(<-- to Part I & II)
PART III
Memory is a curse. Berlin’s schizophrenia exists in the sense of having too many memories. Like the rest of us, his past is erased physically each day by a new present, as he changes, shaves, eats, breathes. His body replaces those old cells with new ones, as each day fades into dusk, and disappears into the nigh. But memory stores them all, so well and so cunningly. All those fragments collected inside the unlimited abyss in our heads, and on a bad day, they haunt us and chase us, and on a good day, they pride us and reassures us. But unlike the rest of us, Berlin remembers beyond his present life. He remembers every soul that he had ever been before. He’s a 1000 year old stuck in a 23 year old’s body. His past lives come back to haunt him as sights, sounds, smells, touch, and tastes that triggered pain, sufferings, by-gone glories and battles lost.
800 hundred years ago he was a boatsman, running ships for Hansa merchants that traded bundles of fur, grain and logs of timber through the Spree, to the Baltic, to the North Sea, to far off places and to people that spoke different tongues and had a different shade of skin. On land, he lived with his wife and their 8 children, and his four brothers and their family in the market village next to Lange Brucke. They rose with the sun and worshipped the moon, and drank beer as if it was water, until a fire set by his debtors wiped out his entire clan. Four hundred years ago Berlin was a Jewish refugee expelled from Vienna that was invited into settle in Berlin by Kaiser Fredrik Wilhelm, who’s religious tolerance allowed immigrants of all trades and creeds to settle in Berlin to help him build a
more sophisticated city of diverse, well skilled and resourceful population. Despite her family providing an essential lending and financial backbone to Berlin’s growing business life, when she died, at child birth aged 21, they still insisted that her family bury her outside of the city, nine or ten miles away from her home. Her family found her a fortification where she could rest in peace without her grave being desecrated. A hundred years ago Berlin was a man working in a sooty munitions factory for hours on end, but nevertheless made time to play football on Sundays after Church. He joined the Communist Party rallies, went on strikes, and handed out leaflets of propaganda. But despite all this, he still died a few years later, poisoned by British phosgene in a cold, muddy, rat infested trench in Belgium. Sixty-four years ago he was a women who tirelessly survived the bomb raids during the war, only to be raped by Russian soldiers as they took over the city in April 1945, spat on and kicked at as they left her sobbing in pain and in shame behind an alleyway. But she held her head up high as she joined the other women in cleaning away rubbles, planting vegetables in plots of shrapnel littered land, and brought up her children on rations, as the Russians, Americans, French, and British cut her city up in pieces again.
Nineteen years ago, his mother took him across the boarder to the West for the first time, to look for his father, who had fled across the Wall a few years back, and they had not heard from him since. Later he met his father’s new family, the spoilt brats called Amsterdam and Copenhagen, and the bitch of a stepmother called Paris. But he still smiles politely at their dinner table and drank their wine. He figured that he never remembered anything happy from those memories from his cursed past lives, and that in this life now, he should be creating something good, something worth remembering and worth 
living for. Something his future lives won’t have to shudder at the thought of.
And he can.
Because now he can do what ever he likes. He dresses in second hand clothes – a slouchy zip jacket with white stripes, multi coloured sneakers, fitted jeans, big rimmed glasses, panama hat adorned in a red pheasant feather, and sports a 3-day stubble. He can spray paint his poems on the side walk, smoke a spliff by the canal, he can even snog another man in the park without being arrested, jump a fence without being shot at, and put on a play about the Prime Minister without his books being burnt. He doesn’t care if no one else likes him, as long as he likes himself. And that I like him. Like how all the ladies like him.......................................
Much of old Berlin was erased during World War II, and with the East-West division soon after it, Berlin never had the chance to rebuild itself into its old pre-war form like Munich or Dresden. There were 3.7 million people living in Berlin in 1936, and by 1946 there were only 1.2 million, including the occupying forces. First the Jews – sent to their deaths across the concentration camps in Europe, then the soldiers – dying in battle for Fascism, then the other residents – women, children, the elderly, buried under rubbles. Undetonated bombs, as heavy as 2000 pounds, are still being found in and around Berlin after almost 70 years. During the Wall years, West Berlin was still very much an empty shell isolated from the rest of West Germany, and only attracted the young and the rebellious, and the Turkish immigrants that were sent in to support its lack of labour. Even after the Wall came down, despite the efforts in trying to rebuild the city and despite it being the capital of one of the most powerful countries in Europe, it had never really economically recovered from the WWII or the Cold War. Berlin today has 3.4 million people, still short of its pre-war population, and has no industry to support itself economically. The unemployment rate had been going up and down between 20 – 30% in the last few years, so a huge percentage of its population survives on handouts from the government. But neither has it been, reportedly, affected much by the current global economic crisis
because, ironically, it is already ‘so poor’ that it doesn’t have much further to fall. Yet strangely, its renewed political prowess and its ‘poor but sexy’ character continues to draw an eclectic mix of intellectual, political and creative residents.
