The Weather in Berlin

by Ward Just

  He said, L.A. is a bad town when you’re not working. It’s like being a stowaway on shipboard, but everyone knows you’re there, hiding in the lifeboat. They don’t mind as long as you stay out of sight.

  Is that what it’s like?

  Pretty much. You don’t know where the ship’s going, either.

  Lost the compass, is that it?

  They know, or they say they do, and once upon a time I knew. I was able to read the time, see things before they came around the corner. I had second sight. I knew how things worked. That means, how people saw themselves. What they wanted and what they would do to get it. And then I couldn’t do it anymore. The clock stopped. I can’t tell you the time right now, never mind tomorrow or next month or next year. America has overwhelmed me, and no wonder, it’s a big country. Country’s big, L. A.’s small. And I’m sixty-four. I need another country.

  Dix, she began.

  I loved L.A. in the early days. We were so young.

  Me too. Loved it to death.

  You still do, he said.

  It’s good to be working, she said. That’s true. But I’d be happier if you were working.

  I will be, he said. That’s a promise.

  In Germany, she said.

  He did not reply to that. Instead he said, Did you hear what that woman said to him, and the way she said it? Get the fuck in the car.

  I heard it, she said. Poor Billy.

  Yes, he agreed, but said nothing more. He turned to her in the darkness and kissed her. In the moonlight he saw their two worn Adirondack chairs, side by side under the beech. The chairs were as old as their marriage. They kissed again and after a while he said in his slow voice that for the longest time he could not forget her black eye, livid against her fair skin, swollen, angry, yet her expression was of the purest amusement, and so the black eye was nothing more than a sudden squall on a beautiful summer day. So alarming, and then you adjusted and learned to live with it, and in a heartbeat it was gone, healed like any other wound.

  You thought my black eye was sexy, she said.

  Yes, I did.

  She thought a moment, her head resting on his shoulder. She said she knew he was going to Berlin and that it was all right. He did need a change of scene, a different plot and a different cast of characters, something new. A change of country, she said. A different time and different weather, another narrative. A place to quicken the heart, like L.A. in the old days.

  PART ONE

  Berlin, January

  1

  MAX SCHREK weather, the chef explained. He meant that the German winter had the grainy texture and somber mood of a prewar black-and-white, the sort of weather bat-faced Max Schrek was always walking in at the end of the third reel, the atmosphere so gray and indistinct you recognized him only by his defeated slouch and his black overcoat. In this weather, northern Europe generally had a prewar look of listless discord and unemployment. People on the streets were withdrawn, private and silent. The raw wind was part of every day.

  You know Max Schrek, Herr Greenwood?

  Of course, Greenwood said.

  A great actor. Incompatible with the sun.

  Every afternoon Werner complained about the weather because he was looking forward to his holiday in Majorca, señoritas and magaritas under a hot yellow sun, an ur-sun, not the pale Berlin button that declined even to cast a shadow upon the earth. In January it was dark by four and cold, too, the Baltic wind driving snow two hundred kilometers across the North German Plain, that featureless tableland two feet above sea level so beloved of Prussian aristocrats and military historians—and Chef Werner also, who had grown up on a farm near Peenemunde in old Pomerania. His eyes glowed when he spoke of the region’s agriculture, potatoes, rye, oats, and, in former times, tobacco. Werner cooked all the Prussian specialties, but Monday nights were reserved for Königs-berger Klopse, meatballs nearly the size of cannonballs and almost as heavy. The recipe was his dear grandmother’s. Like so many others, she had been butchered by the pig Russians in the frightful winter of 1944–45. Thank God for the Americans.

  They were standing in the dining room of Mommsen House waiting for the teakettle to come to a boil. The dining room and kitchen were at the rear of the villa. French doors overlooked a stone terrace and the wide frozen lawn that sloped to the lake beyond. The big round table was already set for dinner, ten places for the residents and the Rektor and his wife. Six bottles of wine were gathered on the sideboard next to the kitchen door. Dusk was coming on, so Werner reached behind him and threw the switch that illuminated the huge mural on the wall behind them. It described a bacchanal, or perhaps the artist’s version of a merry Götterdämmerung. The women residents were infuriated because the central figure was a spread-eagled woman with a two-foot vulva, the vulva yawning in what appeared to be a scream of delight. The vulva contained teeth, and above the teeth a ragged Hp with a little toothbrush mustache. She was surrounded by men whose body parts resembled carpenters’ tools, handsaws, hammers, screwdrivers, and awls. Supervising the fun was an army officer in a brown shirt and leather jodhpurs, brandishing a whip.

