Berlin Cantata (14 page)

A long paragraph, but there it is. But the “intrigue” was not the real story, in my view. The real story, in my view, had to do with my newspaper, and journalistic standards, and ethics. I presented the story to my paper fairly much as I had put it together. My editor refused to publish. And why? For a complete answer you would have to know the financial straits that our
alternativ
paper found itself in that year. Like much of Berlin's cultural life, it had come into being through the help of grants. Throughout the Cold War, the Western powers had been eager to promote West Berlin as a cultural capital. Now that the Cold War was over, and the vast expenses of reunification were upon us, such grants began quickly to seem superfluous. Our paper, which had been fine and brave in its best days and plain silly in others, was in danger of going under.

This is what Kröller, my editor, said, in response to my story: “It's premature, Schreiber.”

I had worked on the piece for months. I had five key facts down incontrovertibly. I flew into my version of a rage, which was to feel my voice get as tight as my neck. “Premature? You wait much longer, you wait till the war's over, you'll have to put the story in a walker.”

“You haven't given Rosen chance to rebut.”

“How can I? He's fled, he's gone to ground.”

“Find him.”

“Oh for God's sake. Do you wait to publish every crime story till the criminal's caught?”

“Besides…Herbert Kaminski has reimbursed the reparation fund.”

“What?”

“Out of his own pocket. I was waiting for you to walk in here. Kaminski himself called. No harm done. Completely mortified about the entire incident.”

“And doesn't want the story out.”

“Now you can drop the sarcasm, alright? You, Schreiber, of all people, ought to be sensitive, in Germany you don't implicate a Jew in a financial scandal before you have all the facts straight.”

So that was that. Or not quite that. Forty-eight hours later it was happily announced that the Herbert Kaminski Foundation had made a four million mark grant to our prize-winning
alternativ
paper so that it could continue its fearless brand of journalism. A “no strings attached” grant, a lifesaver, a tribute as well to the brokenhearted integrity of Herbert Kaminski, who put his deceased wife's name onto the gift as well. Kröller phoned me with the brilliant news. He liberally sprinkled the phrase “no strings attached.” He promised me if I found Franz Rosen, he would reconsider publication.

And even this wasn't the whole story, if you bothered to ask my heart. The whole story my heart would nominate would have to include my number one girl, who in the months I'd known her, until his disappearance, had grown increasingly close to Franz Rosen. They kept bumping into each other and then Holly discovered that Rosen's uncle had had a summer house on the lake where her parents had theirs. They met in a piano bar to discuss this and Holly came home in tears. It was the first time I'd seen her in tears. She told me their conversation word for word. It had begun with Holly herself telling Franz that her parents had been happy at their summer house, that it was why she was pursuing her claim, that it was the happy time of their lives. To which,
per
my number one girl, Franz replied: “Yes, perhaps they were. Of course within the limits of each person's capacity for such things. My uncle certainly felt arrived, pleased with himself. This self-, I don't know what to call it, self-something, self-acceptance, I suppose, despite all the bad conscience of the Jew in Germany. Being told you're rootless. Being told you didn't belong. In all sorts of books and so on. And then looking at the land beneath your feet and it's all true… You've trod it for however many years, but never enough, and a little slip of paper obtained through other little slips of paper says it's yours. And blood, and most of seventy million people, saying, not really, you never bled for this land… Such a barbaric concept, don't you agree? To have to bleed for land for it to be yours. Though even this game we played! The lists drawn up, the accountings, of the Jews that fought and died in 1914… Of course, I speak out of my feelings, perhaps not your father's or mother's whatsoever.”

Or perhaps I've filled in a few of his words. But a few such words can make a friend forever. Thereafter Holly was his defender whenever the subject of Franz came up, which it inevitably did, since I was working on it all the time. Once she told me that I was only doing it for the irony of it all. Another time she asked me if I was enjoying my little ironic turns over her body.

“Your body?” I asked incredulously.

