The Weather in Berlin

by Ward Just

  Naturally craft was involved, along with the usual deception.

  Harry had told him stories of his interrogations in the windowless cubicle in the detention center, a long table, the prisoner at one end and Harry at the other, like old marrieds who had little to say to each other. Harry always began with vital statistics, harmless evidence that tended not to incriminate. And at some point on the second or third day, the witness would begin to fashion a narrative. He would describe his duties, a staff officer filing reports, a logistics major assembling transportation for weapons and ammunition. Q: Were the trains used for other purposes, such as the transfer of prisoners? A: That was not my department; for that information Herr Greenwood must speak to Colonel X in Department Y. The witnesses seemed to want narratives with beginnings, middles, and ends, coherent narratives with a cast of characters and plot twists and a moral, narratives that suggested that they were not anonymous cogs in the mighty Reich machine but figures of consequence, following orders scrupulously, and if the orders seemed irregular, that was not their department, either. They were not storytellers, Harry said, so their accounts proceeded in fits and starts, contradictory and unconvincing. Of course they believed that victory was inevitable except toward the end when nothing was inevitable but collapse. Harry listened as the staff officers went on and on, making the best of things, richly anecdotal, especially when describing the fuckups—hilarious fuckups that all armies experienced since the beginning of warfare. Homer described fuckups. If the apes had had access to pen and ink, they would have described fuckups, too. So we continued day by day, doing what we were told to do, confident that the Reichschancellor knew the score. We trusted, you see. We were too trusting.

  With the liars, sadists, blusterers, and amnesiacs, Harry was curt. But he was unfailingly polite with the others, the ideal audience for people trying to tell their own story, adhering now to one line, now to another, always in the vicinity of the truth but never on its mark, trying mainly to account for themselves in a way that seemed—plausible. They seemed grateful for the opportunity to audition, amateurs who apparently were unable to learn their lines. Often when they faltered, Harry suggested a possible turn of events, some incident or motive of which they were unaware. He led them back into their own past, refreshing their memories, discovering new possibilities of imposing order on chaos. Of course they were enthusiastic, and why not? The answer to chaos is repetition.

  I wanted to inspire them, Harry said. I wanted to bring them face to face with themselves and their neighbors.

  In a roundabout way, that’s how you got Summer, 1921 financed, Harry went on. Whit Reade, the man in the Brooks Brothers suit? He had one of Eichmann’s people. Or Whit thought he was. He couldn’t prove it. He interrogated this bastard for three days and was about to let him off. Charming German aristocrat, beautifully educated. They spoke English because Whit’s German was only so-so. After three days, Whit decided he had the wrong man and the aristo was who he said he was, a functionary in one of the minor ministries. Nothing to do with transport. Nothing to do with the camps. Whatever the Final Solution was, he had nothing to do with it. Whit gave me the transcripts to read and I offered to take his man for a day, try another tack. See if another narrative presented itself, speaking German and only German.

  Amazing what happens when you give people openings, Harry said. They can’t resist improving their story. Improving it beyond all plausibility. When you catch them out, you make light of it. You convince them they’ve made only a small mistake, not worth worrying about. They think you’re a fool and begin to play games, and before they know it they’re in a hole. And that’s when you go over their testimony comma by comma. They want to switch to English but you don’t allow that. And after a day you’ve discovered who they are really. What they did actually. This one, he went to prison. Not for long, but he went.

  And Whit was grateful and came to me, Dix said.

  I signed Whit’s name to my interrogation, Harry said. The command would have busted him for letting the bastard get away. He promised to return the favor someday. And he did.

  How did he know about Summer, 1921?

  Whit’s the sort of man, knows things. And maybe what he wanted was to get even. Summer, 1921 evened the score for him. And returned a favor, both at once.

  Harry continued his reminiscence for an hour or more. And when Dixon asked him what he made of the experience, and what conclusions he had drawn from the season in Germany in the ruins of the Third Reich, Harry thought for a moment and replied that he was left with a question he was unable to answer. Who is responsible for the demagogue?

