Less

by Andrew Sean Greer

  And then another.

  Three go down before the club raises its lights. Less sees the crowd, in their Cold War Nostalgie, their Bond-girl and Strangelove chic, caught in bright lights as in an old Stasi raid. Men come running over with flashlights. Suddenly the air is full of restless chatter, and the room seems barren with its white tile—a municipal bathhouse or substation, which, in fact, is what it is. “What do we do?” Less hears behind him in a Cyrillic accent. The Russian novelist pulls his lush eyebrows together like the parts of a modular sofa. Less looks down to where Frieda is approaching in a clatter of mincing steps.

  “It’s all right,” she says, resting her hand on Less’s sleeve while looking at the Russian. “It must be dehydration; we get that a lot, but usually much later in the evening. But you started reading, and suddenly…” Frieda is still talking, but he is not listening. The “you” is Less. The crowd has lost its shape, clotting into politically impossible groups by the bar. The lights on the tile create the awkward feeling of a night’s end, though it is not even one in the morning. Less feels a tingling realization. Then you started reading…

  He is boring people to death.

  First Bastian, then Hans, Dr. Balk, his students, the crowd at the reading. Listening to his tedious conversation, his lectures, his writing. Listening to his terrible German. His confusions of dann with denn, of für with vor, of wollen with werden. How kind they have all been to smile and nod through his sentences, wide eyed, as if listening to a detective announce the killer before he lands, at last, on the wrong verb. How patient and giving these people are. And yet he is the killer. One by one, with his mistaken blau sein for traurig sein, (“I’m drunk” for “I’m blue”), das Gift for das Geschenk (“poison” for “gift”), he is committing little murders. His words, his banalities, his backward laugh. He feels drunk and blue. Yes, his gift to them is a Gift. Like Claudius with Hamlet’s father, he is ear poisoning the people of Berlin.

  Only when he hears it echoing from the tiled ceiling, and sees the faces turning toward him, does Less realize he has sighed audibly into the microphone. He takes a step back.

  And there, in the back of the club, standing alone with his rare smile: Could it be Freddy? Fled from his wedding?

  No no no. Just Bastian.

  Is it after the minimal techno starts again, that sound that reminds Less of old New York apartments, with the pounding of pipes and the throb of your own heartbreak—or perhaps after the organizer hands him the second “Long Island”? —that Bastian comes to him with a pill and says, “Swallow this.” It is a blur of bodies. He remembers dancing with the Russian writer and Frieda (two potatoes together, and they are trouble) as the bartenders wave their plastic guns in the air, and he remembers being handed an envelope with a check in the manner of a briefcase being delivered over the Potsdam bridge, but then somehow he is in a cab and then is on a kind of shipwreck where various levels of dancers and young chatting Berliners sit in clouds of cigarette smoke. Outside, on a plank deck, others hang their feet over the filthy Spree. Berlin is all around them, the Fernsehturm rising high in the east like the Times Square New Year’s ball, the lights of Charlottenburg Palace glowing faintly in the west, and all around the glorious junkyard of the city: abandoned warehouses and chic new lofts and boats all done in fairy lights, concrete Honecker residential blocks imitating the old nineteenth-century buildings, the black parks hiding Soviet war memorials, the little candles somebody lights each night before the doors where Jews were dragged from their houses. The old dance halls where elderly couples, still wearing the beige of their Communist lives, still telling secrets in the learned whisper of a lifetime of wiretapping, dance polkas to live bands in rooms decorated in silver Mylar curtains. The basements where American drag queens sell tickets for British expats to listen to French DJs, in rooms where water flows freely down the walls and old gasoline jugs hang from the ceiling, lit from within. The Currywurst stands where Turks sift sneezing powder onto fried hot dogs, the subterranean bakeries where the same hot dogs are baked into croissants, the raclette stands where Tyroleans scrape melting cheese onto the bread and ham, decorating it with pickles. The markets already setting up in local squares to sell cheap socks, stolen bicycles, and plastic lamps. The sex dens with stoplights signaling which clothing to remove, the dungeons of men in superhero costumes of black vinyl with their names embroidered on them, the dark rooms and back alleys where everything possible is happening. And the clubs everywhere, only just getting started, where even middle-aged married folk are sniffing lines of ketamine off black bathroom tile, and teenagers are dosing each other’s drinks. In the club, as he later recalls, a woman gets onto the dance floor and really lets go during a Madonna song, really takes over the floor, and people are clapping, hooting, she’s losing her mind out there, and her friends are calling her name: “Peter Pan! Peter Pan!” Actually, it isn’t a woman; it’s Arthur Less. Yes, even old American writers are dancing like it is still the eighties in San Francisco, like the sexual revolution has been won, like the war is over and Berlin has been liberated, one’s own self has been liberated; and what the Bavarian in his arms is whispering is true, and everyone, everyone—even Arthur Less—is loved.

