The Weather in Berlin

by Ward Just

  She shrugged and turned to look at the river, its glassy surface silvery in the light.

  I didn’t mean to frighten you.

  I’m not frightened, Jana said.

  You shouldn’t be here alone.

  It’s safe, she said. As you can see, it’s quiet. Nothing happens in this town.

  Yes, it’s very quiet. They roll up the sidewalks.

  I beg your pardon?

  An American expression, he said. Describing a one-horse town.

  She smiled and repeated the words: One-horse town.

  Where are Trude and Marion? He paused there, aware that he sounded like a school prefect or a suspicious father. He added, I saw them earlier tonight—

  They are out, she said.

  —in the dining room with the boys.

  She made a little impatient motion, adjusting her scarf. Her manner was formal. She was composed in a way she did not display on the set. In front of the camera or relaxing between takes she seemed a young girl, frequently distracted, self-conscious in her dealings with him and Billy Jeidels. Yet her scenes on film were superb. The camera saw something the eye did not, and from that he concluded she was a natural actress. Now she said something to him in German, and when he did not reply she repeated herself in English.

  Are you married, Herr Greenwood?

  He thought a moment and said, No.

  She said, Not even once?

  The men in my family marry late, he said. It’s a family trait, like blue eyes or bad teeth.

  You were never tempted?

  Many times, he said. But then a job would come up and I’d be off to—somewhere.

  On location, she said. I suppose on location there would be many unattached persons.

  Dix smiled. Yes, you could say that. Definitely unattached persons.

  Is that why you wear a wedding ring?

  I suppose it is, he said, but saw at once she wasn’t listening.

  She said, Herr Jeidels is married?

  No, he said. Billy is definitely single.

  I thought so, she said.

  Billy believes marriage is a prison, he said. When she did not reply, Dix said, Are you enjoying yourself, Jana? Working here with me, with Billy, and with the boys? Is this a life you can see for yourself?

  Yes, it’s all right. I wouldn’t want to devote my life to it, acting someone else’s story. Who would? You are always caught between the lines, chained up, directed by someone. Do this, do that. You are never yourself. She glanced at her wristwatch.

  And he knew then that she was waiting for someone, perhaps Wendt, perhaps another friend. He stepped back and she turned from him to look again at the bridge. Was that a figure in the shadows? Greenwood thought to offer her a sip of his nighttime schnapps but she shook her head, No thank you. No schnapps.

  A good actor is always herself, he said.

  Actresses are exaggerated, she said.

  Yes, they are vivid, he agreed. On the set. Not always in person. Actors have multiple personalities, some more successful than others.

  I haven’t seen many movies, she said. The last one I hated. Spanish soldiers searching for El Dorado in South America, up one mountain and down another, centuries ago. No maps, only an idea of the destination. They were pursuing a rumor of a rumor, for the greater glory of their king. Running short of food, harassed by Indians. Soldiers die of fever. Misfortunes accumulate. One of the officers has brought his daughter, a lovely young girl. He is bewitched by the quest for gold. Why is she with him? There is no answer to this question, she is simply there, a member of the party, always combing her hair. So they march deeper into the interior of this terrible place. The men begin to quarrel, as they always do. They decide to separate, the officer and his daughter taking to a raft with a detachment of soldiers. They drift slowly downriver, passing first one settlement and then another. Inside the huts are human skulls and bones, dead campfires. The Indians are cannibals who sacrifice their victims. They attack the raft time and again, arrows flying out of the bush. The men begin to die one by one, and still the raft floats on, guided by the officer. His daughter is dying. The raft is overrun by rats. He seems not to notice. At the end he is the only one left alive, entirely unaware that the mission is doomed. He is in a kind of no man’s land, starving, without maps, half mad, death everywhere. The raft floats round and round in a whirlpool—

  I know the film, Greenwood said. Herzog’s film. A great film.

  Vainglorious, she said.

  Yes, he said. That’s what it represents. A study of megalomania.

  I hated it, she said.

  Allegorical, he said.

  I still hated it.

  You didn’t admire the direction? The performances?

