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Authors: Jeffrey Lewis

Berlin Cantata (8 page)

BOOK: Berlin Cantata
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There. At last it's done, or at least begun. The story of myself. My documentation. Mission accomplished, for the eager support the defunct Writers Union gave me over the years. You know what I say to all of it? Bullshit. You know what I really want to write about? I'll tell you what's really on my mind. I'd like to scratch out every word of my past. I know what other people say about me. I know all of it. Do you think I don't know? Of course I know. I've known all along. The one shining, perfect example: Anja Mann. She's confronted me with her hauteur. I told her, I said to her, to her face, I said, “Anja, at least I admit. At least I come clean. Everyone wrote notes about everyone else, and if they say otherwise, they lie.” She says to me, “I never wrote notes.” Not her, not the great Anja, the great civil rights leader, the taunter of Honecker and the rest. Bullshit. She probably did, in her sleep, with the sluts of the regime she slept with. I know these things. Why am I a leper, why am I maligned? Malign us all, but then shut up. Another perfectly good example: Oksana Kozlova. Top of the Red heap,
nomenklatura
through and through, now she comes around, she drives my new would-be landlord up to the house in her silver little shitty new Mercedes-Benz car, and what's she saying, what's she poisoning my new would-be landlord's ears with? I don't have to have been there to know. It was all in her knowing expression when she came to the door. “Oh, Simona, everyone knows Simona,
pure
Stasi!” What the hell does that mean,
pure
Stasi? She slanders me right in front of my new would-be landlord, tries to get me kicked out! I've lived here eight years. I'm the only one left. I told her, the would-be landlord, I tried to make it even a joke, so she'd understand, I'm from the States too, almost the States, so fuck it, so it's Canada, so what, Canada, I'm from North America too, so I say, “Simona Jastrow, Last of the Mohicans.” And she didn't laugh, and you know why she didn't laugh? Because that cunt Red whore Oksana had already “told her all about me.” Fuck her and all her progeny, if she didn't have too barren a womb to have any. And anyway it was true what I reported about Anja Mann, that she projected Zionist tendencies.

There. That feels better. Now I can resume. Where was I? Oh yes. Electra Papaiannis. The séances. Which those too, by the way, the likes of Anja Mann and all the rest would savage me for: “From ardent Communist to ardent communing with the dead, in what? Two snaps of a finger? Some people need faith badly.” Fatuous self-righteous crap. She'll see, Anja will, the West has no need for her moralizing, her endless boring starch. I slept with her once. No fun at all. There. Forgive me. The séances, on the subject of the séances. I invited Electra to come to the Writers Guild house and organize them. Every other Tuesday night, twice a month. Get out the candles, darken the library, Electra's coming! They were the only moments of my weeks that I feared and looked forward to. Mama didn't come. Father didn't come. Nobody came for me, I had no idea what I was doing or supposed to be doing, I listened, I purified my mind, I invited celestial thoughts, I did whatever Electra said to do. And you know for the others, tables moved, whatever else, voices, trances. I thought they were insane and I wasn't. What a distraction it was from everything else. To have something, however absurd and unlikely, that offered hope, or as I might rather put it, still the possibility of beating life at its own game. This went on for two months, then the American arrived.

Was
chauffeured,
if you please, driven up by that little cunt Oksana in her whored-for car. Driven up like a princess out to do her shopping, “Ah yes, I'll take two of these and one of those, and don't
those
look delicious, and by the way I think I'll just have that nice house over there. What? There are already people in it? But look, I have papers, I have a claim! My, my, we'll just have to see about this. People already living in
my
house?”

Obviously, I get excited about this. You see, this house, this empty old GDR house, this empty institutional functionaries' house, had become my home. I had my room, I had my things, I had my curtains. My bedspread, even my bear. Yes, my bear, you admit you have a stuffed bear and people will think what a pathetic fool, what an insane one, who never lived past childhood! Well screw them, let them think whatever, I happen to know others who have a stuffed bear, I've heard, I've read, it's not so unusual, but even if it were, the point I am making is that even when the Writers Union retreat in Velden am Moritzsee later claimed by some American who never lived there a day in her life was empty of every writer but me, it was not the center of my universe but its entirety, that to which my universe had been reduced, where Electra with her brood of seekers came every other Tuesday night. I would serve them tea afterwards. Slowly I got to know a few of their names.

