Dead Europe (28 page)

In Berlin, where I have to change trains, it is raining. I am ravenous and I walk through the station underpass and into the first fast food place I see. Under the comforting yellow, red and orange banners of McDonald's I order three quarterpounders, two large fries and a German version of the ubiquitous sloppy dessert. I wolf it all down with a giant Coke. I burp and I am happy. It is night in Germany and I have five hours' wait for the train to Paris.

I can recall every moment of the last few days. I can map the contours and recall the textures and minute details of every face: the doomed old couple in Venice; the smiling waitress at the Café Beirut; the sailor who fucked me contemptuously in the sleazy hotel in Brindisi; Pano and Milos, Maria and Syd; the woman on the train. If it had been demanded of me, I could have scripted every word and nuance of the conversations between Sal Mineo and myself. I am all too aware that the events that have occurred on this journey through Europe are objectively perplexing and disturbing. But I do not feel distressed. Instead I am experiencing a remarkable clarity. Without a tremor of guilt or betrayal, I am clear about Sal Mineo's dissipation. He is whoring his art. I understand that the sexual encounter with
the woman on the train had nothing to do with lust, and everything to do with nourishing myself on her blood and her spirit. None of this shames me. Of course, I can give it no clear sense or meaning. This journey seems to be taking me further away from myself, from all my certainties, from even a sense of my own origins.

I let out another large burp and stare around at the sterile space of the restaurant. A dishevelled old woman, a bundle of her belongings held tight underneath one arm, is sipping slowly on a coffee. When I catch her eye, she quickly looks down. Some atrocious pop song, sung in a little girl's voice, is playing on the radio, and a group of dark-haired, dark-skinned boys with blonde-haired, pale-skinned girlfriends are crammed across a tier of seats. They wear a global street style, all brand names and sportswear. There's a grin on my face. I have clarity and I am in control. I feel contempt. The shitty pop song, the frightened old homeless woman, the faux-Yank niggers with their slutty white-trash girfriends: all of them shit, refuse. Nothing.

I deposit my backpack in the railway station lockers, but take my camera. I am not interested in the faces and bodies that I pass as I walk the grim city. Berlin seems devoid of colour. The only splashes of brilliance that pierce the night are those emanating from the plasma television screens that dominate the shop façades. Otherwise, the streets are bleak and dark. But I have no fear of the night and its shadows. Beggars, cops, drunks, teenagers, sullen men, defiant women, gay men in leather, financiers in suits, blacks, whites, Arabs, Turks, Asians, they all pass by me, smoking, laughing, drinking, scowling, grimacing, throwing me looks of hate or diffidence, or curiosity when they spy the camera in my hands. There are the sounds of the city: cars, bars, music, shouting, laughter, fighting. And there are the smells. The whole city stinks, a putrid sewer of filth and waste. The smells are chemical, of the city. There is nothing organic
in any of it. I walk and I wander, a huge smile on my face, aware as I have never been before of my separation from the mass of bodies that throng this metropolis. The whole human species exudes a foul, bitter stench.

It does not cross my mind to take a photograph of any human. Instead I photograph the bricks and steel and mortar and vinyl and plastic and wood and silicon. My flash illuminates a bare automatic teller machine wedged tight between two shopfronts. I capture buildings and streetlights and billboards. I rid Berlin of its people and capture instead the evidence of their passage. I am fascinated by the banal modernity of the city. It is as if history refuses to be trapped in this sterile landscape, as if history never happened. The flashlight falls on the last negligible vestige of the old Wall, and as the light quickly fades, there is a whirr from my camera; my film is exhausted. I buy a kebab at a kiosk and wolf it down. A radio shrieks a Lebanese lament. I lick the juice from my fingers.

I make my way back to the station and I buy a coffee, an English-language copy of
Rolling Stone
, another pack of cigarettes, and I book into an hour session at an all-night internet cafe. I experience no loneliness, no fear. I am not even a tourist in this city, for to consider myself a tourist I would require a home to have begun my journey from. I am above all that. In this heightened state of omnipotence, I don't even miss Colin. I am alone in this world.

But Colin has emailed and I smile to myself on reading his short, restrained message. The cats are well. There is spinach in the garden and the lemon tree is finally producing abundant fruit. I miss you, I love you, he finishes. Colin has an antipathy to the computer. I am touched by his effort. There is an email from Sophie, and she writes about our mother and about my nephew and niece. There's also a message from Clem, who works with me at the video store, and who invites Colin and me to a party the weekend I am to
return to Melbourne. I have to scroll through one hundred and seventy-eight pieces of junk to find these three stray missives from family and a friend. There are two hundred and four messages remaining unread when I look up at the cafe clock and realise I have only ten minutes left on my time. I load page after page of electronic text and scan rapidly through the email addresses. Porn, penile extensions, miracle pills, cheap drugs, insurance advice, gambling opportunities. The list confirms the puerility of the human race. I don't mind, I don't mind it at all. I am experiencing pure joy. The machine is slow in loading new pages and I am tempted to log off and ignore any possible messages from friends. Or the promise of someone, some agency, wanting to look at my photographs. That is what I am really searching for.

In acknowledging this desire, the sense of completeness and power that has buoyed me in this city begins to desert me. Not that I am aware of it immediately. As if descending from a drug rush into a pleasant plateau of stillness, I become slowly aware of my physicality, my body in this space. The computer screen is dusty, the chair I am sitting on too hard, the fluorescent lights in the cafe too harsh. I watch the electronic words tumble across the screen as I keep my finger firmly pressed on the computer mouse. An address captures my attention. The postfix is
fr
: I know no one in France. I look across at the subject attachment, and then I take a deep breath.
Are you the son of Vassili Raftis?

