“Does the piece have real news interest?” I asked, more out of a compulsive editorial motive than for self-protection.
“I think so,” he said, his earnest gray eyes watching perhaps for my flinch. “The news interest is you. Your character. Why someone with a sterling reputation would risk all of it, even cheat, for a moral cause that nonetheless could be easily challenged.”
“And your answer is…Khalil? But if that’s the answer, I’m quite the dupe, am I not? It’s what your article must inevitably imply.”
“He does seem, let’s say, unworthy of you.”
“Well I assure you, Khalil has some very decent qualities. When he wishes to be, he can be warm and sincere. He appears to adore his new wife and family. He detests homosexuals, a fact which he’s often conveyed to me, along with the assurance that he’s not one himself.”
“Then, why?”
“You see, Mr. Schreiber, I don’t wish to be humiliated. I may deserve to be humiliated, and so that part of me, that recognizes my worthiness for it, of course demands it. But at the same time I wish to be saved from it.”
“I don’t follow.”
“No. Of course.”
“You wish me to humiliate you? But that’s not the article’s intention. It perhaps even shows you in a flattering light.”
We were on my terrace, on a cloudy day, with a view to the gray sea. So far away from my only real home, I suddenly felt lucky to have been found, like a runaway who will soon be taken back to the rude shelter he has always known, and who feels, despite the cruelties he may have experienced there, that it is the one place that knows him well. I sipped my own tea and decided to tell Nils Schreiber: “More importantly, Mr. Schreiber…you see, I am a fraud. The great Franz Rosen, one of the fairies who slept with the Nazis for the underground…all false.” I then supplied him with the various details, the coal bin, the haberdasher, my fear, my lies. “Now that would be a scoop, wouldn’t it, Mr. Schreiber? To replace the one that fell rather flat? I suppose you’ll be smart enough, I suppose I’ll not have to connect every dot of my shame. But…a man may wish to act once in his life with the moral courage on which he’s dined for forty years.”
My words had their desired effect: tears in the gray eyes of this thoughtful man. It was as though, if you’ll pardon me, the sea beyond us was reflected there.
At length I asked him if he thought, when his article appeared, that I could be charged with some sort of crime. He thought most certainly not. I insisted we drink to that, and got out a bottle of wine. He raised his glass but it was I who made something of a toast: “Be sure to write – I think this is good, perhaps – a small part of the guilt money the Germans gave the Jews, a Jew gave the Arabs. Or rather, tried to… You know when people are most easily made fools of, don’t you? When they wish to be the hero.”
SIMONA JASTROW
Confusion
WHEN I WAS BORN, and where I was born, divorce was rare. Nonetheless my parents seemed to manage it. It was the time of the yellow star and of being booted out of everywhere. You would have thought it was a time for sticking together. But no. I was too little at the time to understand all – I was nine – but what it seemed like, and from what they said, which was contradictory and not really to be believed, even by me, my mother wished to emigrate and my father didn’t, then subsequently my father wished to emigrate but not with my mother. This emigration business never seemed the whole story. Then my father, who always talked about the Socialists, said to us that the Soviet Union was our only hope. My mother thought this was crazy. Later she would say it was his way to get rid of her. My father said that was crazy. He went to the Ukraine and worked on a collective farm. My mother obtained passage for her and myself to Shanghai. We had little money left but we made it. Our life in Shanghai was not at all full of the fun and games that some authors have described. Afterwards we emigrated to Vancouver, B.C., where my mother married a high school principal. I grew up and found Vancouver and all of it, my mother’s life, our life, repulsively bourgeois. Shortly after the GDR’s founding, I myself moved back to Berlin, convinced of the need to build Communism in the land of its invention. My father, I learned, had fought in the Red Army and survived the war. We resumed an occasional awkward communication by letter. He had other children by now and what I took, sight unseen, to be a shrewish, fat Russian wife.
