The wind ushers her back to her girlhood in Luanda, to the distant singing of market vendors: Coconuts! Cassava! Maracujá! Pé de moleques! These last are her favorite—nut caramels so sweet they make her mouth water. Lizards scamper in the leaves. Eyes are watching her from the edge of the forest. Soon she must take up her microscopes again, her colibri forceps, her Keratome blades. Without their exactitudes, her mistakes would be too great.
2.
Djazia Alves shakes off her dream and lies in bed, listening to the morning rain. Since her pregnancy she’s been dreaming profusely, as if her unborn were conjuring images for its own entertainment. Djazia considers this child, a mere four months in production. Already it’s consuming her, feeding off her flesh, scalding the convex walls of her belly. The father, an Italian retinal specialist, was a hookup at the ophthalmology conference in London. She’s told him nothing of the baby’s existence.
Djazia tries on swaggering baptismal names: Anastasia, Hélène, Bonaparte. She imagines the child absorbing their rhythmic welter. Fleetingly, she’d thought of abortion, but she is nearing middle age and another pregnancy is unlikely. Djazia herself was born of her mother’s passing romance with a Cuban soldier who’d fought in the Angolan Civil War. Ephraim Cabrera had walked to Luanda after long months in the bush. Angular and copper-colored, he asked Mãe for a drink of water while she was on schoolyard duty. She pointed to the outdoor spigot. When he drank his fill, she said, “Wait here, Soldier. I’ll help you when the day is done.”
But it was his gratitude—understated, sincere—that seduced Mãe. He wasn’t insolent like the city men she knew, strutting around like roosters with two combs. Right then, she decided to take the soldier home. Mãe invited him to bathe in her tin washtub, offered him a bowl of her leftover yam stew, coaxed him to rest under the shade of the silk cotton tree. What came next surprised them both: “I’m a virgin,” she announced as boldly as she’d exhorted her students to memorize the battles of the Napoleonic Wars.
Djazia was her father’s replica—long limbed and graceful, her lips embarrassingly full. This was the curse of her girlhood. How gladly she would’ve traded her beauty for the love she saw in other mothers’ eyes. But no matter Mãe’s prayers to a pantheon of gods, her Cuban lover never returned.
Once, Djazia saw a photograph of Havana in an old propaganda pamphlet, its curve of coastline even more breathtaking than northern Angola’s. She imagined her father taking her to Cuba, away from her brooding, violent mother, to a place she could sleep without fear. Before Djazia was eight, Mãe had tried to kill her three times: first, by stuffing an oil-soaked rag down her throat; next, by abandoning her in the jungle; lastly, with three slashes from a blunt machete. Nobody believed Djazia, not even when she showed the scars on her stomach to the parish priest.
Djazia is often struck by the ease with which others experience happiness. In the Guatemalan highlands, where she volunteered to do cataract surgery last year, an Ixil elder stared into her eyes as she examined his. “Offer your sorrows to the trees, Little Sister,” he said. “They are generous and will absorb your sorrows.”
But what are her sorrows exactly? That she’d longed for a mother’s love? Longed for it when Mãe ran off with a German iron-ore dealer and reluctantly sent for her eight months later? Munich was frightening—crowded, deafening, the cars alarmingly fast. The new language hurt her throat, as did the Germans’ rudeness, their insistence on her not belonging. To them, she was either invisible or hyper visible, nothing in-between. At school Djazia’s classmates taunted her, except for Yonca, the shy Turkish girl who was a genius at math.
When her mother’s affair with the German ended predictably—in the streets with Mãe and their belongings in shopping bags—Djazia helped her clean the shiny homes of the rich to survive. An exceptional student, Djazia left home at seventeen to attend university in Berlin. Mãe told her daughter that from then on, she was on her own. Nothing but bad luck you’ve brought me!
