Leaving Berlin
Leaving Berlin
Britt Holmström
© Britt Holmstöm, 2011
All rights reserved
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Thistledown Press Ltd.
118 - 20th Street West
Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, S7M 0W6
www.thistledownpress.com
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Holmström, Britt, 1946-
Leaving Berlin / Britt Holmström.
Short stories.
ISBN 978-1-897235-91-1
I. Title.
PS8565.O639165L42 2011 C813'.54 C2011-905335-7
Cover photograph detail of Elbeo Stockings advertisement
by Wolfgang Sievers, 1938 with permission from the Powerhouse Museum,
Sydney, Australia
Author photo by Amy Snider
Cover and book design by Jackie Forrie
Printed and bound in Canada
Thistledown Press gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Saskatchewan Arts Board, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for its publishing program.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thank you, Al Forrie, for wanting to publish my stories.
I am also very grateful to Elizabeth Philips for being such an excellent and inspiring editor.
And it was very generous of Mungo Jerry, alias Ray Dorset, to happily let me quote from his famous song. Thank you.
As ever, a standing ovation for Nick, Christopher and Anna for always encouraging me and putting up with me.
And while I’m at it, I would also like to doff my hat to all the people who — unaware of the fact — inspired these stories.
To Nick, my patron saint
CONTENTS
* * *
Leaving Berlin
The Blue Album
The Soul of a Poet
Doing Laundry on a Sunday
The Company She Kept
Under the Eiffel Tower
The Sky Above Her Head
The Rebel Doll
Charmed
It is inevitable that each of us will be misunderstood;
this it seems, is part of twentieth-century wisdom.
— Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries
LEAVING BERLIN
* * *
WE LEFT BERLIN ON A WEDNESDAY EVENING. I don’t know why I still remember that. It was mid-March 1970, the weather gloomy, already getting dark around four o’clock when we handed our remaining Deutschmark (down to the very last Pfennig, I remember that too) to Frau Paulus at the Pension. Such money manoeuvers were Henry’s specialty, the counting out of exact change in every transaction in foreign currency to make sure we were not robbed of a single worthless coin.
Early on I had pointed out that people might find his lack of trust insulting. His reply had been the standard one. “Too fucking bad.”
Frau Paulus was a seventy-six-year-old widow who had turned her large fifth-floor apartment into a Pension to make ends meet. She wore a different dress on each of the five days of our stay, all of them dating from the forties, very feminine, complemented with a pearl necklace and a brooch, ready for her daily social event, afternoon tea with a lady friend. Whenever we arrived back after another aimless trek, we heard the hum of their murmured conversation, glimpsed them sipping tea out of cups as fragile as the hands that held them. They nodded when we passed the door to the salon, the lady friend staring with disdain at Henry, Frau Paulus greeting us with a nearsighted smile of indiscriminate delight.
We were her only guests that week, and as we were leaving she took her time scribbling the receipt she insisted we must have, “Eine properly business tranzaction, ja?” She used an old-fashioned pen with a nib she kept dipping into a porcelain inkwell, expertly, never spilling a drop, her head bent over her task, every single white curl obediently in place. And all the while she talked — mostly in German — sometimes directing the flow of words at us, sometimes at her husband, Oberst Paulus, who stood attentive in his Luftwaffe uniform in a brass frame on the desk. He had been a late casualty of the war. Shot by a mad Russki, she informed us when we first arrived, illustrating the event by pointing her hand like a gun at Henry and shouting “Boom!”
Henry did not take offense, which was amazing considering that lately he took offense at just about everything. He just stepped aside and said, “Ha, ha, you missed.” Frau Paulus found that extremely funny.
The small overheated room that served as her office was an aviary of stuffed birds. They sat perched on every shelf, lurked in the deep windowsill behind her, nested on the giant dresser and the desk. Every bird wore a grey cloak of dust.
Henry waited patiently beside me, very unusual for him, not a single pianissimo tapping foot or jittery finger, no snarky comments about why the old bat didn’t keep a fucking stuffed dodo as well.
The exact moment Frau Paulus handed the carefully blotted receipt to Henry, the streetlights came on. The lamppost directly outside the window behind her haloed the two cranky-looking horned owls regarding us with beady glass eyes from the sill.
The abrupt light emphasized the dusk outside, giving the impression that it was much later than what our watches claimed, as if foreign time flowed at a different pace. Hoisting our backpacks, we said good-bye to the nearsighted Frau — she shook our hands with both of her talcum-scented ones — and with no German money we headed for the elevator to begin the long trek to Zoo Bahnhof.
We stood like polite strangers in the coffin-sized elevator, its wood paneling creaking, travelling an inch a minute down the five floors. On the fourth floor an old man carrying a snuffling Pekingese tottered in and squeezed rudely between us. His perfumed silk scarf matched his pink nail polish. Henry made faces at the dog over the man’s shoulder. The dog wriggled towards him and licked his face. Henry smiled. For some reason animals loved him. The old man scowled and stuck his nose in the air, an aristocrat among peasants. By the time the elevator had laboured down to the first floor, we all reeked of his perfume.
