Péter Nádas

Some Light

(Excerpts)

 

...

Berlin morality tales

At the time I could not cross over from the eastern part of Berlin to the western part, though I could easily have looked over the Wall. I noticed early on, however, that nobody looked over the Wall. Whenever I inquired about what things were like over there, I received brief, dry replies, or no reply at all. It was as though the residents of the city's eastern half regarded such inquisitiveness as unseemly, something a decent person does not indulge in. One does not peer into the windows of a stranger's flat, after all.
It was autumn.
A young woman asked me whether I wanted to join the group that was going to see the Wall the next day. I said no, I had no desire to do so. It wasn't the truth, actually, but I could tell—I could see it in her face—that she didn't want me to want to. She registered my response with a wry smile and said I was the first one this year who hadn't wanted to. Had there been any last year? The French didn't want to. And this year they did? This year there were none.
The Wall deeply offended the Berliners' sense of self, so they made believe it did not exist. However, their secret curiosity could not be overcome by either the offence they felt, the intimidations they faced, or the wide-spread, zealous opportunism they practiced. Anyone walking through the dark, war-ravaged streets of the city could be certain that despite the prospect of severe punishment people did look over: little blue screens flickered behind the windows.
I rented a small room in the spacious flat of a couple by the name of Wanger. During the day they left all the doors in the flat open, if only to give the dog a bit of freedom. In the afternoon, however, Frau Wanger would carefully close them and turn on the television set in the back room. By then Herr Wanger's cold supper stood waiting on a tray, and when he arrived after dark, he would partake of it in front of the screen. So they too looked over, though they never spoke of what they saw. And there were some evenings when, visiting friends, I looked over, and I can't deny being taken with what I saw. The Wangers, though, were such passionate over-lookers that they did not take their dirty dishes into the kitchen until after the station had signed off, and in a respectable German household that is saying a lot. They tried to fool me. Which was part of the ritual. Frau Wanger would ask whether I could hear the radio through the wall. They listened to the radio in the evening, she would say, looking me straight in the eye. And looking back at the aging woman—not without a certain wonder—I would assure her that no, I could not hear the radio through the wall, and thank her for her concern. She had lived her whole life under dictatorships. When she said radio, she could just as well have meant television. I saw my own terrifying past in her—and my hopeless future.
In dictatorships concepts are classified not so much by their meanings as by the roles they play in the struggle to defend the self. I know that you watch television, and you know that I know, but you can tell me that you listen to the radio.
If you put something in a certain way, you are letting me know in a secret language that you have done something that is forbidden, while I am careful to make believe in my own best interest that I haven't understood a thing. You, on the other hand, know perfectly well that I have. But if you were to give me a visible sign of your confidence, I would have no choice but to call the blue light flickering out of your room the sound of a radio. Language becomes saturated with the heat of animals penned up in a stable.
The iron gate of the Jewish cemetery in Senefelder Platz had a padlock on it, a padlock no one ever unlocked. I was just about to climb over the fence when someone called out to me to go round to Kollwitzplatz, where thick clumps of bushes had grown up amidst the bombed out buildings: I could get in through a large hole in the brick wall. In October 1973 I found the gravestones overturned just as the Nazis, drunk with conflagration and murder, had left them on 10 November 1938. Later, of course, bombs hit graves as well as buildings. I saw craters several meters deep with water collecting at the bottom. The residents of the buildings that had remained unscathed regularly tossed assorted junk into the cemetery—armchairs, couches, kitchen waste—while the neighbouring police station used it to get rid of excess office equipment like lamps and typewriters. In early summer frogs serenaded one another in its depths, and a soil ravaged by history had engendered a shady wood creeping over everything— stonestones, ruins, bones, refuse—with its evergreen ivy.
