The Weather in Berlin

by Ward Just

  Do be kind, Dix.

  It’s a eulogy, he said.

  That’s what I mean, she said, smiling fractionally.

  Let’s talk about something else, he said.

  Bye-bye, Ada, Claire said in Ada Hart’s voice.

  He said, Do you remember Henry Belknap? UCLA. A German scholar, he gave me some help on Summer, 1921. About my age, a porker. Looks like Sydney Greenstreet. A wiseguy, talks out of the side of his mouth. Very, very smart.

  Vaguely, she said.

  Dix said, He wants me to come to Berlin.

  And do what?

  Nothing much.

  So go, Claire said. What is it, a weekend? I’ll come with you.

  It’s a residency, Dix said. He wants me for three months.

  Three months?

  Henry gave up UCLA and became a Rektor. He runs a think tank in Berlin. He wants me to come and think. You’ll be off on location. You’ll be locating while I’m thinking.

  First I’ve heard of Berlin, she said. How long—

  He called me last month, Dix said.

  She said, Whoa.

  He explained that Henry Belknap was insistent, offering a semester’s residency, go anywhere, do anything, no obligations except to give them an oral history on moviemaking. The oral history was intended to be his personal settling of accounts. They were eager to have him as one of the eight Fellows; the others were historians and economists. The German film industry was especially enthusiastic, since Dixon Greenwood was a cult figure among the younger directors and actors, who saw him as the unenviable victim of fin-de-siecle American capitalism, a casualty no less martyred than the heroic Hollywood Ten. Henry Belknap’s Mommsen Institute proposed to provide him with money for expenses and an apartment in its villa at Wannsee. Learn about Berlin, let the Berliners learn about you. Three months, January through March. He had nothing better to do and he thought he might learn something from the change of scene, winter on the North German Plain, where the wind originated in Finland via the Arctic. Dix knew no German but Henry was reassuring. No problem, my man. Everyone you meet will speak English.

  You don’t know anybody in Berlin, Claire said after a moment. You’ll be bored.

  Berlin is never boring, he said.

  So what’s it about really? she asked.

  It’s about loose ends.

  Oh, Dix, she said.

  Loose ends for a decade or more, he went on. I can’t work. At any event, I don’t work. My audience has vanished, gone away, emigrated somewhere. Something happened, I don’t know what it was. But I looked around one day and discovered that I was the only one in the room. Everyone else had gone away.

  All you need is a decent script, she said.

  I write my own scripts, remember?

  You know what I mean, she said.

  I’ll tell you a story, true story, not a script for a movie. Andy Richardson was one of my father’s closest friends. Andy manufactured greeting cards, birthdays, anniversaries, but his specialty was Christmas. He had a team of artists at his plant outside of Chicago. Nineteen sixty-two was his banner year. In some locations he even outsold Hallmark. The next year, he borrowed every dollar he could and hired more artists—artists who could draw distinctive Santy Clauses, the Virgin Mary, elves, wreaths, and the Three Kings. Nineteen sixty-three was going to be his breakout year. He shipped more than two million Christmas cards, and then catastrophe. A month before Christmas, Oswald shot Kennedy. Andy was a great Democrat. He was inconsolable, and when he came to work a week or so later he realized that his business was ruined. No one sent Christmas cards that year. Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, we wish you and yours the very best for 1964? Little elves dancing around a snowman? The Three Kings gazing at the star in the east? America was in mourning, or anyway that part of it that bought cards for the holidays. Andy’s business never recovered. So he sold it, and spent the rest of his life playing golf. He and Harry were great golfing partners. Everyone liked Andy. But when Oswald shot Kennedy, the bullet hit Andy also.

  Claire shook her head. So instead of golf, you’re going to Berlin.

  When John F. Kennedy was killed, Andy Richardson was the age I am now.

  Don’t start that, she said.

  I like to work, he continued. Always have. I like the set, for me it’s a kind of lair. I saw the world from the set, the lights, the camera, the actors with the script I had written myself. Then something happened, damned if I know what it was. Something. The weather changed, drizzle all day long.