“It's how it feels, yes. You slay Franz, you slay me.”

“That's unfair.”

“At least it's not ironic,” she said.

HOLLY ANHOLT

Franz

HIS INDISPENSIBLE QUALITY
was his grace. You never saw him in a rush. He never moved in a rush. His opinions were considered and he spoke with the sort of calm I associate with works of art – particularly Japanese works – that seem to view the world from some point beyond it, that seem capable of stepping outside and looking back. I suppose he was backward-looking. Things didn't surprise him. In this, he was a good match for Nils.

Then there was that topcoat of his, or overcoat, whatever is called that long dark coat in wool or gabardine. Or there must have been more than one of them. Like an undertaker, he would wear it even in mild weather. He must have felt ill-at-ease without that protection.

He had a large head and I would say that he had happy eyes, they could seem to swim in that large head like tiny, sparkling fish.

I suppose he had a gay man's little belly, and rosy cheeks, so that he could seem elfin, even if he was over six feet tall. His hands were enormous and a little bit thick, like the paws of a puppy you could expect to grow huge.

What else? Anything else? I loved his voice, which was unusually steady, through thick and thin, and which I think you would call a baritone. It was a voice that made me want to listen and fall sweetly asleep at the same time. Or maybe it was the voice that made me sleepy and the words that kept me awake. The uncle I never had.

FRANZ ROSEN

Exile

WHAT IS IT ABOUT MY NATIVE CITY
? Because of the wars, it is mostly too new. What is old in it is often elephantine and suffocating. It has no charming medieval town. It is replete with bad smells, gasses that come from who knows where, as though it suffered from gastric distress. The light is pale and weak. The cruelty of its history speaks for itself. It harbors more than its share of rough characters. Its sense of time is disjointed and extreme. Everything there becomes tiresomely political. The inhabitants cannot be said to be well-dressed or elegant or beautiful, at least not to a notable degree. The food is what it is. The distances to get from here to there are enormous.

These are my complaints. Yet I flee to Sicily where it is very pleasant and long every day to return. It is where the subway lines move as my mind moves, where the streets are mostly where they were when I had my joy in them.

NILS SCHREIBER

Rejection

THE NIGHT THAT KRÖLLER
turned down my story for being “premature,” there was hardly a thing in the apartment I managed not to stumble into. At last Holly had had enough of my childishness and I was forced to tell her. My certainty that Kröller was in the wrong perhaps failed to convince her, likewise my threats to take the story to another paper.

“You'd be gone then. You'd lose your job.”

She seemed worried for me then. A pleasing thought, to have someone worried for you. But of course in my anger I had looked right past her. What she was really thinking was that she
should
feel badly for me, for my frustration and sense of futility and injustice, but that in reality she didn't quite. All the doubts she'd ever had about my pursuit of Franz came freshly into focus. She was unused to me being certain about anything, which was understandable, since I never was. It alarmed her. “But if it
is
early in the story…” she finally said.

And she said it a little sadly.

My mind wheeled around her. “With Herbert reimbursing, the thing's already deflating! Do you want me to wait till the other papers get it on their own?”

“No, but what
is
the story?”

“The story is, someone embezzles millions out of a public trust.”

“What did he do with the money?”

“That comes out next. Either a trail of paper leads to the gas masks, or he's cached the money away and whatever he got from Herbert was simply a kiss goodbye. Are you going to make me feel guilty about this?”

“No. But… I do think…I'm trying to think…of the consequences, that's all. You publish, and a noble life gets smeared with shitty innuendo…”

“I didn't do it! He did it!”

“For decent reasons, maybe.”

“The decent reasons will be there! I'm not out to crucify him! Listen, Holly, you haven't been here, you don't know. There's been a taboo in the German press for years about the Jewish community and money. Somebody stole millions from a reparations fund a few years ago, it disappeared off the news pages in days. Such coverage, as they say, is not kosher.”

“But understandable?” I heard her question mark, so faint as to barely make an impression, a stamp made with only just enough ink.