Djazia burned memories of her mother on an imaginary pyre, pictured the smoke rising past the tallest poplars to the vanishing clouds. Recently, she learned that her mother was on her deathbed back in Luanda. It’s irrational, Djazia knows, but she fears that her mother—blind and clawing and breathing her last—could drag her headlong toward the diminishing light.
Bitch. Mãe de merda. Let her die alone.
3.
It’s the most mundane of procedures, mechanical, really. Djazia could teach a motivated teenager to do cataract surgery in four or five months. Today, she’s operating on Frau Wildgrube. Last year, under local anesthesia with intravenous sedation to remove an anterior orbital tumor, Frau Wildgrube rambled on about the war. She’d been fourteen when the Soviets marched into Berlin. The Ivans hunted us down like animals. We disguised ourselves as boys, smeared feces in our hair . . .
Djazia makes two incisions in Frau Wildgrube’s left eye. Her steady hands are why the Germans couldn’t kick her out of training. They tried one pretext after another: her “inadequate” early education in Angola; her “proclivity for tardiness” (once arriving two minutes late to grand rounds); her “brusque” manner dealing with superiors. To penetrate the upper echelons of medicine, she learned, you had to be one of them.
After emulsifying the cataract, Djazia vacuums it out. The patient’s iris is floppy and the pupil constricted. Djazia inserts a Malyugin ring to dilate it. Without warning, Frau Wildgrube resumes talk of the war. One soldier brought me eggs and cheese to fatten me up, promised me cream and chicken if I returned with him to Leningrad. I felt guilty eating more than the others, but they didn’t have to pay with their flesh like I did. Frau Wildgrube’s legs stiffen; her jaw clenches.
“We’re nearly done. You were an excellent patient,” Djazia reassures the old woman, a former lawyer. How worn-out her voice is from everything she can’t say. She injects the new lens into the capsular bag, where it unfolds in a flash of light. Djazia’s own eyes remain her best weapons. They can stop even the most ill-mannered idiot with a glare. Frau Wildgrube flinches as Djazia administers the anti-inflammatory drops. Twice a month, she visits a nursing home on Karl-Marx-Allee to care for patients, mostly women, who are too weak to come to her office. How many, she wonders, have suffered like Frau Wildgrube?
An orderly wheels Frau Wildgrube out of the operating room. Her godson waits for her in recovery. He looks like a pensioner. Berlin is a city of pensioners, pensioners and artists. Djazia removes her surgical mask. This is her final case of the day. She steps out on the hospital balcony, rolls a cigarette, and sits wide-legged on a concrete banquette. Next week, if all goes well, she’ll remove the cataract in Frau Wildgrube’s right eye. Then the old woman will see perfectly.
Maganhildi Koertig
Little Goldfish
What are the odds of finding him in this asylum, though neither one of us is insane? And don’t think that just because I, like Oskar Matzerath, am short-statured that we’re carrying on like rabbits. Do you assume that two full-statured people would be fraternizing on the basis of vertical compatibility alone? For the record, my father was six foot three to my mother’s five feet, and they were the rare happy couple, may they rest in peace. Nine years ago they died in a car wreck on the Berliner Ring. Social services didn’t know what to do with me, a mature, two-foot-ten-inch woman with excellent knitting skills. And so they placed me here.
Everyone was eager to match me up with Herr Oskar. He’s something of a celebrity and a relative giant at four foot one—a height difference, please note, identical to that of my parents. How old is he? Why, he might be a hundred for all I know! His orderly, the taciturn Bruno, listens to Herr Oskar’s stories all day long and responds with tangled sculptures of string. I heard these very same stories but didn’t believe a word of them. “Liar!” I accused Herr Oskar more than once. This amused, rather than annoyed, him. But soon I, too, fel
l under his spell. Here, have a look. I’ve crocheted these doilies in the bright reds and whites of Herr Oskar’s battered tin drums. That’s very kind of you to say, Dear Visitor. Vielen Dank.
