Berlin Cantata (5 page)

Anja Mann had told me a little of what to expect: the GDR had converted it into a writers' retreat. The East German writers union had held it.

We peered in through one set of gates, our noses close to the posts.

“Climb over?” Nils asked.

“Just look.”

“Probably best. No point scaring people.”

“I guess they're still living here.”

“Do you know how many?”

“No.”

“The union's sycophants and Stasi informants, for sure… I'd have no regrets throwing those jokers out.”

“Look!”

“What?”

“That birdhouse. It's in my film.”

It was just then, I believe, that I imagined for the first time the possibility of possessing this house, of it being mine as it had been my parents'. Or even more oddly, of it being properly mine, of it being in some half-lit sense my inheritance. A girl finds a film in her parents' strongbox and passes it through the incandescent halo of her mother's bedside lamp, squinting to ward off the glare, seeing little. Numbers. Seven-six-five. Three-two-one. Then what might have been a lake and what might have been the sky, or the other way around. It began there and now I was here. For a few moments, I forgot about my partners the Nazis.

ANJA MANN

Joke

ALRIGHT, I
'
LL SHARE A SMALL JOKE
. Or perhaps it's not a joke at all. Perhaps only someone such as myself could think it was a joke. When I gathered the paperwork together regarding the claim of the elder Mrs. Anholt, inherited by her daughter, I recognized at once the property described as the old East German Writers Union retreat in Velden am Moritzsee.

I knew who was living there and who might be evicted if the claim came to fruition. This provided, shall we say, a delightful added motivation, above and beyond my customary fees, to see the claim through to a successful conclusion. Of course, it would have been inappropriate to share this motivation with my client.

Screw yourself, Simona Jastrow. Be homeless, for all I care.

HOLLY ANHOLT

Atonement

I MENTIONED PREVIOUSLY
that it was through Anja that I met Oksana and it was at Oksana's wedding that I met Nils.

But the circuits were busier than that.

The day of my second meeting with Anja, she invited me to her apartment for something which she described as “a little gathering.” It turned out it was to mark the conclusion of Yom Kippur. I hadn't known it was the Jewish holy day. But here in the old East Berlin, on the fourth floor of a mouldering apartment building on a leafy, cobblestoned street, people were gathered to somehow take note.

It could have seemed like a little cabal, the thirty of us there to break a fast when few of us had been fasting, Jews coming out of nowhere, as if responding to a call that only they could hear, “Communism's finished. Come on back. Check it out.” There was even a close-shaven rabbi from Illinois who fashioned himself a missionary. “These people wouldn't know the Day of Atonement from Income Tax Day.” His mantra went something like that, and probably it was so. It certainly might have been so of me, if I'd known exactly what he meant by “Income Tax Day.” But then it turned out the mantra was mostly prologue to an invitation to dinner, which I declined, citing jet lag, though I'd only flown from Paris. As for the rest, I was bewildered. A city without Jews that had all these Jews in it, or this many anyway, enough to make a party of plastic cups and wine out of jugs in an apartment that if you squinted might have been on the West Side of Manhattan up by Columbia. Remnant Jews, secret GDR Jews, a few Soviet Jews. Jews who'd fled and come back with the victors, Jews who were lost mandarins now, Jews who'd believed in the universality of man and maybe still did.

It was as if one crisis of faith was begetting a flirtation with another, and as if the city that had lost one of its limbs was receiving a miraculous gift, a little bump under the flesh, where the limb was just beginning to grow back. Faith and miracles, not really things I knew much about.

But so many people who came to be what the city itself would be for me, its human geography, its insisting pulse, were there that night. Oksana, the beautiful Franz Rosen, and sweaty David Fürst. And Nils, who came late with David. Somehow we didn't meet then, but I saw him across the room, spare, reserved, cool, not talking with anyone, or seeming to want to. It may have been on account of that first night that always afterwards I would dream of him with one hand in the pocket of his jacket. His left hand, holding something, holding something back.

