The Weather in Berlin

by Ward Just

  Almost there, Dixon.

  He awoke slowly, stretching his stiff left leg. He placed his palm under his knee, massaging, trying to ease the pain.

  You have been asleep one hour.

  You must have had a wonderful dream, Willa said. You were smiling.

  10

  WILLA’S AUNT and uncle lived in the stone gatehouse of an estate. A rutted road wound back from the gatehouse to a high barn and up a rise to the main house. The land was heavily forested except around the main house, where it was bare, sloping east to the unseen Oder. The house was plain-faced, a three-story center section with two-story wings on either side and a chapel connected to the west wing. The chapel’s rose window was visible from the gatehouse, along with an empty paddock. Willa pointed all this out, adding that the main house and the chapel had been restored from rubble caused by Russian guns in the final offensive, March 1945. Then she turned to greet her aunt and uncle.

  Their house was small but comfortable, the walls washed white, a floor of magenta tile, the windows narrow with thick glass to keep out the wind. Even so, the panes rattled against the windy gusts. There was a chess table in one corner, the game in progress, and a schnapps bottle on the windowsill. They had put out the tea things, a china pot and flowered cups, a plate heaped with pastry. Greenwood felt self-conscious entering a strange house in the company of three women, as if he required an entourage to move from place to place. Willa made the introductions in English. Reinhold and Sophie Lenord, these are the friends from Berlin that I spoke about, Dixon Greenwood, Anya Ryan, and Karen Hupp. Karen you know from the show. She’s the naughty one. Anya and Dixon are visitors from America, living also at Wannsee. She turned to Dix and said that Reinhold and Sophie were her favorite aunt and uncle. Sophie was her mother’s sister, though sadly enough they had not spoken in many years, a family situation.

  Everyone shook hands and Reinhold indicated that Dix should sit in the overstuffed armchair next to his own heavy rocker. He was a big man, well over six feet, with a thick cloud of white hair and pale gray eyes behind wire-rimmed spectacles that looked too small for his face. But it was not the hair or eyes that commanded Dix’s attention but the steady tremor in his heavy hands. When he bent to stir the fire, the iron poker rattled against the grate. Dix guessed that he was in his early seventies, though he might have been ten years older or younger. He had the vitality of a much younger man except for the tremor. He and his wife appeared very fit, athletic in ski sweaters and corduroy trousers.

  Are you comfortable, Herr Greenwood?

  Ja. Herr Greenwood was comfortable.

  Willa was talking to her aunt, Karen to Reinhold, confidential German business from the sound of it. Dix gazed at the schnapps bottle, so near and yet so far. All his life he had avoided meals with strangers, an invitation to small talk and insincerity unless a raconteur took charge. He remembered visiting Ireland as a young man, the summer following his graduation from college, one of the first journeys he made with his father. They fetched up somewhere in the west of Ireland, visiting Harry’s Anglo-Irish friends. The house in Ireland was much larger than this one but equally dark, everyone suspicious. The food came in small portions and the wine was poured into tiny glasses, to the obvious distress of Harry Greenwood, who complained about it later and then blamed himself for not bringing a house present, two magnums minimum. These were friends who had fallen on hard times, struggling to maintain their estate in the socialist era of confiscatory taxes and reduced incomes. They were nine at table. Dix remembered the worn carpets and forty-watt bulbs in the lamps and the bare places on the walls where the pictures had been taken down for auction. Even the English setter looked malnourished. Yet the landscape was lovely, the gardens well tended and the lawns mowed; perhaps there was a little less lawn each year. A gray sliver of the River Shannon was visible through the flowering rhododendron. Everyone made an effort. One of the women wore a long velvet dress, the velvet worn at the sleeves and seat. But she had an emerald at her throat and diamonds on her fingers. The men wore well-cut tweed jackets from their auspicious youth. He remembered the general air of pinched embarrassment, people making do with too little (or less than they thought they were owed), leading to resentment of Americans, people who had too much for their own good and certainly much, much more than they deserved; and there had been a recent Washington indignity, he had forgotten which one, and they had gone after Harry, demanding explanations. Harry remained good-humored, then began to tell stories of Europe before the war, the time they walked from Montmartre to Montparnasse and greeted the dawn in the Luxembourg Gardens and that movie actress happened by and joined them—it was Hedy Lamarr, wasn’t it, Nigel? And Nigel’s look of perfect bafflement as his wife laughed and laughed. Yes, it was Hedy Lamarr wearing a mink coat and we all walked over to Le Select for a corrected coffee, and a day later we left for Scodand and the final round of the British Open—when was that, Nige? ‘Thirty-seven? ‘Thirty-eight?—and other stories of those years, remembered in retrospect as brilliant though at the time there were shadows in every doorway, and all the late-night conversations ended with speculations concerning the coming war. Harry Greenwood was superb that night, leaving the company loose, disheveled, laughing; for those few hours they all looked twenty years younger. And when he began to tell the story of F. Scott Fitzgerald on the Normandie, Nigel sighed and left the table for the cellar, returning with a dusty bottle of claret, avoiding the look in his wife’s eyes. Dix remembered that it was still light when they rose from table, everyone hilarious. The lawn was painted a luminous brilliant orange by the setting sun, and they all stood at the window admiring it. Harry recalled other dawns in other countries, making each dawn a kind of fiesta.

