‘Last week I came by train from Salzburg,’ he said, ‘and there were eight hundred refugees on board.’
‘Eight hundred. And how were they?’
‘Very tired. And hungry. And dirty. Some with children, some with old people. They all want to get to this country because they have friends and family here. Germany is trying to be generous, trying to be kind, but…I took many photographs. If you like I’ll drop some off for you.’
‘Please do. I’d be grateful.’
And I remembered that other photograph from the front pages a few days ago: two or three dozen refugees arriving at a German rail station and being greeted by applause. In the photograph some of the arrivals are smiling, some laughing; and some are just breathing deeply and walking that much taller, it seemed, as if a needful thing had at last been restored to them. I said,
‘Trying to be kind. When I was in Berlin the police closed a crossroads in the Tiergarten. Then bikes and a motorcade coming through. The Austrian prime minister. Faymann, for a little summit with Merkel. Hours later they announced they were sealing the border.’
‘The numbers. The scale.’
‘And the day before yesterday – I was in Salzburg and there were no trains to Munich. All cancelled. We came here by car.’
‘Long wait at the border?’
‘Only if you go on the highway. That’s what the driver told us. He took the parallel roads…In Salzburg there were scores of refugees gathered at the roadsides. Girding themselves for the last leg.’
Bernhardt said, ‘You know, they won’t stop coming. They give up all they have – job, family, house, olive trees. They pay large sums of money to risk their lives crossing the sea, and then they walk across Europe. They walk across Europe. A few policemen and a stretch of barbed wire won’t keep them out. And there are millions more where they came from. Unless Merkel yields to domestic pressure – you know, to the people who call them aliens – the flow’s going to go on for years. And they won’t stop coming. Wir schaffen das, she says – we can do this. But can we?’
II
It was two o’clock. I had forty-five minutes (my book tour was winding down, and this was not a busy day). In the bar I waited at the steel counter…When Bernhardt asked me how I was bearing up after three weeks on the road in Europe, I said I was well enough, though chronically underslept. Which was true…And actually, Bernhardt, to be even more frank with you, I feel unaccountably anxious, anxious almost to the point of formication (which the dictionary defines as ‘a sensation like insects crawling over the skin’); it comes and goes…Home was 4,000 miles away, and six hours behind; pretty soon, it would be quite reasonable, surely, to return yet again to my room and see if there were any fresh bulletins from that quarter. For now I looked mistrustfully at my phone; in the email inbox there were over 1,800 unopened messages, but from wife, from children, as far as I could tell, there was nothing new.
The heroically methodical bartender duly set his course in my direction. I asked for a beer.
‘Non-alcoholic. D’you have that?’
‘I have – one per cent alcoholic.’
We were both needing to shout.
‘One per cent.’
‘Alcohol is everywhere. Even an apple is one per cent alcoholic.’
I shrugged. ‘Go on then.’
The beer the Oktobrists were drinking by the quart was 13 per cent, or double strength; this at any rate was the claim of the young Thomas Wolfe who, after a couple of steins of it, acquired a broken nose, four scalp wounds, and a cerebral haemorrhage after a frenzied brawl (which he started) in some festival mud pit – but that was in 1928. These male celebrants in fancy dress at the bar had been drinking since 9 a.m. (I saw and heard them at breakfast) before setting off for the Biergarten, if indeed they ever went there. I saw them and heard them the night before, too; at that point they were either gesticulating and yelling in inhumanly loud voices, or else staring at the floor in rigid penitence, their eyes woeful and clogged. Then as now, the barman served even the drunkest of them with unconcern, going about his tasks with practised neutrality.
I was carrying a book: a bound review proof of the forthcoming Letters to Véra, by Véra’s husband, Vladimir Nabokov. But the voices around me were insurmountably shrill – I could concentrate on what I was reading, just about, but I could extract no pleasure from it. So I took my drink back into the foyer, where the pianist had resumed. The businessman was still on the phone; as before we were sitting two tables from each other, and back to back. Occasionally I heard snatches (‘Have you got any office method where you are? Have you?’). But now I was slowly and appreciatively turning the pages, listening to that other voice, VN’s: humorous, resilient, boundlessly inquisitive and energetic. The letters to Véra begin in 1923; two years earlier he sent his mother a short poem – as proof ‘that my mood is as radiant as ever. If I live to be a hundred, my spirit will still go around in short trousers’.
As January dawned in 1924, Vladimir (a year older than the century) was in Prague, helping his mother and two younger sisters settle into their cheap and freezing new apartment. (‘Jesus Christ, will you listen? Will you listen?’) These former boyars were now displaced and deracinated – and had ‘no money at all’. (‘5C? No. No, 4C. 4C for Christ’s sake.’) Vladimir himself, like his future wife, the Judin Véra Slonim, had settled in Berlin, along with almost half a million other Russian fugitives from October 1917. And in Berlin they
