Berlin Cantata (11 page)

“Love is love,” I said.

“Of course love is love,” she said.

I kissed her the way you do when you wish to change a lover's hurtful subject. But she was having none of it. Light-headed now, nostalgic to the point where her voice got frail and insistent, as if she had to will it to keep it going, she said, “Remember that record I told you about, with the church and Christmas Eve and the steeple and snow? Do you remember that, Nils?”

I said that I did.

“It was a cheap record. It was so cheap it had a hole punched through the label, to show it had been dumped by a warehouse or something. Probably a dollar apiece, but my father would buy piles of those records, until he had his classical collection complete, one or two of everything. Of course they weren't usually the star conductors, I don't remember many von Karajans. But they were good, always good, mostly guys he remembered from Europe… And they were a bargain, they were what he could afford, or thought he ought to afford… It gave him such pleasure. The size. The completeness. The economy. All a reflection of him, of the way he'd learned how to live.”

She leaned closer to me, against my arm. “My father,” she said.

Her eyes were lightly shut. Mine were wide open.

I thought of my own father and wished I had not.

Well, it was so. I could hardly deny it. Or I suppose I might have, but this would not have been my style. Anyway, it was well in the past.

Still, Holly was not quite amused. She accused me of having a thing about Jewish girls. We had one of those conversations, sweet and hurt and silly all at once.

“I'll make a list for you of my lovers.”

“Good. Then as I meet them I can check them off…”

About the Jewish girls, I denied. It's only good form to deny such things, to refuse to admit such paralyzing generalities. “How will you tell us apart?” she said. “Will you keep a scorecard? Will you give us numbers instead of names?”

She thought Oksana must still be in love with me. She thought, when we were in Italy, that Oksana was bringing Herbert's files to me. But I knew otherwise.

As for the numbers, in the end I conceded her point. Perhaps I was more sociologist than lover. Numbers might make more sense. Number one was in New York and played the cello and showed me the whisper chamber in the basement of the train station there and had a neck as thick as a boy's but a gentle way that could seem a little defeated, that could make you root for her in fear. Number two was passing through. The same with number three, as best I could tell. Number four reminded me of my mother, an amazing thing considering my mother's coldness, sentimentality, narrowness, and preference for long, bracing walks over thought. Number five was the aforementioned skinny Russian girl. Number six was Holly. I took to calling her Number Six. She hated that.

But, of course, she was a sociologist too.

FRANZ ROSEN

Weakness

MY GREATEST FEAR
was that I was careless of Herbert's reputation. You can say he should not have cared so much for what others thought of him, for his reputation in the city. But it was something he had earned, this reputation, it was something he had had to struggle for. All men are weak somewhere. Herbert's weakness was this, that he wished to be, if not loved, then respected. But really he wished to be loved.

I might say all of the same about myself, of course.

When I proffered my resignation, Herbert gave me money to make my escape.

OKSANA KOSLOVA

Separation

GO BACK
. Turn around. Spool the film in the other direction. Something to make me smile. When I was a little girl, my mother held my hand. She put me in a fine coat and I squinted at the camera, in the Moscow sunlight, holding her hand.

NILS SCHREIBER

Words (Continued)

MORE THAT I SAID TO HER
, at one time or another, whether it was true or not:

We were in Italy then and had not made love in a couple of days.

But there was nothing about her that was not attractive. She had a mild, honest sense about herself, she could see through things if she had to, her words were simple but accurate, she was slow to put her troubles on others, her eyes were large and dark, her smile was easy, she could be funny if really forced to be, she found the world interesting, she could hold onto a question until she wrung its neck or it wrung hers, she was not too proud, her legs were long and her ankles just slender enough, everything about her, truly, was just enough, she could run if she had to, she could do most things if she had to, she was not averse to a bit of lazing around, she was not averse to the bed, she was not averse to a good argument, her lower lip in particular was sensual, her thirst for revenge was small, she woke up in the morning with things on her mind, her breasts would kindle an Arab poet, she wore clothes in an offhanded way, she wasn't boyish at all, she seemed to possess a well of mercy, she was no more lost than I was.

