In the afternoon he collected his suitcase from left luggage and took the S-Bahn to East Berlin. He already felt as if he had been away from home for weeks. At Bahnhof Friedrichstrasse he was sent from one window to the next for an hour and a half by needling Vopos with forms and still more forms. Passport, visa, all his money on the table, take off those sunglasses at once! However, he realized that he was not just going from one half of the city to the other, not only from one country to another, but from one world to another. He looked at the fenced-off Brandenburg Gate and walked along Unter den Linden, where there was a refreshing calm. The difference between West and East Berlin was like that between the Amsterdam of 1967 and that of 1947. Everywhere on the unpainted housefronts there was nothing but ideological advertising slogans on red banners: ARTISTS AND CULTURAL WORKERS, INSPIRE THE WORKFORCE WITH YOUR ART TO ENSURE THE TRIUMPH OF SOCIALISM. Passers-by cast glances at his French summer suit, Italian shoes, American shirt, and English tie; now and again someone spoke to him, wanting to change marks at a rate of four to one.
The end of the avenue, opposite the recessed square where the book burning had taken place in 1933, he went into the Neue Wache: a small neoclassical building with a columned portico, where two motionless soldiers were resisting the giggling attentions of a group of curious onlookers. Inside, in a crystal cube, an eternal flame burned above the urns of the unknown soldier and the unknown resistance fighter, DEN OPFERN DES FASCHISMUS UND MILITARISMUS, it said in gold letters on the side wall, but he was given no time to meditate; the hall was gently cleared, and when he came outside, the relief guard was approaching along Unter den Linden with martial music and squeaking boots. The orders, the goose step, bodies that seemed to be joined together, the awesome Prussian precision with which fifty rifle butts slammed onto the pavement like a single butt, the whole unfathomable ceremonial elicited mainly giggling from the Berliners — and the only one who felt his eyes growing moist was himself, because though it was militaristic, it was nevertheless intended for the victims of fascism.
Guidebook in hand, he wandered on through the city and felt as if he were wading knee-deep through history. Finally, in the deserted Otto-Grotewohlstrasse, once the Wilhelmstrasse, he stared for minutes at a sunny lawn where the Reichskanzlei had stood. A swelling tumor indicated where the entrance to the bunker had been; below, deep in the ground, the monster had finally fired his first shot since the First World War: into his mouth. Max nodded in approval. Having a sweet tooth has its uses, he thought.
To his delight, the night train to Katowice was still pulled by a hissing and shuddering locomotive with an archaic whistle. They were kept waiting for hours at the Polish border. A succession of new officials in different uniforms walked down the corridor and slid open the compartment doors; the train moved backward, forward, bumped into other carriages, left the station, came back into the station, while outside one could see watchtowers, searchlights, jeeps full of soldiers, a boot sticking halfway out of a car. He felt utterly content. Finally, everything was different. In the sparse light he tried to read an article by some English colleagues on the discovery of a new kind of radio source, a "pulsar"; they had been rash enough to admit that they had even considered the possibility of an extraterrestrial civilization. But he could not concentrate on the technical details. Up to now he had been facing the engine; now he entered Poland with his back to it, so that he had the feeling of returning home. The guard kept returning with blacker and blacker exchange rates for the zloty, but he thought it advisable not to accept; the peasant woman on the seat opposite, with a scarf around a snorting piglet in a basket on her lap, seemed to hear nothing. Near Gliwice everyone began getting up and collecting their things — Max knew that this was the former Gleiwitz, on the former German-Polish border, where Hitler had staged an "incident" as a pretext for invading Poland the following day. This was where it had all begun.
He booked into a run-down family hotel in the center of Krakow. Had Lysenko been right after all? Were even experiences hereditary? It felt like coming home. When he opened his balcony doors overlooking the quiet, overgrown courtyard, he was surrounded by a strange, indescribably familiar smell of brown coal, linked to a temperature which must be exactly the same as that of his skin: it was as though his body were expanding as far as the walls of the surrounding buildings. Afterward, in the town, he tried to take in the thought that his father had also walked around here, with a stiff leather satchel on his back; but it would not come into focus. The high school looked like all high schools, with Ionic columns and a pediment over the entrance. In a cafe, where he was given a glass of water with his coffee, he looked in the telephone book to see if there was still a Delius living in the town, a male or female cousin perhaps; but of course all the German-speakers had left for the rump of Austria immediately after the First World War. Perhaps there were still Deliuses in Prague, Vienna, or Budapest, where he was planning to go next. He spent the rest of the day as a tourist— admired the cathedral, stood at the tombs of Polish kings, walked in woollen overshoes across the parquet floors of hundreds of pointless rooms in Wawel Castle.
The following morning at the crack of dawn, he took the local train back along the north side of the triangle to Katowice. Flat fields, bleak and deserted under an overcast sky, impoverished villages, children waving at the train from the courtyards of wooden farmhouses, gloomy woods, gradually changing into a black industrial landscape of mines and factories and then an endless railway yard full of goods trains. He wandered aimlessly through the silent streets for a couple of hours, inhaling the heavy, damp smell of coal and sulfur, and looked at the woman street sweepers.
Would his own child ever walk through Amsterdam and Leiden like this? He found himself thinking immediately of Ada. Did this mean that he should go back to her? Since she had left, he had had no further contact with her, had in fact half forgotten her. Imagine her ringing him up to announce that she was pregnant with his child. What would he do? But that was impossible; the pill took care of that. He put these thoughts aside and went back to the station. The train took him along the base of the triangle to Bielsko-Biala, thirty miles farther south. But in that town, too, where his grandmother had screamed at his father's birth, he heard no echo. The feeling of familiarity, which had originally inspired him, had receded. Perhaps Lysenko had not been entirely right. An hour later he traveled back along the southern side of the triangle to Krakow, looked at the crows in the fields, at the horses and horsecarts on the country roads, and wondered whether he ought to have listened to Onno.