Berlin Cantata (6 page)

This, of course, was rather shrewdly reasoned on their part. I could hardly deny the possibility.

I had hoped our orgy of self-criticism might dissipate with the success that Richard's innovation would bring us. But success proved elusive. We built six “clean” Trabants yet sold none of them. And our failure begat more doubts. I was accused, not by Johann alone, but by Hermann and Heinrich as well, of being naïve, stupid, grandiose, and clueless about the capitalist world I'd supposedly lived in all my life. My counterpoint was to suggest that the door was wide open, they could quit anytime they wished, or we could close the shop down and they could go to hell. But none of my critics quit. Either I was their main chance or they found me oddly interesting or they were gathering evidence against me. A father figure, that's what I really was, and a rather patient one when you came right down to it, who permitted them to vent their bottled fantasies of rage. I supposed I had them where I wanted them. Richard alone refrained from grumbling, a restraint which I attributed only to my own recent extravagant praise of his inventiveness.

How to move our fine product? I wrote more columns, I teased my friends, I applied social pressure wherever I could. Finally an American woman rose to the bait. She had a recent inheritance, she needed a car, she'd recently taken up with a friend of mine, she probably thought she was doing some good. I had been plying her mercilessly with my store of aphorisms which scared the shit out of her, “The Germans have never forgiven the Jews for Auschwitz,” and so on, and she must have felt that if she became my customer I would let up on her. Little did she know that I'm said to be even more obnoxious with my friends. So we sold her a Porsche-red Trabant then voted unanimously to use the entire proceeds to buy alcohol and have a drop dead drunk party. Why invest wisely when you can celebrate your limited success today?

The party took place in the warehouse. After several hours of carousing, it came to recriminations and blows. Here at last the word “Jew” and the phrase “Jew pig” entered our polite conversation. No offense taken, I returned most compliments with equal or better. At one point I whacked Johann in the kidneys with a large wooden mallet. During most of the goings on, Richard Kunstlinger maintained a curious reserve, speaking little, drinking less. He became an observer more than a participant. No amount of jollying or teasing could engage him. Through a stale haze I became aware that this was pissing me off. What right had Richard to cop a superior attitude? One puny bit of innovation? I observed him at one point sitting cross-legged on the shop floor, hunched slightly forward, his watery eyes watching the rest of us through the frame of his upturned toes. He seemed fatigued.

The next day everyone showed up for work. This wasn't so large a feat as it might sound like, since all but Richard had passed out in the warehouse and awakened there. I duly wrote about all of it, the sale, the debauch, the fights, the fact that the next day our work continued. My charges were hardly voracious readers, yet there was little chance a column of mine would be overlooked by them, inasmuch as Johann, ever on the lookout for evidence against me, brought in a copy of the newspaper religiously each time a piece of mine appeared. The reaction on average approximated what it always was, a mix of sullen suspiciousness and sardonic sniping. Hermann offered up his critique that it was a three blowjob piece, a standard of criticism based on my charges' assumption that loose leftist women were everywhere waiting to reward me for writing what they wished to hear.

But Richard had disappeared. The day after our blowout he was there, but the day after the column appeared, he was gone. I allowed for the possibility that he was ill, or that he was reevaluating and might yet return. The other boys didn't seem to know much about it. It turned out they weren't close to him. The three together were comrades, but Richard had been the stray dog. This I had more or less understood from the beginning, but not to the degree that they would think it good riddance if he was gone.

So I was the only one that was fond of him, and even me he pissed off. I went looking for him. I found him living with his mother in a cruelly colorless and dilapidated apartment block. The apartment stank of years of sour cooking. Richard invited me only a few feet in. He doubtless didn't wish the neighbors to hear us speaking; at the same time, the entrance hall to the apartment was so narrow that even his slender frame, when he backed away from the door a few steps, was enough to block any invasion I might have planned of his mother's reeking home. Richard wore his athletic jacket indoors. A recent haircut had made him look more skeletal than ever. Viewed from a certain teleological angle, he could have been an apprentice angel of death. I asked him where he'd been, an ill-designed question all but asking for a smartass, dumbshit answer.

“Right here,” was all he said, in a shuffling monotone.

“We missed you. You're not coming back to work?”

“Why should I?”

“Well. It was what we agreed. It was what you committed to do.”

“I don't anymore.”

“I understand that.”

“You said if anybody wanted to quit, they should just quit.”

“But I wanted to know. We hadn't heard from you.”

“What did you think?”