  He looked up suddenly and said, America doesn’t interest me anymore.

  That’s what you said then, she said. What I’m thinking is, Germany’s old news. Germany is the place you went to when you were young and made a bull’s-eye, and you know perfectly well that life isn’t lived backwards, it’s lived forwards. Claire paused a moment, unsure of her thought. Her husband did seem to have a reverse gear, his life’s objective a series of successful returns. She said brusquely, So side-of-the-mouth Henry Belknap calls up one day, and the next day you’ve decided to spend three months in Germany.

  It isn’t the same Germany, Dix said.

  It’s the same Germany, Claire said. Despite itself. You’re looking for inspiration, go to Paris. Everyone else does.

  Germany’s been a captive nation, Dix said. The First War, Weimar, the Third Reich, the Cold War. But the Wall’s down, Kohl’s gone. Question is, What about the corpse in the corner?

  She looked at him strangely, then laughed. The corpse in the corner?

  Henry Belknap and I spent a month in Germany, summer of ’fifty-six. Henry had introductions to people, academics here and there, and a banker in Hamburg. It was Henry’s trip, I was along for the ride. We stayed with the Hamburg banker for a weekend. Evidence of the war was everywhere, though the war did not concern us because it had ended years before, half our lifetime. The banker was hospitable, he and Henry discussed the Hanseatic League, with detours to poets and novelists. The banker was a cultivated man, a widower. In his den he had a wall full of Emil Nolde’s prints of Hamburg’s harbor, and photograph after photograph of his wife and children. He told us that his children were dead, and so he lived alone. He remarked casually that he had no one to leave his bank to. He was the sole survivor of his family. He looked directly at us then and spoke with the utmost gravity. You boys cannot know the catastrophe of the war. You will never know it. You can only have it secondhand, appalling—and then he stopped, flustered, as anyone is when he realizes he has said too much, opening a door to an unspeakable room. He returned the conversation at once to some obscure diplomatic crisis of the Hanseatic League in the fifteenth century, a pregnant century, and that was how we spent the remainder of the evening, talking pleasantly, surrounded by photographs of his wife and children. I have never been in an atmosphere where so much was left unsaid. We were discussing the nap of the carpet and ignoring the corpse in the corner. At the end he looked at us, smiling, or it seemed like a smile, perhaps it was something else, and said, We are at the beginning of a great prosperity. Prosperity will save us and we will never again be the nation we were. You’re nice American boys. Your parents must be proud. I wish you were my boys because, if you were, I could leave you my bank. He wished us good night, and went upstairs to bed.

  Henry and I went on to Lübeck and some other place I’ve forgotten, but the weekend at the banker’s house in Hamburg stayed with me, and has to this day. When I returned to the United States, I mentioned it to my father. I described the banker, the look of his house, the photographs, the carpet and the corpse, and the prosperity. Harry did not interrupt me once. When I finished, he reminded me of the remark of the French general following the loss of Alsace in 1871: “Think of it always, speak of it never.”

  Listen always for the unspoken thing, Harry said.

  Then he asked me the banker’s name, and when I gave it he was silent for some seconds.

  Hard to know, he said.

  Hard to know what?

&n
bsp; His religion, Harry said. Whether his boys died in the Wehrmacht or the camps.

  I’d guess Wehrmacht, I said.

  Perhaps, Harry said thoughtfully. Perhaps not. You’ll never know.

  The boys are dead either way, I said.

  Yes, he said. Where would matter only to their father.

  Coffee arrived. Dixon listened to the restaurant’s piped-in music, some Beach Boys ballad. Retrograde, he thought. The Beach Boys were as retrograde as he was. He wondered if aspiring composers sent songs to the Beach Boys, hoping they would sing one. Hoping that new music would snap Brian Wilson out of his trance. For himself, scripts continued to arrive but he did not understand them, complaining that they seemed written in a foreign syntax, familiar words and phrases spliced and rewired to resemble the nonsense speech of a dream. Who were these stories written for? At the same time, he had no ideas of his own. The world had moved on, but he had not moved on with it. He believed his audience had vanished, and without an audience he had lost his most valuable collaborator. Like Andy Richardson, he was out of business, adrift on a featureless sea without chart or compass. The other changes were predictable. The Industry’s revolving door had swept away all his old friends and replaced them with aliens young enough to be his own children.

