A Greater Music (8 page)

After I'd walked a little way I came across another tram, also stopped in the middle of the tracks with its lights on. The doors of the first carriage were open, and the driver—I could tell that was who she was by the uniform she was wearing—was leaning against
the door, reading a book. I went up to her and asked where I could catch a tram going back into the city, and she pointed across the road to a bus stop and platform that I hadn't noticed before. As if to make up for the general desolation of the place, these were glittering like a phantasm, like a cloud of glowing insects suddenly birthed from the nighttime fields. The platform clock showed 11.45. The driver told me that if I waited here for five minutes, a tram would arrive that would then head back the other way. As luck would have it, it was a Saturday, when the trams run all night. I waited on the wet platform, and sure enough a tram pulled in before long. After the new driver got in, they switched direction at the end of the tracks and drove back they way they'd come. The driver who'd been reading a book must have finished her run ahead of schedule and been waiting to clock off. When the tram I was on pulled away from the platform she was still reading, leaning against the door of the other, empty tram, which shone like a beacon amid the dark fields. There was no one else on the platform. I found my place in my book, and sat down again.

Forms of Human Coexistence
was by a young writer from Leipzig, about his experiences living in America. The writer's father was the playwright and novelist Christoph Hein; I remembered having heard his name before. I chose the book because it was printed clearly in a large typeface, and had photographs which broke up the monotony of the prose (something that usually irritates me when I'm reading in Korean, but with German it was helpful to have a break now and again); it caught my attention because I'd recently become interested in works by young East German writers. The fact that it was about America was neither here nor there for me. The book clearly didn't set out to be taken seriously, yet, as I read it, I often found myself unable to suspend a properly critical judgment, and every now and then I'd come across a part which I
found unconvincing. The writer had spent his teenage years longing for New York, which to him was all street gangs and gunfights and stylish, sexy women who hail taxis to shuttle between bars and breakdancing classes. Back then, though, it wasn't easy for an East German to get permission to travel abroad; you almost always had to wait until you were an old-age pensioner, sixty-five years old at least. All the same, he never abandoned his dream. In the end he managed to find a way around the various obstacles that lay in his path, though some of this was more through luck than initiative, and traveled to America as soon as he finished school at eighteen. Whenever I picked up the book I would open it at random and begin to read from there, and as I didn't mark off the pages I'd already read I frequently ended up rereading certain parts. I couldn't ever be sure whether I'd read the whole thing or not, especially as there'd been certain especially difficult sections that I'd had to abandon. I found the opening section incredibly disappointing, especially considering that the author was a young East German, stuffed as it was with adolescent hankerings after an idealized New York. All the same, I didn't set the book aside. His writing fairly zipped along, enlivened by a jaunty tone and a wit that could be incredibly cutting. He clearly enjoyed showcasing his literary talents, and if all this wasn't quite as effortless as he made it seem, the effect at least was there. I was so fucking happy, making out like nothing bothered me; his writing was littered with expressions like these. On the one hand, this was no doubt an accurate rendering of an eighteen-year-old's feelings on visiting America for the first time, but it was equally clear that it was a pose, carefully calculated to give the reader a very specific impression of who the writer was. In any case, it was the wittiest book I'd ever read—or at least, that I could remember having read—with the possible exception of some by Milan Kundera. According to an online review,
