by Craig Nova
“You’ll get over it,” Linz said. “There’s nothing to it.”
“Then why don’t you do it?” she said.
“I’ll leave it to you.”
Then he went along the river and up the stone steps that led to the avenue, his reflection like a film on the water that undulated from a passing boat. At the top of the stairs, in his dark clothes, he appeared like a man in an advertisement, at once promising something and yet not being clear about what it was. He tipped his hat to Armina and disappeared with his precise gait, as though if he walked carefully enough he could keep the hangover away for an hour more.
“Are you all right?” said Weiss.
“Yes,” she said. “No. I don’t know.”
“That happens to all of us these days,” said Weiss.
“What do you suppose they were doing, marking her like that?” said one of the uniformed officers.
“Well,” said Weiss. “They were trying to get her to talk about something. That’s one possibility. Maybe she owed them money.”
“Are there other possibilities?” said the uniformed officer.
“They were doing it for fun,” said another uniformed officer.
“No,” said Weiss. “It could have been something else.”
“What could that have been?” said the uniformed officer.
“Somebody who enjoyed his job,” said Weiss. “You know, a collector.”
The men moved around, looking one way and another. Yes, they seemed to be saying, as they looked around, that could be possible. Someone might have enjoyed his job.
“I’m going to look around,” said Armina.
“Sure,” said Weiss. “See you later.”
Armina walked upstream. The light of the rising sun covered the east side of the buildings with a film that looked like it had been painted on. At this time even the squat, enormous buildings, like the Reichstag, looked as though they had been carved from blocks of gold. Soon the sun rose and the sky turned blue, which meant that the gray stone of the buildings revealed itself again. She went along the river with its fishy, moist odor. In some places she was able to walk under the bridges and stay by the water, but at some bridges she had to climb up to the street and cross over, going among the cars and the wagons and horses. The countrified smell of horses mixed with the fishy stink of the river, and on top of that the air had the smell of burning coal.
She kept thinking about the marks. Some of them looked like they had been done with a cigarette, but others were the work of something else, a wire perhaps. The coat thrown over the face was familiar, of course, and Armina thought that the man who had done this was ashamed. Just like in the park.
She went into the Altes Museum, behind the Lustgarten. Inside, the atmosphere was dusty and damp. The statues of Roman gods stood on pedestals, all of them contradictory in their human forms, familiar and yet strangely remote, too, since the ordinary inability to know a human being had been elevated, here at least, to the difficulty in knowing a god. So, she sat there, thinking about the signs that had been left on that young woman and that torn flesh.
Armina was left with the memory of the impulse to do the right thing, which now, or so it seemed, had led to those marks, to the shape under the rubberized sheet. And where was Armina’s sense of detachment, her belief that she was remote from these things? The certainty that she was getting nowhere, just going through the motions, and that Armina had a hand in what happened settled around Armina like a fine, horrible dust, a million points of accusation, all sharp and specific. She sat there in the aroma of the stone of the old gods. Whispers came from the depths of the museum.
She started walking to the address of the girl’s parents, although she stopped in front of a store that sold men’s clothing. An animated mannequin stood behind in the window, a kind of machine-powered dummy. It was dressed in a brown suit and a green tie, with shiny brown shoes, and it took off the hat and beckoned to the window shopper in the street. This mechanical politeness seemed friendly, but the jerkiness of the machine made Armina feel suspicious, or it made her aware of her humanity in the face of such a creature. After all, the machine never made any mistakes. It went on tipping its hat forever.
At the river she sat on a bench by the water, which had a film of oil, separated into a dirty rainbow, at once colorful and oddly subdued, as though it had leaked up from a long-submerged and tainted source. The colors seemed leached out. Her hands trembled as she put them in her lap, and the breeze that came up left her uneasy. The light seemed to fade, or to become yellow and oddly dim.
At the next bench a man and a woman, both dressed in black, reached into a paper bag and took out small handfuls of crumbs for the cooing pigeons, some of which, in the sunlight, were marked with those same tints of a dirty rainbow. The old hands sprinkled the crumbs, and the pigeons nodded their heads and pecked. And now, she thought, I am supposed to go home, to be alone, to sit there in the dark? She sat on the bench and trembled. The old man and the old woman went on feeding the pigeons, which picked at the crumbs, their heads going back and forth.
She did her job: the parents listened with the expression of being changed forever.
On the way home, Armina stopped at the church on the side of the Lustgarten, and while she stood in front of it, she felt the attraction of the place, like a churchyard in the country. Somehow the churchyards were just as reassuring as the sound of the horses on the pavement: suggestive of the ordinary peace and tranquility that eluded her.
This is where she had come as a child on Easter with her mother and father, and Armina remembered this as the best of times, her mother’s pale, translucent skin, her thick, almost black hair, her eyes that were the color of wet, gray granite. Her father had attracted this woman with his wit and his mind. He was thin and bald, a man who wore dark suits and wire-rimmed glasses.
Both parents were dead now. The best of times had been when they had all come here on Easter, when they had given in to the rustling, the shuffling of feet, the glitter of the altar. On one Easter, just before Armina’s mother had died, Armina’s father had said to Armina, “I love you for all the reasons a father loves a daughter. And for one other.”