  Dix said, Were you responsible for Whit Reade?

  No, Harry said. Whit acted alone.

  Dix wet the pencil lead on the tip of his tongue. He began to write again, then pushed the paper aside and sat with the pencil point resting against his lower Hp. His desk lamp cast a soft glow on the yellowish wall at his elbow. He is back in Franconia, the long golden afternoon in June, the last day on location. The boys are in the woods smoking dope, the girls on the ledge overlooking the lake, the water smooth and soft as a bedsheet. The sun is still bright at six, the shadows not so long. Billy Jeidels is setting up for a final shot. This is not planned, it’s only that the afternoon is so lovely he wants to shoot film—in case. In case they wanted it later. In case something unexpected occurred. In case Dix had an inspiration. In case the girls did something enchanting.

  The girls stir, stretching like cats in the warm shadows. The light falls sweetly through the trees, dappling their skin and the rocks they sit on. One of them says something and the other two laugh, turning to look at the woods where the boys are becalmed, unseen. Every afternoon they retreat stealthily into the woods, to a clearing nearby where they can smoke undisturbed. Billy begins to film, imagining voices over or voices off. He is thinking of the boys and their drowsy conversation, a complement to the lethargy of the girls; really he is composing an adagio in his head, something to conform to the colors and gestures of the girls. Jana steps to the lip of the ledge and looks down, ten, fifteen feet. The lake is shaped like a clarinet, two miles long and narrow where the girls are sitting. A thin ribbon of smoke rises from the cabin across the water, and some ways down a young boy is maneuvering a red canoe. Jana raises her arms and preens a moment, her face to the dying sun. Billy films all the while, creeping to his right so that he will have her in the frame in the event she decides to dive. Behind her is an easel, and on the easel a half-finished portrait. Jana and Trude embracing on the ledge, Marion drowsing in the foreground; she is asleep now. The brushes rest in a coffee tin, tubes of paint in a wooden cigar box, Rosing’s box. Wendt and Fischer wander off into the woods. Rosing likes to paint alone, himself and the models, no witnesses. He requires silence, so he tells them to go away. When he finishes, he joins them in the woods.

  Jana takes a final look behind her and launches herself into the void. She touches her toes in midflight and enters the water slim as a sword, her ankles disappearing in a tiny splash that softens at once, the water closing behind her as firmly as a door. Trude claps her hands and moves to the precipice to peer down and then looks back when the boys emerge from the wood, their voices loud, trailing laughter. She puts her fingers to her lips and says, Be still! The boys pay no attention and complete their journey to the makeshift canteen, where they begin to eat ravenously—bread, cheese, chocolate bars, Coca-Cola. When they finish, they sit sulking in canvas director’s chairs. They seem not to know what to do with themselves. Wendt—his actual name is Thomas Gwilt and he is their leader, as the artist Wendt was so many years before—pulls a deck of cards from his pocket. Fischer fetches the folding table, and they wait while Wendt shuffles the cards and begins the deal for a hand of Hollywood gin rummy, twenty-five cents a point. Trude comes to stand behind Rosing, gently massaging his neck and shoulders. He indicates she should lower her fingers to touch the muscles in the small of his back. Marion is roused by their voices and awakens, r
aising her head to discover the source of the commotion. She rests with her head propped in the palm of her hand, looking at the card players, Trude now wandering away, back to the ledge where the easel is.

  Billy has stopped filming.

  He says, Shall we have a drink?

  Dix agrees. Why not?

  Billy has a stash of ice. Dix locates the Scotch.

  They move away from the others, enjoying the failing light and the drinks in their hands. The boy in the red canoe is slowly paddling to the dock across the water.

  Dix says, We’re done here.

  Billy laughs. And about time. I can’t wait to get back to L.A.