I was born in the Budapest Jewish Hospital on the day when the entire Jewish population of the recently occupied Polish town of Mozicz was herded into a nearby stone quarry. On that Wednesday morning, several thousand people were stripped naked and shot. Every last one of them. It happened on 14 October 1942. Hard as I ponder the coincidence, I can make no sense of it. My mother felt the first birth pains, packed, caught a tram and entered the hospital alone. When the job was done, members of a German police special unit inspected the handiwork, pistols in hand. I cannot scream; I have no tears and no God to pray to or even ask a few questions of. The day advanced. Anyone still moving was shot at close range. One of the men deemed the operation, like those preceding it, worthy of being photographed. Meanwhile, I was placed in the arms of my exhausted and exuberant mother just in time for my father to rush in and immortalise the moment.
Several weeks later, by which time we had made it clear to one another that we were conversant in the language that had become the vernacular throughout half of Europe, the ice was finally broken. It was a beautiful sunny autumn morning. On that morning, contrary to her wont, Frau Wanger, greatly excited, shut all the glass doors, so from the depths of the flat I could barely hear the radio's flickering blue voice. Then came a sudden commotion, the doors flew open, and she burst into my room. Practically choking, she called out to me to come, come, look, it's marvelous, so marvelous! I rushed after her. She had made the room dark. I saw a London street, open carriages accompanied by the Royal Horse Guards, a curious crowd lining the street, rubbernecking an endless procession of cars: the royal family was on its way to the royal wedding. Frau Wanger stared at the screen, spellbound. Oh, what a day! She asked me whether I'd heard about it. I said I hadn't. She didn't believe me. She thought it was part of our usual verbal hideand- seek. She couldn't believe I hadn't heard about the event of the century; she couldn't believe I wouldn't wonder about it. A princess getting married! Frau Wanger stared at the goings-on; I stared at Frau Wanger. From then on she not only called me when there was something exciting or unsettling on, she discussed in great detail all the things you could buy on the other side of the Wall. She was especially impressed by all the aromatic varieties of coffee, the kitchen utensils that did just about anything, and the detergents that would take out any spot, really. Not until ten years later did I visit the place my one-time landlady so long and vainly yearned to see.
In the western part of Berlin, I would go to small, out-of-the-way cinemas that showed primarily older films. Most of the audience consisted of young people decked out in carefully unkempt get-ups. They didn't use perfume or after shave or whatever deemed desirable by their society, so obscenely rich in things and substances, and refused to comb their hair or shine their shoes. During the film they would comment out loud on whatever they were watching and enter into heated arguments with anyone who even vaguely opposed their views. They were the second wave of the sixty-eight generation, and many of them had in fact "opted out of the establishment". They didn't leave their coats in the cloakroom; they sat on them. They rolled their own cigarettes. They sprawled out in their seats, kicking off their shoes and putting their legs up on the seats in front of them. They made such a demonstration of touching one another that you couldn't quite tell who belonged to whom, which was their way of saying that each belonged to everybody or that they loved one another and hated the state. Off the Pigs! and No Power to Nobody! were the most common graffiti.
As soon as the advertisements came on, all hell would break loose, a playful, heady, exuberant racket that caught me unawares at first. The greater the earthshaking miracle behind the deodorant (or detergent or coffee-with-the-inimitable- aroma or spotless bathroom), the harsher the protest, the louder the curses and guffaws. It took me weeks to realize that these young people were protesting— in self-defence, in the name of their own reality—against the manifestations of an unreal, sterile world, a world the peoples trapped behind the iron curtain considered worth striving for, the height of perfection. The screen did not hear their protests, but they kept vying with one another to prove that the world it depicted did not exist, that the values which that world proclaimed should be rejected. And by so doing they proved themselves immune to the illusion that the peoples of the other half of Europe were yearning for and had unthinkingly accepted as the good life come true. I don't know whether Frau Wanger is still with us, but if she is, I am certain she is anything but immune.
Two differently styled rubble heaps—such is Berlin, the secret, symbolic and true capital of the continent, where the mutually illusory ideals of immunity and yearning do not and cannot understand each other, where there is now nothing more to keep this mutual lack of understanding obligingly apart. The Wall "was after all a solution." The common sky is all-powerful and remote.

