The Pages Read online

  As a journalist, my author reported on his visit to a hospital where two thousand five hundred men lay recovering, all born healthy and remodelled on the battlefield. A soldier went out to the front and came back a fragment of a man. Living war memorials, he called them. One of the men he met in that hospital was missing his lips. A grenade had struck him in such a way that he was otherwise completely unhurt, only his lips were gone – unable to kiss.

  The main character in Rebellion is based on these damaged men. A war veteran by the name of Andreas Pum who finds himself in a military hospital full of broken bodies. He has lost a leg in action and received a medal. Like the other invalided soldiers, he envies the shivering man because he will be looked after by the state. When Andreas finally goes before a commission in charge of handing out livelihoods, he drops his crutch in a panic and falls into a fit of shivering. A moment of luck. His shivering is the making of him. It draws the empathy of the officials watching him fall and he is instantly rewarded with a licence to play the barrel organ. A secure future as an artist opens up for him, playing a rotating selection of eight tunes around city streets. He takes up lodgings in a house with a sausage thief named Willi and his lover, Klara. She works as a cashier and earns money on the side. Andreas watches her undressing. He hears them kissing and falls asleep dreaming of love.

  The story of this decorated veteran, with no intention of harming state laws or doing any more than earn a living, was now classified as unworthy of life in literature.

  Lena’s grandfather stood watching the fire with me tucked inside his coat. The faces of the onlookers were lit up in the warm glow of the flames. Their eyes turned jet black. Their lips were green. Their nostrils inhaled the pungent paper-smoke that came from those books, like the smell of burning hair.

  It was a bonfire of life stories. The pages were curling and flying in black scraps over the rooftops. These imagined lives, these human thought-roads, were being turned into worthless heat. The words were no longer bound together in sentences. They had been discharged of all meaning. From inside the flames came the sound of voices rising in a collective stream of consciousness, extracted like free prose from the text, a ghostly recital of absurd phrases and detached bits of dialogue. Expressions of love. Men calling their mothers. Crying children being removed from their parents. Homes turned to ash and family histories dissolving into vapours in one long, silent scream of pity that could be heard right around the city.

  Just before midnight, Joseph Goebbels came to make a speech. Microphones had been set up for him away from the fire. Some bottles of water on a small table in case he got thirsty. Wearing a beige coat and speaking in a voice that overestimated his stature, he praised the students for their cleansing action. He said it was the end of Jewish supremacy in literature. No more asphalt writing. Time to regain proper admiration for death.

  He spoke about the will of the people.

  6

  The dealers stand around in the park addressing their customers with soft voices in the dark – everything OK? Need anything? They pick up their stash from under a bush and do their deals by the overfilled rubbish bin. What do they care for a book about an invalid? They come from countries where they’ve had enough war and missing limbs. Countries where boys step on landmines and play football without the kicking leg.

  Beside me, the Vietnamese takeaway has little more to offer the world. Its contents have already been digested and converted into clubbing energy, followed by sexual energy, followed by sleep, followed by more clubbing energy in a wonderful sea of bodies before it is eventually turned back into soil.

  A rat comes running across my face. The tip of his rubbery tail lies on my author’s name – Joseph Roth. His pink illiterate eyes are on the Vietnamese takeaway as he urinates and sniffs, prevented from getting at the remains inside the single-use plastic container. The rat shows signs of pulmonary dysfunction. Some poison, perhaps. Blood thinners. What is good for humans can be bad for rats.

  A man, a bottle collector, forces the rat to retreat into the shadows while he roots through the overfilled bin. He takes an interest in Lena’s discarded shoulder bag and tries it on. It has the stolen look, so he puts it aside and takes out two bottles of Beck’s Gold, which he adds to his expanding nightly collection of clinking glass.

  Would he not be interested in taking a discarded book back to his shelter for the night? An antique bookseller would give him a couple of euros. But he has other priorities and walks away with his blue Ikea bag full of spent fun.

  Hey – his story is not unlike the man working the streets with his barrel organ. Joseph Roth was a champion of the homeless. As a reporter, he wrote about men sleeping rough. That homeless shelter in Berlin where they ran a cinema for the guests every morning at nine thirty. He wrote about the women on the streets, the prostitute with the golden smile, the woman accused in court of giving poison to her men to steal from them. He stood by the beggars, the unemployed, the missing, the murdered. Dead faces with no names. A dead man released from prison after serving a sentence of fifty years, staring in wonder at the traffic on Potsdamer Platz.

  He wrote about a man collecting cigarette butts. How the weekend yielded a better crop. He asked his name and invited him back to the hotel where he was staying, but the cigarette butt collector never came. He got into the habit from that point on of throwing away his cigarettes with a longer butt, in the hope that everybody else would feel generous too and leave something for others to find after dark.

  And the disabled war veteran who found a nail file on the street. What use could that instrument be to a man so badly damaged? Filing his nails as though that’s all he needed to restore him.

