Berlin Cantata (15 page)

It was two weeks before a letter came, postmarked Velden am Moritzsee. “Dear Nils, I'm well enough. The house may soon be mine! I suppose ‘ours' is the correct pronoun. Anja did some digging and the claim on the country house is apparently near the top of the bureaucrats' pile. In the course of weeks that I've been coming out here, this thought has filled me alternately with dread and possibility. You used to call the two of us sociologists. But I believe I've become more an archaeologist, sifting through the ruins of the lives that bred me. I see I wrote, just a few sentences ago, ‘The house may soon be mine!' But actually I doubt the exclamation mark is justified. I've moved out here full-time and am living with neurotics and paranoids in a dark, heavy house that as far as I can tell hasn't even a stick of my parents' furniture. Everything with the possible exception of the birdhouse is institutional, and GDR cheesy, even the refrigerator feels like it was made with the plastic they use in PEZ dispensers. And a guy across the road hung himself after setting fire to the claims office. This is some indication that I might not be popular here. Someone else left some old Nazi propaganda on my windshield. Am I becoming thick-skinned? I seem to wave these things off now. My goal, I've decided, is to discover where my parents hid in the woods. There is a bunker somewhere and one of the old Writers Union housekeepers has promised to find it for me. I am more aware than ever that there is some dark hole in my life that needs to be filled with light.

“But none of this is why I'm writing you. I'm writing on account of your piece. It's wonderful, from the very first words. ‘Franz Rosen asked of me only that I tell the story of one queer Jew in Germany exactly as I saw it.' I've been going around quoting all kinds of lines from the piece in my head. I could imagine Franz standing there, his glass held high, with savage self-mockery, saying, ‘You know when people are most easily made fools of, don't you? When they wish to be the hero.' What astonished me, really, was the sympathy. I've read dozens of your articles, but never one where you were so much a part of the picture. I could hear you in every choice, in every phrase, even when you were being only ‘objective'. And that photograph of Franz, the perfect part in his hair, the thin starved face, the intense theatrical eyes. How old must he have been? Seventeen? And for what special occasion had he gone to the photographer's studio? You got that right, too. Finally I began to understand your point of reference, your argument, and saw that it was the same one you'd once applied to my father: everything Franz had done had been to overcome a humiliation imposed on him without his choice, yet it was a humiliation he was fundamentally powerless to undo. The best he could do was live with it, make choices accordingly, play the heroic fool, or the ‘realist,' or whatever else.

“And then, Nils, I wondered: wasn't the same true of you?

“Who in that sense was far more a Jew than I was, so no wonder I couldn't live with you. Well that's a joke, I suppose, or half an insight in search of its whole. But I did imagine, just a little while ago, sitting with my coffee in the faux-leather armchair that was never my father's and reading your article a fifth time through, that I had begun to think like David, or like you. Nils the spirit Jew. Was it the murdered Jews' only revenge to turn the next generation of Germans, or at least its best and brightest, into themselves? Or did it work the other way? Did the Germans steal the Jews' lightning out of their corpses and pack it into their children?

“One could of course go on that way. Who cares, finally? But I admired you so much just then, as a reporter, as a lonely seer. I'm embarrassed, really, that I doubted you. But of course I had to.”

And then her name.

HOLLY ANHOLT

Silence

WE HARDLY TALKED
about what had happened between us. We didn't “rehash” or think to start again.

Was our silence the proof, as Nils might have thought, that our conspiracy of guilt had fallen apart? Or of what Oksana in her borrowed, birdlike English said, two needy people shouldn't hook up?

Maybe we were just stupidly brave and stoical.

And my anger, that magic bullet of mine? I could remember its name but not its feeling. I remembered it in sorrow.

HOLLY ANHOLT

Incidents

TO ELABORATE ON CERTAIN INCIDENTS
which took place:

2. When I first saw my neighbor across the street, he had a broom in his hands and was shooing a woman off his stubbly front yard. The woman had arrived in a chocolate brown Mercedes with license plates of the West which she had parked in front of his shabby stuccoed house. She had expensive, piled-up hair and wore a designer ski parka with a variety of bells and whistles hanging off it. My neighbor himself was a ravaged-looking man with thinning hair and a mouth knit tight by repression, probably in his forties but who could know for sure. “Plant your own garden!” he was shouting. “Sweep your own walk! Clean your own dogshit!”

“There's no need for that, Mr. Anspach”, the woman said, backing away from the probes of his broom. “I'm simply trying to bring a little beauty…”

“You're trying to bring yourself, that's all! Colonist! Scavenger!… Here! Here! You!”

He looked at me suddenly. He picked up a stringy brown piece of plant life, roots and a lifeless stem. “Is this dead? Be impartial! Judge!”

“Of course it's dead! You uprooted it!” the woman shouted back at him, then she too turned to me: “I plant things. This insane man destroys everything.”