 

Vassili. Bill. Billy boy. Lucky. The various names my father was known by. It was never Basil. That prim English rendering of my father's name never suited him. Of all his names and nicknames, it was Lucky that stuck and the nickname most suited to the continent he was to make his new home. It was a name my father carried well. He was cheerful, he was easygoing, and despite my mother's half-hearted sporadic attempts to make him responsible, he was always
looking for a good time. Lucky, a bastardised abbreviation of the Greek Vassilaki, which means Little Bill, may have an echo in the tender English appellation of Sweet William. He's sweet, your old man, it was said to me of my father. Not cute, not effeminate. Sweet as in alright. As in a good man. My dad was Lucky.

He wasn't Lucky in France. In France he was Guillaume. On the mantelpiece above our gas heater, I have placed an old photograph of my father taken when he was nineteen, and a student in Paris. It is a small black and white photograph. My father is one of a trio of young men, squinting in the sunlight, their arms across each other's shoulders, on one of the bridges that cross the Seine. The three men all have well-groomed, slicked hair, all are wearing identical white shirts and black trousers; they are handsome and smiling. The other men are wearing thin dark ties but my father's shirt is unbuttoned at the neck and a packet of cigarettes is visible in his shirt pocket. My father rarely talked about his two years as a student in France. I know he studied philosophy and politics, and that he still read French literature right up to his death, never wanting to abandon the language. When we were children, Sophie and I would be embarrassed by his eagerness to speak it. We would be on a tram and he would hear French spoken and immediately interrupt and introduce himself to the speaker. Our embarrassment was also laced with a certain resentment that he never introduced the language he loved to his own family. It was a point of separation between himself and his children, and between himself and his wife. French marked another life, another continent, and I believe, another class. You sound like a bloody Kraut, he would answer my stilted attempts to speak high-school French. When he spoke the language I could hear the beautiful measure of it. I was ashamed by my nasal pronunciation. My French is pitiful, but Dad could not help
but instil a love for the country in his children, and when I first arrived in Paris as a young man, I unconsciously dressed as my father did in the photograph I had of him. All austere black and white.

Sitting at the terminal, I am now remembering my father without sadness. I am remembering his unshaven face, the short sharp black bristles that as a child I loved running my fingers across. His clear bright eyes that would seem to implode and be masked by a cloud of film every time he took the heroin into his blood. My hands have dropped to my sides, off the mouse, off the keyboard. I do wish the bastard had not died, that he had had the opportunity to meet Colin. I do wish the fucking prick had lived.

 

—Why did your father come to Australia? Why didn't he just go back to France?

—My
Papou
, my grandfather, insisted he migrate here. He didn't want him to go back to France because he blamed France for my father's politics. Anyway, from what I can understand France was caught up in the Algerian mess they made for themselves and were reluctant to take on any Greek commies. I think
Papou
thought that if Dad was to remain in Europe he'd just be caught up in politics again. He thought Australia would be safer.

—Did he have to leave?

—
Papou
thought so. Dad was already blacklisted, thrown out of university. His family was terrified the next step would be to put him in prison.

Colin finished his coffee. His fingernails were black from the earth and he pulled up his torn pair of trackpants in which he always gardens. His faded indoor-cricket t-shirt was also full of holes. He walked off the porch and began weeding.

—He should have returned to Paris.

His back was to me. I know. Guillaume. Not Lucky.

I open the email. The message is short and the grammar is awkward. He is an old friend of my father and he realises I probably will not remember him. He wishes me to contact him when I reach Paris and he has forwarded a mobile phone number. He signs off, simply, Gerry. No surname, no address, no further details.

I don't remember Gerry. I certainly don't remember any French mate of my father. I write the phone number down on the back of my return plane ticket, and I am about to reply to the email when I receive a message that my time is up. In an hour I will be on the train to Paris.

Berlin. It is my second time through this city and once more all I have seen of it is the railway station and the cold bleak office buildings of its commercial heart. My euphoria has waned and I am tired.

Fuck the Germans, my father had roared, fuck those treacherous Poles and those swindler Czechs. Fuck them all. If the fall of the Berlin Wall had seemed to inaugurate a moment of universal happiness, it was not so in my father's house. They've got what they've always wanted, those dirty Poles: fascism. Same with all of them—fucking dirty Eastern European scum. He spat at the television screen. May your children die in poverty, he roared at the jubilant Hungarians, may you sell your whore bodies to the Americans, he cursed the East Germans leaping through the shattered concrete of the wall. He took their jubilation about capitalism as a personal betrayal, and every slab torn from the wall he saw as an attack on his very own home, his very own property. My father did not believe in a soul, but his spirit hangs over me as I impatiently await the train to Paris. The German faces I brush past in the underground corridors of the railway station seem mute and distant. I can't relax in Berlin; my father's soul won't let me.

The train comes, I board it, take a seat next to a sleeping man, his backpack his pillow, and squeeze past the knobby
knees of a young woman. She smiles at me and I drop into my seat as the train begins its slow chugging journey out of the metropolis. I know I will never return to this city.

 

—Where you are?

There is still a faint trace of Australia in his voice.

—At the Gare du Nord.

—You know how to make the Metro?

—Yes.

He barks out a destination and I ask him to repeat it.

—I will be there.

—How will I recognise you?

—Do not worry. I will know you. I will see Lucky in you.