“Can you chew your food without teeth?” she snapped back.
I pulled a handkerchief from my jacket pocket and limply mopped my brow.
Then the Cuban agent offered to tutor me—and she said what follows with the seductive bluntness I’ve since come to associate with citizens of your island: Now keep watching until you can suck the marrow from my bones.
Achso.
Mustering my courage, I tentatively included a basic mambo variation in my proposed dance craze.
None of my superiors could make heads or tails of it. My attempts at breaking down the movements—I’d practiced them until my feet blistered—made me look, in the words of one coworker, “like a malfunctioning propeller.” Dispirited but undefeated, I decided, with the help of our desultory graphics department, to work up a more complex diagrammatic of exemplary, flexible, and—for a whiff of exoticism—dark-skinned youth.
After weeks of trial and error, I had my dance. The name I came up with—as if drawn like a rib from my side, I swear it—was the coup de grace: ISATSI! It had a wildly primal feel to it, yet my superiors at the Ministry of Culture couldn’t help but notice that the letters, rearranged with the addition of an extra i, spelled Stasi. The dance, if I may be so immodest to suggest, evoked a certain foreign hedonism while paying homage to the most feared institution in the country. Capitalizing the name and adding a de rigueur exclamation point underscored the enthusiasm I hoped to ignite.
The music? I daresay it was something of a shotgun wedding between the mambo and the twist, with a touch of bossanova thrown in. At its unveiling before the top brass, the ISATSI! was met with universal approval—a rarity, trust me—and speedily given the go-ahead. In the somber corridors of the Ministry of Culture, once-dour colleagues clapped me on the back, winked at me with complicity, even envy. My hopes soared two octaves. For a time, I took to wearing a black beret at home. Its rakish angle inflamed my wife to ever more connubial delights. In a spirit of solidarity, Sigrid insisted that we dance the ISATSI! together every night, which naturally led to further erotic mischief.
The most difficult challenge proved to be piqueing the interest of the GDR’s indifferent youth. The students, forcibly assembled in high schools in and around East Berlin, exhibited little to no curiosity in the ISATSI! Dear Visitor, there’s no way to sugarcoat this: our large-scale dance lessons were abject failures. When I distributed the worksheets, most of the teens lowered their heads or slunk away in boredom. One or two jokingly shifted back and forth like rusty hinges. I wondered if their rigidity was due to their constraining uniforms, or to the inhibitions drummed into them by their teachers. Certainly it was not what I, or the Ministry of Culture, had intended.
You must believe me when I say that I tried everything possible to salvage my ISATSI! At one point I threw in a hard-charging polka backbeat, hoping this might stir the teens, but their impassivity proved impenetrable. Desperate, I zeroed in on Potsdam’s sole performing arts school. Bullhorn in hand, I announced that the reward for those who danced for the song’s duration was a free trip to a popular amusement park which featured, among its oxidized ruins, a mechanical Tyrannosaurus rex. Well, that did it. Instantly, the teens flooded the gymnasium floor and danced like it was the last party on earth.
After careful assessment, I pulled aside a dozen of the most physically coordinated and promised each of them a pair of bell-bottom jeans—Czech-made, but better than nothing—for participating in my pilot project. Dear Visitor, they leapt at the chance.
The Ministry of Culture scheduled our premiere for a Sunday night, in the prime spot immediately preceding the movie hour. As the much-anticipated day approached, there was a surfeit of optimism in our hallways. Backstage at the Deutsches Theater on Schumannstraße, makeup artists painted daisies and peace signs on our performers’ cheeks while I fantasized about a big promotion, vacations to the Black Sea, a new refrigerator with a compartment for all the kilos of off-ration pork chops I’d be buying. Here, before an illustrious audience of the GDR’s elite, was our answer to the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, to Elvis’s hip-swiveling decadence. I felt confident that the ISATSI! would conquer them all.
At last the curtains parted and our black-market psychedelic lights sputtered to life. The Potsdam teens, glittering in their costumes and flower-power makeup, stormed the stage and launched into their routine, twisting and clapping and jumping in syncopation. I surveyed the audience—highly decorated generals, ministers, and other top officials, including the head of the Stasi himself, Erich Mielke, who was seated with his family. Dear Visitor, not a single person so much as cracked a smile. The students were dancing their hearts out, but even their own parents were too frightened to react.