  Almost sixty years ago, just after midnight, a few feet from the river where they danced, a wonder of modern engineering occurred: overnight, the Berlin Wall arose. It was the night of August 15, 1961. Berliners awoke on the sixteenth to this marvel, more of a fence at first, concrete posts driven into the streets and festooned with barbed wire. They knew trouble would come but expected it in degrees. Life so often arrives all of a sudden. And who knows which side you will find yourself on?

  In just such a way, Less awakens at the end of his stay to find a wall erected between his five weeks in Berlin and reality.

  “You’re leaving today,” the young man says, eyes still closed as he rests sleepily against the pillow. Cheeks red from a long night of farewell, someone’s lipstick kiss still smudged there but otherwise unmarked by excess, in the way only the young can manage. His chest as brown as a kiwi, slowly rising and falling. “We are saying good-bye.”

  “Yes,” Less says, steadying himself. His brain feels like it’s on a ferryboat. “In two hours. I must to put clothes in the luggage.”

  “Your German is getting worse,” Bastian says, rolling away from Less. It is early morning, and the sun is bright on the sheets. Music comes from the street outside: beats from nonstop Berlin.

  “You still to sleep.”

  A grunt from Bastian. Less leans down to kiss his shoulder, but the young man is already asleep.

  As he rises to face the task of packing again, Less endures the ferryboat’s tumble within himself. It is just possible to gather all his shirts, layer them carefully as pastry dough, and fold the rest of his clothes within, as he learned how to do in Paris. It is just possible to gather everything in the bathroom and kitchen, the mess of his middle-aged bedside table. It is just possible to hunt down every lost thing, to pinpoint his passport and wallet and phone. Something will remain behind; he hopes it will just be a sewing needle and not a plane ticket. But it is just possible.

  Why didn’t he say yes? Freddy’s voice from the past: You want me to stay here with you forever? Why didn’t he say yes?

  He turns and sees Bastian sleeping on his stomach, arms spread out like those of the Ampelmännchen who signaled East Berliners: walk or don’t walk. The curve of his spine, the glow of his skin, pimpled across the shoulders. In the big black iron bed of these last hours. Less goes into the kitchen and starts the water boiling for coffee.

  Because it would have been impossible.

  He gathers his student papers to grade them on the plane. These he carefully slips into a special compartment of his black rucksack. He gathers the suit coats, the shirts; he makes the little bundle that an earlier traveler would have hung from a stick over his shoulder. In another special place he puts his pills (the Head was right; they do indeed work). Passport, wa
llet, phone. Loop the belts around the bundle. Loop the ties around the belts. Stuff the shoes with socks. The famous Lessian rubber bands. The items still unused: sun lotion, nail clippers, sewing kit. The items still unworn: the brown cotton trousers, the blue T-shirt, the brightly colored socks. Into the bloodred luggage, zipped tight. All of these will circle the globe to no purpose, like so many travelers.

  Back in the kitchen, he loads the last of the coffee (too much) into the French press and fills it with the boiling water. With a chopstick, he stirs the mixture and fits it with the plunger. He waits for it to steep, and as he waits he touches his face; he is startled to feel the beard, like someone who has forgotten they are wearing a mask.

