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Authors: Jeffrey Lewis

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HOLLY ANHOLT

Tenant

IT
'
S SO THAT I HAD BEEN WARNED
by Oksana about Simona Jastrow. I took care right from the start with her. It's the case that, combined with suspicions I could scarcely avoid about myself for having made my deal with the Schiessls, Simona's presence in my parents' old house seemed to me a cruel omen. She was obviously obsessive, demanding, self-deluded, narcissistic, and mistrustful, the kind of person you could try to win over and be left with nothing but sand in your smile. So why did I come to pity her? I suppose for all those reasons. Or what I could finally see was her intelligence. Simona was right about something: that every person's politics are so deeply mixed with the personal that terrible mix-ups between them can take place. That the divorce of individuals could be confused with the divorce of peoples seemed as plausible as it was terrible.

As for the odd coincidence that she had once informed on my lawyer Anja to the Stasi, I knew it because Oksana had told me even when Anja had not. As between myself and Anja, and myself and Simona, it had to remain a secret. I didn't wish Simona to have another reason to mistrust me.

DAVID FÜRST

Tease

I AM UNFORTUNATELY AWARE
of my own worst traits. I am a bully and I am a tease. Ask the American girl, ask Nils' friend. Of course her vulnerability, her naïveté, disturbed me. Jews aren't supposed to be so naïve. That's what comes from living in a country where you're hardly oppressed.

Yet what a delightful conversation I had with her in the back room of the Café Charlie. Johann and Heinrich were my witnesses, as I had brought them there to show them a bit more of all they had hitherto missed in life and might aspire to, techno girls and Gauloise smoke.

Holly had come in with Nils, but he was off on the phone, once more in pursuit of Franz Rosen, his great whale.

“And how are we doing on our psychotherapeutic ramble through the GDR countryside?” I asked good-naturedly. “Experiencing any epiphanies this week? Any
crise?”
I would not have been so facetious with her, but I was at a loss as to what else to say. Really, I was only trying to make conversation.

“Would you stop being such an asshole,” she replied, also good-naturedly, a response clever enough that I translated for my boys, who were suitably impressed with the ability of Western girls to curse.

“So what's next? A little
tour de Pologne
, perhaps, for spice?” I asked.

“What are you talking about?” she asked.

“Auschwitz,” I replied. “No tourist of shame would want to miss that. Psychodrama guaranteed, the past rising up like a puff of smoke.”

“I can't believe you think you're being witty. Have you even been to Auschwitz?”

“Yes I have. When I was two.”

So I scored my cheap points. Nils returned and the conversation moved on, to the fate of his story on Franz Rosen, or the very survival of our old paper in the new penurious, post-unification era, or things of that nature. The West's realization that it no longer had to support us like little kings. Holly stayed grumpy with me then, offering no more than a pout and a bout of silence – and not without justification, I would add. But later I came to believe that I had put the idea of Auschwitz in her head.

OKSANA KOSLOVA

Father

WHAT WAS MY FATHER DOING
on his trade missions to Switzerland? The official Soviet version was that he had been granted the privilege to travel abroad in order to negotiate gas contracts. Unofficial versions inevitably had it that these gas contracts were only a cover – no more than a piddling few were said to have ever been completed – and that the real reason for the trips was, variously, to make hard currency deposits on behalf of the Party in Swiss accounts, to make such deposits on behalf of individual high-ranking members of the Party in such accounts, or to invest the Party officials' money in American securities. All these versions allowed for a juicy conclusion: my father had the opportunity to steal. And so gossip, or as it may have presented itself, character analysis, came as accompanying baggage. I learned that my father, who had always brought me very nice gifts from the West, was a swindler, a confidence man, a charmer, a womanizer, and for the icing on the cake, a Jew. It was then inevitable for the character analysts to conclude that he had been caught absconding and paid for his crimes with his life. But if so, where was the body? The Swiss were said to be orderly people. Was the body at the bottom of Lake Geneva?

You can therefore imagine how I held out hope. I dreamed of my father in various exotic settings, in Monte Carlo or Las Vegas, gambling the Party's money away, having a high time of life, and thinking every once in a while of me, and of the present he would send me home.

