‘We came out, all together… out of our individual lives, crossing the thresholds of our I’s, and there, once we had all stepped beyond our limits, it opened up and embraced us, the limitless ocean of love.’ Oksana Zabuzhko, An Album for Gustav
*
So, there we are, a day after squeezing the last drop out of Snow, in the English Theatre in Kreuzburg, stepping out together through the doors of Motel One Alexanderplatz, three writers (call the others Lucy and Nick), in Berlin with a little under four hours on their hands before the next and last event of the mini festival of writing from Northern Ireland called at my suggestion and in my mouth homophonically Neu NI Now.
One of the other writers we three are here with (call them Padraig) will tonight launch a pamphlet-length essay, The Sensual City, in which they invoke Samuel R Delaney’s Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, with its famous distinction between networking (defined interaction) and contact (open to chance). We have spent two days networking in the English Theatre and satellite venues, now we just crave the contact of the late February Saturday streets and whatever the afternoon ahead will bring.
I realise before we have gone more than a hundred yards from the hotel that I have lost my gloves or left them balled among the debris of books and introduction notes and interview notes and panel discussion notes and taxi and bar receipts on the folded single duvet on the unused side of my double bed in Room 13022.
The temperature on the street is hovering around 5°C. We discuss playfully but robustly my general under-preparedness for the cold (gold-braided blazer, black cotton polo-neck, velvet trousers), my well-layered friends and me. (Lucy’s faux astrakhan coat, it has to be said, could have been made for this season in this city any year in the past hundred: it could be 30°C and I would be urging her to keep it on.) We are in part setting a tone. We know each other well – or I know each of them – but we don’t yet know the three of us together. It is, more than any of its uneven compatriots, an odd number, three, given to shifting permutations of two and one. I am the one in this instance who will not listen to reason: go back, find your gloves and get a heavier coat while you’re about it.
I am also the one who knows Berlin – this eastern part of Berlin in particular – best, having visited for the first time in 1990, the year after the Long Second World War ended with the tumbling of the Wall (it went up four days after I was born in August 1961), and the year before the Soviet Union collapsed.
In large tracts of the city – some of which the three of us will soon be walking through – the clean-up then from 1945 had barely even begun.
I am, in my haphazard-turning-circles way, therefore, guide, though we are led at first as much by our desire to eat as our desire to see and for a time are blown off the vague course I have set – the mile-plus length of Unter den Linden, just across Museum Island from Alexanderplatz, to the Brandenburg Gate, the Reichstag just beyond – through, instead, the colonnades of the Old Museum, on to the other side of the Spree and the cafes clustered around the Hackescher Markt S Bahn station.
We opt for the first place we see – fitted into a railway arch by the edge of a small riverside park – that has seats free. Two bistro chairs flanking an emerald-green velvet day bed, backed on to the short end of the rectangular service and display counter, a wooden stand on top, shaped like a mug tree, with pretzels hanging from it, salt-crusted, sesame-dusted, glazed.
If you had asked me in advance to close my eyes and imagine, I could not have conjured a more perfect spot. Although in truth there were times in advance when trying to imagine being here at all felt too much like tempting fate.
Neu NI Now has been 12 months in the planning. Twelve months and two variants of the worst pandemic since the end of the first World War. When the German organisers and I settled last March on the final weekend of this February 2022 as a date, I told myself it would be typical if, Covid at last behind us, Belfast suffered its traditional one snowdump per annum the (Thursday) morning we were due to fly out, shutting all airports.
Monday and Tuesday were spring come early and glorious. Wednesday wet but mild… at least to start. Some time in the late afternoon the temperature dropped. The first sleet landed on my windscreen as I sat at the junction of Cherryville Street and the Woodstock Road in east Belfast waiting for the lights to change and listening to an American military analyst on Radio 4′s drivetime news explain why there was unlikely to be a war in eastern Europe any time soon.
Come Thursday morning it was snowing so heavily that the plane carrying three-quarters of our party had to cut short its first attempt at take-off from George Best Belfast City Airport and return to the stand for a third de-icing treatment in the half-hour since we were called on to board.
I had switched on my phone again while we waited and looked for updates on Ukraine, which, at almost the exact ungodly hour my alarm was going off, found itself under full-scale attack by the army of the Russian Federation.