Mercifully, it was over in four minutes and thirty-two seconds. The teens stood hand in hand across the stage and bowed deeply, as we’d rehearsed. The silence lingered for an interminable moment. I sat there like an emptied glove, expecting the worse, now imagining myself chiseling stones in Siberia for an eternity. It was Mielke’s adopted daughter who clapped first, startling those around her. Her father followed suit, icily staring straight ahead. Then the crowd burst into applause, whistling and thunderously stomping their feet, as if to compensate for their delayed response. The ISATSI! was a success!
That night, my wife and I celebrated with more dancing and a bottle of Bulgarian Sekt.
I’m an old man now, nearing ninety. The Berlin Wall, which had defined our lives for so long, was torn down, and the world we’d known changed forever. I was already retired and drawing a modest pension, which the West Germans graciously honored. My dear wife passed away on the eve of the new millenium, and our son, Hänschen, turned his back on GDR values and became a rich banker in London. Now and then I like to switch on the oldies radio station and pretend to dance with my frisky Sigrid again, inhaling the fragrance of her tousled hair.
Dear Visitor, how I wish I could report that the ISATSI! took the Soviet bloc by storm. But after the initial fanfare, my dance ended up where it probably belonged all along: in oblivion. Only I live to remember those halcyon days, the most golden of my career, and to share them with you today.
The Visitor
Her friend A. came to see the Visitor in Berlin. He wanted to show her “his” city: its histories and excavations, its uneasy embrace of the frayed eastern districts. Together they traveled to Karlshorst, where the German Armed Forces surrendered on May 8, 1945. For a mild-mannered man—A. would’ve been at home in a Kafka story—he knew all about the T-34 tank in the garden. Late afternoons, they devoured enormous slices of Erdbeerkuchen—strawberries were gloriously in season—and spiritedly fought over the bills.
The Visitor’s German was improving day by day, and A. complimented her on her accent (his was flawless). Until then they’d spoken to each other only in English or Spanish, or a mix thereof. She recounted to him her three student summers in Germany. One year she’d lived in a commune of Marxist hippies in Freiburg. A copy of Das Kapital sat on the toilet tank. Everyone slept with one another, but she demurred. Another summer in Münster, she’d watched a ragtag parade of veterans in their old Wehrmacht uniforms march by her host family’s house.
Later, the Visitor worked for an American firm in Frankfurt marketing disposable diapers. She bought a used Russian Lada that never worked. Her lies began almost immediately: that she’d studied literature in college; that she’d written her thesis on Joyce’s Ulysses; that she lived, above all, for poetry. One smitten colleague left chocolates on her desk. She slept with two of her coworkers: the Brit in hand soaps, and the Swiss intern in detergents. She played table tennis naked at a local spa. After six weeks, she quit the job, fleeing her thicket of lies. She resold the Lada to the same dealer for less than what she’d paid for it.
The Visitor and A. spent hours at the three-story international bookstore on Frie
drichstraße. There the Visitor learned that Hitler’s gifts to Eva Braun had improved over the years. In 1937, he’d given her a book on Egyptian tombs for Christmas. Seven years later—a month before their marriage-suicide pact in the Führerbunker—he surprised her with a silver fox fur cape. Apparently, he’d avoided getting married before so as not to discourage German women from dreaming that, one day, he might be theirs.
The Visitor hadn’t been lucky in love. But happy and unhappy seemed to her meaningless distinctions now. What mattered was this: Did the hardships get her to where she wanted to go? In contrast, A. had been gratefully (his word) married to the same German woman for twenty years. Her family hailed from Hoyerswerda and never forgave A. for taking their daughter away. They called him “the Negro” and “the Mexican” and once sang the Horst Wessel Song in his presence.
“The family is a police state,” the Visitor said, describing how miniscule stages lit up inside her, repeating key scenes from her life. “Do people remember only what they can endure, or distort memories until they can endure them?”
