Berlin Cantata (3 page)

Herbert didn't say a word about my cruel indiscretion. I knew that he wouldn't, nor would he hold it against me. Past midnight we wandered, more or less together, in the ruins the party left behind. Herbert is an optimistic person but not a happy one. Happiness must seem too dangerous to him. But he finds possibility in anything other than outright disaster. The party in his view had been a great success. The cleaners would come in the morning. “Was it not too unpleasant for you, Oksana?” he asked.

“Unpleasant? Of course not. It was fine.”

“I'm glad you invited your friends. It would have been terribly gray without them.”

You will observe the politeness and care in Herbert's speech. Sometimes I went along with this and sometimes not. I was still regretting my earlier cruelty. We mounted the stairs to the upstairs suite as if we were wandering ghosts. Jews had built the house in the twenties, Nazis had taken it in the thirties, leaving behind the hint of morbid Eros that pervades this entire city. It is like a fog, this hint, light and deft, coming and going, and it permits its inhabitants to behave like sleepwalkers or carnival goers in masks; love and death intertwined, invisibly. I contemplated an apology. Instead I took his hand.

Herbert accepted it with guarded passivity, holding it as one might hold the hand of a child while crossing a street. We were at the top of the stairs. The next stop surely was the bedroom, but it provoked in me no anxiety. I had little difficulty having sex with Herbert. I do not say this as a prostitute might. The absence of desire has its own beauty, austere, nearly colorless, like water. I don't believe I ever prostituted myself with Herbert, though I came out of Russia with nothing and in material terms he gave me much. He gave me my studio. He gave me the possibility of my own work. I had much to thank Herbert for, but gratitude was hard for me and sex has always been the coin of many realms. If he gave me little pleasure in bed, he was not alone. Long before Herbert, even going back to my first husband in the woods, I had developed an intricate fantasy that, coupled with the earnest thrashing on top of me, ultimately relieved me of my indifference. My old stand-by. A father goes away and then what? Go west, seek him out, even in the city that smells of death. But I can't divulge more. It would be unseemly to reveal what seems proper only in my own mind. Here you see my anti-Utopian tendencies. Now where would those have arisen? Of course a Prince Charming might come along one day and unlock all my secret lockets. But if I were Herbert, I would not be too afraid.

In the oversized bedroom, I felt that we were worse than merely short, I imagined that we might actually be “little people,” people out of a Grimm's tale. Herbert not only built big, he redesigned big, or he had, until he met me. But there was nothing to be done about the high oak posts on which the bed sat, or the tall Venetian windows. I went to look out at the Wannsee. For easily the fourth or fifth time in the handful of nights we had spent here, Herbert, standing just behind me, pointed to a dark lump across the lake, quite identical to other dark lumps, and observed that it was the villa where the famous “conference” took place, that supposedly settled the Jews' fate. I nodded, nothing more, because I didn't care to find another fault with him by telling him it was the fourth or fifth time. It was then he told me how ridiculous he had felt in his smoking jacket and foulard.

For some reason I couldn't answer that, though I've told you how distinguished I'd thought he looked. “What a night,” was all I said.

“Oksana…” I detected a pleading tone; never a good sign. He still stood behind me, touching my shoulders now. His light touch was slightly stronger on one shoulder than the other, as if urging me to turn around. But I was afraid.

“May I tell you a thought I never thought I would have? I think I would like to have a child.”

Like a shot from behind, these words grazed my neck, causing it to burn.

“That's ridiculous,” I said.

“What's ridiculous about it?” he asked.

“You never mentioned it once before. It must be this whole wedding fantasy that's gone to your head.”

“I suppose…But I think of myself when I was young…I'm sorry, I never intended to trade so blatantly on my own suffering…”

“Let's go to bed,” I said. I turned towards him. The pleading in his eyes overwhelmed me. He seemed, suddenly, defeated. I became furious. It was if he were interfering too far in my life, as if he felt he now had a right to. But I still would have said nothing more about it if he hadn't added:

“I know it wasn't part of our bargain…”

“What bargain? We had no ‘bargain.' You think I would make a bargain with you? I wouldn't make a bargain with anybody. That's mad! You have this whole idea, now I see it, you've built it up in your head. You were waiting to spring it on me.”