‘It’s like you wake up in a totally different reality at 5am and you find out the world is no longer the safe place you imagined,’ says a citizen of Kharkiv, interviewed on the CNN bulletin I saw when at last (the snow stopped the plane took off touched down in London City where we picked up Lucy and Nick and caught another plane then an airport train) we made it to the hotel on Alexanderplatz late on Thursday afternoon.
Torn between thinking that none of this matters and all of this matters; that the moment when it feels as though words fail is maybe the moment when words are needed most.
We have in the days since all struggled with the awareness of what is happening just a few hundred miles further east as we read from and talk about our work and listen to others read from and talk about theirs. Torn between thinking that none of this matters and all of this matters; that the moment when it feels as though words fail is maybe the moment when words are needed most.
Why else spend an hour considering the 105 that make up the hymn to ‘the drunkenness of things being various’ that is Louis MacNeice’s ‘Snow’ – all world being crazier and more of it than we think incorrigibly plural?
But now here we are sitting down, full plates, full glasses, in our Hackescher Markt cafe. And, again, MacNeice is among us, not Snow this time so much as Autumn Journal, written in the last months of 1938 and the first days of ‘39, months that included the Munich Agreement, the delusion of ‘peace in our time’, and the beginning of the end of the Spanish Civil War. Months that for MacNeice, opening his art to all of that, included too the publication of his book on London Zoo and his continuing love affair with Nancy Sharp (Coldstream as she was then, being still married to fellow artist William) who provided the book’s illustrations. I have been trying for some years past to turn that work – their lives, and love, their afternoons spent alone and with friends in cafes and cinemas – into a film.
If ever again I struggle to imagine how life goes on in close proximity, in space and time, to war, I tell myself, I need look no further than these teeming streets, this cafe, the three of us sitting here deciding – why not? the afternoon’s still young – to have another drink. We could, to be honest, and as my father would have said, sit here rightly until it was time to go back to the hotel. But, no. We drink up, go to pay.
Which is the moment when the waiter chooses to inform us that the card machine is down and has been all afternoon. He listens politely to our remonstrations – surely, he could have told us that before he let us order? – then directs us to an ATM around the corner. When Nick and I get there, however, (Nick has left his hat and gloves on the table where Lucy remains as though for security) we find it too is out of order.
I think for a moment this is how it would be in the film of this new era’s warfare: the first intimation of a cyber-attack on the entire banking system (Russia has been threatening to disrupt Swift payments in retaliation for Nato sanctions), though admittedly there would likely be more than just the two of us breaking into a jog, splitting up – I’ll go this way, you go that – desperate for cash. Which Nick finds first.
We return. Remonstrate again. Really, the waiter should have told us. Nick pays. We leave.
The temperature has risen. The sun is out. The gloves are off, or not back on. This, I say, taking out my sunglasses, is Act 2.
The temperature has risen. The sun is out. The gloves are off, or not back on. This, I say, taking out my sunglasses, is Act 2.
Across the Spree, back through the colonnades, over another bridge, we are at last out on to Unter den Linden proper. There are roadworks down at this end, the safety barriers channelling pedestrians either side of the broad tree-lined central strip that gives the street its name. We take the channel that leads past the Neue Wache – the New Guardhouse (it is 200 years old) – and finding it almost devoid of tourists, step through the squat portico to stand before the only object in the stone-faced interior, the bronze figure of a mother, hunched and shawled, cradling her dead son. The sculpture is the third to occupy the spot in the century since the Great War ended (the sculptor, Käthe Kollwitz, lost her own son in the war’s opening months), having replaced the Soviet-era glass prism containing the eternal flame that replaced the black granite block and mounted oak wreath put there after WWI as a simple war memorial, but pressed into service by the Nazis as part of their new cult of militarisation.
More than almost any street in any city I can think of Unter den Linden bears the marks of history’s repeated revisions. It was surely always a vanity to imagine that our own generation’s version would be the lasting one.[1]
Our four free hours have shrunk to two. The roadwork barriers go from straight lane to chicane and we find ourselves on the opposite side of the street from the Neue Wache, where we pass the open expanse of Bebelplatz, with at its centre, and unnoticeable at this distance, a square of reinforced glass set into the cobbles, affording a view of an underground chamber, the ‘Empty Library’ (by Micha Ullman) whose rows and rows of bare shelves mark simply and powerfully the spot where 89 years ago, when Bebelplatz was Opernplatz, the Nationalist Socialist Students’ Organisation made a pyre, 30,000 volumes deep, of ‘Un-German’ literature.
