INFAMY

TO ENTER THE CLUB HOLOCAUST BUNKER IN BERLIN, you first cross the courtyard of a bombed out apartment block, its pathways littered with broken glass, flowerbeds trampled and torn. Over the grass stretches a jumble of unlikely objects: bicycles, horseless carriages, a half-buried yacht; from the lightpoles hang plastic kamikaze planes. Some of the objects are intact, though peeling and corroded by time, and in the ambiguous mix of lunar and electronic light they seem covered by a patina, an old violin's varnish. Others are only skeletons or chassis, rods and cranks that threaten indescribable torture. You picture yourself chained to a rack, something digging in your flesh until you confess.

Beyond this sequence of antique machines - once mobile, now immobile, their souls rusted, mere specimens of a technological pride that is so keen to display them to the reverence of visitors - sinks the Bunker, guarded on the left by a scale model of the Statue of Liberty Bartholdi designed for another world, and on the right by a statue of Pascal. Here the Bunker's grim mouth is flanked by the nightmare of a deranged entomologist - chelae, mandibles, antannae, proglottides, and wings - a cemetary of mechanical corpses that look as if they might all start working again at any moment - magnetos, monophase transformers, turbines, convertors, steam engines, dynamos. In the rear, in the tussle of broken earth raised by the Bunker mouth, rest Assyrian idols and Chaldean, Carthaginian, great Baals whose bellies, long ago, glowed red-hot, and Nuremberg Maidens whose hearts still bristle with broken nails: these were once airplane engines. Now they form a horrible garland of simulcra that rise in adoration of the Bunker; it is as if the progeny of Reason and the Enlightenment had been condemned to stand guard over the ultimate symbol of Tyranny and Horror.

BABEL was an excellent musician, that so much was plain to those who heard her play, and I could understand her frustration in not being able to at least kickstart her plans of global domination. I could not understand, however, the weeklong disappearance which followed her newest defeat. Band practices, which had dominated most of our spare moments for years, fell apart in her absence. She didn't answer my calls; her flat seemed deserted with every visit. I was beginning to grow deeply concerned about her whereabouts when she paid me a visit as unexpected as her disappearance.

Dark drops of rain were drumming against my bedroom window, spreading patches of cold over the glass. I was lying eyes closed in bed, halflistening to a TV program on the slow decline of an Amazonian tribe. I had almost fallen asleep when a barrage of urgent knocks shook the window, and I arose to see a wet mop of hair out in the night.