Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project (50 page)

‘He continued his walk which was not, after all, the exploration of a tourist but in the nature of a pre-pilgrimage to places, at present unhallowed, which might become as haunted for him as, say, certain corners of Dublin or the row of iron huts on the Curragh plain. How little he foresaw that nothing from the past had prepared him for what was to come!’

Erich Mendelsohn’s Einsteinturm was suddenly there, of its time and ours. The realized signature of an idea: deep steps, recessed windows, an unashamedly priapic form. A sketch, swift and sure, manifested in the world, creating a force field powerful enough to keep witnesses at a respectful distance. The tower grew out of a lawn, set among the woods, like the periscope of a submarine emerging from the earth. The thrust of a shamanic observatory from an era of discontinued modernism. Concrete maturing into radiant white skin.

A note was pinned to the door: ‘Dear Visitors – The Einsteinturm is no museum but a Solar Observatory of the Astrophysical Institute of Potsdam.’ We had walked, therefore, beyond the city of museums, beyond towers that were open to the public, sanctioned sites where tourists are invited to wonder at the achievements of past generations of men. In progressing around the meandering paths of the hill, we had triggered a more complex narrative, which would somehow play itself out against the shape of this expressionist structure.

The visionary homage to Einstein belonged in the film studios, down below us, with the wild-eyed scientists and mesmerists of Fritz Lang and Robert Wiene. In 1923, a year of hyperinflation in Germany, when loaves of bread cost 428 billion marks, Lang’s scientific adviser, Hermann Oberth, published a 92-page book called
Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen
(‘The Rocket into Interplanetary Space’). Inspired by his childhood reading of Jules Verne, Oberth – who lived, like Hitler, in Munich – contrived a text to fascinate film-makers, as well as industrialists and ambitious students of engineering like Wernher von Braun. ‘Interest in spaceflight often seemed to coincide with flight into hard-right politics,’ wrote Wayne Biddle in
The Dark Side of the Moon
.

The Einsteinturm, built to test the validity of the Theory of Relativity, worked in ways far beyond its original remit. Mendelsohn described it as a ‘heavenly project’. The authorities in Potsdam dragged their feet over budgets and technical specifications, delaying completion to the point where the tower became operational at the very moment when Oberth’s book was published. The white stump on its solid base was a launch pad for pure research. Equations formulated here were as dangerous in their implications as the Peenemünde rocket experiments that curved towards urban devastation, astral policing and dreams of total war.

Einstein’s thesis having been tested and proved elsewhere, Mendelsohn’s tower became an occupied sculpture conceived by a Jewish architect to honour a Jewish scientist: as well as a demonstration of the technological heritage of the defeated Reich. In its present form, after extensive restoration in 1999, the declared aim of the tower is: ‘to gather data on solar and nuclear physics’. While its covert purpose, I discovered, was to shred received notions and dissolve them into the cosmic stew, a general theory of everything: physics and poetry, Dublin and Berlin. Celtic myths and the dark gods of the forest intertwined like vegetative script from
The Book of Kells
.

The physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who generalized Einstein’s relativity by using four-dimensional geometry with antisymmetric components and connections, received a personal invitation from De Valera to move to Ireland to help establish an Institute for Advanced Studies in Clontarf. Appointed as Director of the School of Theoretical Physics in 1940, Schrödinger stayed in Dublin for seventeen years, fathering two children after involvements with students, and becoming a devotee of the Vedanta philosophy of Hinduism. Individual consciousness, he believed, was only a manifestation of a unitary consciousness pervading the universe. He apologized to Einstein for recanting on his outspoken criticism of the Nazis, a position he was forced to adopt in order to safeguard his tenure at the University of Graz. It was in correspondence with Einstein that he proposed the thought experiment in which a cat is neither alive nor dead. Or both at the same time.

