A Greater Music (7 page)

After the New Year's Eve party and the New Year's music concert, Joachim left for Schleswig-Holstein. He told me that the meister to whom he'd been apprenticed when he first learned to weld had a job which needed finishing over the year-end holiday, and had offered to pay Joachim to come and help out, along with room and board at his workshop in Flensburg. Until the last week in January, when Joachim had to come back in order to sit the end of term exams, I would stay by myself in his apartment and look after his dog Benny. It snowed or rained every couple of days, and the trams went past at seven- or twenty-minute intervals. In the mornings, before the day dissolved the darkness, the sound of Benny padding about woke me from my sleep. Benny waited patiently by the kitchen door while I made coffee and ate bread and honey. But when I'd put on my jacket and boots and attached the lead to Benny's collar, he would make an agonized sound as if swallowing a sob. He must have been pining for Joachim. On days when it wasn't snowing I took Benny for a walk as far as the cemetery, where dogs and bicycles were forbidden. While I strolled around among the gravestones, Benny waited at the bicycle stand, seemingly expecting either Joachim or I to appear at any moment. If the front doorbell rang or footsteps could be heard outside, Benny's ears instantly pricked up. But he would quickly realize that it wasn't Joachim. Stricken with grief, the dog slept on Joachim's
slippers. He stared constantly at the table on which Joachim had left his book of general physics theory. I held Benny the way Joachim had and spoke to him in a muffled voice, my face buried in the scruff of his neck. My love, my love, my only one, stay. I'll be right back. Good boy, my love.

5)
When the weather improved a little in the second week of January, I ventured out a couple of times in search of a café, one that had a breakfast menu and was suitably near to Joachim's apartment. The one I discovered was ten minutes away by tram, so not exactly in the immediate area, but a walk of that length was no inconvenience. I'd actually stumbled upon it quite by chance, while taking Benny for a walk. It wasn't expensive, and the frothy café au lait was really good. The café was fairly small, and hidden away on a corner at the end of a craftsman's street rather than being out on the main road where the tram passed by, but plenty of people sought it out. It was impossible to find an empty seat at weekends, but on a weekday afternoon the roomy window seat was almost always free, and I could take my time buttering my bread and drinking my coffee while reading whichever book I'd brought. And dogs were allowed inside, so it was good for Benny too. The café even had a set menu for dogs, but I only bought it for Benny every other time. Joachim hadn't mentioned anything about the café even though, having lived in this area for several years, there was no way he wouldn't know about it. On weekday mornings he usually took the tram and subway as far as Danziger Strasse to have breakfast. I wasn't fond of Danziger Strasse. The street itself was wide but felt chaotic and disorganized. They'd widened the street with the original intention of putting up some fine buildings, but for some reason this plan had been almost
immediately abandoned, and so all that remained were shabby second-hand clothes stores and cluttered tattoo studios, the pavement was narrow and uneven, and the jarring contrast of the road's incredible width made the place seem as though it was falling apart. It was a place littered with ugly, hastily erected buildings, a vast place, where dust motes from the countryside danced in the bus station. But it was also the location of Joachim's favorite breakfast café; at weekends they served a buffet, it was cheap, it was tasty, and there were lots of dishes to choose from. The downside was that if you went early in the morning there was no way you'd get a seat. I brought Joachim's copy of
American Psycho
to breakfast there one morning, purely for the sake of having something to read, but in the end I couldn't get on with it. There was nothing in the book to justify my initial interest in it. It was the same with the books on physics and art, and the
Harry Potter
series. Personally, I really liked the Baedeker travel books; compared with other travel books, which tend to rely too heavily on photographs, they allow a relatively large amount of space for description, prose essays, historical background, literary quotations or reproductions of artworks, that kind of thing. In spite of the practical information which they also contained, the Baedekers provided more pleasure and fulfillment than many other books, the kind that are light on intelligence and stuffed full with hyperbole. But unfortunately Joachim's Baedekers were all ones I also owned, or else had previously read somewhere. I wanted to read something properly, not just in order to pass the time at the café, so I relaxed my budget and went to a bookshop in the city center. There, I chose three books. The first was Kafka's
The Castle
; I've no idea why I chose it. Not only had I already read it a long time ago, but I hadn't even found it all that interesting when I did. Perhaps I bought it because when I discovered it in the bookshop it made me remember the
Max Anderson comics I'd read the last time I was in Berlin. I hadn't been studying German for very long when I read them; there was a scene where the heroine, Akina, gets a call in the middle of the night demanding that she reads
The Castle
. She has to stay up all night to finish it, and after that she's told she has to read
Crime and Punishment.