In the run-up to the trip, I have been getting Berlin-match-fit by listening to Public Service Broadcasting’s latest album, Bright Magic, recorded in the same studio – Hansa in Kreuzberg – where David Bowie recorded Heroes and (a more pronounced influence on Bright Magic) Low. The closing track on the Public Service Broadcasting record, Ich und die Stadt, is a setting of Augen in der Grossstadt – Eyes in the Big City – a 1932 poem by Kurt Tucholsky, as eloquent, and poignant, an evocation of chance encounters and fleeting glances as was ever committed to paper: ‘Two strange eyes/ the brow, pupils, eyelids/ what was that? maybe your life’s happiness…’ (Lebensglück is the wonderful; German word) and then the killer line: ‘Gone, blown away, never again.’
‘Vorbei, verweht, nie wieder.’[2]
Tucholsky had already fled to Sweden by the time his books were added to the Bebelplatz flames and died by suicide there in 1935, the year MacNeice published Snow.
I go to say something about the last time I visited the memorial – on a family holiday, half a dozen years ago – but I feel another memory butting up against it… Of what, though? We are still moving, still talking. The memory escapes me.
A little further on, we come across more barriers – more roadworks we think, then see on one side of the barriers the first green flashings of police Volkswagen vans and, on the other, the first blue and yellow stripes on the faces of passersby, the first Ukrainian flags draped like capes around shoulders. Only then do we realise we have drawn level with the Russian embassy, a great off-white slab of high-Soviet architecture, its white, blue, and red flag set atop a colonnaded turret flanked by figures of workers holding hammers or armfuls of grain.
Perhaps we have arrived after the substantial fact, but the crowd on the yellow and blue side of the barriers has the character of concentration, rather than demonstration: so many individual filings drawn from so many parts to do the only thing it is in their power to do: be numbered among the outraged.
Placards abound. Close the Skies, one reads – a reference to the calls for a Nato-enforced no-fly zone over Ukraine. Fuck Putin, reads another.
We were talking as we were coming out of the hotel, and before I realised I had lost my gloves, about the thirteen Ukrainian soldiers on Snake Island, a 500-acre outpost in the Black Sea who on Thursday were called on by a Russian warship to surrender or be shelled. ‘This is it,’ one of the radio operators is heard to say, before another chips in, ‘Russian warship, go fuck yourself.’
We were talking too about Volodymyr Zelensky, the extraordinary courage, humanity, and tenderness, displayed in the selfie videos he has been posting in the past forty-eight hours from the streets of a capital under bombardment and at risk it seems of being at any moment overrun. ‘I am still here,’ he reassures his fellow Ukrainians. ‘I am not afraid of anyone.’
‘He must know he is going to die?’ I said.
Lucy quoted Jean Anouilh’s Antigone, the Lewis Galantière translation. ‘When your name is Antigone, there is only one part you can play, and she will have to play hers through to the end.’
When your name is Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian voice of Paddington… Sometimes it takes a lifetime to discover the part you were really intended to play. Sometimes it takes far less than the lifetime you had until then reasonably expected might be allotted you to live.
We have come out the other side of the crowd, and there before us stands the Brandenburg Gate, the tight-packed trunks trees of the Tiergarten trees beyond.
I have already in my role as guide made a pretty hopeless fist of the history of the gate as we approached. Built at the end of the 18th century, with a nod to the entrance to the ancient Athenian Acropolis (the architecture of Unter den Linden makes more sense when you start from the gate and work up rather than start where the three of us did today and work down), it was originally conceived of as the Peace Gate, surmounted by the figure of a goddess holding a laurel wreath and riding on a four-horsed chariot: the ‘quadriga’.
Little more than a decade later, Napoleon, whose army had occupied Berlin, had the quadriga removed and carted – it would have had to be, literally – to Paris where it remained for the eight years before the Prussians rallied, defeated him and occupied Paris in their turn, whereupon they carted the quadriga all the way back (I imagine villagers along the route coming out to see the once in a lifetime event… for a second time) and replaced the laurel wreath with an iron cross. Peace had become Victory.
