and sleep on their couch.
It was pure elation when Yukio switched off the light â the great relief when the body knows it can succumb to heavy sleep. How grateful she was. She removed her boots and arranged a cushion under her head. The effect of her long day and its jarring sequence of feelings was that she could not have contemplated returning alone to the trainstation, facing the cold once again, travelling back through the mean streets or the rushing tubes of the late-night city.
A thin band of light issued from beneath the closed door. Cass lay on her back, very still. In the dark she heard the lovers continue to talk in sweet, rippling tones. Their Japanese washed around her, tidal and sedative in its effect. It was an ocean of whispers she wanted to sink into.
It may have been a few minutes, or even less â her doped brain disassociated and imprecise â but she stayed awake and afloat for a short, drowsy while. She was thinking not of the anonymous body beneath the train, dragged in agony to kingdom come, though she maintained a vague and impersonal sorrow in response. There was a ruined family out there somewhere, a destroyed mother, or sibling. This was the necessary abstraction of invisible death. This was her rigid control and her refusal to be affected. Instead, she was recalling the man smoking in the wheelchair outside Oblomovâs building: his tough, balled form, his messy spray of ash, his obstinate and casually lifeless persistence.
11
In the dark morning a branching frost lay at the windowpane. It glittered, an unearthly plant, in the rays of the standing lamp near the couch. Wrapped in a blanket Cass rose, stiff from uncomfortable sleep, and tapped on the glass to see if the frost would shatter. It remained intact. Its crystal form was a wonder, like so much here in deep winter. It looked such a brittle deposit, but held on, gently ablaze and unsynthetic, scattered like filigree on the surface of the glass.
She tried to recall her dreams, but nothing coherent remained. They had all been there - Marco and Gino, Yukio and Mitsuko, Victor and herself â but nothing bound them in a story, there was no sense truly to be made. They were merely coincidental, figures becoming wisps of human meaning, then threading away, like blown smoke. Wind; she remembered there had been wind in her dream, and that she had felt cold. But this may have been her awkward rest on the couch, the body half-sensing.
An hour later it was still dark, and Mitsuko and Yukio had not woken. Their apartment was immensely quiet and still. Cass took paper and pen from her bag and scribbled ashort note. In the stuffy room she loitered, quiet as a thief. When she had located her coat and scarf, she drew them on, thinking how abnormally loud the rustle of clothing could sound. She left carefully, gliding on tiptoe, pulling the door shut behind her.
Â
Now Berlin was all trains. She saw how fundamentally the city had mapped itself in rail, how the layers it held, the archives, the spaces of its forgettings and transports and covered-over deaths, were reflected horizontally in striations of overgrounds and undergrounds. It was mid-January, freezing, she was a foreigner to the city, and it may have been presumption or madness to imagine it thus: that these configurations of tracks and stations were the structure of its hieroglyph. She rode the U-Bahn heading south towards the ring line. Again, the Brandenberg Gate formed a veil on the windows of the train. The design monument of choice: the firm Doric columns, the prancing horses of Victoriaâs quadriga, the city represented, reduced, to a neat white stamp.
It was not any dark morning in any northern European city, but precisely Berlin . In the rushing underground Cass consulted her map, and counted the lines and the stops. The U-Bahn had ten lines and about 170 stations. The S-Bahn had fifteen lines and 166 stations exactly. They radiated in a wild way not visible
It was pure elation when Yukio switched off the light â the great relief when the body knows it can succumb to heavy sleep. How grateful she was. She removed her boots and arranged a cushion under her head. The effect of her long day and its jarring sequence of feelings was that she could not have contemplated returning alone to the trainstation, facing the cold once again, travelling back through the mean streets or the rushing tubes of the late-night city.
A thin band of light issued from beneath the closed door. Cass lay on her back, very still. In the dark she heard the lovers continue to talk in sweet, rippling tones. Their Japanese washed around her, tidal and sedative in its effect. It was an ocean of whispers she wanted to sink into.
It may have been a few minutes, or even less â her doped brain disassociated and imprecise â but she stayed awake and afloat for a short, drowsy while. She was thinking not of the anonymous body beneath the train, dragged in agony to kingdom come, though she maintained a vague and impersonal sorrow in response. There was a ruined family out there somewhere, a destroyed mother, or sibling. This was the necessary abstraction of invisible death. This was her rigid control and her refusal to be affected. Instead, she was recalling the man smoking in the wheelchair outside Oblomovâs building: his tough, balled form, his messy spray of ash, his obstinate and casually lifeless persistence.
11
In the dark morning a branching frost lay at the windowpane. It glittered, an unearthly plant, in the rays of the standing lamp near the couch. Wrapped in a blanket Cass rose, stiff from uncomfortable sleep, and tapped on the glass to see if the frost would shatter. It remained intact. Its crystal form was a wonder, like so much here in deep winter. It looked such a brittle deposit, but held on, gently ablaze and unsynthetic, scattered like filigree on the surface of the glass.
She tried to recall her dreams, but nothing coherent remained. They had all been there - Marco and Gino, Yukio and Mitsuko, Victor and herself â but nothing bound them in a story, there was no sense truly to be made. They were merely coincidental, figures becoming wisps of human meaning, then threading away, like blown smoke. Wind; she remembered there had been wind in her dream, and that she had felt cold. But this may have been her awkward rest on the couch, the body half-sensing.
An hour later it was still dark, and Mitsuko and Yukio had not woken. Their apartment was immensely quiet and still. Cass took paper and pen from her bag and scribbled ashort note. In the stuffy room she loitered, quiet as a thief. When she had located her coat and scarf, she drew them on, thinking how abnormally loud the rustle of clothing could sound. She left carefully, gliding on tiptoe, pulling the door shut behind her.
Â
Now Berlin was all trains. She saw how fundamentally the city had mapped itself in rail, how the layers it held, the archives, the spaces of its forgettings and transports and covered-over deaths, were reflected horizontally in striations of overgrounds and undergrounds. It was mid-January, freezing, she was a foreigner to the city, and it may have been presumption or madness to imagine it thus: that these configurations of tracks and stations were the structure of its hieroglyph. She rode the U-Bahn heading south towards the ring line. Again, the Brandenberg Gate formed a veil on the windows of the train. The design monument of choice: the firm Doric columns, the prancing horses of Victoriaâs quadriga, the city represented, reduced, to a neat white stamp.
It was not any dark morning in any northern European city, but precisely Berlin . In the rushing underground Cass consulted her map, and counted the lines and the stops. The U-Bahn had ten lines and about 170 stations. The S-Bahn had fifteen lines and 166 stations exactly. They radiated in a wild way not visible
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