  I like it, Werner said with a smile.

  It’s junk, Greenwood said.

  An artist has an obligation to his material.

  It’s still junk, Greenwood said.

  I am opposed to censorship, Werner said briskly. My country has suffered because of the censorship, burning books and destroying artworks. We are on guard against it wherever it appears. This is the foundation of our modern democracy. It is important to us, absolute freedom of expression, except where the Nazis are concerned. That is the only exception. And it means no swastikas. No torchlight rallies nor hate speech. The women should be open-minded toward artworks.

  You tell them that, Werner.

  They refuse to listen, Werner said. He peeked at the teakettle, almost aboil.

  Tell them about censorship. I’m sure they’ll listen.

  The artist is very famous in Germany, Werner said. His work is in all the museums and galleries. He is often on television.

  I’m sure they’ll take his fame into account, Greenwood said.

  They shouldn’t come here unless they have an open mind. I think it is that they are opposed to us.

  The Germans, Greenwood said.

  Yes, they have preconceived us.

  Speak to Ms. Kessel and Ms. Ryan about it, and I’d like to be there when you do.

  I have spoken to Herr Belknap, Werner said.

  And what did he say?

  Herr Belknap was most sympathetic. He said he appreciated plain speaking.

  Dix began to laugh. I’ll bet he did.

  He said he would attend to it when he returned from the fund-raising. He has gone to Hamburg and then he is on to Düsseldorf. Herr Belknap is a superior type. Did you know his mother was born in Germany? Werner looked at Greenwood sideways and then he said, You should get away.

  I am away, Greenwood said.

  I mean a warmer climate. A spa or beach somewhere in the south, where the atmosphere is not strenuous. You should take care of yourself with that leg.

  My leg is the same, winter or summer.

  Still—

  And I have work to do.

  Work cannot be completed in the German winter, Werner said firmly. This is well known. Winter is the time for hibernation. In the winter we Germans hibernate like bears. We burrow in until it’s over. At least your wife should be with you. In this climate, it’s unhealthy to live alone.

  My wife is in America, Greenwood said.

  In a warm climate, I hope.

  Los Angeles, Greenwood said.

  It is unhealthy, Los Angeles. The smog.

  It’s strenuous, too, Greenwood said.

  I wish you liked the mural, Werner said.

  It doesn’t remind me of home, if that’s what you mean.

  The chef smiled broadly, handing Greenwood his cup of tea, no sugar, no milk, lemon wedge in the saucer. Greenwood thanked him and moved to
leave the dining room and return to his apartment upstairs, to drink his tea and nap for an hour. Hard little snowflakes beat against the windows, and the lake had become obscured. The chef wished Greenwood a pleasant nap. He said that Greenwood should listen to the wind. The wind had a message. The vengeful howling of the wind was the voice of souls lost over the millennia, when Germans made the mistake of leaving their places of hibernation. Frostbite, pestilence, spear, gunshot. The great German retreats always took place in the winter.

  2

  GREENWOOD sat with his tea in the sitting room of his apartment reading a letter from his daughter, one that began with a rambling account of her plans for her garden, three new varieties of roses and a blue hydrangea. She and Mike had dinner the night before and Mike cooked. The hydrangea was his idea. Greenwood looked up into the oval mirror opposite—there were three mirrors in the small room, each at a different height—and wondered who Mike was. Mike had not been introduced, had arrived abruptly in the middle of her letter, unknown Mike. This was bad screenwriting: you either began with the redheaded stranger or prepared the ground for his arrival. But Mike vanished in the next sentence, replaced by Ernie the cat, who had gone missing but had returned that morning, très content after his prowl. And wasn’t it fine news about Mom, who seemed at last to have a really good part in Howard’s movie and star billing, too. She herself had an idea she would fly to Florida for a week, just to lie in the sun and fish a little. Brother Jerry might join her if he could get away. Of her own work she said not a word, but she rarely did. She and two partners practiced law on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, a location, Dix noted, about as far from Los Angeles as she could get. She ended with the usual request that he buy a computer so she could e-mail him, so much easier for her, and for him, too, once he learned to use it. Tell me everything about Berlin. Love, Nancy. The institute had supplied him with a computer that Henry Belknap promised was idiot-proof and a cinch to use, but Greenwood kept delaying the lesson. The computer sat in its box in the corner next to a space-age digital answering machine that recorded messages up to one hour.