My ardor for my new/old country was enhanced by being flattered. The fact that I’d come back from North America seemed to increase the stock that various higher-ups in the regime placed in me. I was installed on a journal. I was considered reliable. I was encouraged to write my own story. And in most aspects I was indeed reliable. I believed in equality. I believed we were besieged. I believed that Zionism was an inauthentic, doomed reaction to circumstances which late capitalism brought about and that West Germany exclusively, not the East at all, deserved to inherit the guilt for the war and the slaughter of all, Jews included. I was not blind to the seams of the GDR, but each time I observed them, I discounted, and explained, and recommitted myself. The hypocrisy could be discounted, for instance, by the supposed greater hypocrisy of the West. The corruption could be explained by the corrosive effects of the Western conspiracies to undermine us. The regime’s harshness was necessary because our enemies were real and strong and ubiquitous, and only when they let up could we afford to relax our vigilance. I embraced such opinions until the end, that is, at which point, deprived of the lying, autocratic structures of authority which supported them, my beliefs – already straining, as I’ve indicated – collapsed utterly. This is not a flattering picture of myself, but it accurately describes the self-loathing around which my disillusionment wrapped itself. By 1991, I had been living for eight years at the East German Writers Union retreat in Velden am Moritzsee, not far from Potsdam. I was supposed finally to be putting to paper my autobiography, but I was paralyzed by my disillusionment. Why had I come to the GDR at all? My old explanations seemed as convenient and lying as everything else. By any account, it had been an unlikely journey. I felt the waste of my life. But who could I blame? It was then I met Electra Papaiannis, through the suggestion of a former colleague of mine in the Writers Union to whom I had confided my despair. Electra was a plump woman who favored loose clothing and heavy jewelry. She gave the immediate impression of being a Roma, which was of course reinforced the moment you learned of her profession. Electra conducted séances. Of course she was not a Roma, she was a Greek whose father had landed in a Düsseldorf restaurant decades previous. I had the vaguest ideas, from certain absurd films and articles, what a séance was. But I had lost both my parents in recent years, after decades of the faintest contact, and along with all else that had gone wrong, I missed them. Electra proposed to me that she might be able to help me. Now if you had told Simona Jastrow the devoted Socialist that a Greek woman in a shapeless dress could put her in touch with her dead parents, she might have written little notes to the proper people about all of you. But I was no longer that Simona Jastrow. I was Simona Jastrow who was devoted to nothing, who had nothing, who was lost. Here you see my vulnerability, here you see how doubters could attack me. But I freely admit it all. I had nothing to lose. This is when people do everything worthwhile in their lives.
There. At last it’s done, or at least begun. The story of myself. My documentation. Mission accomplished, for the eager support the defunct Writers Union gave me over the years. You know what I say to all of it? Bullshit. You know what I really want to write about? I’ll tell you what’s really on my mind. I’d like to scratch out every word of my past. I know what other people say about me. I know all of it. Do you think I don’t know? Of course I know. I’ve known all along. The one shining, perfect example: Anja Mann. She’s confronted me with her hauteur. I told her, I said to her, to her face, I said, “Anja, at least I admit. At least I come clean. Everyone wrote notes about everyone else, and if they say otherwise, they lie.” She says to me, “I never wrote notes.” Not her, not the great Anja, t
he great civil rights leader, the taunter of Honecker and the rest. Bullshit. She probably did, in her sleep, with the sluts of the regime she slept with. I know these things. Why am I a leper, why am I maligned? Malign us all, but then shut up. Another perfectly good example: Oksana Kozlova. Top of the Red heap, nomenklatura through and through, now she comes around, she drives my new would-be landlord up to the house in her silver little shitty new Mercedes-Benz car, and what’s she saying, what’s she poisoning my new would-be landlord’s ears with? I don’t have to have been there to know. It was all in her knowing expression when she came to the door. “Oh, Simona, everyone knows Simona, pure Stasi!” What the hell does that mean, pure Stasi? She slanders me right in front of my new would-be landlord, tries to get me kicked out! I’ve lived here eight years. I’m the only one left. I told her, the would-be landlord, I tried to make it even a joke, so she’d understand, I’m from the States too, almost the States, so fuck it, so it’s Canada, so what, Canada, I’m from North America too, so I say, “Simona Jastrow, Last of the Mohicans.” And she didn’t laugh, and you know why she didn’t laugh? Because that cunt Red whore Oksana had already “told her all about me.” Fuck her and all her progeny, if she didn’t have too barren a womb to have any. And anyway it was true what I reported about Anja Mann, that she projected Zionist tendencies.