  Then one of the tweed jackets turned to Harry and said, In Berlin at the end of the war, weren’t you, Greenwood?

  Briefly, Harry said.

  You were an interrogator, I believe. We never met. I was in another department. We did the evaluations in my department and I must say you were a bit of a puzzle to us. You let them off pretty easy, is what we thought.

  I had the mechanics. So I talked to them about the machine.

  And got damn-all.

  Got plenty, Harry said evenly. You weren’t reading carefully.

  They were war criminals.

  Some were, some weren’t. Most of mine weren’t. My mechanics were—mechanics.

  Yes, we could see that from your reports. What did you call them? Your “auditions.”

  That’s what I called them because that’s what they were.

  Filthy Nazis, “auditioning.”

  Not all were Nazis, either.

  We thought you had—rather a soft spot.

  Come along now, Nigel said, herding everyone onto the porch to look at the sunset. He began to describe the various landmarks, an ancient oak here, a stone wall there, and the Shannon glittering in the distance.

  Harry said, The soft spots were in your department.

  No need to take offense, old boy.

  But I do, Harry said. And if you’d read the dossiers closely, you would understand why. Now apologize.

  But the man didn’t apologize. He turned to Nigel’s wife and thanked her for a pleasant evening and went away, Harry watching him all the while. Dix noticed his father’s fists clenched at his side. The others were talking skittishly, and at length his father joined in, but after a few moments made his goodbyes, and he and Dix returned to their car. When Dix asked Harry what that had been about, Harry shook his head in irritation. People refuse to recognize complexity, he said. What’s shame in one man is grief in another, and they are not the same thing. What’s pig-stupidity in one man is cowardice in another and blind evil in a third, and they are not the same thing, either. You’d think that would be simple enough to understand but it’s not, not at all simple.

  Dix came back from his reverie. The voices around him were gruff, Willa describing the murderous traffic leaving Berlin and when will you visit us next, Rei
nhold? Sophie, you must insist, it’s been months now and the city changes each day, the construction you cannot imagine, our Potsdamer Platz a thing of skyscrapers and streets without traffic, shops, restaurants, and all the architects are foreigners . . .

  Berlin has always been a city of riffraff, Reinhold said.

  We must be tolerant, Sophie said.

  Riffraff and bankers, Reinhold said.

  Shall we have our tea? Sophie offered.

  When the tea business was concluded, everyone balancing cups and pastry on their knees and laps, grumbling about conditions in Berlin, Willa explained that her aunt and uncle were retired. They were pensioners but stayed active and involved, managing the estate for the absentee landlords. They were great hunters. They were hikers also, getting about everywhere on foot.

  They had a lively interest in the outside world, Willa went on. They were particularly eager to talk to Americans. They had never met one, yet Americans seemed to be part of their lives, the air they breathed, present everywhere and visible nowhere, like the Christian God of Martin Luther, ha-ha-ha. They see more of Texas and California than they do of Austria or even Poland. It’s a big change for them, America in their living room at night. England, too, sometimes.