  I don’t admire madmen, she said.

  It’s a performance, he insisted.

  Germans, she said.

  Because Herzog is a German?

  Because he is cruel, she said.

  Below, on the bridge, a solitary figure became visible. Greenwood could not make him out. He walked slowly, then paused, resting his elbows on the walkway railing. He lit a cigarette and stared at the water, the current slack, motionless in the chill and the mist. Greenwood said he had to get back to the hotel. Tomorrow they would return to the lake to begin shooting the final sequence, a complicated shoot. And then they were done. You can go home, he said, and then, teasing, Do you know your lines?

  There are not so many of them, Jana said.

  Yes, not so many. But those few are very important. The summer is ending. You can feel the chill in the air. The boys have their portfolios, Fischer his landscapes, Rosing his portraits, and Wendt—well, it’s a mystery what Wendt’s been working on. You, Trude, and Marion have sat for Rosing, singly and together, clothed and unclothed. A summer of tremendous magic, almost sorcery. All summers hence will be lived in reference to this one, when the world was far off, unobtrusive, unobserved. Of course each of you has fallen a bit in love with the others; perhaps, in the case of you and Wendt, more than a bit. And now—what next? You believe that Wendt will take his portfolio and vanish. He is the sort of man who would vanish with no explanation. And he believes the same of you, that one morning he will awaken and find you will no longer be present. So these last days are a kind of dance. The parties have become suspicious. The summer began with a chance meeting in a café, a flirtatious affair among strangers. And now you know each other better than anyone before in your young lives; and, you suspect, will ever know again. Fischer is the first to leave, back to his wife in Lübeck. Marion leaves at midday in the opposite direction. Rosing and Trude leave the next afternoon, but not before giving you and Wendt the choice of his watercolors. His manner, always confident and at times overbearing, is subdued. Marion is talking too much as usual. That leaves you and Wendt, and it is as if a plague or other natural disaster has ruined your civilization. The tents are in place, the coals in the fire still glow, the lake is as it was, but the atmosphere has changed utterly. The silence gathers. Wendt is shirtless despite the chill, and in the dying light the scars on his arms and chest appear waxy. You turn away. Wendt says, We must leave. And you say?

  Where?

  He says, after a pause that seems to you interminable, Where is your home? I will take you there. And you reply?

  Nothing. He knows I have no home.

  Wendt raises his head, then lowers it, his eyes narrowing. He is irritated with you. And you say?

  I want to see your work, your canvases. I want to know your heart.

  So he opens his tin chest and removes the artworks one by one, as if he were unpacking his suitcase. On top are sketches of you, fluent line drawings, unmistakably Jana but Jana without emotion. Jana without soul. An art instructor would call them workmanlike, certainly drawn with facility, charm even, but lifeless. At the bottom of the chest are the canvases, rolled tightly, scores of them, his account of the days and nights in the trenches of the Western Front. Violent, appalling artworks, disgusting to contemp
late—and inspired. No part of human anatomy spared. And he looks on them as a father would look at a daughter, the most favored daughter. His expression says, This is my heart. Then he adds, this time in words, I owe these to you, Jana. These are for you.

  And you—you believe you have seen the shape of the future. You are witnessing prophecy. The unquiet course of the postwar years is palpable in the contents of the tin box, and Wendt’s undisguised pleasure. I owe these to you, Jana. These are for you, Jana, as if he were making a gift of the Sistine Chapel. Tears rise in your eyes but you do not weep. He has laid the canvases at your feet, the corners secured by stones he has gathered. What you are seeing is his fate, the fate of Europe generally. Wendt’s heart, the product of his youth on the Western Front. And what do you do next?

  I know what to do, Herr Greenwood.

  Dix smiled bleakly, wished her a good evening, and walked back across the park to the street. When he turned to look at her, the mist had thickened and she was only a dark shadow under the lamp. The man on the bridge, whoever he was, had vanished.