Affected by the vision of the tower, I returned with Anna for a fortnight’s stay in Dublin, the city in which we had met as students, but never revisited. Space–time anomalies permitted us, like Schrödinger’s cat, to be in two places at once; blessed with a special tenderness for the sea town in the rain, as we walked or rewalked half-remembered routes between Howth Head and Dalkey. Anna said that she had seen more in this brief stay than in the four years of her student life, which was now a kind of dream. A trio of old folk, out on the razzle, made it their business to find us the site of the vanished hotel where we spent the first night of our married life. In the long, light evenings, possessed by an agenda of her own, Anna tracked down the bars that had survived and the ones that had transformed themselves into Mexican restaurants or tourist hotels. The priests had vanished from the streets and the beggars were now site-specific professionals from the Balkans. One night we took ourselves off to a travelling circus pitched alongside the house where Bram Stoker was born.

We had been on the move for so many months that it was impossible to fix our coordinates. We slumped on a bench, in a damp park, or a windblown square in mid-construction, and the world raced past us. Potsdam on the S-Bahn was Shepperton out of Waterloo: woods, reservoirs, film studios, the connection to the city stretched to its limits. Hermann Oberth’s proposal for the spacecraft with the giant mirror could have come straight from Ballard’s
Vermilion Sands.
When Brigid Marlin sent me back to
The Kindness of Women
in search of her fictionalized presence, I found an incident that could only happen when time was being sucked into a black hole. Ballard and Fritz Lang, two confirmed self-mythologizers, come face to face. And it happens in South America.

‘An elderly man in an oversized tuxedo sat on a straightbacked chair turned sideways to the wall. He slumped in the chair like an abandoned ventriloquist’s dummy, buffeted by the noise and music, the light show dappling his grey hair a vivid blue and green. He looked infinitely weary, and I thought that he might have died among these garish film people. When I shook his hand and briefly told him how much I admired his films, there was a flicker of response. An ironic gleam flitted through one eye, as if the director of
Metropolis
had realised that the dystopia he had visualised had come true in a way he had least expected.’

For a long time I stayed away from the Acropolis … It’s what we have rescued from madness … There are obligations attached to such a visit.

– Don DeLillo

They were going to hunt dogs with guns, the Berliner said, to clear the streets for the Olympics. He was in Hackney now, where the buzz was, an architect, but he had been in Athens in 2002, when the deals were going down and the grand project was under way. And the inspectors, flown in from all corners, lavishly lodged and entertained, were getting nervous. I sat in an afternoon pub, beside a street market that seemed to have migrated across town from Notting Hill, close to a stretch of the Regent’s Canal that had been peremptorily closed, fenced, drained. Instead of dogs, perhaps they were going to kill fish, or the birds that feed on them. No work was in progress, but the exclusion zone was briskly set up and policed by the usual yellow tabards. The challenge, trying to discommode stubborn pedestrians, always comes from the wrong direction: ‘What are you doing on the towpath?’ Good question. I’ve been trying to find an answer for years. But it is where I am, where I like to be, every morning. At their first appearance, the invaders assume absolute authority, without explanation or apology. What are
you
doing here? And from where does the conviction, about the rightness of your piracy, emanate?

The double-banked lines of narrowboats, council-tax dodgers, have been dispersed. Cyclists are thrown into the murderous stream of Mare Street. A procession of women, all ages, being taught how to swing their arms while marching (and talking) at pace, runs slap against the plywood barrier. As a precaution, the authorities have painted a white line around the former boating lake in Victoria Park. You can’t be too careful of this stuff, the alien medium: water. Comb off the algae carpet, the duckweed, and prepare to airlift in a dune or two of cheap sand, with deckchairs and parasols, for the creation of an urban beach. A rising hysteria grips the fortunate Olympic boroughs, funny money is available, in serious quantities, for those who can come up with the right kind of fun. If you are going to hunt dogs, Victoria Park would not be a bad place to start. But that’s not what the German meant, it must have been his wicked sense of humour. He was part of a nocturnal cycle patrol, middle-class professionals, architects, graphic designers, financial journalists, who cruise the city searching out interesting properties to squat, hip industrial sites preferred, with visible pipes and naked brickwork, Crittall windows.