DAVID FÜRST

Enterprise

MY ROUGH REACTION
to all the Jews arriving from Russia was, get out of here, this is my turf. Go home, go to Israel, go to New York, what's wrong with you? Of course I knew the many reasons why they came here. In Israel you'd have to serve in the army and there were many other inconveniences, including the possibility of being bombed on a bus. America had more restrictive immigration laws and less socialistic political arrangements. By comparison, Berlin felt oddly familiar. Germany was close by, prosperous, free, and best of all, it was welcoming. To go by our government, it actually wanted its Jews back. Well, it couldn't have
its
Jews back, of course, but it could have substitute Jews. So the unlikely tripartite emigration developed, to Israel, to America, to Berlin. My objection was entirely personal. I wrote about this in my newspaper. For years I had made a nice living, thank you, being the lonesome Jew in the land of the murderers, describing the hills and valleys, making my accommodations, being ironic like crazy, fitting in, doing well or well enough. These new immigrants were turning me into a commonplace. If things went on like this for ten more years, Berlin would be a normal city, Jew-wise and otherwise. David Fürst begins to see his redundancy. I wrote a last column about it all and resigned.

This was more a dramatic flourish than a fact. I agreed at once to do occasional guest columns. In the meantime, I believed I had found a way to stay ahead of my brethren from Russia and to keep myself relevant. One of my columns a few months before had been about the skinhead effulgence in the East and the efforts of a Lutheran minister to do job-training among the right-wing youth of Marzahn. Shortly after my column ran, the minister ran off to Casablanca with a male schoolteacher he met on the job. This did little to enhance the confidence of his skinhead charges in the sincerity of the West. I saw an opportunity to step into the breach. If these little right-wing savages wanted job training, why not receive it from a Jew? I had been a car enthusiast and amateur mechanic most of my life. You may have already noted a certain working class coarseness of grain in my personality. I should say that this has been equal parts my
shtick
and my desire. To be not superior to my pipefitter father, to not try to show him up, against and admixed with all my reflexes to rise in life. To embrace the romance of manual labor, to be a muscle Jew, not a lump in a chair. As well, I suppose I was eager to show, to whom exactly I couldn't quite say, what a Jew could do in the love-thine-enemies area. So a mid-course correction in career seemed as seductive as it was practical.

A sensible Berliner of my generation, I did the first thing any of us did whenever we came up with a fresh idea: I looked around for a grant. An acquaintance of mine, a recent émigré herself, had recently become affianced to one of Berlin's richest men. She persuaded him that his foundation would do well to toss a bit of seed money my way. I rented a warehouse in Marzahn and began recruiting from the swirling local pool of bitter, racist, disillusioned, neo-Nazi little shits a crew of the least objectionable to be apprentices in my program, which would teach them not only about the various Western model cars they were unfamiliar with, but a handful of capitalist business skills as well.

In a word, the program went badly. I managed to sign up, from among the absconded pastor's former charges, four reasonably bright, appropriately shorn, politically questionable apprentice mechanics. I bought up various junkers and shop manuals for us to work from. We set up regular hours for study and practice. We opened our doors. We advertised. Our rates were dirt cheap. But no business walked in the door. Part of our problem, of course, was that we were in Marzahn, where if the citizenry had cars at all, they were mostly Trabis, which needed repairs often enough, but for which, on account of the chronic problems, there was no shortage of experienced hands to fix them. But I couldn't afford the rent anywhere in the western city, and it would have been a long, strange commute for my charges in any event. So we were slowly going bust, until what seemed a miraculous brainstorm arrived to save us. It seemed miraculous to me, I should say, not only for its timely appearance but on account of its source. Richard Kunstlinger was a bony, watery-eyed boy of nineteen with a pencil-thin nose that reminded me inevitably of my favorite needle-nosed pliers. He had come into a wreck of a Trabant on his father's death. Before joining my project, his chief experience in car repair had come from attempting to restore to roadworthiness this modest, ruined example of the East German economic miracle. One day he drove his father's Trabant to the garage. It made the immediate impression of being a clean piece of work. It didn't belch or hiccup. Even the windshield wipers were attached. We all looked under the hood, medical interns with a new cadaver to consider. What struck me at once was not only its resplendent cleanliness – you could have cooked and eaten the mythical fried egg off its exhaust manifold – but the presence of a gleaming, unfamiliar part, like a chick from a different species in a nest, in the already tightly-packed engine compartment. “What's that? What's that doing there?” I asked.