  Dix says, And cut the film.

  It’s good, Dix. It’s very, very good.

  I think so, Dix says. The girls—

  Aren’t they extraordinary?

  The boys did a good job, too.

  They finally understood ensemble, Billy says. They smoke an awful lot of dope, though.

  They were straight when they needed to be, Dix says. Young Mr. Gwilt will be a star after this. And that’s what he wants. I’ve never seen anyone want it more. Isn’t it good to see people get what they want?

  He hasn’t got it yet, Billy says.

  He will, Dix says.

  Then Trude is at his side. She is very shy, the shyest of the three girls. It was difficult for her to speak to him. She stood looking over his left shoulder, distressed, her mouth forming an O.

  He said, What is it?

  It’s Jana, she said. She’s lost.

  We’ll find her, Dix said. Which way did she go?

  No, Trude said. I mean, she never came up from her dive.

  Dix slowly returned from Franconia, his memory dissolving into a helter-skelter of activity, he and Billy running down the path that wound to the lake, the boys following, their game abandoned in midshuffle. Wendt dove in at once, Rosing and Fischer behind him. Dix took a long breath and dove deep, following the underwater ledge. The water was cold and, a few feet down, opaque. They dove again and again but there was no sign of Jana. Billy Jeidels was frantic, diving and swimming far out and diving again. When he surfaced he called her name over and over, and when there was no reply he thrashed about in the water like a man drowning.

  And later, when the police arrived and professional divers went to work, there was still no sign. The water was very deep, the divers explained. They searched that night and the next day and the day following but Jana left no trace. The body was not recovered. Wendt was inconsolable and for many months professed to believe that the disappearance was Jana’s Sorb deception, a wretched joke. She had gone home, tired of the demands of the film, tired of taking direction and suspicious of his attentions. Wendt said, She doesn’t believe in anything. When he told her he wanted her to come back with him to Los Angeles, she said she would never leave Europe. Trude and Marion were the ones who wanted to live in the United States. She was happy where she was, migrating here and there in Europe. They had quarreled, not violently but seriously, and she was angry with him. She had complained for days of boredom, and then late one night she said that what she really wanted was to get off the set, to go on the road for a while, wandering. Sorbs enjoyed wandering, to become flaneurs on the surface of the earth. Often it was necessary not to have an objective, simply to receive what was present for no better reason than the fact that it was present and you were, too. We Sorbs are at home wherever we happen to be, so long as we may speak our own tongue. We like to be let alone, and we seldom are.

  She was annoyed that Greenwood had insisted that she use her real name in the film. She believed as a result that she had two personalities, the film Jana and the real Jana. The same was true for Marion and Trude, and yet you are Thomas Gwilt and not Jan Wendt. He thinks it’s clever, Jana and Jan. I don’t have a last name. Marion and Trude do not have last names. But you boys have last names. It is not respectful.

  He laughed at her. You’re already behaving like a movie star and the film isn’t even released. Remember, you’re working with an American director on an important motion picture—

  Don’t be surprised if one morning I’m not there, Jana said. Wendt told Greenwood later that she was furious, but not so furious that she didn’t throw in her newest phrase of American slang.

  I’m going to make myself scarce, she said.

  Wendt said, But you can’t leave the film.

  It is not my film. It is Herr Greenwood’s film.

  Wendt believed she was still alive and Greenwood agreed with him. Jana kept her promises.

  The formalities were grueling, a hearing before a magistrate and a long wait while the magistrate inquired into the matter of negligence. Greenwood was taken into custody but released after a day. Jana’s parents could not be found. The other two girls disappeared when their testimony was concluded. Naturally the story was a sensation in the American press, the occasion for editorials on the historic mistreatment of the Sorb minority, not only in Germany but in all of central Europe and the Soviet Union as well. America would be no different, if America harbored Sorbs. Then the story slipped from the front pages to the pages inside, and then was forgotten. When the magistrate delivered his verdict—“presumed death by misadventure”—there was a final flurry of interest, then oblivion. The Americans packed up and went home.