My first time in Berlin, the friend I was with told me that when the Wall went up, between the gate and the Tiergarten, the East German authorities had the quadriga reoriented so that instead of looking west, it looked east, down Unter den Linden, the administrative heart of the DDR. It was such a good story I couldn’t begin to say how many people I passed it on to before I discovered it was absolutely untrue.
That, it seems, is the way the quadriga always faced. Damn you history and your resistance to pat narrative.
The stalls I remember from that first trip selling bits of the Wall, which had only finally been dismantled seven or eight months before, selling Soviet army surplus hats and army surplus greatcoats and cap badges and novelty babushka dolls – Gorbachev, Andropov, Brezhnev, Khrushchev, Stalin, Lenin… John, Paul, George, Ringo – those stalls went years ago. One side of the street is dominated now by Starbucks, the other by the resurrected Hotel Adlon: waste ground in 1990.
Across the road from the gate, just inside the Tiergarten, is a smaller, squarer archway, set into a freestanding, curving wall of frosted glass panels on which are engraved details of the genocide of Sinti and Roma people under National Socialism.
Half a million were murdered between 1939 and 1945. Porajmos, is the Romani word: the Devouring.
Through the arch (the architectural reference point is concentration camp gate), we find another memorial as arresting in its simplicity as the Käthe Kollwitz mother and son: a pool – disc almost – of water, a hundred metres maybe in circumference, a triangle at its centre (Roma and Sinti prisoners wore a brown one) on which lies a single flower, refreshed every day.
It has taken in some instances three-quarters of a century – the Roma and Sinti memorial was only completed in 2012, seven years after the (in every sense) monumental Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, a short distance away – but you cannot say that Germany as a nation has not acknowledged the scale and the scope of the suffering it inflicted in the last war.
The last war. Not the last war.
I think, as we come back out, as we come round finally to stand before the Reichstag – with only minutes now before we know we must start back – how little I understood of any of this in 1990, when the Reichstag itself was still a semi-ruin, but home nevertheless to an important exhibition on the rise of Nazism. It was there I first learned about the Holocaust by Bullets, the mass shootings of one and a half million Jewish men, women and children between summer 1941 and spring 1942, a significant proportion of them in the then Soviet Republic of Ukraine. (Recent research suggests more than nine hundred separate massacre sites within the country’s 1939 borders.) The SS and the special police units who carried out the murders often pressed Ukrainian civilians into participating in the transportation of victims, in many cases their own neighbours, the extraction of teeth, the preparation of clothes for reuse, or simply cooking for the executioners.
But there were plenty too who volunteered, who were all too ready to accept and act on the Nazis’ conflation of Judaism and Bolshevism, or their own antisemitism. I confess I formed a dim view then of Ukrainian nationalism that – I have only recently realised – persisted long after independence in 1991, long, long after I had learned to accept that Germany had put its own Nazi past behind it; persisted, perhaps right down to the Orange Revolution, which brought hundreds of thousands of people into the Maidan Nezalezhnosti – Independence Square – in the heart of Kyiv in the snowy winter of 2004 in protest at the rigged presidential elections.[3]
One of my favourite pieces of writing by a Ukrainian writer, An Album for Gustav, by Oksana Zabuzhko, tells of an historian and her photographer husband (each refers to the other throughout as Sweetie) and the afternoon they spend in their Kyiv apartment, some years later, with a Dutch publisher who wants to make a coffee-table book out of the pictures the photographer took back then on the ‘Maidan’. The story is as much about each of the Sweeties watching the other interact with the publisher, three becoming various combinations of two and one, questioning their own memories of those times, wondering whether anything, verbal or pictorial, can convey what it was to be caught up in such a moment.
‘Somehow, overnight,’ the historian remembers, ‘history ceased being the past,’ a line that could stand in for the sensation of being confronted by the Reichstag. And not overnight either: from one minute to the next.
I feel, as I have almost always felt standing here, almost overwhelmed by the closeness of the past, the accumulated weight of it
I feel, as I have almost always felt standing here, almost overwhelmed by the closeness of the past, the accumulated weight of it (in Iron Gustav – no relation – by Hans Fallada, young Heinz Hackendahl observes the revolution of winter 1918 as it plays out around, and finally in the corridors of, the Reichstag)[4]; the certainty that there will, can be, no cease. That this moment too will be caught up and borne off in history’s flow.