  Because he was afraid.

  And now it’s over. Freddy Pelu is married.

  Less pushes down the plunger as with cartoon TNT and explodes coffee all over Berlin.

  A phone call, translated from German into English:

  “Hello?”

  “Good morning, Mr. Less. This is Petra from Pegasus!”

  “Good morning, Petra.”

  “I just wanted to make sure you got off okay.”

  “I am on the airport.”

  “Wonderful! I wanted to tell you what a success it was last night and how grateful your students were for the little class.”

  “Each one became a sick one.”

  “They all recovered, as has your assistant. He said you were quite brilliant.”

  “Each one is a very kind one.”

  “And if you’ve found you’ve left anything behind you need, just let us know, and we’ll send it on!”

  “No, I have no regrets. No regrets.”

  “Regrets?”

  (Sound of flight being announced) “I leave nothing behind me.”

  “Good-bye! Until your next wonderful novel, Mr. Less!”

  “This we do not know. Good-bye. I head now to Morocco.”

  But he does not head now to Morocco.

  Less French

  Here it comes, the trip he dreads: the one when he turns fifty. All the other trips of his life seem to have led, in a blind man’s march, toward this one. The hotel in Italy with Robert. The jaunt through France with Freddy. The wild-hare cross-country journey after college to San Francisco, to stay with someone named Lewis. And his childhood trips—the camping trips his father took him on many times, mostly to Civil War battlefields. How clearly Less remembers searching their campsite for bullets and finding—wonder of wonders!—an arrowhead (time revealed the possibility his father had salted the area). The games of mumblety-peg in which clumsy young Less was entrusted with a switchblade knife, which he fearfully tossed as if it were a poisonous snake and with which he once managed to impale an actual snake (garter, predeceased). A foil-wrapped potato left to cook in the fire. A ghost story with a golden arm. His father’s delight flickering in the firelight. How Less cherished those memories. (He was later to discover a book in his father’s library entitled Growing Up Straight, which counseled paternal bonding for sissy sons and whose advised activities—battlefields, mumblety-peg, campfires, ghost stories—had all been underlined with a blue Bic pen, but somehow this later discovery could not pierce the sealed happiness of his childhood.) Back then, these journeys all seemed as random as the stars in the sky; only now can he see the zodiac turning above his life. Here, rising, comes the Scorpion.

  Less believes he will head now from Berlin to Morocco, with a quick layover in Paris. He has no regrets. He has left nothing behind. The last sands through his hourglass will be Saharan.

  But he does not head now to Morocco.

  In Paris: a problem. It has been the struggle of a lifetime for Arthur Less to break the value added tax system. As an American citizen, he is due a refund of taxes paid on some purchases abroad, and in the shops, when they hand you the special envelope, the forms all filled out, it seems so simple: find the customs kiosk at the airport for a stamp, collect your refund. But Less knows the con. Closed customs offices, kiosks under repair, stubborn officers who insist he produce goods that were packed in his already-checked baggage; it is easier getting a visa to Myanmar. How many years ago was it when the information lady at Charles de Gaulle would not tell him where the detax office was? Or when he got the stamp but posted it in a deceptively labeled recycling bin? Time and again, he has been outwitted. But not this time. Less makes it his mission to get his damned tax back. Having splurged recklessly after his prize in Turin (a light-blue chambray shirt with a wide white horizontal stripe, like the bottom edge of a Polaroid), he gave himself an extra hour at the Milan airport, found the office, shirt in hand, only to have the officer sadly inform him he must wait until leaving the EU—which will take place when he concludes his layover in Paris and heads for the African continent. Less was undaunted. In Berlin, he tried the same tactic, with the same result (lady with red spiked hair, in mean Berlinese). Less remains undaunted. But at his layover in Paris he meets his match: a surprise German, with red spiked hair and hourglass spectacles, either the twin of the Berliner, or this is her weekend shift. “We do not accept Ireland,” she informs him in icy English. His VAT envelope, through some switcheroo, is from Ireland; the receipts, however, are from Italy. “It’s Italian!” he tells her as she shakes her head. “Italian! Italian!” He is right, but by raising his voice he has lost; he feels the old anxiety bubbling inside him. Surely she feels it. “You must now post it from Europe,” she says. He tries to calm himself and asks where the post office is in the airport. Her magnified eyes barely look up, no smile on her face as she says her delicious words: “There is no post office in the airport.”