  He put Nancy’s letter aside and stood, favoring his bad leg, looking into the oval mirror. He wondered if the decorator had a family in mind, one mirror for Dad, the two square ones for Mom and Junior. If you stood at a certain point in the room and looked into the high oval mirror, you could see different aspects of yourself in the other two. From the rear, broad-shouldered Dix, even in late middle age with the build of a tightly packed middleweight boxer, no neck to speak of, narrow hips and a game left leg, but in balance all the same. He gave the impression of a man who could take care of himself, though it would be a while before he got around to it. When Dix looked at himself in the high mirror, he saw a nondescript face, not in any way remarkable, more handsome than not, gray eyes with laugh lines at the corners, a nose turned up at the end, gray hair cut very short, another face in the crowd. But that was not what a stranger saw. The stranger noticed a man of medium height, a largish Roman head on a compact body, too casually dressed for a business executive, perhaps he was an academic or someone connected to the entertainment field—then he looked twice, startled, believing that Dix was someone, a figure from the movies or the evening news. The stranger would turn to whomever he (or more likely she) was with and say, Who is that man? I know I’ve seen him before, and then name a popular film, identifying Dix as the tough priest or the lieutenant colonel who goes down in flames in the second reel or, snapping fingers, declaring that he had it now. That’s the character who took the Fifth again and again at that Senate hearing last week, the witness who never cracked a smile or spoke beyond, I respectfully decline to answer . . . He looked like a standup guy. What do you suppose he’s doing in Los Angeles?

  Dix turned on the radio and returned to his chair. German radio was playing American music, Ella Fitzgerald’s Cole Porter album, the “songbook” that everyone was buying in 1956, two long-playing disks in a sky-blue and brown jacket. Cole Porter was still alive, living here and there in Europe and America. Everyone was alive then, Adlai Stevenson, Gary Cooper, Ernest Hemingway. Harry Greenwood was very much alive, entertaining friends from coast to coast. When Ella began to sing “All Through the Night” Dix smiled, drawn back to his freehanded youth on the North Shore of Chicago, summer dances under high-topped tents in Lake Forest and Winnetka, the moon rising hugely over the vast somnolent lake, the lights of the city visible to the south. They stood on the lawn in their dancing shoes and praised the moon for showing up.

  The music went on and on. He was dancing with a wild girl, looking over his shoulder at the other dancers and at the older men gathered around the bar. His father was telling some story, people laughing, leaning forward to hear the punch lines. His father held a highball against his stomach, telling the story deadpan, drawing it out, always with impeccable timing. People gravitated to him, and now he looked over at Dixon, nodded and winked. Greenwood yawned, trying to remember the name of the girl. She was that summer’s scandal because she refused to wear a bra. She said she would wear pearls but not a bra. She was red-haired, beautifully built and light on her feet, and spoke in a sarcastic staccato with a back-of-the-throat boarding school accent. He remembered her laughing when he held her close, dancing a tango, the violins soaring. Her fingers were in his hair, tugging. She was humming to the music, dancing barefoot.

  It was warm in the apartment and Greenwood yawned again, his eyes closing. All the best parties had orchestras imported from the East, Meyer Davis or Lester Lanin. But this girl chose a supper dance with the violin section of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and everyone agreed it was an outstanding idea, simply superb, the concertmaster leading with the panache of a Viennese Joe Venuti. She insisted on a jazz pianist from one of the North Side clubs to play during the breaks. The party went on until well after midnight. The strings departed but the piano remained, and they danced and danced. The scandalous girl was puzzled why Dix was going to UCLA while all the other boys went east to Yale or Princeton. California was practically a continent away. He told her he intended to live on the West Coast and make movies, stories about the way people lived actually, not only in America but abroad, too. Infidelity was his subject.

  Adultery, you mean.

  Adultery would be included, he said.