When the Wall came down, Berliners made immediate steps architecturally and infrastructurally to re-link the city, to fill both physical and mental voids and divisions created by the Wall and the no-man’s lands. The previous outline of the Wall could still be seen on the ground like a scars. Despite having the actual structure being leveled down, one can still see the bricks of the foundation clearly running along the ground. Cars drive over those lines, trains run through them, houses and gardens rose from the wasteland, and children throw balls across spaces where bullets used to fire from one side to another.
History collects and shadows, like memory builds and curses. The grand and magnificent buildings like the Berlin Dome, Bode Museum, the Old Synagogue – a lush and glorious reminder of Berlin’s 18th Century grandeur at the peak of Europe’s industrialising and colonising prowess, stands side to side with the kitsch TV Tower, and the straight rows of rectangular, blunt Soviet building blocks that rose out of the rubbles. Further on, remains of bombed out sights like the Kaiser Dome and a large cordoned off section at the old Warschauer Str station is kept like how it was found. The former is kept on purpose, like the Peace Dome at the A-bomb Peace Memorial in Hiroshima, for future generations to ponder – on horrors of war that they shall not ever want to experience and on a collective guilt that shall be shared and inherited. The latter is simply kept there because it happened to be located in no-man’s-land during the division of East and West Germany, and even after the Wall came down, the
lack of public funds and the subsequent take over of the surroundings by squatters gave people another excuse to not have to clean it up. A procrastination that has been gotten away with for so long, that it no longer needed to be attended to. That is, unless the multinational developers of O2 fame shall never lay their fingers on that part of the waterfront.
Like any other big city, the rich
and poor, the haves and have nots live side by side. Except the rich here are better at keeping a low profile, not really willing to flaunt their wealth or status, and humbly keep to themselves in Charlottenberg and Shöneberg, or try and loose themselves amongst the yuppy young parents in Mitte or Prenzlauerberg. Apart from around Embassies, I’ve never seen big BMWs purring around the streets, and the affluent here still wear expensive clothes, but independent boutique labels from Scandinavia, and not bling-bling stuff like Prada or Louis Vuitton. At least not a despicable, filthy kind of rich. The have-nots seems to be everywhere in Berlin, not like in other big cities where they are only pushed out to ‘ghetto’ areas in the fringes. Its not that they are not out there, its just they are everywhere. The old beggars in the squares in Neukolln, drug dealers with their warted hounds at the train stations, drunks on the trains, Romas in the parks, Turkish teenagers selling stolen bikes on the bridge...This city has tolerance for them, cheap living costs, good social programs, methadone, a liberal outlook and a generous state that keeps them alive, if just. But it has decay, violence, history that comes in cycles, a culture of dependency, and more than anything else, sadness, and above all, no solutions. The students, artists and musicians are not really the haves
or have-nots. Some of them are rich, though many of them are poor. But it seems like those questions are beyond their concerns. They have their mental and physical creative space, they have their government supplements that can afford to buy enough in this cheap city, their chemical vices, and their networks and communities that will always have a bed for them somewhere. They survive day to day on adrenalin, on freedom, on self-confidence and on hope.
...................................
r-blown toy baseball bats, and he encouraged me to take one and smash the place up with him. So I did, guiltily. A waitress came down the stairs and I asked her if I should pay for the damages. “No,” She said, “but you’ll have to pay for lunch, 7 Euros.” So I did. I appeared in the lounge at the RCS lobby. M-1 walked in, and gave me an animated black and white pencil drawing of a man on a bicycle. He said his mother did that drawing, and she would like me to have it. I was half baffled as he walked out. Then T walked in, and presented me with a felt-tip drawing by his mother, of a scribbled multicoloured sunset against the Eiffel Tower. He said she really wanted me to have it. I clutched the drawings from M-1 and T’s mothers under an arm, and opened a big heavy elaborately carved door, and disappeared in
to a grey misty evening. I just evaporated................................................
Do I have memories? I thought I didn’t pack them with me in my backpack, but they tagged along anyway, obviously. They came back to me via melodies. Sounds linger in one’s mind longer than visions. One may remember words said as records of particular messages, information and meanings, but music trigger whole scenes, colours, an entire mood. When I hear a particular song by Feist, when I would be just sitting in a café or wandering in a bookshop, I would be transported back into an evening in the kitchen of the apartment I had in London, after a day trip to Cambridge, and floods of both sorrow and happiness would rush into my chest. Her soft wounded voice grinds at my heart but the lightness of the melody and strums sent me to another place, and I don’t know whether to love her or to hate her.
.......................................
Because of Memory, the curse that it is.
Memory sliced off a piece of my heart and buried it at the bottom of a garden somewhere deep in another continent, amongst plump Jeruselum artichokes that grew out of abandonment, and cherry tomatoes, clear like droplets of blood in the desert sand. I wonder if it’s still there, pumping away, or if it had been dug up by a neighbourhood dog, and eaten for dinner. Either way, I don’t know....................................
And I’m sorry. I just needed to save myself.
(TO BE CONTINUED)
Row row row your boat