Or I mustn't be flippant: she recognized, I recognized, we both did, I think from the very first, that a part of each of us was a little bit lost. A certain equivalence in this regard made our affair possible.

It was afternoon in our darkened room and I was reading. “Put your book down, Nils,” she said. “I need to ask you something. Don't answer right away, okay, don't just assume an answer. Do you still find me attractive?”

“You asked me that question awhile ago,” I said.

“No I didn't. I asked if you found me attractive. But then I decided you did. But now I'm wondering if you still do.”

“I still do.”

“But you're kind of aloof.”

“It's only been a couple days,” I said.

“So you are. That's how you feel.”

I recovered the semblance of my slightly haunted smile and kissed her. We kissed two or three times more. She must have sensed something, the pressure of my lips, as slightly forced or willed. “Never mind. Go back to your book. Screw you,” she said. “You're not doing me a favor, Nils. You're not favoring me with your presence!”

“Sorry. But I don't know what you want.”

“Nothing. Never mind. I know, I'm just making trouble.”

She grabbed a magazine off the floor and appeared to plunge into it, refusing to put it aside even when she realized it was in Italian and she could read hardly a word. There were not any pictures, either. This, too, I found attractive.

It was part of the same conversation and it could have been true or false. It was later and she had grown quiet. She had gone to the window and pulled aside a corner of the curtain. A shaft of sunlight illuminated her forlorn expression. Wherever it was that her eyes wished to take her, I could see that her mind was not. I was not to my knowledge a sadomasochist. No woman had ever whipped me or tied me up. I actually thought such things comical. But as I observed Holly's sad distraction in the harsh glare that streamed from the parted curtain, I saw, or I must have thought I saw, as in a negative, her anger.

“In a sexual sense,” I added, when her incomprehension was plain.

She dropped the curtain and we were in the dark. But her voice was tender. “How do you know I don't want to be your instrument in a sexual sense?”

“Nobody wants to be a slave. Or if they do, I won't give them the satisfaction.”

“What are you talking about, Nils? Who are you talking about?”

She'd come closer to where I was, on the low, thin mattress. “You, Holly,” I said.

I was, as I thought, in the throes of the discovery of a kind of hope. I was throwing off my aloofness. These things I didn't say, as I didn't wish to embarrass myself.

“Nils, you can't make me your slave. I don't think so anyway. But I do want to be close to you,” she said.

“You can't. You're far away.”

“Don't say that.”

“Because of your anger, you're far away.”

“Don't make me afraid.”

“Cut me,” I said. “Hurt me. Make me bleed.”

“What?”

“With your fingers, with your anger.”

We were silent then. I could begin to see her again, sitting at the bed's edge, looming over me. A dark angel, her eyes glistened.

For a moment our eyes met, as she lifted my shirt away and placed her hands on my sides. “I'm not begging you, Holly,” I said. And she, who had been commanded very little in her life, responded as though to a command. With no discernable erotic intention, rather with obedient deliberation, she spread my arms then squeezed my flesh with her nails. I could smell the blood when I was cut. “How could you not be angry with me? How could you not? Here's your chance,” I said, and she drew her nails down my chest.

Later she would say that my face was such a picture of pain as she had never seen. But I felt no pain. “Holly,” I whispered, “Where is your anger, Holly? Why are you lying? What are you hiding?”

When she struck me, it was with such a rush of anger that she screamed and struck me many times again.

This was later in our stay in Umbria, after our little night of violence, after everything was calm.