The American was the hugest distraction. After her first appearance with the Russian slut, she began to make regular visits, every two weeks, every week, looking around, imagining. Mrs. Baum would hear her coming in her cute little fixed-up car. Who did she think she was? These were always Mrs. Baum's words. More to the point, who did
we
think she was? She had a claim. We had no idea how long it might take to be processed or if it was valid. We had little idea of her intentions, because she never said. She was unfailingly polite and mild. She came and wandered around, in the house, in the fields, down to the lake. She was like a visitor from another planet. This, too, is what Mrs. Baum often said. And when and if she took over, would she dismiss the caretakers first? And would her last living tenant last-of-the-Mohicans-Stasicollaborationist-despised-by-all-for-her-honest-accounting-of-the-reality-of-how-things-were Simona Jastrow be given the boot as well? By all accounts, I should have been the first to go. It turned out my room was this Miss Anholt's parents' old bedroom. I let her in to look around. I imagined she hated everything that was mine. When she saw Bear-Bear, I cringed. Or perhaps it was she who cringed as well.

Obviously I tried to ingratiate myself with Miss Anholt. I brought her fresh local tomatoes. I showed her this and that around the house, ooh'd and aah'd at her old bits of film. My initiatives of course came with risks, in that she might have become more attached. At the same time I could imagine her thoughts, the nights she was at the top of the stairs while Electra conducted our proceedings in the library. I gleaned and wheedled. I tried to establish what her timetable was and her intentions. She had some boyfriend in the city, which for a certain period was a godsend, keeping her away most of the time. But inexorably her visits grew more frequent and longer, until it was clear to me that all my hopes that she would soon tire of us, or split with the boyfriend and so return to the States or Paris (or wherever it was she imagined she came from – really, it takes one nomad to spot another) were not to be realized. Finally I had it out with her. What else could I do? I accused her of many things. I told her how she had invaded us, how she had no thought for others, how she was a slave to little pieces of paper, money and deeds, how she could scarcely imagine how others' lives had been led, how limited she was, how small and pathetic, how everyone in Velden loathed her, how we knew perfectly well her plans to kick us out. Don't say that I went too far. I went as far as I needed to. She was taken aback. She admitted that yes, it was a possibility, that she would have to evict me. She claimed to have made no decisions, but I knew the truth.

And yet, from that confrontation, I grew to like the girl. She absorbed my attacks with bewilderment. She tried to explain her own quandary. For she had one, just like me. Something was hidden from her. She wasn't even certain what it was, except that it might be here, in this house or in the woods. She was very indefinite, and sad. I hugged her like a sister, and she hugged me back.

But now I had not a crutch left, not even my room with its pretty curtains and its view to the lake that I woke up to. My life here was over. My last defenses were down. Those whom I'd written little notes about haunted me and I woke up from nightmares begging their forgiveness. Surely this was too melodramatic, yet it created still another fault in me which I could not avoid. I put my things away, took them off the dresser, packed them up. My life felt over. I felt overwhelmed by my life's lovelessness. An endless waste, all of it. I wept and trembled.

Nor was it even any longer a pleasure or solace to recognize what cunts and monsters all the others were, those who would not even admit, even now, the comprehensiveness of our history's disgrace, so comprehensive it engulfed even themselves. I told Electra to call off her séances. I wanted nothing more with them. It had all been a fool's errand anyway. I had sat there in the dark befuddled. But she beguiled me. She wouldn't quite take my “no” to be final. She intimated that just then, when all hope was lost, when one's being had lost every structure of expectation and support, was when a miracle might occur. Though of course to her it was no miracle. To her it was all very scientific. The logic of the universe was called upon.

