to for most of his life, and he still uses the same cup, only survivor of a once-complete tea set. For many years he has held this hot cup in the morning, and it has given him the resolve to put the night away.
He switches on his television for a bit of sound to eat his beans by.
He is irritated by the weather programmes that come on the international channels. Ignorant people judging the world’s weather. In that place it will be a nice day because there is pure sunshine. They estimate a nice day as when you can sit outside in sunglasses and drink coffee that no normal person can afford. Their minds cannot consider that a place is full of people cursing because there is no rain. They say: There it will be a nice sunny day today. Or: There they will have to suffer rain. What do they drink, these people? he thinks.
And here there has not been rain for so long.
He hears explosions: there is another war in Iraq, and now Bulgaria is sending troops to assist the Americans in their occupation. He pictures the journeys of his childhood, when Baghdad was part of his family, when his father strived to connect that great city with silver rails to Berlin. He thinks of his dead mother, who would be driven mad if she knew of her country’s assault on those places she loved so much. How time changes things, he thinks: making people forget who they were, and turning them against their own kind.
He switches the channel.
It is a science documentary, and Ulrich hears how the world has far more computing capacity than it needs. Most computers are idle for most of the time. He hears that when a modern computer is idle it switches into a reverie, and displays on the screen a meditative pattern, like fishes swimming, or whizzing stars, or geometric designs. At any one moment, most computers in the world are occupied in this way. They sit alone in dark, after-hour offices, considering the movement of fish or the emptiness of space.
Ulrich thinks about a planet full of computers with nothing to do except daydream.
In his own idle moments, Ulrich makes lists in his head. He makes lists of journeys he has made, and animals he has eaten. Making lists gives him a sense that he is in command of his experiences. It helps him to feel he is real.
He makes lists of the pills he has to take each day, though in reality it is his neighbour who takes the responsibility. She draws up grids that she pins to the cupboard door to remind herself, and she walks back and forth to check them as she pours out the pills, because she is never sure. Her step is uneven as she goes, and the floor creaks with the heaviness of one side, the left or the right. She has referred before to problems with her legs, but Ulrich does not know exactly what is wrong.
He has a strong feeling about the calendars that she makes: they seem like divine plans, sustaining him in life.
‘I cannot die yet,’ he jokes with her as she draws them, ‘or who will take all those pills?’
He has many more lists. He makes a list of activities that, when they have been proposed to him, have always triggered the thought ‘That is not for me’. A list of things he would tell his son about himself, if he ever saw him. A list of things he never enjoyed, though he always said he did. A list of things that comprise, in his view, the minimal requirements for a happy life. He makes a list of his possessions, as if it were a will:
| Item: | One armchair. |
| Item: | One television. |
| Item: | One writing desk. |
| Item: | Two photograph albums with photographs. |
| Item: | Books, assorted. |
| Item: | Gramophone records, assorted. |
| Item: | Gramophone player. |
| Item: | One bed. |
| Item: | Kitchen utensils, various. |
| Item: | Clothes, various. |
| Item: | Tools, various. |
There are several things he does not include. Paint, ashtrays, various kinds of string and sewing thread, medical supplies, writing ink, cleaning fluids, playing cards. There is a host of objects like this that seem too insignificant to be part of a list.
7
SOME DECADES BEFORE Ulrich arrived in Berlin, German scientists made a philosophical leap that would change history. They rejected the idea that life is a unique and mystical essence, with different qualities from everything else in the universe. They reasoned instead that living things were only chemical machines, and they speculated that with enough research, chemical laboratories could emulate life itself.
They began to experiment with making medicines, not merely from trees or plants, but from man-made chemicals. A triumph came in 1897, in the laboratories of the chemical company Bayer, when chemists observed several positive effects of the first synthetic drug: aspirin. Not long afterwards, the chemist Paul Ehrlich, who was seeking a cure for the sleeping sickness that devastated his compatriots in the German Congo, injected infected mice with hundreds of different chemicals until he found that an industrial dye cured the disease – and so discovered the first antibiotic. Ehrlich coined the term ‘chemotherapy’ to describe the great new work he had started off.
German scientists also wanted to see whether chemical laboratories could make materials that were usually found only in nature. The world was running out of natural nitrogen deposits, for instance, and agriculturalists were concerned about how they would continue to fertilise crops. Populations were exploding. Doomsayers began to warn of imminent famine, and people dying off in swathes. The Berlin chemist Fritz Haber began to seek a chemical solution to this problem. Working with BASF, he discovered a way of fixing the enormous supplies of nitrogen in the air, and turning them into ammonia for fertilisers. He won a Nobel Prize for his discovery, and a large fortune, and the newspapers called him the saviour of the human race.
When its empire was taken away after the First World War, Germany was deprived of access to essential raw materials. It was set far behind Britain, which could take all the Malayan rubber it wanted, and Middle Eastern oil. Germany’s chemical firms – BASF, Bayer, Agfa, Hoechst, Casella, and the rest – were consolidated into a vast chemical cartel, I. G. Farben, whose objective was to produce chemical versions of these lacking natural resources.
Farben’s synthetic rubber and oil technologies soon became the envy of the world. Within a few years, it was the largest corporation in Europe, with stakes in oil companies, steelworks, armaments manufacturers, banks and newspapers – in Germany and across the globe. It had its own mines for coal, magnesite, gypsum and salt, and cartel arrangements with leading American companies DuPont, Alcoa and Dow Chemical.
It was in Farben’s laboratories that a chemist named Hermann Staudinger, while attempting to synthesise natural rubber, first hypothesised that there might exist molecules much more extensive than any hitherto imagined. These giant molecules, he suggested, would be arranged in mobile, chain-like structures, which explained the unusual flexibility of rubber. Staudinger’s work on polymers won him a Nobel Prize, and set the course for a new direction in chemistry: the development of plastics.
This new area of innovation transformed the human environment. Until that era, every human being had lived among the same surfaces: wood, stone, iron, paper, glass. Suddenly, there emerged a host of extraterrestrial substances that produced bodily sensations that no one had ever experienced before.
This was the production that Ulrich wished to be a part of.
When Ulrich arrived in Berlin he realised immediately he had walked in upon the wonder of his age. Berlin was the capital of world science, which lifted him upon its tremendous current, and made him certain of his own great future. But Berlin was also the studio of mighty artists and musicians. Bertolt Brecht was there, Marlene Dietrich and Fritz Lang. It was a carnival of boxing, jazz and cabaret.
Later on, after Ulrich left it, this miraculous metropolis ceased to exist. With the next war, old Berlin was gutted, tossed away and forgotten, and it sank into forgetful waters, until only a few bent tips were visible above the surface, twitching with the bad dreams below.
This has had a curious effect on Ulrich’s memories of the