  He wrote about the migrants. Women arriving in Berlin carrying children like sacks of laundry on their backs. Followed by a child crawling on crooked legs, nibbling on a crust of bread. A young man with his hands in his pockets dreaming about getting away on a ship from Hamburg to New York. And the family arriving with scissors, ruler, a needle and a spool of thread, ready to set up in business.

  In public discourse they became known as the Threat From the East. Which is where my itinerant author was from. He understood the need to keep moving. He never had a birth certificate. Never had a father. His place of origin in Galicia (now Ukraine) was twenty per cent Jewish, a community that would soon disappear from the map.

  The rain has stopped, but the night is cold.

  A book doesn’t want pity. Literature is a long game. There is no shame in living among the discarded. Obscurity can have its vivifying air, one of my author’s successors liked to say.

  My patience finally wins out. A young man wipes the rain from my face with his sleeve. I am held up to the light coming from the street. And you know what, it becomes instantly clear that this man is a reader. Some intuitive affection spreads to my damp heart as he begins leafing through the pages. It’s an emotional thing. A refugee book in the hands of a person who gulps in the first sentences before he places me into the pocket of his jacket for later.

  What luck!

  We reach an apartment. We enter a kitchen where there is music playing. A female voice singing about walking on water. My new custodian is greeted by two men and a woman who invite him to drink whiskey with them and I hear his name for the first time – Armin. They offer him a joint, but he decides to go to his room.

  He lies on his bed and enters the story.

  Andreas Pum, the invalided soldier. The dampness in the air causes pain in the stump. His missing leg continues to send messages of distress from a desolate landscape where it lies buried among thousands of other severed body parts calling for their owners to come back and bring them home. Whenever the clouds build up and the rain comes in, the missing leg feels the pain and the stump begins to mourn.

  On a good day, playing his barrel organ in one of the courtyards, a woman asks him to play his saddest tune for her. She has just lost her husban
d. He gives her the song of the sirens luring men to their death along the Rhine. A sorrowful melody which he renders with great feeling while she stands leaning out of the open window listening. Katharina Blumich is her name. The woman of his dreams. She invites him inside when it rains and gives him food to eat. They fall in love. They get married. She provides him a warm home and buys him a donkey so that he no longer needs to carry the barrel organ on his back. People love his music and the money comes raining down from the windows.

  7

  A small creature crawls across the sheets. A passenger brought from the park. Armin sits up and positions his hand in the path of the earwig. It climbs on but soon walks to the edge and falls off. He tries a second time. Once more the earwig falls off. On the next attempt the earwig seems reluctant and turns back, so Armin stands up and carries the lost insect to the open window. It has no sense of gravity.

  Armin goes back to reading.

  From the kitchen, the sound of talking can be heard coming along the corridor. A burst of female laughter from a head thrown back. They stop laughing abruptly as though they have been reminded of something serious that cannot be laughed at. After a short pause, they set off again and the joke seems even more funny the second time around.

  Somebody has begun to knock on the wall. The night is full of noise and counter-noise. Next door, or maybe in one of the apartments above or below, somebody feels offended, or excluded, by these sudden explosions of laughter. The knocking, wherever it’s coming from, has a lonely quality, like something people do in prisons, the signals of a solitary person trying to communicate with the world. It’s hard not to imagine the complainant standing on a bed, or a table, jabbing at the ceiling with the handle of a broom, desperate to know what’s so funny.

  And then, it appears the knocking is coming from another source entirely, from a couple fucking somewhere in the building. The beat is rhythmic and methodical, possibly the sound of a headboard banging against the wall, or a chair being whipped back and forth on the floor. It could be any one of many possibilities. We cannot be absolutely sure, of course, that what we’re hearing is love. It could be that somebody has decided to hang a picture late at night without any consideration whatsoever for the neighbours, hammering a nail into the wall and then placing the picture up, standing back for a moment only to discover it’s too high, the nail needs to be taken out and a new one hammered in just slightly below. But then the hammering gathers pace. Too much urgency to belong to any spontaneous, late-night redecoration plans. Better to go back to the chair theory. The chair, if it is a chair, seems to be moving steadily from one side of the room to the other, speeding up like the sound of a horse galloping across the bare floorboards and turning around when it reaches the wall.

  By now, the counter-knocking has come back. The person complaining downstairs has become so worked up that the broom handle poking at the ceiling sounds like encouragement. The knocking downstairs has become an assistant to the knocking upstairs, urging the couple on the chair to hurry up, for God’s sake, get this over with – the happiness of others can be so infuriating. The entire house has become connected, participants in this magnificent sexual act. The couple getting carried away in one room, a misanthropic individual responding with furious indignation down below, people in a kitchen laughing their hearts out, while in a room nearby, somebody is trying to read a book.

  One of the men in the kitchen comes to Armin’s room and opens the door. He wants to know why Armin hasn’t joined them for a drink – the night is only beginning.

  Maybe later, Armin says.

  He continues reading the story of Andreas Pum making his way around the city with his barrel organ strapped to his donkey. Business is good and he’s thinking of buying a parrot to enhance his act. He knows which courtyards to avoid. Where they have signs erected saying – no begging, no peddling. He sticks to the places where his tunes are welcome. Where children come to stare in fascination at the fairy-tale scenes painted on the side panels of the barrel organ. Where coins come floating down from the windows wrapped in tissue paper, so as not to injure the donkey.

