The Weather in Berlin

by Ward Just

  Very interesting, Herr Greenwood. But there’s something missing, isn’t there?

  And what would that be?

  Forgive me. This is not a question we ask in our country. But it seems worthwhile to ask it of you. What did your father do in the war?

  Heart trouble. He didn’t come in until the end.

  And when he came in, what did he do?

  Greenwood paused, thinking that Herr Doktor Professor Blum was not as dumb as he looked, nor as affable as he pretended to be. Greenwood stood, stretching his bad leg, and clumped to the bay window that looked into a narrow courtyard fringed with box hedges. Behind him, he could hear the whir of Blum’s tape machine. He stood for several moments looking into the empty courtyard, thinking that it had no cinematic possibilities at all. Herr Blum’s courtyard was a dead end.

  He said, My father was fluent in German. He had a grasp of German history, as I do. In April 1945 he offered his services as an interrogator and was immediately hired. He knew half the OSS crowd so there were no difficulties. They were delighted to have him. You can imagine the confusion in those days, so many Germans to question, so few Americans or English with the background to question successfully. Or the wish to do so. The chief apologized to Harry, all the big fish were spoken for, Goering, Goebbels, Speer, and the others, the real war criminals—why, they were the crown jewels and reserved for the senior staff. Harry said he wasn’t interested in war criminals, he was interested in marginal characters. He was interested in the ones who went along, the ones who made the machine work. Not the drivers, the mechanics. I’d like to debrief the ones who changed the oil and cleaned the spark plugs, got the paperwork from the In box to the Out box. I have no interest in the vultures at the top of the tree, only those farther down.

  Harry was rich in metaphor in those days.

  So he spent the late spring and summer in 1945 in Berlin, interrogating.

  He told me later that he worked twelve-hour days in Berlin, probably the first time he had ever worked. He felt guilty that his bad heart had kept him from combat, so he was determined to make up for it. He called his interrogations “auditions” and his witnesses “my mechanicals.” And at the end of it he had filled five fat looseleaf notebooks, Q and A and Q and A and Q and A and Q and A. And then he went home.

  And that was it? What did his interrogations mean to him? And to you?

  He said the Germans were inspired mechanics, fanatical attention to detail, no detail so small that it could be ignored. They had the ability to ignore context. They had the ability to ignore most anything unconnected to their specific job. One did not take responsibility for what one ignored. And one step further: the responsibility was assigned elsewhere. The Bolsheviks were candidates, and naturally the Allies themselves bore some responsibility for the excesses of the regime. Cowardice at Munich, for example. When they talked about Hitler, it was to condemn his deficiency as a military strategist. Of the camps they knew nothing. When asked about the Jews, one of Harry’s mechanicals replied casually that he knew no Jews. It was his understanding that there were no Jews in Germany. They had emigrated to America, where they were well cared for. He himself wished to emigrate to Milwaukee, where he had relatives. He wanted no more to do with Germany. Germany was finished.

  Harry had a girlfriend in Berlin. She didn’t know about the camps, either.

  And there were others who knew quite a lot and were voluble about what they knew. And still others who knew more and refused to say one word, kept counsel behind a sullen façade and a smirk that seemed to say, If you knew what I knew, you would not be asking these foolish questions. They were easily dealt with. Taken outside into the yard where the colonel spoke bluntly to them. He gave them a choice. Those who cooperated would be removed to a detention camp in Florida, and those who didn’t to a camp in Siberia. Of course it was all bluff, but they didn’t know that. In any case, no one chose Siberia.

  Harry stayed on in Europe after his interrogations were ended. My mother met him in Paris and he went on to Spain when she returned home. She said he had changed in ways that were not agreeable to her. He was drinking more, and showing it. He was sleepless. He worried that he no longer fit in. The Europe he knew was gone and America was newly triumphant. Harry was not attracted to triumph—“hence,” he said, “Spain.” He showed up in Libertyville at Christmas and at that time he told me a little of what he had done in Berlin. I was very young and didn’t understand much of what he said. But I remember this. He stated that Germany was prodigious. It was subterranean, its soul hidden somewhere in the forests. Its people were disciplined, yet given to savage moments of hilarity and recklessness, and profound sorrow. You never knew which mood would show up.