Pre-Olympic Hackney was an open city: Bill Parry-Davies told me that he hoped to get £200,000 from the council, to allow the long-term squatter known as ‘The Owl Man of Albion Drive’ to relocate with his wounded birds to the country. The budget for the transport-hub slab at Dalston Junction, serving bus routes, climbed vertiginously, and without explanation, from £26 million to something closer to £60 million. The consortium involved in this project, Balfour Beatty and Carillion, was alleged to have been engaged in bid-rigging activities over public contracts in the Midlands. After what appeared to be some American-style ‘plea bargaining’, a reduced fine of £10 million was paid. TfL reassure us that Best Value is integral to the planning process. And central government confirm that a ‘transport interchange’ is essential for the 2012 Olympics. Even though, as Lord Low of Dalston points out in a letter to the
Hackney Gazette
, none of the buses using this facility will actually go anywhere near the Olympic Park.

Those dogs stayed with me when I left for Athens. I had seen film footage shot two years after the 2004 Games: loping beasts, freelance caretakers patrolling the overgrown wilderness of the futurist sculpture park that once housed the Olympic complex, out at Maroussi. Furtive ghosts in shaggy coats demonstrating a classical trajectory of fate: how those who are condemned, without justification, become the sole occupiers of the deserted palace for which they were the intended sacrifice. Now, starting early, to get to the new Acropolis Museum before the promised crowds, I noticed cats scavenging from the lip of a brightly polished litter bin; sleek, piebald creatures leaning back, using fat tails for balance, as they sniff the refuse. Pavements are rain-washed and scrupulously clean. The graffiti, in this high-visibility tourist zone, is Arabic, framed in cracked marble panels at the base of the steps like calligraphy by Cy Twombly.

The tribal dogs, wolfish spirits of place, skulking guardians of something that has been lost, circumambulate the major tourist attractions without feeling an obligation to tout or charm. They are the unculled, collateral victims of the Olympic gaze: heavy-pelted German-shepherd types, down on their luck, war veterans with a folk memory of clover-munching sheep. And fluffed-up, pinkish creatures also, on very thin legs, like wealthy matrons from the Kolonaki district caught in the rain without their dark glasses. Feral packs roamed the old city, it’s what dogs do: test architecture designed to be abandoned and recall the years before they were enslaved as household pets. They scrounged at restaurants and tavernas with Balkan insouciance. While unaffiliated cats blanketed roofs like gently stirring fur underlay; they stretch, arch, settle on the corrugated iron of Monastiraki Station or the skeleton of the wrecked café, halfway up the limestone plug of Lycabettus Hill.

At the dawn of a new golden age for Greece, with Elena Paparizou about to carry off the Eurovision Song Contest in 2005, and the football team grinding out a victory over Portugal, 1–0, in the final of Euro 2004, rough-trade canines were seen, by outsiders, as a cosmetic issue. You couldn’t blow billions of euros on a reef of fabulous stadiums, an immaculate Metro system, Baghdads of synchronized fireworks, and have TV coverage fouled up with drooling, belly-on-the-floor bandits, begging for leftovers and shitting on your shoes. There was talk, the Berliner was right about that, of taking them out, not with guns and blood (and ugly press): by the traditional Socratic solution, poison. But the dogs were family, and were treated as such: cleaned-up, neutered, turned loose.

The €9 billion spent on the Olympic party was equivalent to the amount financial experts reckoned investors were siphoning out of Greek banks to bury in Cyprus or Switzerland when the collapse finally came, just as I visited Athens early in 2010. The people I talked to, students, academics, film-makers, all agreed: it had been a monumental, epoch-defining opening ceremony. The children of the middle-class suburbs, out by the mountains, down at the coast, queued up to volunteer, to play their part as marshals or programme sellers. Everybody had the DVD of the firework night, it was still selling. Nobody remembered what happened after that. One young woman, a highly qualified lawyer, now working off-the-book for around €400 a month, recalled the only Olympic event she’d actually witnessed. ‘There were horses dancing. Very pretty.’ The story of the drug-cheat sprinters and their staged motorcycle accident, on the eve of an appointment with the testers, has been quietly forgotten. There are different takes on this kind of behaviour. ‘Better a thief than a fool.’ Students help each other in exams, everybody gets the same grades. The honour of the group is salvaged. They told me how they demonstrated most afternoons, stoning the Hilton Hotel, or marching to the American Embassy: their only form of exercise. Once established as a student, the hard part has been done, you can maintain that status, failing or avoiding exams, for years, as an alternative career.