There. That feels better. Now I can resume. Where was I? Oh yes. Electra Papaiannis. The séances. Which those too, by the way, the likes of Anja Mann and all the rest would savage me for: “From ardent Communist to ardent communing with the dead, in what? Two snaps of a finger? Some people need faith badly.” Fatuous self-righteous crap. She’ll see, Anja will, the West has no need for her moralizing, her endless boring starch. I slept with her once. No fun at all. There. Forgive me. The séances, on the subject of the séances. I invited Electra to come to the Writers Guild house and organize them. Every other Tuesday night, twice a month. Get out the candles, darken the library, Electra’s coming! They were the only moments of my weeks that I feared and looked forward to. Mama didn’t come. Father didn’t come. Nobody came for me, I had no idea what I was doing or supposed to be doing, I listened, I purified my mind, I invited celestial thoughts, I did whatever Electra said to do. And you know for the others, tables moved, whatever else, voices, trances. I thought they were insane and I wasn’t. What a distraction it was from everything else. To have something, however absurd and unlikely, that offered hope, or as I might rather put it, still the possibility of beating life at its own game. This went on for two months, then the American arrived.
Was chauffeured, if you please, driven up by that little cunt Oksana in her whored-for car. Driven up like a princess out to do her shopping, “Ah yes, I’ll take two of these and one of those, and don’t those look delicious, and by the way I think I’ll just have that nice house over there. What? There are already people in it? But look, I have papers, I have a claim! My, my, we’ll just have to see about this. People already living in my house?”
Obviously, I get excited about this. You see, this house, this empty old GDR house, this empty institutional functionaries’ house, had become my home. I had my room, I had my things, I had my curtains. My bedspread, even my bear. Yes, my bear, you admit you have a stuffed bear and people will think what a pathetic fool, what an insane one, who never lived past childhood! Well screw them, let them think whatever, I happen to know others who have a stuffed bear, I’ve heard, I’ve read, it’s not so unusual, but even if it were, the point I am making is that even when the Writers Union retreat in Velden am Moritzsee later claimed by some American who never lived there a day in her life was empty of every writer but me, it was not the center of my universe but its entirety, that to which my universe had been reduced, where Electra with her brood of seekers came every other Tuesday night. I would serve them tea afterwards. Slowly I got to know a few of their names.
The American was the hugest distraction. After her first appearance with the Russian slut, she began to make regular visits, every two weeks, every week, looking around, imagining. Mrs. Baum would hear her coming in her cute little fixed-up car. Who did she think she was? These were always Mrs. Baum’s words. More to the point, who did we think she was? She had a claim. We had no idea how long it might take to be processed or if it was valid. We had little idea of her intentions, because she never said. She was unfailingly polite and mild. She came and wandered around, in the house, in the fields, down to the lake. She was like a visitor from another planet. This, too, is what Mrs. Baum often said. And when and if she took over, would she dismiss the caretakers first? And would her last living tenant last-of-the-Mohicans-Stasicollaborationist-despised-by-all-for-her-honest-accounting-of-the-reality-of-how-things-were Simona Jastrow be given the boot as well? By all accounts, I should have been the first to go. It turned out my room was this Miss Anholt’s parents’ old bedroom. I let her in to look around. I imagined she hated everything that was mine. When she saw Bear-Bear, I cringed. Or perhaps it was she who cringed as well.