“Every week she arrives. Her ladyship in her Stuttgart pig-mobile! To
ti
dy up!
Burgher
ize! I've had it!” Again he polled me: “Dead or alive?”

I could understand well enough, but was afraid to put my limited German into the equation of his rage. I shrugged as if I wanted no part of any of it and went inside, while he continued to shout at the woman.

But I had unfortunately not escaped Mr. Anspach's interest. How could I have? I must have been the talk of the neighborhood. Later he brought me, as a housewarming gift, he said, a green cake in the shape of a dollar sign. What a clever man, Mr. Anspach. Like a fool I tried to explain to him that I was neither a speculator nor a colonist, and that my parents had been forced to live in a bunker in the woods. I was always telling people that, hoping that someone would know something about it. “Why don't you claim the bunker?” Mr. Anspach replied dryly.

Then it was Mr. Anspach who opened a “Museum of Colonization” in his house. He spray-painted a bed sheet and hung it from an upstairs window to announce what it was, and he would stand out front in a disheveled state yelling “Entrance Free!” at people who passed in cars. I went in once myself, to prove to myself I had nothing to be afraid of and that I was an objective observer of such things.

It was a house where the windows were never open. What a musty, sad smell it had. The combined living room-kitchen had been converted, according to a scrawl on the wall, into a “ROOM OF FIRE.” News and photographs of the fire at the Potsdam claims office were taped to the walls. Another scrawl on the wall opposite proclaimed “OUR GLORIOUS VICTORY.” This appeared to be headline for more clippings and statements, including Anspach's own, arguing the possibility or expressing the hope that the claims process would be set back by the fire. A small room adjoining the kitchen was bannered “EXAMPLE: POHL” and was devoted to the comings and goings of the woman who had claimed Anspach's house, the Berliner with the big car. I felt very lucky that he didn't have a third room for “EXAMPLE: ANHOLT”.

Later the police came and questioned Mr. Ansbach about the Potsdam fire. Simona told me he was their prime suspect.

Later still Mr. Anspach hung himself. I write this with a worldly matter-of-factness but in truth I was horrified. It was a night for one of Simona's awful séances and I was cooped up in my room with the door shut. Mrs. Baum, the housekeeper, burst in: “Herr Anspach!” She thrust her hand to her throat. “Kaput!”

In his “Room of Fire,” Anspach hung from a water pipe. His wife was hysterical. Neighbors hung back and gaped. After a moment seeing all these people looking at his body as though it were a piñata, I went to the sink and found a knife. The way I would later explain this to myself, my seeming composure was because I was so depressed about Nils that nothing else could bother me that much. I placed a chair under the dangling body, got up on it, and began to slice through the rope. “Please,” I said to Mrs. Baum.

She came forward, as though prepared at least to break the body's fall. Someone else put a second chair under it. Mrs. Baum then held Anspach's legs, supporting him somewhat, so that the rope would be less stretched and easier to cut. I positioned myself so as to avoid looking at Anspach's face. His body exuded sweat and urine. As a way to shut out everything else, I focused on the strands of hemp, letting themselves go one by one in response to the insistent incursions of the blade. But my arm weakened, and the rope was still thick. Giessen the caretaker, another of the Writers Union retainers, at last got up with me, on the second chair, and took the knife from my hands. He was strong enough, the rope split apart, and the three of us lowered Anspach's corpse to the floor, where his widow threw herself on it, shook it and slapped Anspach's face. I was trembling by then, and still trembled half an hour later. The police would not be coming till morning. Other neighbors finally pitched in, to cover Anspach's body and close his eyes. I went home. The séance was continuing. I crept upstairs and tried to read and felt nauseous.

4. The way to Velden from the city is the S-Bahn to Wannsee, and from the Wannsee terminus to Velden a bus. I fell asleep on the train, my cheek on my balled-up coat that I had wedged between my seat and the metal window frame. I must have heard the conductor call Grunewald. Later I wasn't even sure I woke up. That would explain what happened next. It was a weirdly deep sleep, brought on seemingly by my lack of sleep the night before, up worried over one thing and another, the claims that were coming up, the Schiessls, all of that all over again. I seemed to open my eyes. We were stopped for some reason just short of the station, in the middle of a freight yard. Many tracks, many trains, strings of box cars and cattle cars. And I thought I heard someone, in English, maybe Nils's voice, though I didn't know it at the time, say to another person, “You know, the deportations took place from Grunewald. The transports left from here.” And as I heard the words, uttered between two people I could not see, a freight train moved past my window. And car by car, I could see hands thrust through the wooden slots of the cattle cars, and faces, high and low, pressed against them, crowds of people in each car as in a documentary film. They seemed to be crying for help, some of them, at least, I could see the mouths of women moving, and children. But I couldn't hear their voices. Then the train jerked forward, and the passing freight was gone, and I was truly awake, sitting in an S-Bahn car in Grunewald station.