These Dreams of You (23 page)

H
e stops. “Of course he isn't a Nazi. ‘Too'?” Jasmine doesn't say anything. “I'm not a Nazi,” he says quietly. “Would it matter if I blamed it on the drugs?”

“No.”

“No,” he shakes his head, “quite correct. You're absolutely right. I made the choice to take the drugs, didn't I, so whatever bloody stupid things I do or say when I'm on them, well, then it's on me, isn't it.”

“That's actually very sensible,” she says.

“I'm . . . I'm . . . sabotaged by my impulse to be flamboyant about
everything
. But that whole sodding business about that so-called Nazi salute at Victoria Station,” he argues fiercely, “was bollocks! On the life of my four-year-old son, I was
waving
to the crowd. Look at the fucking photo! Look at my bloody hand—it's no Nazi salute. A wave. Whatever other awful thing about me that you believe and that I no doubt deserve, you must believe at least that.”

Impressed by the ferocity of his defense, she says, “I do.”

“The whole Nazi business . . . ” he says, trying to shoo it away like a fly, “I was just fascinated by . . . by . . . by the . . . romanticism of it—”

“
Romanticism
?”

“Of
course
. Nazism is
extraordinarily
romantic. It's King Arthur and all that . . . and what was King Arthur anyway but Jesus in armor, with his twelve knights? I understand how grotesque and destructive it finally all became . . . ” Defeated, he sees the look on her face. “I know it's
evil
. I know
what happened
. Bloody hell,” he continues quietly, “look, Jasmine. Can I call you Jasmine?”

“You know you can.”

“I need to get out of this
steaming shit pile
of a city,” he says with new intensity, “away from the coke, away from the pills. Away from the sirens, the fucking limos cruising the Strip . . . get to Berlin where I can clean up—”

“Think they don't have any drugs in Berlin, do you?”

“Yes, yes, I know—they have drugs bloody everywhere, don't they? But Berlin is . . . ” He ties his robe around him more tightly and for the first time doesn't start over the record on the turntable. “ . . . attached to the rest of the western world by a thread of track and highway, like the balloon on the end of a string, isolated, besieged. Haunted, insolent, bold. Divided down the middle—like
me
. Listen, Jasmine. I need you to fly . . . do you fly? . . . to Frankfurt and take the train to Berlin and find a place for us to live. For you and me and Jim, I mean. Somewhere not too far from the Hansa studios . . . do you know Hansa?”

“A German label, isn't it?” she says.

“They have their own studio at the south end of the Wall so we need something accessible. Of course I'll pick up your expenses and you'll have a month to track down something simple, in an interesting part of town but functional, anonymous, where one can go to a market and buy tea. Nothing extravagant, nothing rock-star. I mean that. I've never meant anything more seriously.”

“Wait.”

“Jim and I will be in France a bit, another studio north of Paris where we'll be laying some basic tracks . . . but we'll be coming—”

“Wait!”

“—by train and boat. What?”

She realizes she doesn't know what. “Nothing.”

“Right, then. A new chapter! a new town, new career . . . ”

“On one condition . . . ”

“Oh yes, yes, I know,” he says impatiently, waving it away, “listen,” and in the brown light through the blinds he looks at her, “I can only guarantee that's not my intention and I shall never, never, never . . . ” he waves again. “Just . . . I'll
never
, that's all. I'll never. Whatever. Who knows, right, luv? And Jim's a perfect gentleman, I might add, for a bloke who has the biggest cock in the history of rock and roll, and that includes Jimi.”

“Should I even ask how you know this?”

“Luv,
everyone
knows this.”

Within a single breathtaking hour she has in her possession a cashier's check for $15,000. Bundling up the books and records she can't bear to part with and sending them onto Berlin, Jasmine has the idea to give the rest to Kelly; but sitting in her car watching the house where she lived for three years, trying to summon up her courage, she hits the gas at first sight of the other woman. She listens for the tune of “Tezeta” coming from her womb, but hears nothing

She leaves like someone who's set fire to the building. Spends the night in the car before dropping it off with the Korean couple to whom she's sold it, then the last fifteen hours in the Lufthansa terminal waiting for her flight. When the plane stops over in London, she's mildly startled that her old city fails to beckon; from Frankfurt she takes the train through the long hundred-mile outdoor tunnel that runs from West Germany to Berlin. She takes a room at a small hotel off the Kurfürstendamm and retrieves her books and records.