  We have a dish, Reinhold said.

  Willa got it for us in Berlin, Sophie said.

  Before, we lived apart, she added. We occupied this little space at the bend of the Oder. We had few visitors. Who would visit this little village? And we were content ourselves, living apart. And then Willa gave us that. She pointed at the television in the corner and everyone dutifully looked at it. All of this was going on under our noses, Sophie said. We didn’t know a thing about it.

  Entertainment, Reinhold explained.

  From everywhere, Sophie said.

  Mostly from America, Reinhold put in.

  We traded one propaganda for another, Sophie said with a smile. We traded governments. We traded armies. We traded cars also, our Trabant for a Volkswagen. Filthy car, the Trabant. Is it true that in the West they are buying them as souvenirs? Kitsch? Never mind, I know it’s true. I heard about it on the evening news, they showed a Trabant in Paris! Reinhold, I told you we should have gotten a better price for our Trabant. But how were we to know? On the whole, she said after a moment’s pause, we prefer your propaganda. It’s much more . . . She sought the word.

  Entertaining, Reinhold said. He rose to stir the fire once again, the poker rattling against the grate. When he finished, the embers were glowing with a fine orange flame. He stood looking at the fire, the poker nervous in his right hand. He said, Do you watch television much, Herr Greenwood?

  A little, Greenwood said.

  We don’t watch too much, he said. Sophie and I, we play cards after dinner, drink a little beer, sometimes read a book aloud or play chess. But when it’s there, you turn it on and find yourself watching whether you want to or not. He gave a little mirthless laugh. Much of what we see on television seems to us a capitalist fantasy, a world we know nothing about. As Sophie said, we live apart. I don’t have a way to judge a world where people buy cars for souvenirs. But we looked up one day and there we were, a part of the audience, no different than if we lived in Rome or Cleveland. The first day we turned it on we saw blond girls on a sandy beach in southern California, can you imagine? I tried very hard to feel part of the audience, to think of myself as one of millions of Europeans watching the girls on the beach, a community after all, but it was difficult, and for Sophie, too. We have never been outside Germany. We have only been one time to Berlin!

  Sophie said, We went to see Willa last year, to watch the filming of an episode of Wannsee. You were not present, Karen. But your lover Karl was there.

  He is not my lover, Karen said.

  He isn’t?

  In the script, Karen said. In the script only.

  He is very handsome, Sophie said.

  He is an oaf, Karen replied.

  What a shame, Sophie said.

  It’s an interesting program, Reinhold said loyally.

  Yes, authentic, Sophie said. Everyone in Germany watches it.

  Greenwood felt a movement behind him and turned to see a slender girl standing in the kitchen doorway. Her orange hair was spiked and she glittered with colored glass, rings on her fingers and sewn on her blouse, hanging from her earlobes and screwed into her nostrils, and one also pressed into her cheek, a glass dimple. She stood swaying from side to side as if she were listening to music, and then Greenwood saw the headphones and cord that ran from her left ear to a device on her hip. She wore a perfectly blank expression, her eyelids half shut. She was barefoot. Her clothes—a white blouse and a knee-length skirt—looked as fallible as a lace handkerchief.

  This is Ingeborg, Reinhold said.

  Greenwood nodded and rose from his chair but the girl did not move or make any sign of recognition.

  Our granddaughter, Sophie said. She lives with us.

  Hello, Ingeborg, Willa said without enthusiasm.

  She is tired, Sophie said. She was late last night, out with friends.

  Our son and his wife, Reinhold began, but did not finish the sentence.

  Young people, Sophie said by way of explanation.

  In the strained silence that followed, Ingeborg turned her back and glided from the room. A minute later it seemed that she had never existed. Sophie poured more tea and passed the pastry plate. Things were as they had been, the atmosphere normal. Dix cleared his throat and said, So you feel part of the audience, watching Wannsee 1899?

  I suppose we do, Reinhold said. He thought a moment, then shook his head, neither yes nor no; perhaps yes and no. Greenwood, watching him carefully, believed Reinhold’s idea of community extended to the boundaries of the former GDR. It evidently did not extend to the remarkable girl in the kitchen doorway. Reinhold said at last, Do they watch it in America?