Earlier that day I had considered exchanging some Canadian dollars into Deutschmark to be able to take a taxi, travel in comfort for a change. It was going to be a long and tedious slog from Berlin to Copenhagen. In the end I didn’t bother. I knew it would be pointless. Henry would refuse on principle, because he knew what he knew: that every unshaved taxi driver in Europe belonged to a widespread fraternity of criminals whose sole purpose in a long and pointless life was to cheat Henry P. Fontaine out of his hard earned cash.
We had not taken a single taxi in any of the countries we had travelled through during our five-month trip, no matter how tired or lost, no matter how hopelessly late for the next train, bus or boat. Nor had we utilized subways, streetcars or buses.
Why?
Because Henry scorned all public transit as well. He agreed that it was inexpensive, but so what? It was jam-packed with pickpockets, con artists and the general riffraff of a decadent continent.
I was convinced we would miss the train to Sassnitz, but it turned out we had plenty of time. A clock struck five when we crossed Bundesplatz. By then I was trailing Henry by a good eight feet, a distance that made conversation impossible. Not that it mattered. It appeared we were once again not speaking. Like an atmospheric disturbance, this communication interruptus ha
d changed from a sporadic phenomenon to a daily occurrence as soon as we set foot on European soil. Suddenly everything I did annoyed the hell out of him. As the days went by I watched him change from merely brooding — which was what had attracted me to him in the first place — to hostile and paranoid. The merely brooding I had always taken for angst, common in the artistic type and not without charm; it suited his persona. The hostility and paranoia I found harder and harder to interpret generously.
The sforzando dissonance of the trip was — like everything else that went expectedly wrong in life — entirely my fault. Okay, it was true that taking the winter off to travel had been my idea. And maybe it was whimsical on my part, but I had wanted to go to Europe since graduating from university two years earlier. Not a shocking suggestion. Europe was not outer space. Everybody went there.
There was another reason that I wanted to travel to Europe. I had never been able to get close to Henry despite having lived with him for almost a year (wondering every day why he had deigned to move in with me), so I hoped that when we found ourselves alone among strangers we would grow closer, having only each other to turn to. That he would let me inside his private sphere as we shared new impressions. The music he had composed and played when I first met him was soft and mellow and sensitive, reflecting the expression on his face at the time, and it had led me to believe that getting close to him was possible with a bit of patience. Perhaps it was a naive assumption, but in my defense, Henry did come along willingly: I did not force him, did not beg, nag or plead. “How about taking the winter off and going travelling?” I had asked.
To which he had lifted his fingers a quarter of an inch off the piano keys, shrugged and asked, his voice pleasant enough, “Where?”
“Europe?”
This was followed by another shrug and “If you insist,” before he lowered his fingers onto the keys and continued playing. There had been no frown, no acid in his voice.
The moment we found ourselves in Europe, the questions and accusations began, as if the ground beneath his feet had grown unstable. Why did I insist on dragging so much goddamn luggage around?
Because we’re going to be here for five months and we need more than a change of underwear.
Did I have to stuff my face every five minutes?
Twice a day is not every five minutes.
Did I know what that dried up fucking sandwich cost in Canadian money?
Yes, a dollar fifty.
And what was it with my moronic habit of smiling at strangers? How clueless was I?
You tell me.
He had grown more distant with each day that passed. I had felt increasingly ostracized. More often than not he treated me like a troubled stranger who had forced herself on him, some demented nutcase talking to herself. I wanted to yell, “It’s me! Don’t you recognize me?” But I never did, I was afraid of what his answer would be.
To soften him up, I tried harder, talked more, talked faster, laughing more shrilly with the strain. The harder I tried, the more I failed. And the more I failed, the harder I tried, succeeding only at fueling his contempt. His contempt invalidated me, and I discovered how difficult it is to function when you’ve become invalid. People sense it and treat you accordingly.
Later that sullen Berlin afternoon as we stopped at a red light across the street from the Zoo Bahnhof, an elephant began to trumpet. It was a sudden desperate bellow. Another elephant responded, equally vexed, and together they continued to vent their anguish which reached a fortissimo crescendo when the piercing shriek of a tropical bird made them fall silent.
Not on speaking terms, Henry and I exchanged no comments about this, but I noticed his shoulders tensing. He was listening to the elephants as if interpreting a message. As if he was in psychic contact with them, sharing their pain. Maybe he was.
We had visited the Zoo two days earlier. That was when I discovered Henry’s peculiar weakness for elephants. Peculiar only because he seemed to retain no weakness for anybody or anything else in life, apart from his music, that is. If there were only pachyderms plodding this planet, Henry P. Fontaine would plod among them, a harmonious man.