  He thought of the encounter many times, most often when he received letters from film students asking him to explain the Sorb girls, what there was about them that accounted for their extraordinary presence onscreen. The camera seemed to capture Jana’s very essence, and that of the other two as well. Was it true that he had borrowed from the German expressionist painters, Nolde, Kirchner, Heckel, and Schmidt-Rotduff, scenes shot in such a way as to make angular bodies alluring and sinister at the same time? Nolde’s harsh colors—Rosing’s purple shirt, the garish yellow shifts the girls wear—clashing with the forest monochromes and the watery turquoise of the lake. But what they wanted to know couldn’t be explained, or not explained in a way that was useful to them. Pointless to inform his correspondents that what he remembered most vividly was Jana in the park overlooking the river, dressed like a middle-class working girl, tan trenchcoat and red scarf, waiting for someone in the night mist; and describing Aguirre, Werner Herzog’s masterpiece, as she would describe a fatal disease or the wrath of God.

  She did not want a drink of schnapps, was not responsive to his questions, and wanted only to know why he was unmarried and what there was about Location that seemed to encourage unsettled behavior. When she asked about his wedding ring, he considered confessing. But he knew it was not important to her. She had smiled cynically when he agreed that he had been tempted many times, but work always interfered. Work was a great interferer. That is to say, he preferred to occupy the rat-infested raft as it drifted toward disaster.

  When he told Claire Jana’s story, she refused to believe it. Another European fairy tale, that girl is an actress, Claire said. She’s a pro. So you’ve been had again, Dix. She doesn’t sound to me like some little peasant girl you found in the Café-next-to-the-flower-market. If she talked the way you said she talked, she’s educated. She’s been around. I think you and Billy Jeidels fell for her, two Svengalis from L.A. working their magic on little Trilby from Lusatia. But that’s all right because nothing happened, did it?

  No, he said.

  I did tell her I was single, he added.

  Yes, you did. Why?

  It seemed like a good idea, he said thoughtfully. Probably I felt like making up a story. It wouldn’t be the first time. Probably I thought the lie would bring us closer, director to actress. The encounter was strange, Jana alone in the park, some character walking across the bridge in the evening mist. I had the idea that nothing was as it seemed. You would call it an altered state. So I was entitled to lie a little.

  A lot, she said.

  It’s only data, he said.

  Our data, she replied.

  He had asked Billy Jeidels if he was meeting Jana and he said he wasn’t.

  Rosing said he was smoking dope with Wendt and Fischer.

  So the identity of the man on the bridge remained a mystery.

  Greenwood always refused to answer questions about Jana, her life or her death. He said that all he knew could be seen on the screen, and if they wanted to know about the judicial inquiry, they could read the transcript. Interview the participants, those who could be located. Later on, Summer, 1921 was seen as an allegory of America’s vicious role in the postwar world. It was true that the Sorb girls had a certain Asian cast to their features, and they had been very badly used by—the word was “captors.” So the fate of the actress Jana seemed to parallel the fate of the movie Jana, a useful symmetry for those who were attracted to useful symmetries, and many were. Even Claire had a question, and was not entirely convinced when Dix told her that an allegory was the farthest thing from his mind. He had no interest in allegories, then or later.

  6

  CONVERSATION was spirited at dinner, the events of the Balkan war competing with the marital strife of the Clintons. Jackie Kessel had all the latest gossip, downloaded from the Internet. But in this company the Balkans took precedence—except for the Australian agronomist, avid for lacy tidbits he felt were being withheld by a slavishly supine American press, too stupid or lazy to dig deeply into matters well known in Australia, liaisons with stewardesses, starlets, teenage rock stars, women of that nature. Tell me more, Jackie said, so the Balkan war was declared a truce as the company listened to stories of the president and the women of that nature.

  The agronomist spoke for forty-five minutes and, as there were no questions, departed ten minutes later. The Whytes had eaten quickly and slipped out a side door, bound for the nine o’clock showing of Shakespeare in Love at the theater near the Zoo station. The others vanished on mysterious evening errands. The remaining residents gathered in the library for coffee and cognac. Young Bloom and his Italian girlfriend settled in at the chess table. Chef Werner looked in, poured a cup of coffee, and left. Jackie Kessel announced that at last she had convinced Adam to see cabaret in Mitte and why didn’t they all go, an evening out, cabaret that amusingly and scandalously merged the political with the sexual, Reds providing the political and transsexuals the other. It was a very naughty show, all the critics said so. It was the best show in Berlin, even the Rektor had pronounced it vintage Weimar. What about you, Dix?