  It’s not available in America, Greenwood said. Maybe one day, from the satellite. I’m not sure Wannsee 1899 will travel. It’s very German.

  The blond girls in southern California travel, Reinhold said indignantly. They are traveling everywhere, to India and Belgium, Belarus, I suppose. The difference is, they are American, isn’t that correct?

  Call it Wannsee 1999 and put Karen in a bikini, Dix said. It might work.

  That is foolish, Karen said.

  Is it because it is German that it cannot attract the worldwide audience? Reinhold asked. Beethoven was German, Bach was German. Cranach, Dürer, Kant, Heisenberg, Steffi Graf is German. I suppose you will tell me now that the world is an American suburb and southern California the world’s sandy beach. All right, America is the world’s culture—

  Low culture, Karen put in.

  —and everyone is interested in America, how things work, how people behave, and so on. What they wear, I suppose. What they eat and how they eat it. There is no thing in America too small to be beneath notice. The underwear, the activities of leisure, even the erotic adventures of your president. The other night I saw a hockey game, and still I cannot quite believe. I do not think the American programs are genuine.

  They’re not, Greenwood said. It’s only television. It’s entertainment.

  Dreck, Karen said. Escapism.

  No kidding, Greenwood said.

  America owns television, Reinhold said glumly. Television is the world’s culture.

  We make an effort to keep Wannsee 1899 authentic, Willa said. Within limits, she added slyly, grinning, her mouth full of pastry. Our customs, the furnishings, the music and the dancing, the way people talk to each other. Anya is our adviser on these matters. Do the American programs have advisers? Historians, social scientists, people familiar with the period?

  I have no idea, Greenwood said.

  Doubtful, Anya said.

  Mafia programs have wiseguys on the payroll, Greenwood said, suddenly beginning to enjoy himself.

  Is this so, Anya? Sophie asked. You come all the way from America?

  Arizona
, Anya said.

  Wouldn’t a German do just as well? Reinhold leaned forward, staring at Willa.

  Anya was born in Germany, Willa said. She was born in the DDR and went west with her family. She is an expert of the period.

  The German Idyll, Anya said.

  Reinhold shook his head and grumbled, Retrograde.

  Conservative in nature, Anya said.

  Submissive, Reinhold said. Women submissive to men, the proletariat submissive to the capitalists. Paupers ruled by princes, a politics supervised by the lackey Martin Luther, who supported the class structure and thought it unwise to challenge the natural order whereby the poor supported the rich and were honored to do so. And they call it the German Idyll. That’s where the fascists came from.

  Thomas Mann also, Anya murmured.

  But Reinhold did not hear. He rose heavily from his chair and went to the window that afforded the view of the Oder and unfortunate Poland beyond. The sky lightened and now flurries appeared, hard little flakes that swirled in the gray air. He said slowly, My grandfather was part of that world as it was coming to an end, dying of exhaustion, so many internal contradictions. He was a cavalry officer who went on to manage an estate in Pomerania. The owners spent most of their time in Berlin, and in Italy on holidays. When in Berlin they lived in an apartment in Charlottenburg. They were friendly with the king. They returned to Pomerania in the summer and stayed on for the fall harvest, working the fields alongside the farmhands. There was a death and a divorce and one thing and another, the war, the Depression, the second war, illness. In the second war the estate was lost behind the lines and the Red Army destroyed it, down to the last brick. As a child I remember my grandfather talking about the parties they had, everyone on horseback during the day and in evening dress at night. They were great sportsmen. The aristos were a hard bunch, played hard, worked less hard. And not one of the family survived the war. Not one. Naturally they fought with the fascists. What would you expect? The Reich was their life, it didn’t matter which one, First, Second, or Third. The family dated from the Teutonic Knights, always at least one son an army officer. For eight hundred years they had one son in the army, and then the family was extinguished and their land donated to the people. The authorities turned it into a collective farm, and last I heard it had been carved up and the land redistributed. The soil is poor. The farm was not a success.