“I'll tell you what I thought,” I said. My voice gained breath and certainty. “I thought even a little shit like yourself wouldn't leave without giving some kind of notice.”

He nodded. But where I expected bitter words, all I got were his watery eyes. And they were the real surprise. I hadn't imagined that what they contained were tears.

He hung his head so that I couldn't see. “Why did you write that?” I heard him say, the words trickling up his nose, his forehead, the stubble of his hair, to my ears.

“Write what? Which part? I wrote about the party, I wrote about our selling the car…”

“All that. About me.”

“What did I write about you? All I remember that I wrote about you is that you didn't really participate in our drunken brawl.”

“You said I was queer.”

“What? I did not. Of course I didn't.”

“You might as well.”

“By saying you didn't get drunk? By suggesting you might have had a feather's worth of good sense?”

“Jews think everyone's queer.”

“Jesus. Come on. Richard.”

“You can have my invention.”

“Thank you very much. But it wasn't exactly something you could patent, you know.”

“Then fuck off.”

He was so skinny he looked deflated to me then. Or he could have been both skinny and deflated, all that was left of him was bones and sorrow.

“Come back. What shit. This is stupid,” I said. Suddenly it sounded to me like I was talking to a woman. The insane things you say to get her back.

But I did want Richard to come back, despite all my pronouncements about open doors. He had always been my favorite. He'd become like a mascot. And I hadn't even known it.

He shook his head, or it seemed to shake itself, like the head of a raggedy doll. He disappeared into the maw of the sour apartment. I waited longer than I would care to admit for him to change his mind.

In due course I conducted interviews and recruited a new fourth member for our crew. Günther was an efficient little savage whose specialties were carburetors and, as I later learned, harassing Africans on the U-Bahn. Skin Enterprises continued its mission of showing how the most discontented elements of the Eastern citizenry might yet be brought into the western settlement, and of course how a Jew could learn to love his enemies for fun and profit.

I wrote more columns about it all, especially when I realized the columns worked as advertising for the cars. But I never wrote a word, until now, about Richard, whom I found I continued to miss. It wasn't to protect him that I kept that silence. I may have been too successful in the love-thine-enemies area. I didn't want the world to think I was a wuss.

HOLLY ANHOLT

Boyfriend

I
'
LL SAY ONE THING
more about Nils, mention one thing more, something he said the night we met, at Oksana and Herbert's party. It wasn't only his words but their jagged, discontinuous appearance, they connected so tenuously to our trite back-and-forth up till then that they must have been waiting there all along, a certain pressure building, like a chick ready to come out of its shell, ready-or-not-here-I-come. We'd been talking about my fleabag hotel, where as a reporter he'd once covered a murder. Nils said: “You know the dirty secret of every professional in Germany today? That if it wasn't for the mass murder of the Jews, half of us wouldn't have a job.”

He said it very calmly, very conversationally, as if it were no big deal, as if he'd hardly changed the subject. Maybe he hadn't, really. Reporters, professions, his life, his career. Of course I didn't know what to say.

I caught his squint, then averted my glance, like a reluctant witness to a crime. My silence forced him to go on.

“And how many would give their job up, if the Jews could come back to life? It's what we call a competitive advantage, to be alive.”

“Do you think about it?” I lamely asked, wanting to help, wanting to say anything at all.

He said: “You don't have to think about something when it's in the air you breathe. There are ghosts around. Ghost doctors and ghost lawyers and ghost professors and ghost businessmen and ghost editors and ghost artists and ghost actors and ghost biologists and chemists, and ghost reporters. All you have to do is dream about them.”

And: “We can even ask ourselves, we German professionals and intellectuals and artists of the post-war: are we doing as good a job as those who are missing would have done? Or is it even possible, our consciences pricked, that we're doing a better job, or anyway a different job, or, heaven help us, a more German job?”

He was still in that conversational voice, steady, a little bit steely, as if at cost to him somewhere along the line he'd learned the secret of preserving emotion in the amber of facts.

So that's my story and I'm sticking to it, of how I became sure that Nils would be my boyfriend. Later, after I met his friend David, I pointed out to Nils that his best friend David was a journalist, and
he
was Jewish. “Precisely. My best friend in the world. But would I give him my job? That fat fuck?” Nils had a laugh like a crow sometimes, when he was really amused, and a triumphant snort could sneak through his sobriety.