No, I’m not especially attracted to him, though who can deny his boyish appeal? Despite the reputedly magical qualities of his hump and Bruno’s assurances regarding Herr Oskar’s manhood, I remain hesitant. My true objection? Let me just say that Herr Oskar’s taste in women runs to the, eh, tawdry: telephone operators, slatternly housewives, nurses in their starched uniforms. Call me old-fashioned, but I require a certain courtliness in my suitors: flowers (preferably gardenias), chocolates (with hazelnuts, danke), freshwater pearls (a promising start). Frankly, Herr Okar’s indifference regarding romance leaves me cold. Only last week, he took up with a lachrymose incurable from Bavaria. Genau, that shapeless cream puff! But this is none of my concern, Dear Visitor, nor should it be of yours.
Ach, listen to the old boy now: Herr Oskar is recounting the tragic tale of how his mother fell mortally ill after gorging on her cuckolded husband’s eel soup—eels which he’d harvested from the sea with a dead horse’s head for bait. Liebe mich, every time he gets to the part where the eels slither out of the rotting horse’s eye sockets, I turn positively green. I suspect that his mother was the only woman Herr Oskar ever truly loved. Sicher. That is often the case with Lotharios. Now and then he mentions a dead sweetheart named Roswitha. Herr Oskar swears he still speaks with her ghost. Dear Visitor, what do I care if what he says is true? I insist only that it be compelling. From him I’ve learned that for the truth to blossom, lies are necessary.
After Bruno departs in the evenings, Herr Oskar and I settle in to play Skat until the wee hours. It’s a nostalgic game for him, reminding him of his modest role in the defense of the Gda´nsk post office during World War II. Lately, though, I’ve been teaching him to play Texas Hold’em. It’s what the professionals play at the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas. How my palms itch to compete with the big boys there! Surely they’d underestimate me, but that is part of the allure. I’ve thought through my plan. I can see it all so vividly, down to my alias: Little Goldfish. I’d wear wraparound sunglasses, a sequined evening gown, and bring along a gilded booster seat. Na ja, they might laugh at me at first—that is, until I wipe the floor with their arrogant grins.
Herr Oskar encourages my dreams. “Fiat lux,” he whispers to me at bedtime, gently rolling his drumsticks against his latest tin drum.
“Fiat lux,” I whisper back.
Josef von Thorn
The Captain
I like my causes lost.
——Volker Braun
Few of us wake up anticipating the day that we’ll die. And so it was for the 2,117 passengers on the maiden voyage of the SS Zufriedenheit, the most lavish of the KdF (“Strength through Joy”) cruises. These vacations at sea, subsidized by the Reich for working-class families, were designed to solidify the Volk’s allegiance to the Führer and induce in them a willingness to sacrifice everything for the Fatherland. Onboard, every last man was a Nazi.
I was the captain of this dubious pleasure ship. Until that point, I’d succeeded in avoiding protracted associations with the Party, thanks to family connections. My childhood was a privileged one: summer horseback riding on our Prussian estates; long winter nights reading by the fireside. My father, Konrad von Thorn, disapproved of the Russian authors I revered (Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov), blaming them for my rebelliousness. At nineteen, I publicly renounced the Lutheran church and took up with a married woman of lower class, mortifying my family. To avoid further scandal, Father forcibly enlisted me in the Kriegsmarine as the Second World War loomed.
On the morning a Soviet submarine torpedoed the SS Zufriedenheit, a strange dream awoke me before dawn. In my dream I was a boy at the village Konditorei, demanding to sample the hazelnut torte. The baker refused me with a curse. I stormed off, indignant at his insolence and vowing revenge. In that bleary moment, I forgot that I was captaining a ship packed with Nazi vacationers. Outside my porthole, a narrow scrap of moon peeked through the fog. I donned my dress uniform, ordinarily saved for ceremonial occasions, and toured the decks, encountering only a wraith of a woman walking three dachshunds in knitted vests.