“It's a catalytic converter,” Richard said, nonchalantly.

Richard had deduced how to adapt the catalytic converter of a wrecked 1987 Opel in order to reduce the emissions of his belching, smoking, hyper-polluting old Trabant to the point of near invisibility.

I asked him how he did it. He was nonchalant about that as well. He said it had been mostly trial and error, he'd tried out several junkyard converters, determined to make a clean machine.

I praised him lavishly, then announced to the entire group: “I believe Richard here may have saved our skins, pardon the expression.”

My charges grumpily granted me a minute to explain myself. “Why are we beating our heads into the wall? We're in Trabant country, we're surrounded by millions of the little beasts. Currently, of course, they're despised, ignominious, laughable symbols of your former wonderful government's disaster. But what if we, and we alone, came out with a clean, pollution-free Trabant? Wouldn't we be in the forefront of the inevitable GDR nostalgia, wouldn't we have a cult car?”

All four looked at me askance, or with incomprehension. The tools and lingo of the capitalist huckster were still blissfully foreign to them. I repeated myself and explained. Finally, with nods and grunts but mostly silences, they indulged me to the point where I believed they must be allowing me enough rope to hang myself. I went immediately back to the Herbert Kaminsky Foundation, begging for enough money to begin production on pollution-free Trabi cult cars, praising the talent and initiative of my young skinhead apprentice who had thought up the whole scheme, thereby showing fine capitalist instincts waiting to be exploited. I walked away with enough cash to buy a dozen worn Trabis and every mid-eighties Opel catalytic converter to be found in the city's junkyards.

Now all seemed strewn with roses for Skin Enterprises, but what of my relations with my charges? I confess that at the outset I had a hard time differentiating them, as if they had been sculpted ensemble out of a single block of wood. There was Richard, whom I've briefly described. In some ways he seemed the runt of the litter. He was the only one about whom you couldn't have confidence that he could easily beat someone up. There was an angularity about Richard, an inability to face you at anything but a slightly oblique angle. I had no idea, ever, what he thought. And he had skinny arms, unsuitable for street combat. Heinrich and Hermann were more obvious characters. If they hated you, they hated you, end of story. Blubbery and pin-eyed, they were the types you could make beer commercials from, men of definitive but dull opinions, masters of the quick but fatuous comeback, easily amused. I particularly liked Heinrich's raucous, gut-choking laugh, which could be aroused, for a typical example, by any joke whatsoever about a homosexual. Finally there was dear Johann. Johann styled himself the group's leader. He felt that he earned this mantle by being the quickest to criticize me for any failing. He was also the most physically imposing, tall, muscular and rangy. I might have done better to train him as a prize fighter, some new “white hope,” quick but not quite quick enough, whose guts some black man might decorate a wall with. Johann's intellectual framework was to take anything the GDR had ever taught him and believe exactly the opposite. This simple schema also facilitated his desired ascendancy over his fellows: for every question, he had a ready answer.

I could have done with less of Johann. In fact I might have given him the boot, but for the saving grace that he was greedy. He was the only one of the four who seemed to have any interest in, or instinct for, making money. Since adaptation to the new economic environment was the aim, you could see that he provided a promising, if not strictly necessary, component to the whole. Our typical day ended with a session of self-criticism. What this meant, chiefly, was that I criticized them, or they criticized me, or they criticized each other. None of us, yours truly included, showed too great enthusiasm for criticizing themselves. I criticized their laziness, their sloppiness, their tardiness, their snarliness, their indifference to quality, and their not infrequent alcohol breath. I left their politics alone. They, particularly Johann, criticized my bossiness, my intrusiveness, my loud mouth, my sarcastic put-downs, my pudginess, and my failure to make them immediately rich and successful. They never referenced the fact of my Jewishness, though of course they knew it well enough, from my public newspaper columns if nothing else. Instead they indicted me as a journalist. According to this theory, I was someone who would inevitably betray them in print. Even if the project failed, I would write a book about it, or more columns, and have my own success. I didn't give a shit about them except as material. I would forget all about them.