  Yes, Harry concluded. A self-conscious people.

  Herr Blum cleared his throat and opened his mouth to speak, then thought better of it.

  At last he said, Did your father ever return to Berlin?

  No, he never did.

  Disgusted with us, I suppose.

  He preferred Mediterranean climates, France, Spain.

  Benign climates, Herr Blum said.

  Except for Spain, Greenwood replied.

  But you—

  When it came time to film Summer, 1921, there was no question in my mind that I would film in Germany.

  Herr Blum looked at him with a pained expression. He said, You see, this is what I do not understand. I do not understand why you decided to write a screenplay about Germans. German artists in 1921. And then film the story in Germany. Isn’t there material enough in America, such a turbulent society with sorrows of its own. Why Germany?

  Greenwood continued to stare into the narrow courtyard. Shadows advanced as the light failed, causing the courtyard to diminish under its rectangle of pale blue sky. The walls were without windows, and he could not see the entrance. Its purpose seemed to be to provide a plot for the hedgerow. He heard Herr Blum stir and wondered how you would live if you saw your fate tied to your nation’s. And if for a hundred years that fate had been a deluge of misery, would the weight of this not be intolerable? Yet it must be tolerated. A Christian nation had an obligation to seek forgiveness, but in the circumstances charity and compassion—the virtues of the church—were ill fitting. In America the past was discarded as tiresome, in some settled sense, impractical. He reached down to massage his leg. The courtyard was now entirely in shadow, and the sky a soft gunmetal gray. The little hedge had disappeared, and a bird flitted from wall to wall.

  Herr Greenwood?

  As for the artists, they were finding their way in the postwar world. Across the ocean, the war was called the war to end wars. The artists were too smart for that. One of them had spent five years on the Western Front, and knew in his bones that nothing good could come from such a prideful struggle, its cost measured in millions of souls. The artist knew that the war was not an end but a beginning. Prelude, he called it.

  Greenwood turned from the window and answered the professor’s question.

  It’s where the modern world begins, Herr Blum.

  Los Angeles, October 1998

  WEDNESDAY NIGHT was overcast with fog so that the lights of L.A. were gathered within it, and refracted as if the sky were a giant footlit screen. The air was warm but an ocean breeze was stirring, an early warning of the chill to come. The neighborhood was quiet except for the occasional siren. Dixon and Claire Greenwood were sitting outside, complacent over drinks, watching the evening news on their portable TV and straining to hear over the muffled noise of insects, but not paying close attention because the news that day had nothing to do with them. Now and then Claire rattled the ice in her glass and made a sarcastic remark about the boyish demeanor of the anchor and the monotony of the mayhem, traffic accidents, a forest fire, two deaths in South Central, and then, the last item, Ada Hart dead at sixty.

  Did he say Ada Hart? That can’t be.

  My God, Dixon said.

  Ada was an old friend, an actress long retired. Dixon moved
to increase the volume, and they both rose from their chairs. Ada had been found dead in her bed, a suspected overdose, though the police weren’t saying and her agent could not be reached. The obituary had been hastily cobbled together, incoherent even by the standards of the local news. The reporter in the street outside her house suggested that actresses of a certain age were cruelly treated by the Industry and she was but the latest victim, so perhaps it was no surprise that observers hinted that she died of a broken heart. The bulk of the report had to do with the circumstances of her death, but the last thirty seconds were devoted to her Academy Award nomination and the films she was best known for; the boyish anchor mentioned two, not her best, and got one title wrong. The clips they showed were of Ada as a young woman in her familiar tomboy pose, “aggressive” would be somewhere in the director’s notes: head turtling forward, hands on hips, mouth worked into a snarl, telling off some hapless thug twice her size. The final one was a photograph of a charity affair the year before, Ada looking every minute of her sixty years but with a wisecracking smile, a glint in her eyes, and a glass in her hand. The glint was especially effective owing to nearsightedness.