  Claire rolled her eyes. You don’t know what you’re talking about, Dix. Some of them are very talented and well educated. You’d like them if you took the trouble to get to know them. And they’d like you, too. They’re smart and they know what they want. They’re successful, Dix, and success has its own specific rewards. You work, for one thing. You’re back on the set. We both have a craft, and if you’re a craftsman it’s obvious that it’s better to work than not to work, always keeping in mind that it’s movies we’re talking about here, not world peace or a cure for cancer.

  He was looking at his wife with a sideways smile because she was in demand again. The saloon door swung both ways.

  You’re looking forward to the new one, aren’t you?

  It’s a good part, she said defensively.

  I know it is. I read the script, remember? And Howard Goodman is a capable director.

  Howard Goodman always shows me to good advantage. He’s relaxed on the set, so the atmosphere’s good. It’s fun, Dix. Everyone has a good time on a Goodman set. The script is solid and the cast is professional, except for that ass. You can’t have everything.

  What ass?

  That ass. What’s his name, the short one? The one who insists on doing his own stunt work, and if a stunt isn’t there he’ll demand one. But it’ll be fine.

  “At a certain level”? he asked, grinning. “At a certain level” was old-fashioned Industry jargon for material that was not junk. It was plausible material that was professionally written, directed, and acted. Well-made entertainment, box-office entertainment that did not embarrass anyone.

  Definitely, she said.

  Howard’s your man, then. Howard’s been at a certain level his whole life.

  Sarcasm does not become you, Dixon.

  He looked at the bill and put money on it.

  So what about Berlin? she asked.

  I’ll decide after Ada’s funeral, he said.

  They stood for a moment under the restaurant awning watching the fog collect and swirl away. Nearby a family was crowding into a high-rise Mitsubishi SUV, the parents, two teenage children, and a youngster, a boy perhaps seven. The teenagers were complaining loudly. Their mother went around to the driver’s door and unlocked it while the father stood behind the children, his arms spread, attempting to herd them into the rear seat. The fog came and went so that Claire and Dix could not see them clearly. The mother was young and the father was Dix’s age, but very tall and bent, and wearing a Dodgers baseball hat. The doors were open but the teenage children refused to enter, continuing their complaints, something about a rotten deal in a soccer game, obsolete computer equipment, and an underdone hamburger. The father was nodding but something in his posture—he was stooped, his arms too long for his body, and his eyes turned away—suggested he was not listening. He gazed off in the direction of the steak house across the street. The mother was talking now, gesticulating at the children. The young boy was leaning against the rear fender in an attitude of absolute boredom, and when his father moved to muss his hair—it was a gesture of the most tender affection—he jerked his head away and said loudly, Don’t!

  Let’s go, Claire said.

  Stay a minute. I want to watch the end of it.

  Claire sighed. You and your third reels. What do you care? What’s it to you?

  Because I know who they are, Dix said.

  Claire gave him her infinite-patience look, then peered through the fog to the Mitsubishi. My goodness, she said. It’s Billy Jeidels.

  And family, Dix said. They had not seen each other in months. Billy was in the same professional cabinet as Dix, different shelf. He had married ten years ago, a young screenwriter with two children. And they had one of their own, the boy. Dix had heard or read somewhere that Billy was filming commercials for television and that he had won some award, an important honor in the advertising industry. He had been away from feature films since collaborating on Dix’s last, a critical and financial failure. Billy shared the blame, unjustly, and his new wife, Gretchen, complained that his long association with Dix had made him unemployable. Dixon Greenwood was radioactive, worse even than Chernobyl. Billy did not take his wife’s part but the friendship suffered. They got together now and again for lunch, talking always about the old days and the five films they had made together. It was a men-only lunch because of Gretchen’s animosity.

