Carry Me

by Peter Behrens

  I very nearly said those words, very nearly cast off my pose of sophistication, my very thin worldliness, my wonderful career.

  Instead I ordered another round of drinks, then worried whether I had enough cash in my wallet to pay for them.

  “It’s quite reassuring to see you, my old Billy. You’re looking very debonair.”

  I was mentally adding up the cost of drinks, trying to figure out how many marks were in my billfold without having to pull it out and check.

  “Are you meeting someone?” she asked. “A girl? You have your plans for the evening.”

  “No. I don’t.”

  She put a finger to her lips. “A secret, all right? I’m not staying at Walden. I keep a little flat on the Eschenheimer. My pied-à-terre. The parents, they aren’t aware, they’d only be hurt. You won’t tell?”

  “No. Of course not.”

  “One needs to dodge out of Berlin from time to time.”

  “Yes, but—shouldn’t you see your mother? She’s not been well.”

  “I should, yes.”

  Drinks arrived.

  “Do you know Berlin, Billy?”

  “Not really.”

  “This time I left in rather a hurry. There was a man in my flat—he wouldn’t leave. Couldn’t stand it anymore. One of us had to go. To tell you the truth, he frightened me. So I left.”

  “It’s not Longo, is it? Can’t you throw him out?”

  A few months earlier I’d encountered Longo crossing the lobby at IG headquarters. He seemed impressed that I was an IG man and gave me his card. He had a government post in Berlin.

  She laughed. “No, not Longo. Much simpler if it were. It was always easy to get poor Longo to do whatever I wanted. Never had a problem with Longo, my dear. No. This fellow is a friend of Marie Zeiten—”

  “Who’s that?”

  “—I met this fellow at a cocktail party at Zeiten’s. Hardly spoke to him, then suddenly he turns up at my flat. He keeps saying he is a dangerous man. He won’t leave. It was becoming tedious. I finally had to get away, so while he was in the bath I threw a few things in an overnight case and dashed off to catch the train for good old Frankfurt.”

  “You left him in your Berlin flat?”

  “I left him some money. Enough to get to Paris at least. He has a pistol.”

  “A pistol?”

  “It’s a good thing I’ve learned to pack quickly. Who really needs more than two dresses, two pairs of shoes?”

  “Inform your Hausmeister. Inform the police! Have him arrested.”

  “Well, I feel sorry for him. I’ll go back in a day or two. I expect by then he’ll have cleared out. I came here straight from the Hauptbahnhof. Left my train case in the ladies’ room.”

  “Who is he? Some sort of criminal?” In those days the tabloid papers were blazing with stories about killers for hire in Berlin and drug dealers.

  “A Russian. I don’t know that he has anywhere else to go.”

  It sounded the sort of thing that only happened in films. I had seen her name flash past in the credits on UFA films like Liebling der Götter—Darling of the Gods—and knew that she “wrote” films even if I wasn’t clear how they could be written.

  I wondered if she was teasing me, making it all up.

  “What type of pistol?”

  “A funny little Russian thing. His precious Tokareva. He says he is a dangerous man, but I think he means he is a man in danger. His German is far from perfect.”

  “I’ll go back to Berlin with you,” I told her. “I’ll see him off.”

  It was gin talking. I was a junior commercial clerk in the Translation Department at IG Farben, wearing a natty Paris tie, discussing Russians and Tokareva pistols with the most surprising young woman in Frankfurt. I hadn’t the slightest idea how to handle a Russian armed with a pistol. And I had to report to work in the morning.

  By then the Louisiana Seven were swooping and diving through “Back Home Again in Indiana.” I owned a collection of records and, like a million other young men, practiced dance steps with footprint maps I ordered through the mail. Everyone danced a fox-trot in those days, though there were a hundred different fox-trots.

  Karin sipped her clear-cold. “He can’t return to Russia because he’s gotten on the wrong side of people there. He says he can’t ask the KPD for help, they’ll bundle him straight back to Moscow. And if I tell Anna about him, she’ll want to call the police.”

  “Anna?”

  “Anna Rabou. Anna von Rabou.”

  “The writer?”