But for some reason or other I couldn't concentrate on
The Castle.
I think at first I'd been a bit daunted, but contrary to my preconceptions it wasn't particularly difficult, in fact I was quite surprised by how simple some of the sentences seemed. But that didn't help me focus on it. I was determined to read it the whole way through, but in the end I found I couldn't manage it so I left it at Joachim's house, along with a brief note saying that I hoped he would read it; he didn't, of course. The two other books I bought were
People Who Read Books
and
Forms of Human Coexistence.
I read them when I'd begun to tire of my usual routine of eating breakfast at the café, taking the tram to the park, being unable to sleep at night, watching television, listening to music etc. Of course, I wasn't reading them very carefully, and I set them aside whenever turning the pages became too much of an effort. Later, I occasionally bumped into people who had read
People Who Read Books
; naturally, when I said I liked reading, they were quick to recommend it to me. Some of them were able to appreciate good writing, but not the majority, and in fact many of them had a taste in books that I would have scorned. I guessed that the reason they liked it was because of the closing section, which became sentimental as it aspired to tragedy. It had been a bestseller here, in the positive sense of the word. The writing certainly had a way of pulling you in. One day, when I'd just recently started the book, I took the tram late at night. I'd gone out late in the afternoon with no particular destination in mind, eaten Thai soup at a standing bar, listened to music at a late-opening vinyl record store
on Friederichstrasse, chosen a book at the bookshop, and was on my way home. I found an unoccupied seat on the tram, sat down, and opened
People Who Read Books
. It was very dark outside the window, so there was nothing to distract my concentration. I read on. Beautiful, arrestingly unfamiliar sentences appeared in front of me, vanishing into the darkness outside the window. Beautiful and complex, they frequently included words that were relatively new to me. I concentrated on each sentence one by one, and had to read them several times in order to understand how the many sub-clauses related to each other, using the context to try and work out the meaning of certain words. The further I pushed my way through the thorny thicket of the sentences, the more I faltered, and even found that I'd unwittingly been sounding out the words as I read them. I wanted to hear the music of the writing, just as M had in the old days. Joachim was the one who'd introduced us. I'd already been taking lessons from a German language tutor, alongside a Vietnamese girl whose vocabulary vastly outstripped mine, as she'd lived in Switzerland for several years. On top of that, our lessons were structured around the university entrance exam for foreigners that the Vietnamese girl was planning to take. I couldn't care less about the university entrance exam and hated that kind of lesson, so I'd been thinking about taking a short private course, even though I couldn't really afford it. But it was incredibly difficult to find a suitable private tutor, as private tutoring wasn't common in Germany. Joachim had sounded fairly diffident when he first mentioned M, stressing that he wasn't sure what she'd be like as she wasn't a vocational teacher. According to him, M was a student at the language school and (this was his expression) absolutely off her head about music; the two of them had taken a maths course together. He left me in front of M's house and headed off to school. At out first meeting I could barely understand her, confused
both by her unfamiliar pronunciation and (to me) convoluted way of expressing herself. She was tall and androgynous, even beautiful, but seemed as though she would be strict. Before I had time to amend that first impression, and without so much as greeting me, M handed me a book and told me to read it out loud, adding that I should take care to pronounce the words properly whether or not I understood them. I glanced at the title but couldn't make any sense of it, and when I opened the book and began haltingly to read, the passage I'd landed on proved equally incomprehensible. It's a shame, but I can't even remember what that book was, now—the first book in German I ever read, aside from a grammar textbook. My pronunciation was, of course, atrocious; I stuttered and often misread the words, couldn't tell where I should pause and where I had to keep going, couldn't get a feel for the rhythm, and mangled everything with my foreign accent. I can assert with complete confidence that M did not understand a word I read that day. It was our first lesson.

Our subsequent lessons continued with the same format, of me reading aloud things I couldn't understand and M trying to piece together the actual substance of the passages, the expression on her face constantly changing, shading into sadness, suffering, surprise, tedium, wistfulness, expressionlessness, defiance, rejection, desire. Once in a while M would ask me to repeat a certain passage. And so I read it again, still without understanding, struggling to pronounce the words clearly. What is this? I trembled with anger and need as I sat in front of M, unable to make any sort of emotional connection with what I was reading. The difference between understanding and not understanding was all too conclusive, like that between a rich man and a poor man, so I didn't dare ask any questions for fear of revealing my ignorance.