We stood for the longest time staring at a sad-eyed grey bulk of African elephant. A chain around its right back leg was attached to a pole, preventing its cumbersome body from moving freely. Henry stood dead still before it, his fists rammed deep into his pockets. After a while he started tapping his left foot, largamente, as though it, too, was chained. He never took his eyes off the giant. The elephant kept moving its trunk back and forth, back and forth, like a metronome while Henry followed it with his eyes, adjusting his rhythm accordingly.
Afraid he would disappear deeper inside himself, I finally said, “Let’s go, please, Henry. I’m cold.”
He mumbled, sounding for a moment like an awkward child, but did not object.
I wished I were an elephant.
When we reached the ape house I suggested we go in, if only to warm up. Henry looked as if he had not heard a word, but when I pulled open the door he said “Okay” and followed me meekly inside, head bent as if in sorrow, hair hanging in his face, preventing me from seeing his expression.
The pungent building was deserted but for a handful of badly dressed people who all looked like they were there because they had nowhere else to go. An old man in blue overalls was busy hosing down the area between the barren cubicles and the rail marking off-limits. He performed his task with meticulous care, taking his time, as if his work was of vital importance. After a while he got to where we were standing, in front of the stark cell that was home to a large orangutan lying in a corner looking more dead than alive.
Then in the unkempt pile of fur an eye flipped open. It was an eerily intelligent eye, out of place in that mangy pelt. Sliding from left to right, the eye surveyed the supposedly superior Homo sapiens gawking back at it, but it was only when it spotted the old man that its supreme indifference gave way to alert recognition.
Henry tensed beside me. I took his hand. He pulled away.
The orangutan came to life, dragged itself up, shuffled to the front of the cage and came to a stop face to face with the old man. Its gaze was inscrutable, but something was going through its mind. This was a creature with a plan.
The old man, unperturbed, turned off the hose at the nozzle and raised his head to meet the steady gaze of the ape. As he did so, the orangutan pressed closer. With a rapid movement, a hirsute arm shot out between the bars. The leathery hand went straight for the man.
The handful of people gasped. So did I. Henry did not make a sound.
Instead of putting a safe distance between himself and the ape, the man stepped closer, moving with the leisurely pace of a person who has not had reason to hurry for a long time. When he got within reach of the outstretched hand, he stopped. The orangutan cocked its head. Its eyes softened as it gently touched the man’s face, stroking his cheek several times before hauling the arm back in as if overcome by sudden shyness.
The man said something in German with a heavy Slavic accent, then he held up the nozzle and pointed to it. The orangutan began to bounce up and down, smacking its lips, pressing its face to the bars. It looked like it was dying to be kissed. The old man turned on the hose and gave it a long drink of water. When the ape had had enough, it took a step backwards and bared a row of yellow teeth in a gleeful grin.
“Ja, ja. Du bist sehr geistreich, mein Liebling,” cooed the old man. He smiled at his clever darling, a melancholy twitch of a smile, and continued hosing away straw, bits of rotting vegetables and fruit the inmates had thrown out onto the concrete floor beneath the cages and the rail.
The orangutan, never blinking, watched the man until he was out of sight, then shuffled to the back of the cage and flopped down. Eyes closed, it once again turned back into a fur rug.
During the entire episode, Henry never stopped drumming on the rail, adagio at first, then faster and faster, reaching an agitato finale when the orangutan stroked the man’s
cheek. When the ape once again looked dead to the world, Henry continued drumming, diminuendo now, unevenly as though his fingers had broken from the strain.
Waiting for the light to turn, I wanted to remind Henry of the episode, make a conciliatory remark, string words over the abyss between us, approach him on them like a tightrope walker without dignity. As usual I had no idea why we were not speaking. Only Henry knew what warranted these punishing silences.
The light turned green and we crossed the street, Henry striding ahead, wading through a group of Turkish Gastarbeiter, seven men dressed in black leather jackets. At least I assumed they were Turkish; one had a Turkish flag glued on the back of his jacket. They were having what sounded like an argument. Whatever it was, it involved a lot of shouting and arm waving. Close by, somebody kept honking a horn. I watched as Henry put his hands over his ears and started running, his backpack bouncing against his back, the fringes on his suede jacket dancing around his hips as he fled.
The inside of the train station lacked the dignity of the ape house. It was early evening, and in Berlin come evening, transvestites and whores, perverts and pimps and what have you, emerged out of nowhere, all dressed up and perfumed, slinking out of the shadows like the undead at sundown. I never understood why so many transvestites favoured the old train station with its glaring lack of ambiance, when the city offered an unlimited number of spas for the morally infirm, dimly lit places where I got the impression that every manner of perversion had been raised to an art form. I saw a woman try to French-kiss her dog. In Berlin you were spoiled for choice not only where to pamper your particular predilection, but with whom and what with.
“There is,” Henry had pronounced on our first night getting to know Berlin, looking around in the first of the clubs we stuck our heads into, sounding like a research scientist confirming his hypothesis, “something unnatural about Germans having fun. I mean, look at these assholes.”
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