The western part of the city ends in woods. First come well-tended gardens and shady, peaceful streets free from the din of traffic; then there are only oaks, beeches, conifers and lakes. Riders trot along the bridle paths, their thick gloomygrey sand beating and throbbing. The wind blows in friendly gusts or rises up to storm over the broad Berlin plain. When I lived in this part of the city—in Grunewald or Dahlem—hardly a week passed, sometimes hardly a day, when some strange happening did not remind of where I was. One night the houses were shaken by cannon fire; the windows rattled. The sky was bright with tracer bullets. I rushed into the courtyard: no one. I rushed into the street: no one. The cannons rumbled on; the bullets turned the sky yellow, then red. I felt ridiculous being so upset. I set off to find a sign of life. It was drizzling peacefully in the brief intervals between the booming and popping. An elderly woman standing near the Grunewald station did not seem to notice a thing; all she could hear was the sweet sound of the rain as she stopped at a tree for her dog to do its business. It's all right, it's all right, she said, as the dog's tail stiffened from the effort. It's just the English on manoeuvres. The station is enormous: there are three wide staircases leading from the vaulted, brick-lined pedestrian tunnel to the tracks. I lived in the vicinity of the Grunewald station for a whole year. It was completely dead, deserted at the time; it looked like a forgotten museum exhibit. This was the station the Berlin Jews had been carted off from. Now birch trees were growing wild between the tracks. The plaques meant to serve as a memento of the event were torn down and destroyed twice during the year I was there.
You would be walking down the street and suddenly there it was looming in front of you, a wall so high you couldn't see over it. Everyone in the eastern part of the city knew where it was; there was no reason to make believe you didn't. In the western part of the city, however, it might as well not have existed: the whole city managed to turn its back on it. Yet it closed them off too. Keeping up appearances shut out awareness of the other world's reality. Whether they took note of them of not, however, the water mains, the streets, the tunnels, the sewerage system all linked their lives to this alien, hostile world. And that is why they never for a moment stopped feeling threatened. The best they could do was to pamper and polish their schizophrenia. The only reason to look east was for a good shudder. The elderly woman may well have found it comforting that the English were so loud and obvious about their maneuvers. People may have breathed more easily over their suppers than on peaceful evenings.
I wanted to study the nature of the Wall. I spent hours following its trail. I refused to believe that an entire city could be fenced in. I was searching for a crossover to indifferent history or trying to cram what I saw through a crack in my brain. There are things between heaven and earth that simply are. Tangible though they may be, their existence cannot be fathomed by the mind. Whether such things are acceptable or not is a question that does not even arise: they remain untouched by aesthetic or moral judgment. And if that is the case, then there is a wonder of the world that is anything but beautiful or good, that is on the contrary ugly and evil. But I am unwilling to take this discovery to heart. Bernauer Strasse gave me a rich perspective, both visual and mental. If we have the Great Pyramid of Cheops, if we have the Taj Mahal, if we have the Golden Gate Bridge, then why not have a wonder of the world like the Berlin Wall? Why should we take to heart messages of beautiful worlds only, and why does the mind hope that the herald of better worlds will be stronger? The Wall was dug into the former tram tracks running along Bernauer Strasse; its cement overlays iron and cobblestone. Can there be anyone who still dreams of clanging bells? Reinhold Messner could not have felt grander on the peaks of the Himalayas than I felt in the rickety look-out tower. I would stand there by day, I would stand there by night, puffing as always on a cigarette. Attention! You are now leaving the British Sector. But what sector could I leave with the Wall there? My country was between the two walls. My home was the no man's land planted with mines, surrounded by barbed wire, within easy rifle range. The warning sign spoke my language, their being no connection between what it said and what it meant. Dead space. Where the basic tenets of European thought failed to function and the dream of freedom was fenced in.
Where there were no facts, where pleasant illusions could do nothing to alleviate matters and there was nothing to be hopeful and nothing to be hopeless about. I once told a friend who as a child had lived through the long days of the blockade—and it was by no means clear whether the fortress would be taken or not—that she should let me know if the Russians came back, because I had some tips for her. She immediately went white; her glasses glistened. That's no joke, she cried, on the verge of choking. I should have thought before I spoke. Then she turned away and wiped the tears of panic from her eyes. Peace was mere scenery. The streets that had replaced the former streets were sets. So too were the houses gullible architects had hastily thrown together during the sixties in place of barely cleared ruins-sets. The population may not have noticed, but their luxurious private houses were nothing but bunkers dreaming of security. The forced free-andeasy style of behaviour—so deceptive and servile—it too was mere scenery. Much more genuine for her were the bomb craters, which by then had bushes growing in them, and the rubble heaps, which by then had grass growing on them.
Berliners talked easily to one another in the streets, in restaurants, in trams and trains, on the stairs. There was little difference in that respect between east and west. The conversations clearly bound no one to anything, nor were they particularly friendly. Once a half-drunk man asked me something. I answered. He then asked where I was from. When I told him, he gave me a slap on the back and said that made us comrades-in-arms. I pointed out that not much good had come from either the camaraderie or the arms. He said he didn't mean the result, just the fact itself. I said I preferred camaraderie without arms. A wild wind blew biting snow into our faces as we talked. We were standing in Potsdamer Platz amidst a wasteland of recently cleared rubble, in Carthage, in a sandstorm, under a distant sky. He said we didn't see eye to eye then. I said I didn't think we did. This meat looks pretty tender, an elderly woman had said to me ten years earlier in the eastern part of the city in a self-service restaurant on the corner of Stargarder Strasse and Schönhauser Allee. Her remark referred not only to the meat, but also to the instant affection I could tell she felt for me. We moved on to different types of meat, then to sweaters and knitting, and finally to warmth, the warmth a human body needs. It was my nice and warm and well-knit sweater that had made her think of the constant need for warmth. Her son had frozen to death. Another time I was taking a bus through the western part of the city at night when a young man appeared on the stairs leading to the upper deck and immediately started a conversation with me. He asked me what was wrong. He had sat down in front of me and was leaning against the back of the seat. As it happened, I was not in a particularly cheerful mood. I said nothing was wrong. But isn't nothing something? he said. I did not respond to his quip. He said he'd asked me a question. Things were beginning to get ugly, even dangerous. Yes, I'd heard it, I said to calm him down. Wouldn't it be easier if I answered? he said. It might in fact be easier, I realised, but felt compelled to say it wouldn't. Whereupon he stood with a lazy shrug of the shoulders. If that was what I thought, then that was what I thought, he said, and left me in peace.

Translated by Michael Henry Heym

Péter Nádas
is a novelist, dramatist and essayist. He made his international breakthrough with A Book of Memories, 1997 (Emlékiratok könyve, 1986). His other works available in English include The End of a Family Story (1977) and A Lovely Tale of Photography (1995). His latest novel, the three-volume Párhuzamos történetek (Parallel Stories, 2005) is reviewed on pp. 151- 58 of this issue. Nádas started out as a press photographer and has continued to take photographs ever since. Valamennyi fény (1999), from which the above extracts and photos are taken, appeared also in German (Etwas Licht, 1999).