess, because it seemed so womanly and so wrong.
    â€˜My father worked in an umbrella factory – on Ferry Street, I think it was – doing who knows what, he never really told me. I was always asking him, “ Tateh , what is it you actually do?” He would wave me away, so that I was left in the dark, contemplating the mysteries of making an umbrella. At school I told the kids that my papa was a cop; it sounded much nobler, somehow, and much more plausible.
    â€˜But Papa gave me my first real sense of the mystery of things , specific things, how something ordinary might carry extraordinary detail. Once, when he’d become tired of the ignorance of my questions, he drew an umbrella and namedall the parts. There was the ferrule at the top, there was the open cap, the top notch, the ribs all joining at the rosette in the centre, there was the runner, the stretcher, the top and bottom springs. There was the shaft, the crook handle, and at the end of the crook handle there was the nose cap. Above was the canopy, that lovely shape, the dome some call the parasol. I remember him saying this in Yiddish, “ Some call this the parasol. ” He sat back in his chair, surveying his named umbrella, and this was the closest to contentment, even happiness, I’d ever seen him. He was transfixed by his own drawing, and by the modest