Beautiful. A lovely shock.
Not that it was remotely unheard of. They took each other’s hands quite a lot. She’d just surprised him on that occasion because they’d spent the weekend fighting until that point: Friday evening on the plane was unhappy, their Saturday had been spent bickering in the Old and New Museums, the National Gallery, the Pergamon Museum — they liked their culture rigorous and swift, or at least he did — then there was unease in a restaurant, and this morning: fighting, fighting, sulking, fighting and sulking. His fault.
‘You booked it on purpose, Dad.’
‘I didn’t, Becky.’ She was right, though — he’d chosen the Hotel Sylter Hof on purpose. ‘I didn’t choose it on purpose. The place was recommended and it’s nice?’ When he was on the back foot, everything emerged as a question. Especially questions. ‘Don’t you think it’s nice? But afterwards I did notice, I checked and I saw that it was … that there was … is a history to the place. And I didn’t change it to somewhere else. I mean, it’s not happening now — it’s history.’
Which fundamentally contradicts everything I believe about history and she bloody knew it.
‘And it is … I have to say … I mean, Rebecca, Berlin has a past …’ I sounded like an utterly patronising moron. ‘There’s no getting away from it without not being in Berlin. And we are in Berlin. So I didn’t change it. Because it’s nice. As a hotel.’
She always understood when he was lying, when he could do nothing else. ‘You can’t help it, can you? Being miserable. You have to be.’
Becky didn’t add Mother was right, but he heard it in any case — the way that only dogs can hear those special whistles when they’re called to heel. ‘I’m not miserable. I’m interested. I like to keep on being interested.’
‘Implying that you think I’ve stopped learning. I’m not interesting now I’m with Terry?’
‘Not at all.’ She glanced at him, appraising, while he bleated, ‘No.’ She always knew.
That was the first of Saturday’s spats. And she had a perfectly valid point: it was probably not fair to pick a hotel — albeit a perfectly acceptable hotel with good reviews — primarily because it stood on the site of what had been the Jüdischen Bruderverein until its forced sale in 1938. And a forced sale did leave an atmosphere of a kind — the pestilent kind — and then, because those intoxicated by the use of force develop a taste for irony, nurture a specialist and heavy-handed brand of humour, the building was taken over by the Reichssicherheitshauptamt Department IV B4 — the department responsible for ‘Jewish Affairs’, which oversaw the seizure of Jews’ homes and possessions, the removal of their German citizenship.
If there’s a department for you, then you must be a problem. A solution to you must be sought.
So he and his daughter were, yes, sleeping not quite where Adolf Eichmann slept, but where he worked, where he and his administrators, his planners and implementers, his civil servants worked. Becky and Jon had been eating their warm little kaiser rolls — warm little Berlin Schrippen — and their hot boiled eggs that morning inside the shadow of a building where human beings in clean and orderly surroundings had proved unable to connect their paperwork with other human beings elsewhere, or with reality, or with pain.
Unable, or unwilling, or uninterested.
Consenting to one hell, so they could avoid another.
Most likely there had been a canteen back then, maybe other warm little Austrian Kaiserbrötchen, other Schrippen, Schwarzbrot, maybe eggs.
Perhaps not always eggs, perhaps not butter, what with the rationing.
The place had been bombed in the end, like so much of the city. Lord, hadn’t it? He and Becky had already explored the sharply modern and forward-looking riverbank development on foot, its immaculate geometries laid out there between the restored Reichstag and the railway station.
The RAF reduced that whole area to a town planner’s dream — wall stubs and rubble, only the Swiss Embassy left standing and that by chance. It’s still there now. And who can guess what it remembers, where it echoes. Not that Speer hadn’t thought he should wipe out the streets himself and start again — build a temple to bloodshed, a monstrous dome as big as a fake mountain and colonnades and boulevards for parading. The things leaders need to help them feel truly like leaders. And anything’s possible once you’ve cleared away inconvenient residences and residents.
Efficient and muscular administration would be required if one were to achieve a plan of such … A legion of servants would have to serve.
What remained of RSHA Department IV B4 had been torn down in the sixties. And a number of people must have planned and some other people must have given appropriate permissions for and some further people must have built and then maintained and some other people must still be making the customary inspections of what now stood in its place. It was a fairly pleasant hotel in which to house temporary visitors who might be unaware of the site’s past and might also not be infected with fatal levels of obliviousness, although no enquiries were made into guests’ moral character, there were no formal vetting procedures and acceptance of bookings was based solely on apparent ability to pay.
Jon hadn’t slept properly during his Friday night at the Hotel Sylter Hof. This was partly because, stretched out in the dark of an anonymous bed, he could still hear, to a degree, the neat ruffling of terrible file cards and the clean peck of ribbon typewriters, summoning in filthy things. They disturbed. As did the thoughts of easy canteen chatter, boredom, office gossip and faraway corpses.
He had lain and checked — fastidiously — that he was the man he thought, who tried to do his job well and to think well, while keeping his grip on wider historical perspectives. Jon always tried to remember how wrong life could go, because that was in his nature and also because, possibly, he came from the humanities. He’d been a European-history specialist. And hiring graduates from the humanities had once served a purpose for the civil service: it had perhaps intended to gather a workforce used to doing more than bouncing along the surface of a subject — or even personnel not unfamiliar with the concepts underlying humanity. Specialists could be called on when necessary: accountants, mathematicians. That had been the way.
IT providers … they were specialists, although Christ knew what purpose they specially, actually served — it seemed one simply fed them money and, some while later, they converted it into insecure shit, uninformative shit, unworkable shit and, in general, shit. And economists — why did you need them? Economics was not a humanity. It was not now, as currently practised, a science. It involved little more than submission to a cult. It made him long for maths, the inarguable truth and perfection of maths.
And he’d always hated maths.
The only mathematical form that I can appreciate is music. Which transcends maths — and a person has to be transcendent somewhere … even me.
Howlin’ Wolf wasn’t thinking of maths when he played. He just felt it. He could feel.
‘Heard the whistle blowin’, couldn’t see no train. Way down in my heart, I had an achin’ pain. How long, how long, baby how long.’
You could see what he felt, know it, share it, taste it.