  He plays the national anthem when requested. It makes people feel good in these times after the First World War when they have lost so much. He can vary the tempo and the emotion of the melody by altering the speed at which the handle is turned. Sometimes he plays it as a waltz. Sometimes he plays it to the pace of a stirring march. Sometimes he plays it as a requiem to reflect the plight of a nation in defeat. And sometimes he plays it as a lullaby, comforting all those who cannot sleep at night because of the agitation and the resentment that has taken over the streets. Angry invalids with no money in their pockets have begun to march with placards calling for the government to be brought down. The shivering men with nothing more to lose, all protesting against the state.

  Andreas Pum is a law-abiding citizen with no grievance against authority. Proud to pull out his busking licence whenever a policeman asks. His luck revolves around that crucial document issued by the state. It gives him a place in society. It validates him as an individual. It allows him to eat and be hungry. It gives him the right to live, to love, to be happy.

  At the time, the barrel organ represented a considerable investment, somewhere between two and three thousand marks. According to my author’s newspaper reports, the number of musicians working the streets of Berlin was estimated to be up to twelve thousand. Licences were awarded exclusively to war invalids. They did best in the open with passing trade, not so well in the courtyards. Blind organ grinders had it tough because they could not tell a theft from a donation. Working the barrel organ involved no skill apart from the minimum requirement of one arm to turn the handle. There was something exciting and artificial about the mechanical sound of this machine, a little fake like all new technology, soon to be overtaken by the radio, which could deliver an entire orchestra right into the living room. Andreas Pum was fortunate to have acquired the most up-to-date barrel organ. With manufacturing improvements, the old barrel organs whose tunes were worn down and which played only an intermittent handful of wheezing notes were thankfully being phased out.

  Sadly, the story of the organ grinder inevitably enters a downward spiral. He is vulnerable to the favours of the community. Having left the donkey and his musical equipment at home one evening, he goes into the city for the first time on a recreational outing. Celebrating his luck and his reasons for being alive. His marriage, his home, his family – his place in society is assured. Now it’s his turn to be generous and give some busker a coin.

  On the way home he rewards himself by taking the tram and runs into a businessman of good standing who swiftly brings about his downfall.

  The businessman runs a successful haberdashery firm. He is married with a family, but he sees nothing wrong with desiring and eventually attacking his young secretarial assistant in the office. It’s a classic case of sexual harassment in the workplace, an abuse of power in which the man in a position of authority subjects the young woman to a violent assault. At the top of her voice she lets him know that she is engaged to be married and finally escapes. Next day her boyfriend, a gifted bird imitator, arrives at the haberdashery firm to accuse her employer of attempted rape. He announces his intention to sue for damages and refuses to be paid off. He wants her honour to be restored and turns the office into an aviary with a spontaneous performance of his best bird calls. He continues delivering his shrill repertoire of ornithologically verifiable hits until the haberdashery owner is driven into a rage.

  On the tram that evening, the businessman takes it out on Andreas Pum. With the deafening bird imitations still piercing his head, he refuses to move aside for the organ grinder. He accuses this decorated war veteran of simulating his invalid status. The wooden leg is a fiction, he claims. Easy to let on that a real leg is prosthetic. Andreas Pum is used to people standing up and offering him their seat. Now he’s been called a faker. The city is full of fakers,
the businessman says. They have been out demonstrating with placards all day, these revolutionary cripples, trying to disable the state. The businessman assumes Andreas is one of them. Another passenger concurs, saying the man with the crutch is probably a Jew into the bargain. At which point the offended organ grinder, who fought bravely and lost his leg on their behalf, raises his crutch in anger. A policeman is called. The law sides with the businessman. Andreas Pum has his licence removed.

  He becomes undocumented.

  8

  Before I forget.

  On the day of the book-burning, Joseph Roth’s work had already been quarantined in a restricted section inside the Berlin State Library. Right next to the site of the fire on the opera house square, his books were stored in a place set apart for toxic literature. Available only with special permission. Shielded from the general public, even from students who wished to burn them. This special status inadvertently protected many of them from the fire, at least in Berlin if not elsewhere around Germany. As he continued publishing in exile, each new title was added to this collection. Whenever Nazi troops entered a new country on their march across Europe, they would come upon copies of his work and ship them straight back to Berlin to be stored in this chamber of contaminated books.

  When the bombing of the capital city started, most of the precious stock of ancient books was taken from the library to be housed in a safe place outside the city. Ironically, the special category of illegal books was rescued along with the more cherished volumes. While the Berlin State Library was destroyed during the war, these banned items were kept safe in a remote mansion near Köslin, now part of Poland. Years later, after the Berlin Wall came down, two of Roth’s books from that reserved collection turned up in a Polish library. Originally printed in Holland and shipped by special courier back to Berlin, they received the Berlin State Library stamp, then they were taken away to safety in a country mansion and eventually made their way to the university library of Łódź, where they are now, once again, available to the public.