Berlin Cantata

by Jeffrey Lewis

  Nor did I tell Nils that Oksana had taken files that might have implicated Franz. I didn’t like it that Nils was going after him. Somehow I took it as a personal affront. Yet it weighed on me to have a secret from him, even when it wasn’t much of a secret, that Franz was headed for a shack by the sea with a few marks from Herbert and a clear conscience. Give the fox a head start. Why not? But the hound was my own.

  I know what Nils thinks, or once thought, but our conversation about children had nothing to do with us later breaking apart. It was a childish conversation. I regretted it immediately. Then there was Oksana’s death and we had no more time.

  HERBERT KAMINSKI

  Accident

  I’VE LIVED LONG ENOUGH that I try not to impute myth to fact. A car crash is a car crash. Accidents happen. Now I will record the facts as I know them: it happened near Puglia, on a hill road with many bends, a dangerous road, according to the Italian highway police. It was a road that had seen other accidents, other shrines. There was a second automobile involved, driven by a priest. The priest had a clean driving record and was familiar with the road. As he rounded the bend that was the site of the accident, the priest observed her car, with its headlights on, approaching at an uncertain speed while approximately one-half on the wrong side of the road. The priest took evasive actions, braking and swerving. She likewise swerved, but possibly did not brake immediately. She lost control of her car and it tumbled off the road into a ravine, rolling over twice or three times. Her car’s airbag was deployed but was useless in this case. Her chest was impaled and her neck broken. The priest’s car did not leave the road and he was uninjured. Her posthumous body was tested for the presence of alcohol and none was found. The same test was performed on the priest, with the same result. Further, her car was examined to determine if perhaps some mechanical failure, of the steering or braking systems, or a stuck accelerator, might have caused the accident. No such fault was found. When her body was returned to Berlin, I had the chance to observe it. Despite her injuries, her face in particular did not look injured. She looked like a baby bird that had fallen from its nest.

  Now there were conditions precedent to this accident, certain situations. Before she left for Italy, we had a terrible quarrel. It was perhaps worse than this. I believed that she had left me for good. I could say that the “ordinary things” were said, the things that are always said in such quarrels, but I would be only saying this from what I’ve read in books. No one had ever said such things to me before. I had not had a wife, nor truly a lover, before. If they were not so hurtful, I would have found certain of the things she said banal. But again, this would have been only from having read them. “I am finished, I am trapped, my life is over,” she said. Like a man fending off blows, putting up his hands, I said, “This is because you have nothing in your life.” I was here referring to the fact that she had stopped painting, but she may not have understood. She often said that she detested shouting, yet she shouted at me, “Yes, yes, where you are, that’s where there is nothing.” Then she added: “If I stay with you, Herbert, everything you hoped from me will be gone. I can only hurt you now.” Then she added to that: “This is the same thing I said to my first husband. I cannot ignore this fact. My life goes around and around.”

  The other situation was that she had recently despaired of her painting, which I’ve just mentioned. She had been working on a series inspired by the mosaics of the “brave Soviet airmen” in the Moscow subway, who appeared in her paintings like snowflakes barely crystallized over particles of dust, falling out of a clear sky. I found these, as I found nearly all her work, mystical and beautiful. I am aware that these are categories, particularly the beautiful, that many artists find pejorative and antique, but from my own view she should properly have gloried in them, and defied the right thinkers. I did not often surprise her at her studio, in the interests of not encroaching on her freedom. But on the afternoon before she left, I did, for reasons that seemed little more than chance. The studio had been constructed from a carriage house two kilometers’ distance from our residence on Schwanenwerder Island. The side door was ajar. I knocked, of course, but my nose had caught a draft of sweet-smelling smoke. I walked in to find her stoking an oversized, nearly out-of-control fire in the fireplace with canvasses she had cut out of their frames. “What are you doing?” I cried. She was in one of her enormous white shirts and her face was smudged with the sweet-smelling smoke. What I recall now is her utter calm. “If you never do something like this, you can never start over,” she said, almost as if proud. I moved towards the fire until its heat pressed me back. “They’re beautiful, please don’t, I’ll take them and store them and never show them to you,” I said.