We pass back through the Brandenburg Gate. The light is going, taking what heat there had been with it.
Act 3
Which begins as broad farce. The prop, a snow-adult and snow-infant, head-in-hole photo op on the pavement in front of the store, just up from the Adlon, dedicated to the Ampelmännchen – Berlin’s everyman pedestrian crossing icon. [5] ‘We’ve got to get a picture,’ Nick says and having no camera on his own phone holds out his hand for Lucy’s. We split again, two and one, archivist and about-to-be-archived. …
I read somewhere that these ‘comic foregrounds’, which I had always associated with British seaside towns, might in fact have their origins in the French revolution, a populist trickle-down of the ‘radical transformations’ effected by the guillotine. Radical transformations that led eventually to the rise of Napoleon and the quadriga packed in straw on the back of – what exactly I can’t think – on its way to Paris.
On the principle that you might as well be hung (or guillotined) for a sheep as a lamb, I kneel, offer my head to the lower aperture (I never do look properly at the resulting photos, but I have no reason to doubt Nick’s assessment that they show one person unconvinced, the other… ‘fully committed’), imagining as I do another shot, movie rather than still, that starts on that fully committed face pulling back until the anti-new-war protests come into view, the people paying their respects at the Roma and Sinti memorial, milling around before the police barriers in front of the Russian Embassy, entering and leaving the cafes and shops of Hackescher Markt…
The drunkenness of things being various and maybe also (that second drink) a little drunken.
We are still half messing when we remember the rubbings. The writer of the pamphlet being launched tonight, Padraig, has got into the habit of stopping and making rubbings with crayon and paper while abroad in the centre of Belfast. It is their way, as a young queer man, of taking ownership of streets that have at times been inhospitable or even hostile, of setting themselves at an angle, which others must negotiate and accommodate. I had suggested that all those attending Neu NI Now be given a page and a pencil or crayon and encouraged to do something with them in the free afternoon hours: a frottage mosaic of our personal Berlins. Lucy has our pages, and our crayons, in her shoulder bag. She goes for the bark of one of the lime trees that, in the German, give the street its name. Nick crouches to do a wheelchair ramp, that familiar crosshatched ridging. I do (rather ineptly) a relief of the much-travelled, and -translated, quadriga on the gift-shop window.
Only afterwards do I ask myself if there might not have been something else going on here, an unconscious homage to the fragile fact of glass, in any war right up there with truth in early casualty status: the huge, jagged pop-art shards still clinging to the frames of boarded up shopfronts in 1970s ‘Business as Usual’ Belfast[6], the atomised drifts I once likened to fallen blossom in a passage about Kristallnacht, that all-out assault on Jewish-owned homes, businesses, and places of worship, on the night of 9 November 1938, widely seen as the starting pistol for the Holocaust.[7]
The crowd outside the Russian Embassy has begun to disperse. People in parting make that palm-out two-fingered gesture that in circumstances like these seems to lie on the sliding scale between peace and victory. Defiance, maybe. The photographer in ‘An Album For Gustav’ reflects that while the Germans ‘sort of got’ the Maidan protestors (‘the wall coming down, Wir sind ein Volk’), no one quite understood them like the Poles. She recalls a Polish parliamentarian standing on the stage on the Maidan ‘with the same expression as our older people’, two fingers held up: victory, yes, but also ‘like a blessing on us all’.
I hear someone say this afternoon’s gathering was just a placeholder: the real thing will be tomorrow afternoon: expect half a million then.
(Did I invent it – I ask myself – or draw on MacNeice’s memoir, the scene in my Autumn Journal screenplay where Louis and his young son, Dan, and his live-in nanny Sophie Popper join an anti-appeasement rally, a couple of hundred thousand strong, in London in the autumn of 1938?[8])
We are coming up again to Bebelplatz and the Empty Library. Again, we keep walking. I recognise on this occasion, and from this angle, though, a restaurant down a flight of steps on the eastern edge of the square where I once ate dinner with a German friend, who asked my advice about a matter of the heart. I gave it. She did the opposite. I don’t think she ever forgave me.
It was summer 2000, 10 years and half a dozen return trips on from my first visit. I had just arrived in the city after six weeks on a train with 105 other writers from every state in Europe – networking to the nth degree – on a journey, organised by the Literaturhaus in Berlin, that took us from Portugal, via Spain, France, Belgium, the Baltic States and as far into Russia as Moscow, before doubling back and taking the shorter route to Berlin through Belarus.