“Not at all,” he protested.

“Lie! Liar! Of course you must have. Where could this have come from?”

Herbert looked dumbstruck. His eyes were wide with grief.

I reflected on what I had said, and what he had said. “No. I'm wrong. The bargain we had was that we wouldn't fall in love with each other. What a banal bargain. I can see that now. Would you say a bargain exists when no words for it exist but people behave over time as if they do? I think that's what you mean, isn't it?”

“I'm not so complicated as you, Oksana. My wants don't go away.”

“Please answer me.”

“You're cruel. Not to me, to yourself. That's what I can't bear.”

“Thank you for the car,” I said. “I'll learn to drive it.”

We went to bed exhausted. Or really, I speak for myself. I had thought Herbert must be as well, but he pounded me in our sex that night as he never had before. He was relentless. He was in a rage. I thought he must be young. His relentlessness, first a distraction, became a facilitator of my fantasy. Finally I looked into his eyes, though I don't know what I saw there. It could have been love, but I wouldn't claim to know.

Afterwards, I showered and checked my birth control pills, to make sure that I had taken them.

HOLLY ANHOLT

Claim

MY MOTHER WAS CRAZY
. That's one way to look at the evidence. Though it's funny that I should say that or think that, since I'm not really someone who believes in calling other people crazy. I save it for rare occasions, the way I save the little soaps that like a bag lady in upscale disguise I collect from hotels for times when I feel blue.

My mother was, perhaps, if not crazy, unrealistic? Though here too I would say: I'm not someone who necessarily thinks reality has sharp boundaries. It's there and then it's not there. Harsh critics somewhere will call me a relativist. Take my mother. Please. My mother who survived the extermination and never talked about it unless of course she had a sly conspiracy with my father to never talk about it
around me,
but secretly as soon as I left the room was talking about it all the time; my mother who was light-hearted and made jokes and lost a daughter on the “resettlement” train; my mother who was the most forgiving soul in the world; my mother who at age forty-two, the oldest mom of anybody I knew, had me to make up for it all. This mother who never spoke of the past for almost fifty years, then goes to Berlin at the city's invitation and goes around forgiving every German she can find and having the grandest time. There was no sign of Alzheimer's in my mother, either. She was sharp as a stick, could do the crossword puzzles the whole week through. But what she wouldn't do, in Berlin, was go to the country. This was where she had hidden in the forest. This was where she had survived. It was also where their weekend house had been, and where they had been happy together. I had the pictures to prove it. Thirty seconds of black-and-white home movies, which I only found when they sold the house, because they'd been put away in a steel box, that showed my father in rolled-up shirtsleeves and my mother in a cotton print dress in a rowboat drawing up to a grassy lakefront. They must have been in their late twenties. He helps her out of the boat. Their feet get wet. They're carrying their shoes. They look towards the camera, she a bit bashful, he with a broader smile. A flower in my mother's hair. Shots, too, of a baby carriage and of their sprawling dark house. I wanted to go, I wanted to see, or I wanted her to see, as if I were her shrink honing in on a lively point of resistance. I wanted to break through what I thought was this crazy falseness of hers, this princess childhood she was suddenly reliving. But she said no. Instead, when she died, in her sleep in Walnut Creek, California over the hills from San Francisco, she left me a claim that she had filed, in the days after our return from Berlin. It was for the country house and some property in Berlin proper.
Here
, if you're so interested, you deal with it, the claim seemed to say. She was buried beside my father in arid land made fertile by sprinkler systems and the bounty of the Sierras. For me her funeral was a tearless affair. The mourners were far from young, women mostly, friends from her bridge game or her volunteer work in Oakland, one black face as well, which at funerals like my mother's usually meant the maid, but my mother didn't have a maid. I stood a little apart, a late, hurried arrival, jet-lagged, on a bereavement fare. The only other relatives were an aunt from Toronto and a second cousin from La Jolla. At the time, I attributed my dry eyes, in equal shares, to exhaustion and the fact that I'd never been one to cry much. Even at the time I knew this was probably convenient rationalization. Such bits of wisdom as I've ever acquired pile up in my brain as if scrawled on so many little slips of paper, as if they were someone's recipes, and on one such slip was written indelibly what I'd seen on TV once, a lawyer telling how he won cases, and one rule was that you never let a witness give two reasons for anything. Two reasons are always a lie. The truth is always one reason. But I couldn't have said what that reason was. Most people, when their remaining parent dies, spend days or weeks sorting through what is left. I spent an hour stuffing a suitcase with mementoes and put everything else into storage. The obvious conclusion, that I couldn't deal with it, I dismissed with a slightly uneasy internal wave as pop psych presumption, like all the rest of the talk show shibboleths I hated to hear, get a life, lighten up, get past it, you just don't
get
it. Well, no, shut up, I begged to differ. A person can just want to get out of town. Later for the U-Stor-It in San Leandro. Later for the papers and the bank. Later for notes to various people who had shaken my hand. Later, too, for tears.