  I have stories, she said. I have more stories than you can imagine, and I will tell them all to you if you promise to make movies about them. Promise you’ll listen? And later that summer she told him her stories, one lurid story after another about her parents’ lives, tales of disorder behind the usual suburban greenery. See, she said, they turn out to be normal people after all. But at that time, Greenwood was not interested in the appetites of people like himself. After visiting Germany with Henry Belknap, he was drawn to delusions that bordered on rapture and the catastrophes that followed. The Hamburg banker’s stony face stayed with him, and in his last year at UCLA he wrote two theses, one on symbolism in the films of John Ford, the other on the despised minorities of Europe. He had forgotten the scandalous girl’s stories, but he remembered that she had a marvelous eye for things and what they represented. The mink coat, the photograph in the wallet, the bronze Buddha in the library, and the codicil to the will. Greenwood closed his eyes, trying to remember her name, she was so flirtatious in the moonlight.

  Her name was Donna something. She had beautiful red hair. Everyone called her D.

  He dozed, remembering that she had married, divorced, and married again. She had moved somewhere east and dropped out of sight. He had not thought of her in years, and would not be thinking of her now were it not for Ella Fitzgerald’s Cole Porter songbook, and then he was completely asleep and dreaming.

  Dixon Greenwood’s afternoon dream in Germany:

  His right arm was riddled with needle marks, so they detached it from his shoulder in order to present it intact to Herr Doktor Freud. Somewhere in the course of the meandering journey from his house in Libertyville to the Victorian comfort o
f the doctor’s suite at 19 Berggasse, Greenwood was reunited with his arm, but now it was twisted painfully behind his back. The Viennese refused to notice him, looking through him as if he were invisible. They were retired people, flaneurs out for a stroll with their animals, small dogs and, in the case of the dwarf in the derby hat, a turtle on a long leather leash. The good friends escorting Greenwood raced ahead and one by one disappeared into the Mexican church at the intersection, leaving him alone in the narrow street, the pale winter sun just rising. The sun’s rays advanced as the minutes passed and still he had no clue as to context. The time appeared to be early morning of a long-ago year. He was a broad-shouldered man conservatively dressed in a dark suit and bright yellow tie, a Borsalino on his head. He was deeply tanned from an expensive vacation. He wore a red rose in his lapel, yet his shoes were badly scuffed and in need of repair. He felt out of place in this milieu, standing in a one-way street in an anonymous Viennese district where houses lined the curb like books on a shelf, all the houses painted milky white and of uniform height and fenestration. The streets were empty of cars and the sidewalks deserted, the flâneurs having vanished, even the dwarf. At the same time, Greenwood believed he was under observation, the scrutiny unseen but profound. He heard the breathless laughter of young girls and then, from somewhere in the vicinity of the Mexican church, he heard the unmistakable whir of a camera’s gears. This was comforting and stood to reason; he had spent his life looking through cameras, measuring distances, calculating angles and the available light, studying the perimeter of the frame. He stood a little taller now that he was on familiar ground. No one was ever alone, least of all when they were occupied with their own private thoughts; and in a camera’s lens, nothing was straightforward. That was the point. He knew this as a certainty.

  The shelf of houses presented a blank façade but the interiors teemed with life. When he heard violins, the rustle of evening clothes, and the thud of a champagne cork, Greenwood knew at once that this was not Doktor Freud’s neighborhood and that his visit was misconceived, one more beautiful opportunity lost, and how many opportunities were there in a single lifetime? His spirits fell as the ground shifted. Things had looked so promising, so near a breakthrough. A promise had been made after all, and was now broken without explanation, a disappointment all around. Without question, the great analyst would have been delighted to consult on such a curious affair, an American’s arm mysteriously detached and reunited as if by magic. Naturally Doktor Freud would have a European intellectual’s condescending view of things, American neurosis corrupted by money and the compulsory pursuit of happiness, the symptoms garnished with crude symbolism. Nevertheless, Freud would insist on hypnosis, and following hypnosis would commence an intimate inquiry, his patient’s childhood and early manhood, his parents’ marriage, their attitudes toward each other and him, their sexual life together, and his sexual life as well and any fantasies that attended it. And then to the dream itself, salient in these circumstances. Describe for me the book-houses and the narrow street and the shape of the steeple of the Mexican church. Who were these friends, Herr Greenwood, and what was their business with your arm? Describe your earliest memory of the “detachment,” as you call it, and the circumstances of its reunification. Come, speak plainly! Speak without fear. You are a man of your word and you have something important to tell me. You have come across the ocean from America in order to know yourself in Vienna. Quickly, please, my time is valuable.