Our last stop before Berlin Hauptbahnhof was Warsaw Central.
About the time we were setting out from Lisbon, Vladimir Putin, just six months into his premiership, was installing Akhmad Kadyrov as first President of the Chechen Republic, bringing Chechnya back into the Russian Federation after a war (the second there since the collapse of the Soviet Union) that had cost more – perhaps many, many more – than 50,000 lives. Of the Chechen capital Grozny, it was said that early summer that not a single building was left undamaged. The comparison people used was Berlin in 1945.
By mid-July when we rolled into Warsaw the anger of some of the writers from other former Soviet states had become too much for them to bear. One of the two Ukrainian writers on board had got up a petition that morning in protest at the war and Russia’s reincorporation (annexation in effect) of Chechnya. I can’t be sure, but I think the intention might have been to present it to the Federation’s ambassador to Poland.
A little later, I met two of the other writers to whom I had grown close for coffee in the city’s Old Town (rebuilt at the same time as the New Town after the almost total destruction of WWII). I mentioned I had signed. They looked at one another. She set down her coffee cup. He shook his head. Glenn, Glenn, Glenn. Wasn’t the whole point of us being on the train together to find common ground? Discuss, debate, argue even, but keep it among ourselves. A petition on Chechnya was always going to risk compromising the Russian writers: damned if they didn’t sign, and who-knew-what when they got home if they did. And where did you stop then? What about Turkey and Kurdistan? What about Ireland?
I thought about it. They were right. This wasn’t the place. I went back to the Ukrainian writer who had got up the petition.
‘I want to take my name off.’
‘You’re kidding?’
‘I’m not.’
And I wasn’t and I did.
And became the wrongest person on the entire train.
The entire planet it felt like. In the course of just a couple of hours I had managed to betray everyone including myself at least once.
And it has all just come back to me in a snowball rush of shame this February Saturday afternoon more than two decades on on Unter den Linden.
An ‘oh’ escapes me.
I am fighting the solipsistic notion that this whole afternoon has been choreographed – scripted – that I might be confronted with my complicity (I am microcosm, I am every blind eye. I am the Winter Olympics Committee, FIFA; it was me who sanctioned the Nord Stream pipeline); that what I had convinced myself at the time was a matter of Train etiquette was in fact a pixel in the green light that gave the go ahead for Aleppo, the Grozny of the 2010s, and now – where will it be, the Aleppo of the 2020s? Kharkiv? Mariupol? Severodonetsk? Kyiv?
My companions look at me. Are you OK?
I can mount a defence for words when all words fail. But I can’t begin to think of a single word, defence, or use for me.
I don’t know if it finds its way out, the ‘fuck’ that ends the thought that ‘Oh’ began, or whether my mouth just hangs. As my head ought.
The dispersal begins – the loneliness that inevitably attends the ending of those intense periods in the company of good people a long way from home
We weave our way back to Alexanderplatz and Motel One. The night overtakes us completely.
Next day (we are in structural terms in the realm here of coda) the dispersal begins – the loneliness that inevitably attends the ending of those intense periods in the company of good people a long way from home made more profound by the sense that, this Sunday morning of all Sunday mornings, there is absolutely no telling what comes next.
There is the fear for one thing that having made it here we might not be able to make it back quite as easily – that Russia might respond to sanctions by enforcing its own closed sky policy or hack or otherwise fuck with the whole system – a fear that finds a focus in the blasted UK COVID locator forms that as a collective we spend the larger part of our last hours in Berlin trying to complete.
Lucy and Nick bow out in London again from where Nick will tack northeast and Lucy south. Three become, briefly, one and one and one, each of us already trying, in our various ways (short story, poem sequence, essay, maybe, in three acts… with coda), to give shape to the day before, or meaning to the shape the day itself took on.
On the television news that night the drone footage from Berlin shows the anti-war demonstrators stretching from the Russian Embassy right down Unter den Linden to Alexanderplatz. If they are not half a million strong, they are not far off.