  Greenwood hesitated. He had a headache from listening to the Australian.

  Adam will translate the hot parts, she said.

  Not tonight, Greenwood said. I’m going to bed early.

  The chess players declined.

  Anya Ryan shook her head.

  Adam Kessel thought that might scuttle the idea, but Jackie was suddenly at the door with her coat on, beckoning. She wore black boots and a black beret with a little blue feather and black gloves. With the look of a man mounting the gallows, Adam followed after her, not without a long, pleading look at Greenwood, who shook his head firmly, no reprieve. No cabaret tonight.

  He said, Give my regards to the eternal Footman.

  But the Kessels were already out the door.

  I’m going for a walk, Greenwood said.

  Keep warm, young Bloom murmured from the chess table.

  Mind if I join you? Anya Ryan said. I always try to take a walk sometime during the day. She looked at him apologetically and added that she did not like to walk in the neighborhood after dark. Everyone knew that Wannsee was safe, there was never anyone around, but still.

  Come along, Dix said.

  The street was silent at nine o’clock. Lights within the houses cast short shadows on the lawns and sidewalk. The grounds of the villas on their side of the street, the lake side, were lit by floodlights, a happy coincidence of vanity and security. Robberies were not common but they were not unknown, either. Curtains were drawn but here and there through breaks in the fabric you could observe television’s blue nebula. At this hour Wannsee had the solemnity and outer harmony of a fine American neighborhood, Winnetka or Brentwood, lawns tidy, trees pruned, silent as a desert, one side of the street more desirable than the other.

  They walked for a block without speaking, companionable in the winter chill. Any
a was a full head shorter than Dix, a nervous bird of a woman who spoke in a guttural voice that contained traces of an accent. She was writing a history of ordinary German life in the nineteenth century, the values people lived by and the importance of the German Idyll, its inwardness and loyalty to rustic norms and its apolitical character. She often said that she was researching the century before, but it might as well have been the thirteenth or the ninth, medieval times.

  They walked for a while, the only sound the irregular click-click of Dix’s cane. Then Anya cleared her throat and began to speak quietly, as if she were talking to herself. She hooked her arm through his and told him a story. She had been born in the East but had escaped with her family in the early 1950s when she was a small child. They had gone to the island of Rügen on a summer holiday and late on their last night had stowed away on a fishing vessel, a dangerous maneuver. They sailed with the tide, the transfer made at sea, and the next thing she knew she was living in Lübeck, Thomas Mann’s gray city. Her father was a doctor, a surgeon often at odds with his colleagues. He had his own way of doing things. It was difficult for him to build a profitable practice in Lübeck, probably because he was brusque. He did not share the complacent attitudes of his burgher patients. Also, he was behind in his training. He had risked his life and the lives of his family to flee the East and now he felt himself a displaced person, neither here nor there. He believed he had nothing to show for his sacrifice, but he was unable to turn back. And so in due course Dr. Witters emigrated to America and settled in Hartford. Anya grew up in Hartford and when she finished her studies moved to the Southwest to teach. Her mother died. Her father retired and moved to the Southwest in order to be close to his daughter and his grandchildren, a mistake. He hated the heat and the enormous sky, the torpor of the day, scorpions underfoot, no herring, no wurst. His grandchildren ignored him. He quarreled with his son-in-law. He concluded that he was not meant to live in a southern climate on an unfamiliar continent so he moved back to Germany, to the island of Rügen, which after unification was under the supervision of the “West. He spent his days fishing in the Baltic and on weekends took emergency room duty at the local hospital. Road accidents and tavern brawls. Except for the new hotel and the two expensive restaurants, Rügen seemed no different from former days. Most of the tourists were from the East.