  Greenwood made himself another vodka, a small one. Dinner was in thirty minutes. He stood at the window, looking across the lake to the Wannsee Conference Center. The villas nearby were ablaze with light but the Conference Center was dark, as it always was after visiting hours. Dix noticed none of this, however. He was remembering how much he cared about his film and how disappointed he was that Jana, tired of his demands, tired of taking direction, insulted that her name had been appropriated, did not share his—love was not too strong a word. Back in Los Angeles, working in the cutting room, he saw how unselfconscious her performance was. He began to cut with her in mind. He shifted the focus from Rosing and Trude to Wendt and Jana. Billy Jeidels said his editing was inspired. It would not be accurate to say that Dix made the film as a tribute to Jana—he kept to himself the hope that she was neither dead nor lost but had merely, as she promised, made herself scarce—but that was how it worked out. When he tried to explain what he did, Claire said he was making too much of the accident. That was all it was, an accident. It was sad, tragic even, but it was an accident. Accidents happened all the time on sets. Old men had heart attacks, stuntmen died in cattle drives.

  It’s a beautiful film, she said.

  Leave it at that.

  You can direct actors in a film, she said. You cannot direct their lives. Their lives are their own.

  No, Dix said. Not entirely.

  He finished his vodka and stood before the oval mirror pulling on a fresh shirt. He heard the elevator and Kessel’s footsteps in the corridor. Silence next door, and with that Dix knotted his tie, winked in the mirror, and put his glass in the sink. He stood at the window looking at the dark water and the lights beyond. The wind had lost strength but he could feel the chill beyond the glass, a presence that seemed to him almost supernatural. He remained deep in his memory.

  On such a night in Franconia long ago, unseasonably cold for June, he had spent the evening in his hotel room revising the final week’s shooting script for Summer, 1921. Everyone was asleep. Satisfied with his work, he had gone to the lobby bar, poured a glass of schnapps, and walked outside toward the empty square. Mist had come up from the river, muffling the glow of the streedamps, glass moons the size of basketballs. He stepped into the square, the pavement wet under his feet. Dead center a bronze general on horseback pointed his sword in the direction of Poland. Somewhere a cat screamed and a door banged shut, and he was reminded of the moment in The Third Man, Orson Welles revealed in the doorway of the deserted square in Vienna, smiling his cuckoo-clock smile, a cat at his feet, and then vanishing almost at once, leaving hapless Holly Martins dumbstruck.

  Dix began to walk, taking his time
, sipping schnapps. He was still thinking about the script and the work he had done, not so much a revision of dialogue as a revision of tempo. He was adding pauses and silences. He walked blindly, his head cast down, thinking about the next day’s schedule. A car crept by but he barely noticed. He kept to the main street so that he would not lose his way, though the town was very small, hardly more than a village. Past the rebuilt square with its general on horseback, the neighborhoods had the look of the previous century, the houses high and narrow, decorated at the cornices, seeming to lean drunkenly into the street. When he looked up at last he saw that he was at the little park on the bluff high above the river. The iron bridge was below him, skeletal in the mist. Just then he saw Jana standing alone at the railing overlooking the water, utterly still, her hands at her sides. The mist came and went, swirling around her, so that she faded and returned to focus and faded again. She was unmistakable in her red scarf and tan trenchcoat. When she turned and saw him, Dix smiled and gave a casual salute. She was too far away to see the smile but he did not want to alarm her, conspicuously alone in her zone of privacy in the deserted park. He walked slowly toward her, aware of the glass in his hand.

  He said, I was working. I decided to go for a walk.

  She nodded, looking at him closely.

  I often walk late at night to clear my mind after working. And I suppose it’s the same with you. But isn’t it awfully chilly for June? I hope it’s warm tomorrow, for the scenes at the lake.