  “Anna hates the KPD. She didn’t want me going to Marie’s. No, I’ve left him enough to get himself to Paris. I can work here.”

  “What will you tell your parents?”

  “Oh, they won’t know I’m here. I don’t go out to Walden. Too much fuss. Too many questions. My little place here is extravagant, but. You won’t mention seeing me, not to anyone, Billy, not to your parents, who would inform mine, certainly. Dear Con has sworn silence.”

  “No. Of course I won’t. No.”

  “Are you still my blood brother, Billy Lange?”

  “I am. Yes.”

  Russians, pistols, Paris, little flats on the Eschenheimer Anlage. Spending an evening in her company was like hearing sounds pitched far above my normal range.

  She smiled. “Billy Lange, you have become exactly the man I hoped. It’s so nice when people come up to expectations. Won’t you ask me to dance?”

  Dancing while holding her was nothing like practicing the fox-trot on my footprint map. Her scent was everywhere. I wasn’t a bad dancer, either. That pleased her.

  It was nearly three o’clock in the morning when we left Frankie’s after a breakfast of scrambled eggs, bacon, and coffee. The rain had stopped. The sky was dark blue and starry.

  “Filthy Jews! Bloodsuckers!”

  A pair of stormtroopers, uniformed and jackbooted, stood on the curb opposite, hands on hips and bawling at us while Brutus the doorman whistled up the last late-night cab.

  “Leeches! Bloodsuckers! Whore! Whore! Jew whore!”

  She was shivering as we climbed into the car. People in Frankfurt liked to tell one another that the NSDAP imported bumpkins from remote parts of the countryside but I knew they could just as well have been city boys. We passed the BMW showroom, its window lit, a motorcycle gleaming inside like a projectile of pure speed, just waiting to be launched. I was due back at the office in a few hours. I’d spent practically all my cash on drinks. Luckily, Eddy Morrison, like my grandmother’s bookmaker, had also been willing to take my check—I hoped there were funds sufficient to cover it. In my pocket I had just enough for the taxi to Karin’s apartment house on the Eschenheimer Anlage but not for my fare across the river and home. Frankfurt trams didn’t start running before 6:00 a.m. so I faced a long walk back to Walden, where I’d just have time to bathe, change, gulp a cup of coffee, and deal with my parents’ questions before starting back to the West-End.

  We stared out our separate windows, watching our dark town slip by. We weren’t far enough from the animal howls yet. I remembered those bodies dumped on the pavement in 1919. Overcoats, spilled hats, black blood, and the tram running on time, taking us back out to Walden.

  I lit two Sweet Aftons. She accepted hers without a word and the cab turned onto the Eschenheimer and a minute later braked in front of her building, an impressive white pile. I told the driver to wait.

  “No,” she said, “he must go. You must come up with me, Billy. We throw open the French doors and watch the sun come up. I wish to feel the sun, quite desperately.”

  The building’s elderly Hausmeister, uniformed like a grenadier, was dozing sitting up on a stone bench as we crossed the lobby to the iron lift. Her apartment occupied the third floor. The door was unlocked. She pushed it open and I followed her inside.

  Her parents never did learn about that flat. A bare white room with an exalted ceiling, that’s what I remember. The bathroom was tiles and a huge tub. I gl
impsed a corner of a stark platform bed through the half-open door of her bedroom.

  Furniture was a bore, she used to say, furniture sucked in the light and gave nothing back, and in a room it was only the light that mattered.

  In the tiny kitchen I watched her fill a kettle and set it to boil. We hadn’t spoken since getting out of the taxi. Maybe we both were still hearing Nazi catcalls reverberating in our brains.

  I didn’t know what was expected of me.

  “Perhaps I should leave.”

  “No. Please don’t.” Setting down the kettle she came over and kissed me. A quick, dry, quite startling kiss on the lips. “We’re not going to sleep together, not tonight, are we, but I don’t want you to leave, Billy. Do you remember that brilliant afternoon when you carried me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t look embarrassed, it was nothing wrong. Will you stay for a bit? Billy, I require your company. We’ll sit together and watch the dawn come in. Please.”

  “Of course.”