  Beautiful cameraman, Dix said.

  Yes, he was.

  I think he’s in a fix now.

  That girl is why he’s in a fix, Claire said.

  The family was still in midargument. Gretchen’s voice carried across the asphalt, something about shutting up right now, that money didn’t grow on trees, and getting into the car, and this time I mean it. The teenage girl was furious and stamped her foot. Why are you being such a shit, Gretch? Arms wide apart, Billy Jeidels continued to press against his children, urging them into the car. Dix heard him say mildly, All right, all right now, and that seemed to be the signal that whatever demands were being made, they were now acceded to. The children safely in the rear seat and buckled in, Billy slowly opened the front passenger door and leaned gently against it. The car was taller than he was. He swayed for a moment, almost losing his balance, still looking into the far distance as if he were making up his mind about something. He drummed his fingers on the car’s roof. His wife banged her hands on the dashboard and they heard, most clearly, her next words.

  Get the fuck in the car.

  Billy came back from wherever he had been and with infinite weariness, left foot, then left leg, right foot, then right leg, he complied. He lowered the window and sat perfectly erect, his elbow resting on the metal sill. The children were quarreling again and his wife continued to scream at him. But he said nothing and did not look at her. It was as if he were deaf and alone in the world. At last Gretchen was silent and the car began to move, gathering speed out of the parking lot and into the traffic on Sepulveda, where it ran a red light and hurtled away, soon lost to view.

  He was drunk, Dix said.

  Billy was never a drinker, Claire replied.

  Perfectly drunk. He had probably heard about Ada.

  Was Billy involved with Ada, too?

  Off and on, Dix said.

  Let’s go now, Dix.

  They walked to the car arm in arm. Claire drove. After a moment, Dix began to think out loud, recollecting his move from New York to Los Angeles more than thirty years before. He liked California at once, the glitter and the sun, the endless freeways, the disorder and ambition, the blue Pacific, the girls as restless as the tides. Everyone in Los Angeles was from somewhere else and always on the hustle, and the style of things the reverse of Hamburg in 1956: nothing was ever left un
said. Remember the party where we met, the socialite’s house in deepest Pasadena? The English butler? The butler wanted to be a very big star, so he spent his mornings bodybuilding and his evenings passing canapés on a heavy silver tray that he balanced on three fingers of his left hand. He was always winking at the guests, men, women, it didn’t matter so long as they had something to do with the Industry. A producer stole him away from the socialite and he was happy to be stolen because he figured the producer was going to make him a star. That was the promise. Instead he got a bigger tray in a smaller house. He got his revenge, remember? He ran off with the producer’s wife. He butled his way to the top of the tree, with the help of Mrs. Producer. They’re still around, probably retired and living near the golf course at Palm Springs.

  Claire began to laugh.

  And that’s where we met, at one of those famous Sunday night suppers.

  Billy Jeidels was there, she said. Ada Hart, too.

  I don’t remember Ada, Dix said.

  She was there. She was with you.

  Not with me, Dix said. I was alone, worried about the girl with the black eye. Adorable girl, except for the black eye. She knew every man in the room, and I was wondering which one of them had slugged her, except she was laughing a storm. She didn’t behave like someone who’d gotten manhandled. Those shades you wore, they only called attention to the mouse. And when someone finally introduced us and I asked what happened, you said you’d walked into a door. And I said, Yeah, try the veal, it’s the best in the city, and you called me a wiseguy and took off the shades and blinked twice. Lenses as thick as von Stroheim’s monocle. Myopia, you said, and I kissed the mouse because you seemed so happy to have it, wearing it like a badge. And I knew L.A. girls who wept when they got a bad perm. I knew you were different and I fell in love with the difference.

  She turned into their street, sudden darkness after the bright lights of Sepulveda. The air was scented, the fog beginning to disperse. She pulled into their driveway and stopped under the branches of the huge beech. She turned off the engine but made no move to leave the car. From an open window nearby they heard a fanfare of trumpets, the bellicose signature of the late-night news.