NILS SCHREIBER

Girlfriend

ON
M
ULACKSTRASSE IT LOOKED
as if nobody had collected trash since the Wall fell. Empty lots like missing teeth, competing graffiti, foreigners out, Nazis out, on every exposed wall, and the faint traces of Yiddish over what had once been shop windows but were now as often as not boarded over. As midnight approached, a naked light bulb hung over a single open storefront. The storefront announced itself as an art gallery. In a spirit of bored curiosity, we entered. There were stairs and arrows leading to the basement. When we got down there, we had to walk over broken glass to get to the art, which was a dead rat suspended in the coal bin. Holly stifled what seemed like an unlikely scream. A girl with neon hair laconically held out a donation cup. I dropped a couple of marks in it. Holly wore flats with thin soles and was afraid she would cut her feet on the glass. The gallery was housed in the building her father had once owned, but her parents had never lived there and Holly showed little interest in this, her second claim. This was despite my suggestion that it might one day be worth a pile, that the old ghetto of the Scheunenviertel – centrally located, morbidly appealing, and left to rot during the GDR – was already showing signs of being Berlin's next neighborhood of the future.

FRANZ ROSEN

Hero

THIS IS A STORY ABOUT MYSELF
. I was born into prosperous circumstances. My father owned an industrial firm which processed tungsten for the production of electric light bulbs. He was a confidant of Walter Rathenau, the assimilationist business leader who became the Weimar Republic's foreign minister in 1922 and was assassinated. When I was young, I led the life of a little prince. My elder brother was destined for the family business. I would be an artist, or a writer, or simply a dandy. My heroes were the assimilated Viennese writers with pens of quicksilver, Roth, Zweig, and (unfortunately if inevitably) for a certain period Weininger, who equated Jewishness with femininity and condemned them both. My father was neither a prophet about the Nazis nor a fool. When they came to power, he had the idea, I believe, of ducking down and muddling through: this too shall pass. A great believer in Germany's modernity, he perhaps underestimated fascism's appeal to that very modernity, a mistake in which of course he would not have been alone. My brother Paul was arrested and badly treated. On his release, he had sunken eyes. My father commenced considering emigration for us all. Paul was rearrested. This second time they sent him home in a box with his overcoat stuffed in. My father died of a broken heart. My mother suffered a nervous breakdown and the diagnosis of cancer virtually at once. It became too late to leave. We lost everything to confiscations. My mother was relocated to an overpopulated apartment in the ghetto of the
ostjuden
, where she promptly died, either from her cancer or the embarrassment of her new circumstances. I went underground in the city. My complexion and hair made me look sufficiently “Aryan.” I had never quit attending the city's nightclubs, even after there were prohibitions. Now I made contact with other “U-Boaters,” as we were called, Jews who lived as we could, and we formed a loose alliance. My self-proclaimed role in “the underground” was to use my familiarity with the demimonde to begin love affairs with German officers, and to glean information which I passed along an uncertain chain. My circumcision proved an inevitable problem. I had to be both deft and clever, and in one instance, to an SS man who conceived a true crush on me, I was forced finally to admit who I was and to depend on his love and mercy. When these came into question, or more specifically when he tried to convert me into a “snatcher” of other Jews, I murdered him and retired into the depths of the socialist neighborhoods. On the war's end, I met a camp survivor named Herbert Kaminski. Through Herbert, my deeds became known to the Americans. Soon they earned me modest honors, which were then magnified in the new West Germany's wish to find whatever saving graces it could in the disgraceful past and to put a distance from the rest. I became Herbert's right hand man in his expanding business ventures. At first this consisted of nothing more than collecting rents from whores and pimps. But Herbert had bigger things in mind. “Somebody will have to rebuild this city. It may as well be us, its human rubble.” Of course we were all human rubble then, we Berliners, but Herbert considered us the rubble of the rubble. As money for reconstruction flowed in, our new construction company received its share and perhaps more. I had always been handy with figures, and now I abandoned my dreams of literature and became the one Herbert trusted with his numbers, his “Jew,” as it were. My fortunes were restored. I imagined, despite my inversion, that my father would have been proud of me. I came to be considered a wise man in Berlin's miniscule remnant of a Jewish community. I became, at long last, a Zionist, and when the West German government established reparations funds to aid Israel, I was named trustee of one such fund. I turned ascetic as well. My dandy days gone, I donned a dark overcoat like my brother's in all sorts of weather. It was apparent that I was one of those whom the war had singled out to recast into an unlikely hero. I often spoke at those inspirational occasions held in Berlin's churches where the theme was “never again.”