  “I’d rather they burn. If they exist, they’re like children, I’ll think about them,” she said.

  Then she held both her hands out towards me, and we embraced. We actually hugged each other. I held her fragile, small frame. But her voice remained high, defiant and clear. “There are very specific things in these I detest. Grandiose feelings. Even Franz noticed, he pointed them out to me. And about such things, he’s invariably correct.”

  I studied my wife for clues, for signs of relenting, in what I saw clearly as a war she was waging against herself. That is, I saw it clearly until I did not. I began to think, who was I to say that’s what it was? It was not simply that I felt tongue-tied with her. It’s that I believed her intelligence was deeper and clearer than mine, that she saw things which I would be lucky to see later.

  She took a few steps away from me, picked another rolled canvas off the floor, and without a further look threw it on the fire. It resisted the flames a few moments, then along its cylindrical length a brown curl formed and spread.

  “You’re making me terribly sad,” I said.

  “Then leave,” she said, “I don’t want to become sad myself.”

  I waited a moment, then backed away. “Don’t be alarmed, Herbert,” she said, and gave a careless wave to her work. “About these, I’m quite desperate. About my life, less so.”

  I nodded the sort of tight, aborted nod, little more than a seeming tic, that must inevitably suggest acquiescence more than conviction. Then I left. Outside, my eyes continued to water from the smoke. I sat in my car with tearing eyes and reddened throat telling myself that, after all, my wife might be right, or at least that there was no judging such things.

  It might seem, from my arrangement of facts, that I am assembling a brief to propose a suicide, or a perhaps half-intended suicide. But this is not the case. I would only not wish to be accused of avoiding such evidence as exists. She either wished to live or she did not. It must also be said that she was a rather careless, inattentive driver, better than she had been, but still inattentive. And one thing more: when she left for Italy, it was with certain of my firm’s financial records. Some cabinets had been ransacked. Our friend and my first assistant had recently resigned and gone missing, the result of a potential scandal hanging over him. I believe she had taken the files for him and was going to him.

  A cremation was conducted in Berlin. There was no one in Moscow who wished to claim her body back, and I would have opposed it in any event. Her mother now lives in Finland. We notified her, but she did not appear at the memorial. Of course there was no way to notify the father, if he is even alive, which no one believes. She died with a few friends, no family. In the pews was her first husband from Moscow. I recognized him from photographs, a slight, dark-eyed, dark-haired man, a poetic type, handsome, still young, altogether different from myself. I noticed him three or four times. He made the certain impression on me that he still loved her. A Russian choir sang at the service.

  I consider that she led a lonely life. Like myself, she may have tried to believe that her loneliness was only prologue, that something in her life was supposed to happen next, in which loneliness would be redeemed, the holding out of her soul proving to be nothing more than that, a waiting game, time spent in the heart’s antechamber
. But we run out of chances.

  Oksana. I write her name with difficulty. Oksana.

  HOLLY ANHOLT

  Education

  A SAMPLER of what I learned from Oksana.

  That the biggest casualties of the Wall coming down were the love affairs, since the Wall had been the shield for Western husbands. As soon as the Wall fell, the East German girls came looking for their boyfriends. Utter terror was spread. I heard Oksana express this considered judgment, very definitively, to a French reporter eager to question her about East-West relations, at her wedding party, of all places. Oksana projected an air of unspeakable melancholy. She was frail, yet when she spoke, in a lilting soprano, it was often in terms so definite it seemed as if she were fighting back against something, mounting some veiled yet definitive rebuttal, or launching a surprise counterattack. Even when the “something” wasn’t apparent, as though the “something” must be confined in the precincts of her mind. And she wanted no part in politics at all. Everything was a stage for the personal. Politics had been enough in her life, and had only injured her. In this sense, perhaps, Simona Jastrow was no more than her distorted mirror image.