which I looked up on one of the bookshop's computers, his writing possessed a “merciless wit that is at the same time completely fresh and unaffected”; I didn't think that was an exaggeration. But this was more than just a sharp wit occasionally deployed. His words were like scurrying rats, constantly seeking for something to sink their teeth into. He was also perfectly aware of the effect of his descriptions, which seemed to revel in a particularly cruel strain of mockery. Overall, he was unsentimental, and his descriptions of his travels demonstrated a total lack of awareness of even the possibility that such things might benefit from a deeper, more nuanced treatment, however vague the intellectual framework, or that he might more profitably have employed a more macroscopic point of view now and then, zooming out from the minutiae in order to get a sense of the bigger picture, but he was also hell-bent on hunting down individual subjects upon which to deploy his eviscerating sarcasm without any slackening of the tempo, like a child of badly-off parents who has finally gotten his hands on an expensive toy to satiate that all-consuming greed which people call curiosity (probably for the simple reason that he was East German, he seemed extremely wary that his writing not be saddled with that already hackneyed label, “East German melancholy”); for all of these reasons I was initially impatient, wishing that he would take a break from his outsider's-perspective depiction of the lives of the urban American underclass. Given that such scenes hardly represented anything new for those familiar with big cities, that there was nothing novel or unique about them, at first I'd questioned whether it was really necessary to write such a book; needlessly, as it turned out, because in the end I was convinced that the author's decision had been the right one. The narrative sped along, relentlessly satirizing those representatives of the urban poor with whom the author came into contact (some of whom could even
be described as lacking a moral compass), poking its tongue out at the reader now and then, and far too taken up with all this to leave room for any serious considerations; compared with its incisive yet light-hearted style, the weight and import of the writing were absurdly one-dimensional—trivial fluff, really—meaning the writer couldn't help but come across as little more than a young man caught up in his own caprices, admittedly with some literary talent, but only of an ordinary, trifling kind. As I said, this was my initial opinion, which underwent a radical turnaround as I read more of the book—so radical, in fact, as to leave me a little suspicious. Later, though, it occurred to me that had the writer adopted a position of serious social commentary, I might well have simply stereotyped his writing as yet another example of “East German melancholy,” just what readers like me would unconsciously be predisposed to expect given his age and nationality. Each page had a color picture, pop-art style, and perhaps it was impossible not to dismiss what the writer was doing as merely taking a dig at everything, with the unbounded confidence in his own project common to those who have grown up having praise heaped upon their slightest achievement. It was even possible that its light-hearted tone came off badly because I read it straight after
People Who Read Books
. After all, Jakob Hein was only eighteen when he left for America, and the book remained faithful to the emotions that had moved him at the time. Rather than an objective look back at youth from the distant vantage point of adulthood,
People Who Read Books
is a paean to a boyhood love. As time passed I became increasingly eager to read Hein's debut,
My First T-Shirt
; there was clearly something in his bold, audacious attitude that made people want to return to his work, though I still can't quite put my finger on it. If I'd had time for another quick trip to the bookshop before I left then I might have been able to pick up a copy, but
unfortunately it wasn't to be. Were the opportunity to arise in the future, I would make sure to slough off any traces of the critic, who holds certain preconceptions about the “lives of the East German
Jugend
” (something I was already sick of hearing about), and who has their scathing attitude honed and ready even before embarking upon the first page; what's more, I felt sure that I would be able to do so quite easily, even with pleasure.