No present ever came. Years passed; my mother's flight to Finland with a man; my esteemed grandfather's guardianship over me. A girl grows up. I slept with Mischa Lander once, the hardly publicity-shy German spy, in the understanding that if there was anything in the Stasi records about my father, he would tell me. He told me there was nothing, and he must surely have been telling the truth, because he knew that if there had been anything there, I would have slept with him again.

There are still days when I imagine that some present might arrive, or that I might run into my father, unslept and unshaved, in a park or on the U-Bahn of any Western city you can name.

MISCHA LANDER

Exile

KINDLY CONSIDER THE UNFAIRNESS
of the situation. I have conducted my life in a way that was both lawful and helpful. Lawful according to the laws of the society in which I lived and helpful to the world as a whole. Oh yes, you would deny this? Someone on this earth has to stick up for the poor. That is of course what it was all about. No one can finally deny this, even as they peck at all the rest of our entrails. If you help the poor, you had better win. But it's not so easy to win such a battle.

And for my troubles, now even Israel denies me entry. They let every Jewish gangster in, they even let Meyer Lansky in. Why? Because they have no choice, they say, he's a Jew, so they let him in. It's the law, they say, the right of return, all of that. But when it comes to Mischa Lander, oh no, wasn't he high up in the Stasi, we'll see, we'll have to see. When he's dead, that's when we'll decide. Politics seem to extend even to who is a Jew. Well, very well. It's what I always thought.

Regardless of what you have been taught, it is not only in the East that show trials have their place. Germany would delight to see me in the dock. So I have pulled what levers I can. All have been worthless. When your country disappears, so self-evidently does your leverage. I had hoped nonetheless to conclude a fair bargain: a prominent Zionist wished Israel to obtain a supply of GDR gasmasks which it might still have been within my power to obtain. All I asked in return was that they accept me in the bargain, which even this Israel refused.

I am only a little embarrassed to say that I am now reduced to what some would call, rather imprecisely, blackmail. I know a few things about the worthy businessman Herbert Kaminski and a few things about his Russian wife and a few things more about Kaminski's lieutenant, who is precisely the prominent Zionist with whom I previously negotiated. What makes the situation the more delicate is that I am rather fond of the Russian wife. Oksana Koslova calculates as I do. It's as though we went to the same school.

I continue to be appalled that Israel would take a man who has been portrayed even in films as the greatest gangster of them all and will not take me. The country lacks the spirit of universal brotherhood. Yet I am not surprised.

OKSANA KOSLOVA

Students

NINA ORLOVA HAD THE PALEST
, thinnest face and hoped to apprentice to a haircutter. Gregory Rakuzin had been an engineer in Irkutsk but he came with his wife and two children and so was driving a taxi seven shifts a week. Maria Volozova could have been only eighteen and every bit of German grammar baffled her but she wished, she said, to become a teacher like me. Ilia Fet worked three jobs and was saving to bring his family and when they were all situated he would work even more jobs and then open a video shop on the Kantstrasse. Raisa Goldshtein was in her thirties, her hair was jet-black and straight, she was talkative and rather loud and made no bones of her aspiration to one day run the finest escort service in Berlin. Sasha Tabachinksy would learn German because he had to but he would write his novels in Russian. There were others as well. I can hardly describe, do justice, to the hopefulness of these people. It was on their faces every minute, in their schemes and deductions. It suffused their efforts. They looked at me as if I were the key to some kingdom they could clearly imagine but not quite grasp. But soon they would, of course I presumed they would, they would figure it out and everything would be fine and they would write home to whoever was still there about their success.

But first they would look at me with hope.

You may suppose how disturbing this was, to be looked at in such a manner every day of the week. It came to seem like an accusation against me. Among other things, why was I even working here? A volunteer, no less, as if I were already taking on the protective coloration of a rich woman. Why wasn't I home painting? Why was I giving back to my tribe and was this even what it was?

I adored those faces of my students. There were even days when I went home and tried to paint them, but I couldn't capture their desire, as I had too little of my own. After three months at the émigré center, I quit. They begged me not to. They must have thought I was competent, or some such. But their begging only served in my mind to increase the unrecoverable distance between us. If I could have traded my life for any one of theirs, I would have.