People Who Read Books
makes me think of that time. The people I met and
talked with about books (in Germany, anyway) had all read
People Who Read Books
, so naturally M also had a copy; it's possible that it was one of the various books I read sections from during our lessons. Of course this is just conjecture, not something I really remember. After I'd read a page, M would choose a particular word or sentence and launch into a lengthy explanation. One example was for the word “desolate.” “Do you know what ‘desolate' means? You don't? Of course, one could simply say, ‘when there is nothing visually arresting,' but that would only be a very irresponsible and conventional definition. Something can be desolate irrespective of its visual appearance. The meaning is a little different. For example, when everything is all the same color, like a desert, and there are many buildings but they are inhabited only by scorpions, everyone has left, there are no wells anywhere, or the train station is too far away. The nuance is a little different from when something is tedious or insipid. So why do we say ‘desolate'? Rather than ‘bleak' or ‘empty,' that is. Can you talk a little about how you would use those words in a sentence? And give some examples of the different impressions which they give, to explain how they compare?” I was unable to muster a response. Having barely mastered the rudiments of the German language, M's first lesson was so far above my level it was almost cruel. Blushing furiously, instead of thinking about how to answer M's question I made up my mind there and then to ask Joachim to find me a different German tutor, one who was a little more good-natured and accustomed to foreigners. But in the end, I never did.

I would read a certain sentence, go to turn the page then, hesitating, read the sentence again. “Would you please repeat that last sentence one more time,” M often asked me, “the one you just read.” M listened so intently it was as though she was breathing the sentence in, appropriating it for herself, whereas to me it was
nothing but a meaningless string of syllables. Jerked back to reality, I opened my eyes and saw that I was the only passenger on the tram, which had now stopped. Glancing down at the book in my hand, I saw that I'd only read three pages, but I seemed to have been lost in my memories for an awfully long time. The tram remained stationary for too long for it to have merely stopped at a red signal or to be changing drivers. The carriage I was in still had its lights on, but outside the window the darkness was impenetrable. Rain was trickling down the tram's windows. Intent on my book, I'd missed the announcement for my station and had come right to the end of the line, to a place called Ahrensfelde, on the very edge of Berlin. I'd never been there before. The tram was sitting there with its doors open, and when I stepped down from the carriage I could just about make out some low hills in the distance, but there were no buildings, no lights, not even any streetlamps. I turned to look back at the tram, stopped there in the middle of the track with the rain coming down. The driver had already left. There were no bus stops, no passersby, no shops or phone booths. With darkness rendering the landscape featureless, it occurred to me that I could well be standing in the middle of a vast steppe, the haunt of prowling wolves. On top of all this, the falling rain was icy cold. I wasn't sure of the time, and could only hazard a guess that it was still a little before midnight. Already soaked through, I followed the tracks back up in the direction the tram had come from, convinced that there had to be a bus stop somewhere. Silence, cold, darkness, no traces of human life—if such things are what's commonly called desolate, then this place was desolate. Conventionally, the word may be more often used to describe a desert or wasteland of some kind, but it can equally apply to a bare, lonely railroad station that you've only come to by mistake, where there are no buildings and no signs of life. To be
honest, though, it's difficult for me to distinguish between “desolate,” “bare,” “lonely,” “abandoned,” “empty,” which all seem to mean something quite similar. My understanding of their various nuances is sketchy, to say the least. What M tried to teach me wasn't so much the meaning of each individual word, but the absolute, universal concepts to which the words referred, those fundamental concepts which each of the many languages in this world calls by a different name. Such concepts do not recognize national borders, do not make up a sovereign state, and are all equally close to the center they cluster around. Also, since each word has a wide spectrum of possible meanings, it has to be read within the specific context of each given appearance. Using verbose, unwieldy expressions where several simple ones would do can come across as pretty boorish; in fact, M liked to refer to it as “barbarian.” Ultimately, “learning a foreign language” is too simplistic an expression for a process which is more like crossing a border; similarly, an individual's development as a human being is only possible through language, not because language is our only means of communication, but because it is the only tool precisely calibrated for the application of critical thought. But to me, these thoughts of M's were nothing but phantoms. A mother tongue isn't a border that can just be crossed, not even with the strongest will in the world. Even after fully mastering a foreign language (if such a thing is ever possible), your mother tongue still acts as a prison for your consciousness—this wasn't a view that M ever expressed in so many words, but I knew that it was true. The fact that my mother tongue was different from M's caused me unbearable grief.