After a long silence, A. said: “Childhood is a city you never leave. In Berlin’s past, we seek our own.” He believed that the tiniest crack in a random window could link one world to another. Then he held up a coffee-table book on Bauhaus style. “Only things endure.”
The two discussed translations at length, as well as the untranslatable. They tried to render “Me duele una mujer” into another language. After failing miserably, they treated each other with even more tenderness than usual, as if to acknowledge the inadequacy of words. The Visitor had nicknamed A. “jicotea,” after he’d once described his dancing style as resembling “a turtle fighting its way out of a paper bag.”
A perennial subject for them: their unbearable mothers, whom, they joked, had been separated at birth in Havana. Why, they wondered, had their mothers’ particular sufferings and dislocations left them so indifferent to the misfortunes of others? So inflated about their self-worth? So violent?
In the Visitor’s childhood home, dissent wasn’t permitted; the daily temperature was set by her mother’s rages. As a girl, her resistance had bloomed stealthily. She grew duplicitous, calculative, split herself to survive. Her public self was agreeable, loyal to a fault. All the while her private self was growing cutthroat, one eye on the exit, a Molotov cocktail in each hand. She told A. that she’d had to become a little monstrous to survive.
A. asked the Visitor if she planned to include her personal history alongside the stories she was collecting and retelling in Berlin. Everything that obsessed her, she insisted, was autobiographical in the extreme.
“Have you noticed,” the Visitor said, changing the subject, “how the SS drumbeat sounds a lot like the clave?” It was another drizzly morning, and they were at the cemetery for Russian soldiers who’d died in the final assault on Berlin.
“Carajo.” A. rarely cursed. “We always repeat what hurts us.”
The Visitor surveyed the sea of tombstones, each with its pitifully inadequate synopses. The shadows looked rinsed in the weak light.
“Not everyone who dies finds rest,” A. said.
On their last afternoon together, the two ducked into a Brazilian bar off the Nollendorfplatz to wait out a thunderstorm. As the samba music played, A. told the Visitor tales about the Blue Division of the SS, its ranks filled with veteran Spanish soldiers, how they’d fought in the Reichstag to the bloody end. The two made a pact to write overlapping stories about them.
That night, they attended the Philharmonic to hear Bruckner’s Symphony No. 7. Sixty-eight years earlier, a recording of its adagio was broadcast on Radio Berlin after Admiral Dönitz’s address to the nation. Hitler has fallen, Dönitz announced, fighting to his last breath for Germany. During the scherzo, electricity spontaneously rushed through the Visitor’s body and out the crown of her skull. Her flesh was singing. It said Yes, yes, yes!
Herta Zweig
Nazi Sex Club
Everyone needs a little Nazi sex in their lives, Schatzi. That’s our specialty, and we don’t lack for customers. We’re not in the guidebooks, but whoever wants to find us can do so without much bother. My sister and I have run this place since Papa died. After the Nazis shut down the Weimar sex clubs, they opened a few of their own. Papa ran the most notorious one right here in Berlin. It catered to industrialists, diplomats, celebrities, all the while spying on them and reporting their exploits to headquarters. In those days the audiences used to shout “Heil Hitler!” at the moment of climax.
After the war, Papa opened his own secret nightclub. Though he tried to shelter Jutta and me from the business, it’s kept us clothed and fed these last forty years. Now we’re the same age as Papa was when he died from his heart attack. It’s not logical, I know, but Jutta and I half-expected to go like him—at the club, chasing a troublemaker off the stage. Influenza took our mother when we were infants. You can’t miss what you never had, Schatzi. Our biggest challenge? We have many. But keeping the old Nazi uniforms intact is number one. You see, Jutta and I are sticklers for authenticity. We don’t stoop to cheap imitations, like our competitor. Ja, there’s a similar club on the other side of Berlin, but it isn’t as professional, as meticulous, as ours.