  God, Claire said. Poor Ada.

  She was sixty-two, Dixon said. Not sixty.

  And she loved not working. “Died of a broken heart.” What gibberish.

  She did her best work for me, Dixon said. Anna’s Magic.

  I think she did, Claire said. I’m sure she did. No doubt about it.

  But that was twenty years ago.

  Twenty-five, Claire said.

  Yes, twenty-five. Just after the accident.

  A terrible obit. The photograph at the end, she would have hated it.

  She didn’t give a damn, Dixon said.

  Yes, she did give a damn. Ada always gave a damn about her hair.

  They watched a commercial in strained silence. Dixon was not shocked at Ada Hart’s death. She had never taken good care of herself and only last year had had a heart attack that she concealed from everyone except her agent, who was Claire’s agent as well, so the secret was shared. Everyone knew everyone’s business in L.A. When the item showed up in a gossip column Ada was mortified. But it was ignored, and she understood then that she was old news; no one cared about her health, good or bad. When Dixon shivered and put his hand on his wife’s arm, Claire suggested they go inside. The Pacific chill had arrived.

  I’m cold, too, she said.

  Something walked over my grave, Dixon said.

  But Claire appeared not to have heard because she turned suddenly and suggested they eat out, somewhere quiet and out-of-the-way, perhaps the Mexican place off Sepulveda, close by and perfect for a foggy night.

  They had not seen much of each other in the past year, Ada often away in San Francisco seeing her businessman. That’s what Dixon called him, the Businessman. He owned furniture stores, high-end gear for the wizards in Sausalito. Dixon had an idea he liked her for who she had been rather than who she was, but Ada denied it. Don’t be proprietary, Dix. Behave yourself. They had had an affair during the filming of Anna’s Magic. Claire was off somewhere on location. Was it Toronto? Dixon had cast Ada as the prim younger sister of the randy Anna, whose magic touch with men ran out at the end of the first reel but was restored to her at the end. Anna’s Magic was a comedy, the only one Dixon made. Ada played a nude scene that was supposed to be chaste but had gotten out of hand thanks to the sinister close-up camerawork of Billy Jeidels. Dixon had no idea what he had until he saw the rushes, Ada’s skin deeply tanned and in half-light, her thirty-five-year-old body as taut as a teenager’s but definitely not a teenager’s. The difference between the moon and the sun, Billy had said enigmatically. What he apparently meant was, No glare, more mystery. She stole the movie, in part because she was no longer a tomboy nor showed any signs of ever having been a tomboy. The audience was charmed, seeing a side of Ada Hart that they had never seen before or even imagined. She became their discovery. She had let her hair grow. She wore half-glasses. She made no wisecracks. She never snarled, instead inventing a soft stutter and a cadence that seemed to work out to about one syllable a second. She played prim when the script called for it but in a series of small gestures made it plain that she was not prim, that prim was the farthest thing from her mind. Prim was a disguise, and she seemed to imply that all her previous roles had been disguises and what the audience saw now was the real Ada Hart, Ada comfortable in her own skin, Ada liberated at last.

  They were filming on the Costa Brava. Dixon’s screenplays always called for water nearby. Ada was living in a small villa overlooking the Mediterranean. “When Dixon saw the dailies of the nude scene he was startled. He watched the sequence three times, the last time in slow motion. It was a forty-five-second scene and as expertly choreographed as a three-hour ballet, and he wondered why he had not recognized it at the time. Under the lights, the set cleared, only Ada, Billy, and himself in attendance, he thought it a fine sequence but nothing more than that. And then he knew that the forty-five seconds was a conspiracy between actress and cameraman, not an improvisation but something well thought out and carefully controlled. Ada did not speak except to hum something at the end; he thought he recognized a phrase from Gustav Mahler.