“What’s that?” Armina said.
“You do the right thing,” said her father. “You have an instinct for it.”
After Armina’s mother had died, Armina’s father still did work on new compounds that alleviated pain, and often, when he had cut himself or fallen and turned an ankle, he said to Armina, “I hurt myself but I took a little something for it. I feel all right now.” Well, those had been easier days, thought Armina, when everything had been more clear. That was the beauty of youth: even one’s doubts were pretty certain. Those times when everything was muddled hadn’t yet made themselves quite so obvious. Maybe her father had been right: comfort was to be had in a little warmth from one of those new drugs. What a thin hope, thought Armina. But what have I got?
The steps to the church were gray stone, and the heavy doors were open. In the gloom the gilt of the altar shone like a cat’s eyes at night. Armina stood at the door. She guessed it was the memory of the best time, the closeness and the electric thrill she had gotten by holding the hand of both her mother and father at the same time: it was as though the lingering pleasure of her creation flowed from one parent to another through her. How could she resist a memory like that?
The long pews were shined by the centuries of worshippers sliding along the wood. Armina’s hands gently touched the back of the long seat in front of her. Against her better judgment, she sat down, and yet what she wouldn’t give for the certainty she’d had on those Easter mornings. She leaned her head against the pew back in front of her. Around her the susurrus of the church was like wind in the trees: the shuffling feet, the whispered prayers, the scent of incense. She wanted to pray and yet she didn’t know what she would ask for. Or, maybe it was just that she was too despairing to pray. If only she had the energy to be furious.
Instead
she listened to the hush and tried to recall the touch of her parents’ fingers. How brilliant her father had been. What talent her mother had. At home Armina had a recording of her mother’s, a Beethoven sonata, and when Armina was at her worst, when she was so alone that she felt she was shrinking, like a spot of water in a hot pan, she had played the record until it ended with the scratchy, repeated sound of the needle in the last grooves. She liked the idea that her father had believed in her, but she wasn’t sure he was right. It would be nice, she thought, if he had been.
Her father had been killed by accident in street fighting between the Communists and the Socialists. Maybe the thugs had been there, too. They usually were.
On the way home, she stopped next to a veterinarian’s office where people had lined up with their dogs to have them killed at the worst part of the inflation. It had been too difficult to feed them. Armina still didn’t like to go by this place, where she had seen, as a child, the lines of people who had held their pets or stood there with the animals on leashes. It seemed to be such a poor solution, killing the animals, as though everything could be solved by death.
She pushed the door of her building open and stood in the marble foyer. The stairs were at the rear of the hall, and as she walked that way she just wanted to get upstairs, to close the door, as though that would help and that what she felt was a gas or smell that could be shut out. At the window at the back of the hall the sunlight came through in a luminescent bar, filled with dust, and as Armina watched the motes in the light, she thought, You never think you are going to doubt yourself, to think you are a failure. And when it comes it is such a surprise.
The dust went on turning as pinpricks of light, like the stars Armina had seen after she’d hit her head. She went up the stairs where her footfalls seemed final, like someone going down the hall of a prison, and in the cold vibration of the sound, which seemed to penetrate into her bones, into her skull, into the heart of the ache in her head, she remembered the hush in the church, the whiteness of her mother’s skin, her father’s voice when he had told her he loved her and that she did the right thing. Who was left to forgive her now, or to believe in her? She opened the door to her apartment and went into the silence.
Armina slept until dark and woke to the sound of the dripping faucet in the kitchen. The light from the window made trapezoid patterns on the ceiling, and every now and then one of these geometric shapes moved over the plaster surface, white as the moon, as a car went by in the street. She thought of the boathouse, the cigarette stubs, the pattern in the dirt of the boathouse floor that had been made by someone’s impatient pacing. Armina closed her eyes and tried to fall asleep. Then, when she couldn’t stand the dripping anymore, as though it were some mechanical accounting of her flaws and her errors, she threw back the covers and went into the kitchen, where she stood naked in front of the sink. She pulled on the faucet handle, but the drip only slowed, and as the cadence became more languid it seemed to be more emphatic.
Armina’s apartment building was like many in Berlin, four stories, built around a small square courtyard that could be entered from the street. This meant that her kitchen looked into the apartments on the other side of the courtyard. She let the water run, touching it absently with her hand to see if it was getting cold.
Across the way, in an apartment that had been empty, she saw that a light was on. A man stood among some boxes he was about to unpack, and he obviously was thinking about what to do, looking down at the boxes and then at his shelves. She wanted to say, Put the most used things in the middle of the shelf above the sink. That’s a good way to begin.
He was six feet tall, blond, although his hair was thick, like hay, and his nose was large and brows were prominent. Not much older than her. Twenty-eight? He opened a box and started to put his possessions onto the counter. Pots and pans, bottles, silver, a jar of jam that she could see was made from strawberries. From this distance she could only make out the red mass, almost like something out of a dream that suggested sweet fruit. She imagined the small blond hair on the whole berries. Then she put her mouth down to the water that came out of her tap to drink, enjoying doing something as an adult that she would have been reprimanded for as a child, and then she stood there and watched him, feeling her wet lips.