Obviously I tried to ingratiate myself with Miss Anholt. I brought her fresh local tomatoes. I showed her this and that around the house, ooh’d and aah’d at her old bits of film. My initiatives of course came with risks, in that she might have become more attached. At the same time I could imagine her thoughts, the nights she was at the top of the stairs while Electra conducted our proceedings in the library. I gleaned and wheedled. I tried to establish what her timetable was and her intentions. She had some boyfriend in the city, which for a certain period was a godsend, keeping her away most of the time. But inexorably her visits grew more frequent and longer, until it was clear to me that all my hopes that she would soon tire of us, or split with the boyfriend and so return to the States or Paris (or wherever it was she imagined she came from – really, it takes one nomad to spot another) were not to be realized. Finally I had it out with her. What else could I do? I accused her of many things. I told her how she had invaded us, how she had no thought for others, how she was a slave to little pieces of paper, money and deeds, how she could scarcely imagine how others’ lives had been led, how limited she was, how small and pathetic, how everyone in Velden loathed her, how we knew perfectly well her plans to kick us out. Don’t say that I went too far. I went as far as I needed to. She was taken aback. She admitted that yes, it was a possibility, that she would have to evict me. She claimed to have made no decisions, but I knew the truth.
And yet, from that confrontation, I grew to like the girl. She absorbed my attacks with bewilderment. She tried to explain her own quandary. For she had one, just like me. Something was hidden from her. She wasn’t even certain what it was, except that it might be here, in this house or in the woods. She was very indefinite, and sad. I hugged her like a sister, and she hugged me back.
But now I had not a crutch left, not even my room with its pretty curtains and its view to the lake that I woke up to. My life here was over. My last defenses were down. Those whom I’d written little notes about haunted me and I woke up from nightmares begging their forgiveness. Surely this was too melodramatic, yet it created still another fault in me which I could not avoid. I put my things away, took them off the dresser, packed them up. My life felt over. I felt overwhelmed by my life’s lovelessness. An endless waste, all of it. I wept and trembled.
Nor was it even any longer a pleasure or solace to recognize what cunts and monsters all the others were, those who would not even admit, even now, the comprehensiveness of our history’s disgrace, so comprehensive it engulfed even themselves. I told Electra to call off her séances. I wanted nothing more with them. It had all been a fool’s errand anyway. I had sat there in the dark befuddled. But she beguiled me. She wouldn’t quite take my “no” to be final. She intimated that just then, when all hope was lost, when one’s being had lost every structure of expectation and support, was when a miracle might occur. Though of course to her it was no miracle. To her it was all very scientific. The logic of the universe was called upon.
> I gave in to her persuasions. I invited her and what I took to be her sorry band of followers for one last audition in the house. The procedures began, so banal I’m ashamed to write them, the hand-holding, the silence, the candles. When Electra channeled, her voice broke into a million pieces. She could have been anybody. I can recall that I stared at the bowl of oil that night and on this one occasion my mind did not flee to resentments or self-accusations or fantasies. My eyes seemed to slip into the bowl’s oily substance, to swim in a place where vision is blurred. This is also absurd to write, is it not? Even now I can imagine my dear would-be landlord at the top of the stairs, listening in with condescension and confusion. What were these preposterous people doing in her house? And then, you can take this for true or not, you can tear it apart, you can ask what I really mean, you can believe your own fantasies about me, you can be fantastically cruel, whatever you wish, I cannot control it, be a cunt, go ahead, be my guest. But I became aware that both my parents were in the room, and that they were there together, it wasn’t one of them on the left and the other on the right, avoiding each other’s gazes and intimations, no, they were there together, as if hand in hand, they had reconciled.
How did I know this? You will of course want to know the gory details, whether I saw them with my eyes or heard them with my ears or through Electra’s thousand voices or taps on the table or in a swoon, an ineffable sense, and was I like a saint struck down by God, a biblical story, what about a biblical story, that would make a nice story too. You’ll want to have plenty of information to smash me with, to prove my impossibility. But I swear to you, and you can take it or leave it. My parents were there, and they were together, not hand in hand, I didn’t see their hands holding one another, but it was as if they were hand in hand. Have you enough rope to hang me with yet? I expect little of the world, and from it least of all understanding. I felt their presence. And I knew that it was not a dream. It was entirely different from a dream. I felt their presence with a sense that I did not know I had.
Berlin Cantata Page 6