It was occasioned by a letter from Oksana indicating she might be coming to stay with us for one night or two. She had left Herbert. Her destination was unclear. Holly knew from previous conversations that Oksana hadn't wanted to have a child. So Oksana was in the air, or children were in the air. My son was twenty. I had perhaps not been a great father, but was at least trying now. We were under the trellis outside the kitchen door watching the onset of evening, the low distant hills taking on their animal shapes. She had made us a pot of tea. It was not the first time I had noticed that Holly made a pot of tea when she had something on her mind. What I remember saying, about Oksana, was that she would make a rotten mother and she knew it. Holly disputed this. She would brook no criticism of her friend. I stuck to my opinion. I claimed more longstanding knowledge. “Would I?” she finally asked.

“Would you what?” I asked.

“In your humble opinion. Make a rotten mother.”

“There's no way this comes out right.”

“Of course there isn't. If you say yes, I'll hate you. If you say no, I'll tell you I want a baby.”

“Is that what's going to happen?”

“Take your chances,” she said.

So I did. I told her I had heard on the radio that it was supposed to rain tomorrow.

“Come on, Nils.”

“Holly, you would make the most wonderful mother in the world,” I said, “but I've just raised a child and I'm a little late in learning how to do it.”

“Can't we talk about this? No. That sounds stupid and pushy.
Should
we talk about this? Am I crazy?”

“We are talking about it,” I said.

“Just wanted to know your feelings. Just in general. In the most general way. I saw you playing with those kids today, in the village.”

“They're nice kids,” I said.

“Gordon? My old boyfriend? He wanted children. That was one of the things. And I remember feeling afterwards, the old biological clock's running, why don't I have his urgency?”

“They're not for everybody, you know.”

“I know… But now…should I say this? Just tell me to shut up, I'll shut up. But every once in a while I wonder.”

“Like now.”

“Like now, I guess”

“It's been a sweet time here,” I said.

“It has. And I probably just spoiled a perfectly good evening,” she said.

“Actually, I think your reticence is charming.”

“Do you?”

She leaned over and nuzzled me. I rubbed her neck.

Then I said what I said about a Jewish child and my native land. She pulled away, threw her head back, as though to get a better view.

“What do you mean?”

“Only that. Would you really want to bring another Jewish child into the world to grow up in Germany? Would you want to give Germany another chance with a Jewish child?”

She gripped her tea cup, sipped tea that had to be cold, nervously poured herself more. “I don't know what you're even talking about Germany for, this was a general discussion, there's lots of countries…”

“But I'm German, I work in Germany.”

“I mean, you've worked in New York. You
have
worked in New York. But it's okay…I was only asking, only wondering…” Her voice hardened a little, struggling to regain confidence, to seem a little brave: “But to answer your question, about Germany. I don't know.”

“It's one of the few things I do know about. It seems cruel,” I said.

I thought then that I was meeting her honesty with mine, and it is possible I was. But whether I was or not, it was the beginning of the end of our vacation. We had been like two lovers playing chess late into the evening, and now the game was over. The next morning we received word about Oksana's crash.

HOLLY ANHOLT

Vacation

NILS
'
S ANCIENT
, half-collapsing stone farmhouse sat in a short and narrow valley, little more than a
cul de sac
, forty minutes from Arezzo. It was a place he'd bought with four other people from his paper fifteen years before and it had no heat but a wood-burning stove. Sheep grazed on the hillsides above the farm. One gravel road led out of the valley and around to the village, but there was also a track over the hills to the village, and it was this we walked each morning, often in the rain, to get our coffee and hang around in the sole, eerily quiet café. The tourists had yet to make their springtime descent. I was happy enough for a few days. So many questions put aside, questions like avenging furies, that could take up your whole life and leave your carcass for mere birds. Look, here was life, too. Life without questions but with a village you could walk to, and a café you could linger in, and sheep and goats on the hill and olive and fig trees, and our neighbor for gossip, and the only shower in the house coming from a black hose that sat out in the yard like a fat cat heating up in the afternoon sun. For four days we walked, read books, spoke quietly about the migrating patterns of the geese, about tomatoes, about the Bay Bridge in San Francisco which Nils with unbelievable stubbornness refused to believe was longer than the Golden Gate Bridge; about anything but the city we'd driven from. Then he asked me to beat him, which I did.