“Of course, you mean our history, the desire not to revive slanders. But now it's time to take the next step. We have to afford to be honest. We have to afford to be normal.”

Then she said the sort of thing which I knew embarrassed her to say, which surely she never thought she would hear herself say, and not only for its rhetorical flourish: “Maybe you think it's one more irony, Nils, the philo-Semite writing the story that services anti-Semite agendas. But for all the millions who only see the headlines…and for all the people who just want some shred of justification, some bit of excuse, for what happened to the Jews here…”

“I can't help them! They're sick! They're insane! I have to live for something better! We all do!”

Including Holly, I did not say, but of course she heard it anyway. Would she, after all, be an exception? What dose of self-pity or mortification gave her a free pass? Her boyfriend's a reporter. Reporters report. If everyone's lucky, they report the truth. When they do not, not when they do, is when the problems begin. Yes? No? Holly, please: yes or no?

She found herself shaking her head, a tablespoon in sorrow, a teaspoon in confusion. “I know. I know I'm wrong. But you're hard, Nils. You're really hard,” she said.

She raised her eyes to mine. It seemed a long time that we searched each other. But such searches can leave false impressions; they can be nothing more than holding actions, when two people don't know what else to say or do.

Into this stalemate of the heart Holly spoke quietly. “Oksana said something once – I've never quite gotten it out of my head…probably because it was the only thing she said to me that I was sure was dead wrong…about you and her, you and Oksana…Two needy people, she said, shouldn't ‘hook up'…she used that silly kids' phrase, those silly kids' phrases, like for once her ear was off… But you know her ear was never really off…Nils, I don't know…”

She came close to me and tipped her head into my chest. I held her, but a strange resistance, which felt to be neither mine nor hers, but perhaps only some random magnetic field that had slipped in to fill the air between us, stopped my arms from drawing her in. Finally she stepped back. “Something's off. It is, isn't it? It's gone…I don't know where it's gone.”

“Is it the baby? Your wanting a baby?” I said.

“No. You were right to say what you said. At least you were honest… And I was arrogant. Still am, I think, can't stop, keep thinking, acting, I don't know, like I'm this candle or something, this white candle, this moral candle. Nils, I know I'm not. In my best moments I know that… And I'm not your dark whore, either.”

“And I suppose I'm not as billed, either,” I said. “The good German, big-necked and rough-and-tumble, arriving just in time to save you and all of yours from the licking flames, repulse the butchering hoards from your door. I wish I could, really. But leaving aside the failings you've well-documented, the irony I'm terrified to abandon for more than a minute and all the rest – you're not in any fire, the hoards are taking a rest.”

So we live with the shadows of others until we're confused, and then we live happily with the confusion awhile, and then it clears.

The room seemed very small, like a room in an old slum, with cracked paint and a sagging bed, where an amnesiac wakes up.

Several weeks then passed, and my number one girl became her own again, while I searched for Franz Rosen up and down the boot of Italy until I found him. A lot of bribes in seaside towns and then there he was, in a printed silk shirt and incongruous dark shoes, on a patio with a patio drink overlooking the sea. I told him I was ready to publish, though not that I had little idea whether Kröller would go along. I showed him what I had. He read with detached interest, nodding here and there, correcting a detail or two I'd acquired in the weeks or months of his flight. The gas masks were back in the eastern warehouse by now. A five percent profit had been made. The war was over. My story was certainly stale. For a little while I imagined that his graciousness was due to the fact that he knew he had outrun me; the victor's easy largesse. But it wasn't that. It was more, I think, that he'd found in me someone he imagined to trust with the secret which harried him more relentlessly than I ever had.

Or, simply, it was a gift he chose to make to me. I wrote everything he told me. “A Scarcely Possible Life.” Kroller was pleased. He told me I'd written something at last that was more “human” than “political”. Well, fuck him. Fuck Kroller. There was only one critic I was interested in hearing from.