But for my mother's property claim in Berlin I somehow made a little time, as if for a guest from out-of-town that gets special attention for the distance she's traveled. A month or so after the funeral, I made my way back to this sprawling, shapeless metropolis, this sun-challenged L.A. of Mitteleuropa, to clean the matter up. I had little idea what to expect, other than I expected to leave soon. Then I met a fella. I stayed a little longer. In the meantime the claim plodded forward. I had two businesslike meetings with a lawyer, a woman with pronounced cheekbones, prunish mouth and a silver bun who had once been a formidable democracy advocate in the GDR. Anja Mann. Claims were Anja's money earner, or rather became her money earner after the collapse of the East German regime when it became possible for people who'd been dispossessed under the Nazis or Communists to file claims to get their property back. Soon claims were pouring in from the corners of the earth. My mother's, apparently, was among the first. She'd seen an ad in
The New York Times
.

My feelings at the outset about the whole business were anything but deep. I write this with the sort of confidence that sounds like another lie the minute I read it. I remember now being nervous every step of the way, nervous as the plane landed at Tegel airport, nervous getting my cheesy hotel on the Ku'damm and taking the lift up, nervous meeting the lawyer. Growing up in suburban California with everything normal and American except for two slightly elderly parents silent about their dreadful past, or what from a certain age of awareness I felt had to be their dreadful past, left me with questions, of course. The trip to Berlin with my mother had answered none of them, nor was it really supposed to. It was my mother's trip, not mine. But why was I even alive? I've written something silly on that subject already: “to make up for it all.” I didn't actually know that. I knew nothing. And now there was this claim, this lawyer, my mother's death, and property that might be mine and might carry secrets: my reaction – my conscious reaction, as I suppose I should qualify it – was mostly to feel annoyed at the imposition on my time and attention, and to wish the whole thing would go away. It might have, if I hadn't met Nils. I would have signed a few papers, looked around a bit, and flown back to Paris. Months or years later, a check would have shown up in the mail or it wouldn't have.

But I did meet Nils, which I'll either write about later or I won't. I met him through my lawyer, actually.

It was on account of Anja that I met the Russian painter Oksana, and it was at Oksana's wedding that I met Nils.

Some other fairly irrelevant factors: I marveled at my lawyer's ability to evoke ambivalent feelings in me. If she ever smiled, they were forced, unlovely smiles, as if she were suppressing the taste of something she had eaten. She lacked cuddliness altogether. She gave the uneasy-making impression that if you weren't with her, you were against her. Yet anything I could think to ask Anja Mann, she could explain. And patiently – she seemed to like to explain, she seemed a little schoolmarmy. I felt in good hands with her. She asked me at our first meeting whether I wanted an actual return of my parents' properties or simply a cash settlement. I said cash. And then it was she, on the day after Oksana's party, who called me at my hotel to tell me about the rival claim. “I've been trying to reach you, Miss Anholt. We must go to a meeting. Are you free Tuesday afternoon?”