  That in the Soviet Union everyone had bad teeth because there was no decent dentistry, and there weren’t any bananas which was as good a proof as any that it was not a normal country.

  That the reason David was Nils’ friend was the German soft spot for oracular, posturing buffoons. She offered this in my defense at a moment when I’d only just met him and he was harassing me. But by the time I absorbed the lesson, she had grown rather fond of him, as someone who excited the antennae of her antipathy, which was better than no excitement at all. And I felt challenged to follow her suit, as I had a number of times with Oksana, the force of her frail, persevering personality working its way through me in an underground channel. I remember in particular a day the four of us rowed on the Wannsee. A December afternoon had turned unseasonably warm. We set out from the dock on Herbert’s property. Nils rowed in clean, strong strokes, Oksana trailed her fingers in the chilly water, and David sat next to her with his shoes and socks in his lap, a roly-poly city boy in the country, making a joke or two about how he alone might tip the boat but otherwise oddly subdued that afternoon, as if there were no one there to impress. And I remember thinking: Oksana has tamed him. We were like two old couples that afternoon. Though I don’t imagine she ever slept with him. For Oksana, sex functioned as some sort of junior lieutenant to her curiosity, something which I didn’t so much learn from her as yearn to understand. But I don’t think she was so curious about David. She seemed to know him too well already.

  That it doesn’t take long to make a friend. She invited me to her wedding party on the first night we met at Anja’s. She must have identified me as part of her guild of exiles.

  That the once-notorious spy Mischa Lander was another one who had a foolish crush on her, but his crush didn’t stop him from trying to shake her down. I was virtually there when it happened, one of those moments as cliché-ridden concerning Berlin as, say, seeing movie stars in restaurants in Los Angeles. On a rainy day in early March, I visited Oksana in her studio. The phone rang repeatedly until at last she picked it up, seeming to know who it would be. Her side of the conversation that followed was punctuated by resentments and objections. “My car is in the repair… I’m bored with your threats… What files? What files?… I don’t even know where he keeps such things… I assure you I will not… Well tell them then. Go to Axel Springer for all I care!”

  I overheard all this, first with studied detachment, then with a rooting interest for my friend, and finally with fear. She hung up on him and went back to her dabbling brush, but within seconds threw it down. “I suppose I should see what he wants. Absorb his latest threats, I imagine will be more like it.” So I drove her over. We were always driving each other places. Something else I learned from Oksana, that a good way to develop a friendship is to be always driving with the other one somewhere. She would call me up and ask me to drive with her to this place or that, most often only because she didn’t wish to be alone. It was in this spirit, too, that I took her to meet Mischa Lander in a Grunewald laundromat where he was washing his clothes. On the way she was not embarrassed to tell me more. Lander had been well-connected in Moscow, she had once solicited him for help in locating her disappeared father (a solicitation which resulted in a brief affair), and he knew a lot about her past, which had had its inglorious aspects. She had been a translator for visiting businessmen, and a hostess as well, of very high morals, she said, which meant she didn’t sleep with her Western clients, she only arranged for them to sleep with KGB women who photographed their sleeping nakedness and rifled their attachés. It was how she met Herbert. Who in Lander’s estimation would not wish this bit, embarrassingly framed, to be known by Stern.

  Oksana had no ulterior motive in telling me any of this, it wasn’t as if she expected me to pass it on to Nils or hold onto it just in case, nor did it seem she was telling me secrets the way people often tell secrets, to prove to themselves that they’re unafraid. She simply told me her life as a friend. And perhaps with, somewhere in there, the defiance of the fatally bored: what were they going to do, take her out and shoot her? She found all of it preposterous and trivial. But she had never quite put Herbert in the loop. Now Lander wanted, for sure, something to persuade Herbert to help him get out of Germany. “But he’ll get nothing from me, I assure you. Not even a smile,” she said.