During that period I had no phone and no Internet, though it would have been easy enough to track down an Internet café if I'd wanted to. The only things that marked the passage of time in any regular way were my thrice-daily walks with Benny. At first these were purely for Benny's sake, but they gradually came to be important for me, too. One at half past seven in the morning, one between two and three in the afternoon, and one which varied slightly, but was generally around nine in the evening. Twice a week I took an extra walk to the café for their set breakfast, sometime in between the usual morning and afternoon walks. At half past seven on a winter's morning, the sky was only just starting to lighten in the east, over Poland, and the darkness still lingered over the earth. I really hated having to get out of bed at that hour, when I awoke to bitter cold and it was still dark outside the window. But Benny was waiting. Whenever Joachim had to go to work or school he would take Benny for a walk beforehand, at six thirty. Since Benny was used to relieving himself at that hour, I couldn't put it off until later. Once outside, walking among the bare, white birches in the park and watching the sun come up, my dislike of the early hour vanished. The morning walk was usually a short one, only ten or fifteen minutes, but the post-lunch walk was longer, as long as there was no rain or snow. As the days started to warm up a little I began listening to music while I walked. I only
had one CD with me, so I ended up listening to the same thing over and over again. On those extremely rare winter days when the sun was shining, even if it was only a faint gleam, it felt like the most wonderful gift anyone could possibly have given me. Besides, Benny always had plenty of energy in the afternoons, so we would give our legs a good stretch and often ended up going quite a long way. I used to have a detailed map of the city, when I was here three years ago, which had come in handy whenever I'd had to track down a post office, or the customs house, or the zoo, etc. But it had disappeared; I must have lost it somewhere. If I'd still had it I would have been able to study the roads and alleyways, and search for any castles or churches that might be worth going to have a look at, any small parks or dog cemeteries. I should have picked up a map when I went into the city center to buy a book. But I hadn't, because I hadn't been planning to go out much aside from the necessary walks, and I'd thought that having a map would render the streets overly familiar, stripping them of some of their allure. Around this time, I started to have a recurring nightmare; it begins with my accidentally bumping into someone I know. I'm at the café or the theater or the amusement park, or on the tram. Somewhere full of people. And someone comes up and speaks to me. Wow, it's been a long time. How are you doing these days? Where do you live now? And in the end, of course, the inevitable question: How's M? It's been ages since I saw her. These people have no clear identity, I'm just vaguely aware that I know them from somewhere. Finally, unsettled and even frightened, I open my eyes. No one has hurt me, no one has threatened me or forced me to do anything. They'd just happened to spot me as they were walking alone, came up to speak to me, and then disappeared. All perfectly natural. They all run through the same sequence, in exactly the same way. And then they go away, without bothering
to wait for my answer. Even as the dream unfolds I know exactly how it's going to turn out, the same way it always does, but it's still such a relief when I wake up, and think to myself how lucky I am that it was only a dream.

Music was my other great love aside from reading, and the reason I made such an effort to stick to a strict budget. If money had been no object, I would have bought new CDs every week. Joachim didn't have a stereo, only the kitchen radio, but he'd borrowed some computer speakers from a college friend for me to hook up to a handheld CD player. CDs were expensive, so I liked to go the store on Friedrichstrasse and use their listening station, but since there were always other people waiting to use it you couldn't really listen to anything for very long. Plus, you had to stand up the whole time. Of course, you could always go up to the second floor, wait in line at the customer service center, hand over your ID so they would let you borrow one of their CD players, for in-store use only, take it downstairs to the classical music corner and listen to whatever you liked for as long as you liked, in one of their comfortable chairs. While I was saving up, I listened over and over again to one of the few CDs I already owned, Kim Kashkashian performing Shostakovich's Sonata for Violin and Piano. And so, on the night I'm remembering, the last night of the blizzard that year, with the road to the cemetery completely blanketed in snow and thus indistinguishable from its surroundings, with Joachim's bicycle no more than a smooth white mound, and the light from the lamp lost in the swirling snow, with the chill leaching in through the windowpane, I cracked
Forms of Human Coexistence
open and laid it on the kitchen table, put my feet up on a chair (I was wearing two pairs of thick woolen socks), and listened to Shostakovich's final sonata. I became Jakob Hein from Leipzig, “
coexisting with humans” in a state of great perplexity, experiencing all the inconveniences of linguistic communication on the crowded, diverse New York streets—he recounted how he'd assumed he'd be able to get by perfectly well with his English skills, but in New York the first person who'd been more or less able to understand him was a Korean taxi driver who'd only been living there for two months. There was nothing in the book that struck me as unusual—New Yorkers seem to be incapable of being surprised by anything any more, and consider nothing strange these days—and so, even though it wasn't as though I was hankering for something less familiar or more surprising, and in spite of its short, light-hearted essays, I was bored. I only managed a single sentence before I turned to gaze out of the window, listening to the music with my chin in my hand, threw away the cold dregs of the coffee, made some more, rummaged around in the fridge but found nothing new then, after one more sentence, gazed out of the window again. And then, finally, the third movement began.