  She disappeared into the bedroom. When the kettle whistled, I made tea in a sleek silver teapot, also from the Bauhaus. A streamlined Marianne Brandt design, its bare shape seemed to speak the language of speed. Hurry. Quick. Fast. Now.

  She came out wearing a Scotch plaid dressing gown over her nightdress. She had washed her face; her skin was pale, shining. I watched her close her eyes and breathe in the fragrance of the tea. She put the tea things on a tray and I carried it out to the big white room.

  Karin tugged open a pair of French doors and I smelled rain on the trees in the Palmengarten across the road. The air was cool, damp, fresh. She fetched two Moroccan cushions for us to sit on, then poured tea. I sat awkwardly on my cushion, unsure what to do with my legs. She sat in what I later came to know as the lotus position: legs crossed, back straight. Light filled the sky, slowly.

  Karen Weinbrenner was a young woman impatient for the light of day; she made herself watch for it and wait. For her it was meaningful to be awake at dawn, and almost always she was. Inching, glowering dawn over Germany, skies that resembled a bruise slowly filling.

  “Tell me who you are, Billy Lange. Tell me who you are actually. Do you seek adventure? Do you turn pages to see what comes next? Do you like thin air? Isn’t it cold up there? Have you crashed, ever? Are you barnstorming? What is it like to go walking out on a wing? Might you have room for a passenger?”

  Abruptly she stopped talking. None of it had made much sense, but I didn’t say anything for a while. I let the quiet settle. Those howling boys outside Frankie’s were still with us. We needed silence to establish ourselves in the present, in the safety.

  She began humming. Tunelessly, like the hum of wind on fence wire.

  There was tension in the room, as if we were on the High Plains and a twister was spinning toward us; a black sky was about to explode. I could still hear the Sturmtruppen and so could she.

  “Billy?”

  “Yes?”

  “Tell me a story, old man. I need a story, I’m fresh out. Spin me a tale, old fellow. Put me in the picture.”

  I wanted to calm her, reassure her. Not knowing what else to do I began reciting the story of my father’s birth one thousand miles off the Pacific coast of Mexico. I described his first landfall on the Barbary Coast, brought ashore in a gig boat after the bark Lilith had dropped anchor in Yerba Buena Cove.

  I told her about visiting my father when he was a prisoner, then not seeing him again for years. I invited her to smell a cold, dirty breeze from the upper deck of a London bus in winter, and see aviators cast from a burning zeppelin like red embers spat from a fire. I described crossing the Irish Sea with my mother and my fear that she was going to jump in. I walked across the boglands in company with my grandfather McDermott, who happened to be sleeping with his pretty housemaid, and galloped ponies with Mick McClintock, and poached a salmon from the Ballisodare River, and aboard a Rhine barge a young soldier was shot in the head.

  If a person was made of anything, it seemed to me I was made of those stories.

  What I was after, I suppose, was intimacy. Light filled slowly into the room. The sleek teapot grew cold. She sat calmly, and after a while I calmed too. We sat for some minutes in that silence. I never had felt such connection to another person.

  I realized the best thing to do was get up, collect my hat and leave before the streetcars began jangling up and down the Eschenheimer. So I did. I left without saying goodbye. She was poised, calm, her breathing was steady, she was composed in the light, she was smiling.

  There wasn’t time to go home. I could have a washup at the office before reporting for work. At a café on the Grunebergweg I had coffee and a roll.

  At my desk in the Translation Department I felt replete with joy. I telephoned my parents and told them I’d been working all night on a special assignment. It may have been the first lie I told them. They had been worried, but such hours were not so uncommon in Dr. Ziegler’s department, and it wasn’t yet the era when, if people didn’t show up, one’s first thought was that something monstrous had happened to them.

  “You wear the same tie as yesterday, liebster Billy,” Günter Krebs remarked at lunch. “The same shirt as well. I think you have been not sleeping at home. You have been playing the cat-and-mouse. Have you caught yourself a mouse, dear Billy?”

  I felt exhausted and mature, but as the day wore on I found myself brooding about the Russian, whoever he was, with his Tokareva pistol. After work, instead of catching my usual tram, I walked down the Eschenheimer and asked the old Hausmeister to ring the buzzer for Karin’s apartment.