HOLLY ANHOLT

Journey

NILS THOUGHT IT WAS A BAD IDEA
. He'd been there himself, so his skepticism could be taken two ways, either the considered voice of experience or the light condescension of someone who thinks something's right for him but not for you. I decided to take his advice both ways. I'd go, but with appropriate fear, doubt, and self-loathing. He would have gone with me but he was in the Middle East covering the Gulf War. I would have waited for him to return but I thought, no, I'm a big girl, I have a car, I have my plans, I should carry them out.

Nor was Nils the only dissenting voice. Oksana furrowed her brow and of course David mocked me for it. “A little
tour de Pologne
?” One more of his little phrases. “It's in the papers. American woman seeking enlightenment. No job too dirty.” But then, David was always mocking me. Nils' best pal had so successfully taken on the relentless aspect of my nemesis from fifth grade that I had begun thinking of ways to mollify him, which, as I'm sure he understood, is how I wound up buying one of his cars. The customer's always right: wasn't he teaching his charges capitalist tricks? But David was the worst capitalist I ever met.

I stayed the first night in Cracow. I won't bore you with the guidebook descriptions. It seemed alright, it was old, it was no longer Communist. One more “Paris of the East”, or something else of the East. I stayed in a place called the Metropole that was still musty and chintzy from the old regime and the next day drove to Auschwitz. You know there are signs for it on the motorway, Oswiecim, this exit. I found that rather odd. But then, it's a good-sized town. You couldn't not have signs for it. I began to feel badly for people who were born there. If they ever went anywhere, they'd have so much explaining to do. Or maybe they never went anywhere, just for that reason. Or maybe they just never went anywhere period. I was afraid and thought about such things.

I can't remember how you get from the motorway to the main camp. There must have been signs but I don't remember. The main camp is the one with the “Arbeit macht frei” sign and the museum, but it wasn't actually the extermination camp. The approach is by a cobbled path that could have been to a zoo or a monastery, and the buildings themselves are of brick and neat enough. There was plenty of room in the parking lot. It wasn't a very popular place in the autumn of 1991. I walked the cobbled paths, like a proper museum-goer read the guide and observed the displays. Everything was stacked high as if you were getting something wholesale, empty suitcases, pairs of shoes, Zyklon B cans, hair. Now
there
would be a punishment, a just retribution, to have to spend your life counting up every single human hair, and if you make one mistake, if you miss one hair, you have to start over. I thought such things. I was alone. And this too: if work can't make you free, what can? Only God's grace? Only love? Only luck?

I left, feeling properly alienated, as if this wasn't what I'd come for, this main camp with its straight paths and brick buildings and numbers on the buildings that could have been a second-rate prep school or what in fact it once had been, a Polish army barracks that the Nazis grabbed. If I was making a pilgrimage at all, it had to be to the other camp, the outlier, Birkenau, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Auschwitz II, the processing plant of death. I drove the couple miles and parked in a muddy lot. Now this was more like it, out of town and out of the way, vast, dilapidated, destroyed and gray; I laced on boots and looked up at what I'd seen in pictures, the watch tower with its fort-like flanks extending in either direction and the hole in the wall in the middle where the trains went through. There was only one other car in the parking lot, Polish or Russian and rusted out. I'm not even sure how I knew that this
was
the parking lot. But there weren't any other cars anywhere else. It seemed like it would rain soon.

There was a guard house to one side of the portal. I entered, to see if I needed a ticket. A wasted-looking kid about eighteen in a green shirt thrust a guest book at me. I signed without even looking at who had signed before me. The kid pointed to a stairs and said in English, “Go! Up! You see whole thing!” I said, “Thank you, not now,” or whatever I said, and the kid retreated to a second room where another kid in a green shirt was waiting for him, with a couple of glasses and a vodka bottle. One of them slammed the door shut. Immediately a radio went on, the music loud and laced with acid. I filched a small map off a pile of them, left the guard house, and walked through the portal, hearing from inside the sounds of falling-down drunkenness, shouts, the music, static, people or things crashing into walls. I can remember thinking: they weren't expecting anyone today.

BOOK: Berlin Cantata
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