  When he arrived at Ada’s villa, she was standing at the deck railing looking out to sea, bulky in a terrycloth robe, drinking a glass of wine. The villa was dark but the deck was washed with light from the moon, huge in the eastern sky. Ada stepped inside to fetch the bottle and another glass. I was swimming, she explained. I swim every night to the float, sit awhile, swim back and return here for a glass. I watch the moonlight in the Med and think about how lucky I am, being here. Being in your wonderful movie. You pick great locations, Dix. It’s a side of you I never knew.

  I was looking at the dailies, he said.

  She smiled broadly but did not reply.

  It’s quite a scene, he said. When did you and Billy dream it up?

  It’s improv, she said.

  Was that Mahler you were humming at the end?

  Liszt, she said.

  And was that improv, too?

  Of course, she said.

  He said, Liar.

  She laughed. Well, maybe not all of it. How pissed are you?

  Not very, he said. He thought, No more pissed than any general who rose from his afternoon siesta to find his troops occupying the capital. Presenting it to him as a kind of surprise.

  He wanted me to do it and I felt like getting it done, she said in her trademark snarl, laughing and kissing him on the cheek as she led him inside where they would be more comfortable. What do you say to another glass of wine?

  He stayed that night and the next, and the night after that. When Ada was finished filming she remained in the villa, and a week later Dixon moved in. When they had been together a while they began to talk about life on the set, Anna’s Magic and other sets. So much hurly-burly, she said. So many, many complications. So many, many needy people in one small closet, and in that way the set resembled a theater of war or a political campaign, where the rules were fixed to suit the mighty objective ahead. Those were the analogies everyone liked because wars and political campaigns were momentous and consequential, whereas a movie was only a movie, unless it was an extraordinary movie, a classic movie, whereupon anything went. Anything at all. That was why there was more hurly-burly on the sets of good directors than mediocre ones. That’s a compliment, Dix. The other thing is, on the good sets people are likely to be serious as opposed to delusional, so there’s less of the no-one-understands-me-at-home, boo-hoo. We all have this focus and elation because we’re doing good work and want to share it, and what could be more natural? The best times I’ve ever had were with men who were very happy at home, except they weren’t at home and had this itch and the missus wasn’t around to scratch it. What about you and Claire?

  Dixon assembled a taco and handed it to Claire. They had not spoken much. Ada Hart was the first of his old girls to die, a thought
that came to him when he sat down and the pretty waitress handed them menus, greeted them by name, and discouraged them from the special. Anytime someone you loved died, the world was suddenly smaller and less interesting and you, too, were diminished. They said that these events gave you perspective but that was sentimental. Perspective was what you had before the death, and after it you were so heavy-hearted and blurred of mind that you could not decide the simplest things, such as what to order after the special was declared off limits. Of course, if you were in the movies, your friends and family could watch your work onscreen; but that was work, not life, and bore about the same oblique relation to personality as a composer to his music. Each time Dix reran Anna’s Magic, he was aroused by Ada’s nude scene, the scene surrounded by his memories of directing the shooting, and his surprise at what had been shot, and his visit later to Ada’s villa, Ada in a white terrycloth robe, drinking a glass of wine in the moonlight and then moving inside for another glass. What a time they had had, and it didn’t end on the Costa Brava. It ended a year later in New York. Ada found an actor she liked, and Dixon continued to be happy at home.

  Claire brought up Ada’s funeral. Probably the Businessman would be in charge, but God help him if he ignored Hollywood convention, specifically the selection of speakers and the order of appearance. The Industry always claimed you at the hour of your passing, but took its own sweet time in working out the arrangements. Claire was to begin a film in December. And he had the Berlin business to consider. He had promised to give Henry Belknap a decision soon, and Claire was in the dark about it.

  She said, Do you want to speak?

  If I’m asked, he said.

  You will be, she said.

  Then I’ll speak.