By Marc Berman and Tjitske
English transcript
M: Until today, I had no memory of ever having come here.
And then, in these shopping arcades, I see these iron doors, set horizontally into the pavement, leading down to the basements of the shops, open when they give access to the stores themselves.
I want to go down there, but we remain on the surface.
T: I cannot remember ever having traveled alone with my father.
M: A memory comes back to me: in these streets with my father, I was eight years old. Why was I alone with my father in Bern? The only trip I must have taken alone with him. I don’t think we went down through those horizontal doors; I was afraid.
T: My father grew up in the east of the country. It was quiet there, so he flew westward, where there was movement. So much movement that he was rarely home. With us.
M: And then the memory returns of the trip we wanted to take together, as adults, to Dublin. But my father died before that.
T: Now, much, much later, I ask myself: where was he, really? Who was he?
I was never able to ask him. He died when I was twelve.
M: No. Let’s say: I didn’t take the time, always too many things to do — and then he died.
T: Here we are, in Bern. In the middle of the street there is a fountain. Above the water spouts, children are carved in stone. They carry little satchels, and dead geese.
M: And there we arrived in the middle of a street, lined with arcades, trams running in both directions. On the column of the fountain, at the top, sculpted in low relief, dead geese seem to be struggling with children.
A street like the river of the dead.
T: I read that geese are emotional animals. Faithful too — after the death of their partner they mourn for a long time. But eventually, with the change of season, they fly on.
Shall we go down?
M: Shall we fly away?