  I followed Oksana’s instructions to a commercial street in Grunewald. The light of day, such as it was, was gone. We stopped across the street from the fluorescent-bright laundromat. Through rain-streaked windows we could see Lander inside, in a dark coat and tie like some newly arrived ambassador-without-credentials from a tin-pot regime that had been overthrown, removing his clothes from a dryer and dumping them on a table. No one else was in the laundromat. The scene had the dreary clarity of an Ashcan School painting. Lander held up a pair of socks that must have shrunk. He scowled, attempted to stretch them. He scowled again. He stretched again. Oksana said, “Don’t wait for me.” “But how will you get home?” I asked. She answered with a little wave and got out of the car, jumping across puddles to the curb.

  So I drove away. It was the last time I saw her, except for her body in the back of the mortuary van on the road where she died. Nils and I, choric figures with too few lines, identified her.

  That she would forgive me if I once confused who she was. It happened later, as Nils and I argued, back in his farmhouse, over why Oksana had run away with Herbert’s files. “She was in love with you,” I said out of the blue.

  “What?”

  “She was in love with you and she stole those records for you. She was bringing them to you,” I said.

  “I have an opposite, more realistic interpretation,” he said. “She was highly indifferent to me, and she stole them for her own protection.”

  “Helena wasn’t like that,” I said.

  “Helena?”

  “Did I say ‘Helena’? Oksana.”

  My friend, did you hear that?

  FRANZ ROSEN

  Painting

  I WROTE ELSEWHERE about my “greatest fear.” Perhaps this was hyperbole. In all events, an addendum is in order.

  I spoke with Oksana once about her paintings. The airmen, the limpid Russian sky, a summer day. A kind of realism which doesn’t trust itself, which I feel is the only proper kind. She was one who appeared very definite about what she knew, yet her work was entirely about what she couldn’t know. The explication of a world, perhaps akin to Turner’s, where light is all. And light consumes. Explication of course has no value there. You are dooming yourself to a tragic defeat.

  I said to her one day that there was a grandeur to her effort. As I later learned, she interpreted what I said to mean grandiosity. I’ve considered whether this was an error in comprehension or translation, but it seems unlikely. She was a keen student of language. She was alert to
nuance. So I’ve come to ask myself: how is it, what was it about her, so keen, so precise and observant, that caused her, in effect, to twist my words into something so hurtful to herself and her efforts? Or more tellingly, about myself: how could I not have seen it coming? Not it precisely, perhaps, but some such defeat. Why was I not able to take greater care?

  I remember being so admiring and I remember her nodding, in a noncommittal fashion, and saying nothing, until the subject was passed, until we had turned away from the wall where those lovely pictures were hung. One cannot force words out of someone. One cannot child-proof the world. And of course Oksana was the farthest thing from a child.

  But I might still have imagined what a thin wire she walked. I might have seen more clearly behind the bravura intellect. I might have guessed, from the paintings themselves, how the landscape of her mind was laced with unmapped crevasses.

  To turn the world against oneself is not rare. To be helped along by others in this accomplishment is a commonplace. Like the others, I am an agnostic about the cause of her death. But still, I can imagine myself shaking her, or my words, anyway, shaking her, “Oksana, please, why do you say that, that’s not what I said at all. It’s not what I said at all.”

  FRANZ ROSEN

  Hatred

  I AM THINKING OF HERBERT now, and not Oksana directly. But I believe one certain trait of his allowed him to be her protector. He is not a good hater. Perhaps to compensate for this emotional shortcoming, he has an enlarged ability to deflect or in some cases absorb the arrows shot at him.

  I suppose the same could be said of myself. It’s even possible, though I’ve made no general survey to support the idea, that this vitamin deficiency, as it were, was an adaptive trait for those few of us who remained here after the war. A case of survival of the fittest. Those who hated could have been driven insane.