My sister and I were born in ’47. We grew up in the wake of the war’s suffocating fog. Our agenda? Bitte, we have no agenda other than defending people’s rights to their memories, their histories, their fantasies. It doesn’t matter what’s true, Schatzi, if it’s true for them. What I can assure you is that there’s no end to the longing, or to the loss. And for the record, we’re not Nazis. Smokers and drinkers, like our father, yes; stout like him, too. But not Nazis. Sure, Himmler’s daughter was a regular some years ago, but she came more for the live jazz than anything. Members of her Stille Hilfe frequented our club, too, though we did not support the group financially, or in any other way.
Our sex shows? They’re live, six nights a week.
Our actors are among the best in Germany. Many have careers in the adult film industry, here and abroad. It’s our policy not to use smoke or mirrors or distorting lights, though we’ve taken extensive measures to ensure that our nightclub is soundproof. As you might imagine, privacy is a top priority for our clients. We enhance our performances with slideshows of Nazis at the height of their powers—uniforms impeccable, medals gleaming. No photos of bombed-out Berlin here. No poverty, or desperation. No Trümmerfrauen shoveling the rubble from the streets. Our plot lines are variations on a single theme: the intoxication of power, or rather, its imbalances.
Offensive, you say? Of course, you’re entitled to your opinion, Schatzi. But what we offer is of utmost significance to our patrons. I might add that they come from around the world for our shows. The Japanese are particularly fond of our club. Like us, they were humiliated after the war. Like it or not, the Reich is a crucial part of our legacy. Instead of shunning it, Jutta and I make it accessible to those in need. For even outcasts have their needs, nicht wahr? I’d venture to say that our services have prevented a fair amount of hooliganism in Berlin, and beyond. My sister and I believe that when you can safely indulge your fantasies, you’re less likely to act on them in real life.
Ja genau, we get our share of disturbed customers but probably no more than other establishments. Our bodyguard, the ever-loyal Otto, handles the nuisances. I suppose you could say the range of reactions is predictable. At their most agitated, our patrons cry out with rekindled—or even borrowed—memories. A few of the very oldest nurture nostalgia for their once-privileged positions in the Reich, golden times when they’d lived, briefly, as gods. At our club, they get to relive those days without judgment. True, they can get rather imperious, but it’s nothing we haven’t grown accustomed to handling. You know, Schatzi, so many of our regulars were dying in the eighties that I feared we’d go out of business. But after the Wall came down, a fl
ood of East Germans picked up the slack. That’s right, the Ossis weren’t denazified like us in the West.
Since the fall of the former Soviet Union, we’ve gotten a steady stream of Russians demanding their own reenactments. For them, we offer Russian Night once a month—and the club is always packed. Our Fall of Berlin Supper Show is a big hit. We make the experience as realistic as possible by serving army rations (our chef has done his homework on that score) and playing a recording of Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony on a continuous loop, interspersed with a soundtrack of Katyusha rocket launchers. We reenact the assault on German women, too. Ach, there’s always a fuss, girls screaming, the Ivans shouting to go after this one or that. Typical of the times. War is hardly a pleasant affair, I agree, yet these evenings are festive. And the vodka flows freely.
Stimmt, Jutta and I live by ourselves. This work is time-consuming, frequently exhausting. To relax we enjoy playing Scrabble. Jutta is a fierce competitor and wins almost every game. She’s begun entering local tournaments. Nothing like a good compound noun to bring her an avalanche of points. But honestly, Schatzi, this matters a great deal more to her than it does to me. In the afternoons, we have our coffee here at Café Wintergarten. I agree, they have a lovely Erdbeerkuchen, though my favorite is their poppy seed cake. Have you tried it? And the little bookstore downstairs is quite well stocked, don’t you think?
I’m pleased we’ve met, too. You must join us for coffee again while you’re in Berlin. It would be our pleasure, truly. As our dear departed father used to say: Life is only as good as you decide it will be.
Djazia Alves
Eye Doctor
1.
In her dream, she is nameless. She has no parents, no guilt or joy or grief. Nothing she’s done seems to matter. Not her medical degree, or the hundreds of cataracts she’s replaced. Not the people she’s saved from blindness. It might be autumn, or winter, or spring. The skies reveal nothing. She drifts through the last hour of night before rising to go to the hospital. A thread of saliva, spider fine, clings to her chin. O meu país, she whispers.
Here in Berlin Page 4