S
he writes to him,
I've spent most of the past month familiarizing myself with a city that's desperate and alive, and finally yesterday located a residence that I hope both you and Jim find adequate. It's above a motor vehicle repair shop, very basic but comfortable enough, six or seven rooms with sky-blue walls and doors that open onto a small balcony overlooking a side alley. The floors are tile from before the War and there are carved high ceilings and a yard in front enclosed by an old iron gate. It's in the Schöneberg district on the Hauptstrasse, a short ride on the U-Bahn from Hansa Tonstudio 2, and mostly the people are working-class Turks which means . . . Turkish coffee! Christopher Isherwood lived in Schöneberg as well as Einstein, Marlene Dietrich, Billy Wilder, Klaus Kinski (cracked German actor I've not heard of but you probably have) and now someday someone shall write a letter to someone saying you lived here as well.

H
ello, luv.
Quick note to let you know that Jim and I are here in the Chateau Heroesville (sp?) north of Paris in Pantoise working. Delighted to receive your letter and look forward to joining up with you in Berlin in the next week or so or as soon as Jim disentangles himself from his dalliance with a beautiful asian who rather inconveniently is married to a French actor. I suppose he shall get a good song out of it if nothing else. The flat sounds suitable indeed and as I believe has been said we don't need or want anything luxurious. It is properly heated? is my only concern—the chateau where we record now is drafty and damp and I suppose I got more accustomed to all that detestable California sunshine than I realized, didn't I, even if I never actually went out in it when I was there, ha ha. Since Kill City and its streets strewn with winged corpses we've partaken of nothing harder than vino, being the best boys we know how to be. I look forward to Berlin and living as much like a normal person as I can get away with.

Cheers, D

S
hould she note in a letter the bullet holes in the Hansa recording studio near the Wall? Will this be thrilling or frightening or both? In the
International Herald Tribune
she reads that in five years the assassin of Robert Kennedy will be up for parole; she can't help regretting that he wasn't executed, she who might have assumed herself opposed to executions. It's not a matter of vengeance but rather some rightful order extracted from the anarchy of the world. Everything is personal.

When she goes to look for the clippings she's kept these years, beginning with the first she read in London about the trip to South Africa and the others afterward that made their folded way from one volume to another, they're nowhere to be found among any of her possessions. She's filled with reproach at their loss. She thinks of the aging clippings hidden forever in L.A. with Kelly, who never will know of them unless one happens to flutter from some book she randomly opens. This is the price, believes Jasmine, of such a cowardly flight, of leaving a woman like a man would.

On their arrival in Schöneberg, Jasmine realizes the two singers haven't entirely shed their bad habits so much as downscaled, trading drugs for garden-variety alcoholism. Methodi­cally they carve up the calendar allowing for two days a week of prowling the clubs and bars and strip joints of Kreuzberg–the Exile, the SO36 overrun by German punks–then two days of calm and restitution at the flat, shaking off hangovers over coffee and books. The other three days are devoted to writing and recording at the studio within sight of the wall and its armed East German snipers, who are close enough to pick off one singer or the other and strike a singular blow against western decadence. For a while the two men and woman are tourists, driving in the Black Forest and visiting the Brücke museum, striking poses out of expressionist paintings and snapping photographs with a little polaroid camera picked up in a pawn shop. Sometimes the picture seems to vanish between the click of the shutter and the exposure of the negative; waving his hand, the flame-haired Old World wanderer given to believing such things says, “It's in the air. A ghost camera, taking pictures of the Old World disappearing.”

“Yeah,” cracks Jim, “or a camera that doesn't work.”

The men sink into the anonymity they've craved in their ramble eastward. Turkish immigrants around them trudge westward, worlds passing at twilight, the visibility of each to the other dying at dusk. Session musicians come and go through the cavernous studio, a converted movie set from the silent era before the rise of the Reich where epic visions were filmed of sexy robots in Twenty-First Century Babels. The air fills with the chemical smell of old celluloid rotting in the vaults.