  Less staggers away from the kiosk, utterly defeated, and makes his way toward his gate in a numbing panic; how enviously he looks upon the smoking lounge denizens, laughing in their glass zoo. The injustice of it all weighs on him heavily. How awful for the string of inequities to be brought out in his mind, that useless rosary, so he can finger again those memories: the toy phone his sister received while he got nothing, the B in chemistry because his exam handwriting was poor, the idiot rich kid who got into Yale instead of him, the men who chose hustlers and fools over innocent Less, all the way up to his publisher’s polite refusal of his latest novel and his exclusion from any list of best writers under thirty, under forty, under fifty—they make no lists above that. The regret of Robert. The agony of Freddy. His brain sits before its cash register again, charging him for old shames as if he has not paid before. He tries but cannot let it go. It is not the money, he tells himself, but the principle. He has done everything right, and they have conned him once again. It is not the money. And then, after he passes Vuitton, Prada, and clothing brands based on various liquors and cigarettes, he admits it to himself at last: It is, indeed, the money. Of course it is the money. And his brain suddenly decides it is not ready, after all, for fifty. So when he arrives at the crowded gate, jittery, sweating, weary of life, he listens with one ear to the agent’s announcement: “Passengers to Marrakech, this flight is overbooked, and we are looking for volunteers to accept a flight late tonight, with a money voucher for…”

  “I’m your man!”

  Fate, that glockenspiel, will turn upon the hour. Not long ago Less was lost in an airport lounge, broke, robbed, defeated—and now here he is! Walking down the rue des Rosiers with a pocket full of cash! His luggage is stowed at the airport, and he has hours in the city at his own liberty. And he has already made a call to an old friend.

  “Arthur! Young Arthur Less!”

  On the phone: Alexander Leighton, of the Russian River School. A poet, a playwright, a scholar, and a gay black man who left the overt racism of America for the soigné racism of France. Less remembers Alex in his headstrong days, when he wore a luxuriant Afro and exclaimed his poetry at the dinner table; last time they met, Alex was bald as a malted milk ball.

  “I heard you were traveling! You should have called me earlier.”

  “Well, I’m not even supposed to be here,” Less e
xplains, caught up in the delight of this birthday parole, knowing his words make little sense. He has emerged from the Métro somewhere near the Marais and cannot get his bearings. “I was teaching in Germany, and I was in Italy before that; I volunteered for a later flight.”

  “What luck for me.”

  “I was thinking maybe we could get a bite to eat, or a drink.”

  “Has Carlos got hold of you?”

  “Who? Carlos? What?” Apparently, he cannot get his bearings in this conversation either.

  “Well, he will. He wanted to buy my old letters, notes, correspondence. I don’t know what he’s up to.”

  “Carlos?”

  “Mine are already sold to the Sorbonne. He’ll be coming for you.”

  Less imagines his own “papers” at the Sorbonne: The Collected Letters of Arthur Less. It would draw the same crowd as “An Evening…”

  Alexander is still talking: “…did tell me you’re going to India!”

  Less is amazed how quickly intelligence moves around the world. “Yes,” he says. “Yes, it was his suggestion. Listen—”

  “Happy birthday, by the way.”

  “No, no, my birthday isn’t until—”

  “Look, I’ve got to run, but I’m going to a dinner party tonight. It’s aristocrats; they love Americans, and they love artists, and they’d love for you to come. I’d love for you to come. Will you come?”