  “No use!” he barked. “No one at home! The young lady has gone away.”

  By the time I reached home I was shaky from exhaustion, and worried. I needed advice from someone but didn’t dare say a word about Karin’s Russian to my father, who would feel it his duty to inform the baron, as my mother would certainly have told Lady Maire.

  I had another sleepless night, worrying about Karin and the Russian and the pistol. Heading to work the next morning, not knowing what else to do, I stopped at Rothstein’s Tobacco Shop and rang up Longo’s office in Berlin.

  I wasn’t fond of Longo, but he was an old friend of Karin. And he was in Berlin where, according to his card, he worked in the Civil Law and Procedure Division of the Ministry of Justice.

  A secretary answered the phone and told me sternly that Herr Dr. von Müller-Languedoc was never available before eleven o’clock.

  At lunchtime I quit the office with a pocketful of coins, found another cigar shop with a telephone, and called his office once more. This time I got past the secretary. When I told Longo that I was calling on Karin’s behalf, he snorted.

  “Well, my good fellow, I’m not seeing much of her these days.”

  It was true that I hadn’t seen him at Walden lately, but Karin had hardly been at Walden, either.

  I said Karin might be in some sort of trouble.

  “A Schlampe like that little Karin is made for trouble. She drags trouble around with her like a cat dragging around a fish head.”

  He spoke harshly, the way he used to speak to the grooms and stableboys. I suppose it’s how he thought of me, as a stableboy.

  “At that cesspool called UFA, they do nothing but stir trouble and mischief. Always it stinks. Her old man’s the same. Making trouble everywhere.”

  I thought it a peculiar way to speak of a family that had always been hospitable to him.

  “They stir up trouble, this tribe of caterwauling Jews, then try to blame their woes on us. I’m sick to death, let me tell you. They’ve ruined nearly everything decent and honorable in Germany. And now they squeal. It’s time something was done about it.”

  Suddenly I wanted to get off the phone. It had been a mistake to call him.

  “Tell me, is it the so-called baron who has put you up to call me?” Longo said. “It’s most improper to make such calls here; we have important work and I can’t be bothered about the W
einbrenners and whatever scrape Karin has gotten herself into. All right? Goodbye.”

  He hung up. I felt dizzy. The conversation had literally taken my breath away. Whatever had been human in Longo seemed absent. It had been like trying to speak to a sick machine. By then he had been a party member for four years. He must have feared his past association with the Jewish traitor baron would be used against him.

  I checked the railway timetable. There was an express, an FD-Zug at 1709 that got into Berlin before midnight. It was expensive—those super-express trains only offered first or second class—but I had no choice, my conscience wouldn’t release me. If the fellow was still in her apartment, that was where the danger was. Of course I hadn’t a clue where in the Charlottenburg quarter she lived, and I couldn’t ask her parents.

  Our office had street directories of every city in Germany. I slipped out the Berlin volume. It was subdivided by district and in Charlottenburg—Aha!—I found v. Weinbrenner, K. living at Giesebrechtstraße 5. I studied the Berlin street plan. My train would arrive at the Anhalter Bahnhof. Either the U-Bahn to Uhlandstrasse or a tram up the Kurfürstendamm would bring me very close.

  A few minutes later the mailroom clerk dropped a postcard on my desk. On the front of the card was a photograph of the Tonkreuz soundstage at the UFA studio in Neuebabelsberg. It was unsigned, but I knew it was from her. On the back she had written a line from Rilke, not from a poem but from one of his letters.

  So she was safe and wouldn’t need me or want me there. She was safe. I dropped my idiotic plan to ride to the rescue. Instead I went home and lay awake for a long time, thinking of her.

  Later that month Solomon Dietz drove her parents up to Berlin to see officials about an art museum Lady Maire intended to build on the estate. Karin invited her parents to a “cocktail” at her Charlottenburg flat and Lady Maire told my mother they found their daughter’s rooms packed with noisy, oddly dressed people and left as soon as they could.

  1938

  My parents had to get back to Bad Homburg, and Otto took them and Dr. Lewin back across the river in his taxi. Karin went upstairs to take a nap on the pile of rugs and blankets in her old bedroom.