The following morning, taking a break from Low and the online news feeds, from ordering the Lewis Galantière translation of Antigone, I go walking in east Belfast, feeling – though spring is back, acting like it never went away – bereft, and geopolitically alarmed. Until I see it, on a metal paling to the side of the Holywood Arches Wellbeing and Treatment Centre: wrist-length, leopard-print… a lost glove.
Whoever has placed it there, and however they have done it, by accident or design, its first two fingers are raised in a V sign like a bit of Unter den Linden, or maybe the Maidan, broken free. Victory, peace, blessing.
Go easy on yourself. You can’t fix what was done, or not done. You can only start from here. Do better.
Or maybe I am clutching. But what else do you do? Let go? Despair?
By the time I arrive back at the house I have had a text asking if I will take part in a benefit for Ukraine at the Lyric Theatre this coming Sunday: read the work of a Ukrainian writer of my choosing.
I text back: put my name down.
I search out an ‘Album for Gustav’. Sweetie and Sweetie taking turns to narrate the afternoon spent with their earnest Dutch publisher friend. It doesn’t take me long to find the passage I will read, about an elderly, housebound woman showing her support for the revolution by holding an orange kettle up to her window as the protesters pass by, but I carry on reading caught up in the story, in the shifting dynamic of their three-way relationship, each one – to adapt a phrase one of the Sweeties uses about the congregation on the Maidan – trying to cross the thresholds of their I’s. The last words go to the historian.
‘The boys get up to wash their hands; I glance at the screen before shutting down the computer. The shot there, taken from a low vantage point looking up, shows the line of shields and below them flowers and burning candles, and it looks as if they are bursting straight from the earth itself and the tamped-down mass of millennial snow – small agglomerations of light surrounded in the picture with uncannily bright halos.’
World is scarier than it was even when Oksana Zabuzhko wrote ‘An Album for Gustav’, but I will hold to those flowers and candles bursting from the snow as I will hold to all 105 words of MacNeice’s lyric (turns out there is no such thing as the last drop).
To the uncrushable. The incorrigible. The plural.
Footnotes
[1] Though it is, to do ourselves a kindness, a vanity to which all generations are prey. Bertrand Russell, interviewed in the 1950s describes the ‘world where [he] was young’ in the 1870s as ‘solid’. ‘A world where all kinds of things that have now disappeared were thought to be going to last forever... It was thought that there was going to be ordered progress throughout the world... It was all going to be orderly, all quite nice.’ Forty years before WWI began.
[2] Another Tucholsky line, ‘Soldaten sind Mörder’ – soldiers are murderers – is protected under German federal law as a legitimate expression of pacifist sentiment.
[3] Maybe, given its negative connotations in Irish politics, it was the colour that first intrigued me.
[4] ‘The square in front of the Reichstag was black with people and fresh processions were continually arriving, to wait patiently beneath their fluttering red flags till they were moved to and fro by the stewards…’ (p.221)
[5] Every-potbellied-double-chinned-hat-wearing-purposefully-striding-green-man, though there is an Ampelfrau now too.
[6] Belfast painter Colin Davidson’s first major work ‘Derelict Belfast Street’ shows rows of houses with black holes or breezeblocks where the windows should be. Later he would paint pictures of shop windows in Belfast, London, New York; the subject he has said was not the goods on display or the reflections of window-shoppers and passers-by, but the pane of glass itself.
[7] Friedrichstrasse, running south off Unter den Linden at the next junction, was a particular target. Almost exactly seventy years after Kristallnacht archaeologists unearthed a huge cache of looted items close to a hunting lodge owned by Hermann Göring 30km deeper into Brandenburg. It covered an area the size of four football pitches.
[8] A bit of both, as it transpires: according to his biographer, Jon Stallworthy, MacNeice was photographed in November of that year at a protest march against the Anglo-Italian pact, ‘looking terribly respectable – mackintosh over his arm, and a flag on a long pole over his shoulder’, though he was with three hundred other lecturers from the colleges of London University (MacNeice was teaching at the all-women’s Bedford College) instead of Sophie and Dan. The News Chronicle carried a quote from him saying this was the first time that staff at the university had done anything like this, which just went to show how strongly they felt. He would have a pole over his shoulder in the next draft of the script if I could think for a minute what ought to be flying from the end of it.
Glenn Patterson is professor of creative writing at Queen’s University Belfast. His latest book is The Last Irish Question: Will Six into Twenty-Six Ever Go?