She's never seen musical instruments that look like these. It's as though they've materialized from the same silent science-fiction German movies whose rot the musicians breathe in and out as they play; the instruments appear more like time machines, or what she imagines a time machine might look like, transporting the traveler from the execution of a song back to its inception or forward to its completion–bending the music from the end or beginning back into the middle, and bending the music of years from now back to the music of years ago, to produce this music of the moment. It's as though Jasmine could climb into a song and ride it back ten years to the kitchen of an old Holly­wood hotel, in time to prevent an assassination, or forward twenty years in time to prevent her own.

The first time that Jasmine sees the Professor, as everyone calls him, it's the middle of a stormy afternoon. She's arrived with recording contracts to be signed and finds him alone, hunched over one of the instruments in the barely lit studio; a tinny transistor plays a song from half a dozen years before—
and Ray Charles was shot down
—another musical age. He's lost in thought, staring at the studio floor covered with a couple dozen cards that might be from a tarot except without images or icons. Rather they're emblazoned with maxims and mini-manifestos that barely can be read in the room's shadows: EMBARRASS YOURSELF and THE SONG HAS SECRETS FROM THE SINGER and DO NOT BE BLIND TO . . . on one card and . . . YOUR OWN VISION on the next. Alone, staring at the floor trying to divine its instructions, when the transistor sings
I dreamed we played cards in the dark, and you lost and you lied
, the balding man in eyeliner laughs and glances over his shoulder at the radio

these dreams of you . . .

then looks up and smiles at Jasmine as though they've met many times. Over the days and weeks, sessions spill into other sessions, songs start out belonging to one man and end another's. More often the music is of a no-man's land like that which lies between the two western and eastern barricades that have come to constitute in the psyche of the world a single Wall.

I
t's a music of breakdowns and blackouts and “futuristic rhythm and blues”—the singer with the red hair calls it—about lovers in the Wall's shadow, and sons of the silent age and electric-blue rooms that no one leaves. “Fritz Lang's
Metropolis
starring James Brown!” the singer tells Jasmine excitedly one evening; she's actually come to find such grand pronouncements rather endearing. While she isn't sure she fancies the music or understands it, she senses it's not to be dismissed, though she's not inclined to let him know that. In the Schöneberg flat, the nearby table is stacked with art catalogs, jagged little polemics on aesthetic theory, modern novels. “You're really reading that, are you?” she says to him behind the thick paperback.

He shrugs, “I'm half Irish—me mum,” and laying the book on his lap says, “Do you worry, luv, whether every note of an Ornette Coleman piece has meaning?”

“Maybe I do,” she says, but she doesn't really listen to Ornette Coleman.

“Of course you don't. It's simple, really, a very simple tale—man sets out on a twenty-four-hour walk looking for home and, riding a wave of notes, finds the New World. It's a song we've all sung, haven't we? In this case it's Dublin but it could be Berlin or London or L.A.”

W
hatever his faults, a lack of graciousness isn't one, nor a lack of patience with anyone but himself, for whom he has none. “When Miles started doing funk-Stockhausen,” he tells her, “did someone say suspiciously, Gone all musique concrète on us then, have you?”

“Probably someone did,” she says, “or perhaps they just called it futuristic rhythm and blues.”

“Look, the whole century has been about black and white fucking,” and leaning in the doorway of his room she raises an eyebrow but he won't back down. “Absolutely! I'll bet,” he says of the novel, “Molly Bloom really is a black girl and he just doesn't tell us. New York Jews like Gershwin, Kern, Arlen cumming southern Negro music while Duke Ellington ravishes Nineteenth Century Europeans like Debussy—rather the whole bloody point of it all, isn't it?”

“Is it?”

“But of course,” he insists, “and I'm the new white Duke for the Old World in a new century, stealing the remains of black music and smashing it for good. Writing and singing it like a white limey, because what could survive
that
? And I should bloody well hope some Yank spade out there is doing the same to the remains of white european music. To everything there's a reaction.
Anticipate the reaction
.”

“That sounds like something from one of the Professor's cards.”

“First rule of cultural warfare.”

“Perhaps you should just be the You for a new century.”