Her hands fumbled along her cabinets in the dark until they came to a bottle of French brandy, which she poured into a small glass. Like the ones in Paris cafés. She held the glass against her breasts to warm the brandy, and then had a drink. Just skin temperature. In the pale light that came in the window she looked at her skin and the freckles the color of paprika.
There was something nice about the way he moved. Now that he had arranged things on the counter he started putting them into his cabinets. He picked up the jar of jam and tossed it from one hand to another. And when he almost dropped a glass, she flinched, as though she could have caught it. When everything was put away, nice and neat, the cabinets closed, he stood there as though at a loss. What now? He reached for a bottle of brandy, and while she couldn’t read the label, it looked French. He poured himself a drink and stood at the window, looking into the darkness. She had a sip when he did, and for one pleasing moment they were bound by that same hot sensation in the mouth. Then he turned out his light.
Over the next two nights, she watched in the kitchen with the light off, with the small glass of brandy. She drank it very slowly, and as she felt the warmth of it, she was uncertain as to the source of her peacefulness. Although, she had to admit, it was mixed with something else, too, the anticipation of his appearance. So, she waited, oddly peaceful and keenly alert. When he appeared, he had a reassuring posture: it was as though his movement through the room were soothing, and she supposed this happened because of his frank ease with himself, his uncomplicated ability to be a human being. And a man. She took a drink and let the liquor warm her tongue. It was possible, of course, to knock on his door and to welcome him as a new neighbor. But how could she ever be so forward, so bold? This was another item she gave herself a hard time about: in Berlin women could do just about anything, and many of them did, from using morphine and wearing a tuxedo to taking a woman as a lover, and yet she wasn’t able to find anyone. Then she had a drink. For a moment, as she stood there with the warmth of the brandy in her mouth, she forgot about the hush of the water by the boathouse, the cigarette butts, the marks, the scent of ammonia on the skin of those young women. She imagined that his eyes were dark blue, the iris color of the sky in late evening. The seduction, if that is what it was, came from the fact that when she stood there she felt a little better.
She shook her head, as though to resist the spying, but she thought of being out at night when she had seen a man and a woman at a cabaret. They had been so lovely together, the woman laughing, the man pouring champagne into her glass: this delicious hilarity had left Armina with an ache. Now as she looked out the window at the man across the way that ache vanished. She didn’t know what bothered her the most: that it went away under these circumstances or that it was there at all.
She told herself often that she was alone because so many men had died in the Great War, and that hers, the man who had been meant for her, had been killed. It was one reason she had gone to work for Inspectorate A. She hated what killed, what took away the possibility of ordinary life and left people just like this: looking out the window and feeling that ache. And now, after her inability to stop what was happening, she accused herself of participating in what she despised, if only by some critical omission. She should have known better. Or known what to do. Was there any way to escape who one was? Wasn’t that what falling in love was: becoming someone new and better?
She looked at the light from the window across the courtyard. Her hands started shaking. She sat down at the kitchen table and wondered if you could really go mad from loneliness and self-loathing. If only someone could tell her—she didn’t know what exactly—if only, she finally admitted, someone could love her, although now that wa
s more impossible than ever. And, of course, under those circumstances, just how much of a fool could you make out of yourself? When she glanced across the way, he was there again. She wondered if he had a girlfriend, but then she thought, What business is it of mine? She shouldn’t even be sitting here, like some voyeur, looking in his window.
You see, she said to herself, you are already calling yourself names. And why not? she thought.
She went to take a bath, letting the enormous tub fill with water, the ribbons of steam rising in an ominous way. She looked into the mirror and saw her red hair, pale skin, the freckles on her shoulders, her mother’s cheekbones, which made her seem haughty. Another illusion.
Armina had the next day off, and she slept late. The warmth of the bed embraced her while she drifted in and out of sleep with a delicious, almost sensual caress of the sheets, and she let herself relax into the scent of the pillow, the distant sounds from the street.
She put on a robe, her slippers, and took a towel, too. On the roof there were chaise lounges, made of wood and covered with green pads. At least she’d have the place to herself and could sunbathe nude. She took off her robe and put it on a chair and took off her shoes. She was thin and her skin was white, the color of pale marble, although she had light freckles over her shoulders and across her nose. In the sunlight her hair seemed especially red, filled with highlights, and when she opened her eyes, they seemed all the more green, like a leaf in springtime. The city stretched away in a grid of blocks of apartments to the river, and here and there the tower of a church stood up. From below she heard the traffic and that sad, antiquated, and haunting sound of the horses as the hooves struck the cobblestones.
The sun lay on her skin like a film of heat, and the crimson light through her closed eyes was soporific. She breathed deeply and felt the warm air flow into her as she remembered the light in the apartment across the way. It was like the caress of the sunlight. Just breathing, slowly letting that languid part of it fill her completely. Maybe she could get away from it for a while.