I gave in to her persuasions. I invited her and what I took to be her sorry band of followers for one last audition in the house. The procedures began, so banal I'm ashamed to write them, the hand-holding, the silence, the candles. When Electra channeled, her voice broke into a million pieces. She could have been anybody. I can recall that I stared at the bowl of oil that night and on this one occasion my mind did not flee to resentments or self-accusations or fantasies. My eyes seemed to slip into the bowl's oily substance, to swim in a place where vision is blurred. This is also absurd to write, is it not? Even now I can imagine my dear would-be landlord at the top of the stairs, listening in with condescension and confusion. What were these preposterous people doing in
her
house? And then, you can take this for true or not, you can tear it apart, you can ask what I
really
mean, you can believe your own fantasies about me, you can be fantastically cruel, whatever you wish, I cannot control it, be a cunt, go ahead, be my guest. But I became aware that both my parents were in the room, and that they were there together, it wasn't one of them on the left and the other on the right, avoiding each other's gazes and intimations, no, they were there together, as if hand in hand, they had reconciled.

How did I know this? You will of course want to know the gory details, whether I saw them with my eyes or heard them with my ears or through Electra's thousand voices or taps on the table or in a swoon, an ineffable sense, and was I like a saint struck down by God, a biblical story, what about a biblical story, that would make a nice story too. You'll want to have plenty of information to smash me with, to prove my impossibility. But I swear to you, and you can take it or leave it. My parents were there, and they were together, not hand in hand, I didn't see their hands holding one another, but it was
as if
they were hand in hand. Have you enough rope to hang me with yet? I expect little of the world, and from it least of all understanding. I felt their presence. And I knew that it was not a dream. It was entirely different from a dream. I felt their presence with a sense that I did not know I had.

I told my would-be landlord, she who would never get to boot me out now: “I'm leaving.”

She was either surprised or relieved, but in any event she was speechless.

“I'm leaving Germany!” I said.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“Jerusalem,” I said.

“Well, that's a switch,” she said.

“You know what happened? You know what my breakthrough was?”

She shook her head that she didn't know what it was. “Does it have something to do with your meetings, your…”

“You can say it! Séance! Séance! It's not a dirty word. Yes, of course!…My mother and father came!”

“To your séance? I thought your parents were…” Only then did it seem to occur to her that the entire point of a séance was for dead people to come. But I forgave my would-be landlord her dullness. I was too entranced. I was in love, I was at peace, I was overflowing with forgiveness. I wanted someone to know.

“And they were reconciled!” I cried. “They're together again. Do you know what that means? Do you know how long I've waited? Since I was a child!”

“They came
here
…two nights ago,” she regurgitated with unhidden distress, which my intensity at once ran over.

“Listen to me. It all makes sense! After fifty years! Why I came back, why I was such a stupid Communist! My mother and father divorced, yes, in 1937? Equals Germans and Jews divorced! In a young child's mind! What I never knew, never saw: that all I ever truly wanted from the GDR was a Germany that would reconcile Germans and Jews! Don't you see? The wish of a child for her mommy and daddy to be reconciled.” I was exhausted by then. My voice dropped off to nothing. “Holly, they were in the room. My dead mother and my dead father…”

I wept gladly and, as she held me, I repeated: “It all makes sense, it all makes perfect sense.” I knew then that I had made a convert, that my would-be landlord had begun to admit to herself that it made as much sense as anything else.

I have memorialized the conversation above because it is the only time I ever spoke out loud the truth that had overcome me. I invited Electra Papaiannis to conduct more séances in the house. I was hoping to see my parents again, to strike up a more natural, informal conversation with them, to learn more, to fill in details, to swap stories. This was a foolish hope. Of course they would not come again. But what was truly foolish about it was that I already had perfection. My mind was relieved. I had what I needed. I called off the séances. I packed up the remaining bits and pieces of my life. I took down my lovely curtains. Next year in Jerusalem became my motto.

BOOK: Berlin Cantata
6.64Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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