When the torpedo hit our bow, it jolted awake every last person onboard. In an instant, I knew that our hull was irreparably damaged. It would be a matter of hours before the SS Zufriedenheit would sink into the frigid waters of the Baltic Sea. I envisioned the crucible to come: decks slippery with wailing passengers, their lives extinguished or changed irrevocably; and my name, the name of my illustrious forefathers, forever linked to this disaster. I vowed to behave honorably as captain of my ship. No matter the dire circumstances, I refused to let it sink without saving whomever I could.
As you might imagine, passengers died in great numbers, frequently trampling one another onto the lifeboats, which collapsed into the sea amid the mayhem. The Nazis alternately cursed God and beseeched him for mercy in every German dialect. Mothers clung to their children as the waves swallowed their last breaths. Above us a flock of cormorants circled soundlessly in the phosphorescent fog, as if keeping vigil.
In the last frantic hour, I married nine couples (my prerogative as ship’s captain), two of whose members were wed to others onboard. The most touching was a pair of wide-eyed youngsters in love. They looked like siblings—tenderly squat, their thick fingers interlaced. Yes, Dear Visitor, I married them, too, before they raced below deck to consummate their union. Other passengers demanded divorces, though I wasn’t licensed to perform those. I held fast to the no-divorce rule, even when one desperado threatened me with his pistol (luckily for me, it jammed).
Who survived? Some 312 passengers, the majority of them men and, disproportionately, Nazi leaders. In a crisis, the most selfish prevail. The worst of the bunch became policemen after the war. I’ve often thought it shameful that I survived alongside these thugs, who publicly cursed the “subhuman” Russians for the sinking. Several even had the gall to suggest that their own unwavering faith in God and the Party had spared them from drowning. Not a word about the savage shoving and shooting of those who got in their way. Nor of the final, pitiless silence.
To be plagued with memories is one thing, but it is quite another to relive them aloud. My dear, it’s probably best to leave history well enough alone. To remember too much unsettles one’s stability, devouring the present and what little remains of the future.
What was I thinking as I faced the end, you ask? The divinity of God? The prospect of heaven? No, Dear Visitor, none of these. Perhaps it’s indelicate of me to say, but the truth is that I thought, rapturously, of Magda Grawert’s breasts. Yes, she was the married woman with whom I’d scandalously consorted as a young man. In what I believed to be my final hour, I recalled Magda’s breasts—pale, lovely, quivering, sad. Like this heartbreaking spring day.
Dagmar Trapp
Doppelgänger
Is not your dream
to be one day invisible?
——Rainer Maria Rilke
It never happens anymore, Gott sei dank, but it lasted a good twenty years. When Eva Braun killed herself, I was just another starving twelve-year-old on the outskirts of Berlin. For a long time very few people knew who Eva was, who she’d become before dying alongside the Führer, his bunker bride of forty hours. After the war, photographs of the two of them surfaced, many taken by her—she’d started out as a photographer, you know—and Eva became a national obsession. By the fifties, we knew everything there was to know about her. As it happened, Liebe, I came to resemble her to an astonishing degree.
Wild speculations began to circulate that Eva was still alive. That she’d been spotted at the farmers’ market in Lichtenberg (my hometown). That she was working as a shop girl at KaDeWe, selling French perfume (that was me). That she’d changed
her name to Trudi Stern and was appearing onstage in Berlin’s theatrical fringe (that, too, for a brief time, was me). Eva’s shadow followed me everywhere. Though we were nearly identical physically, I cultivated other resemblances: arranging my hair like hers, practicing her Führer-adoring gaze, even adopting two Scottish terriers, her preferred pets. I walked mine daily in the Tiergarten, in part—I admit it—to hear the gaping passersby whispering: Could it be her?
There’s no worse celebrity than being mistaken for somebody else; worse still when that somebody is a celebrity by association, not by her own achievement. So, to answer your question: Yes, I became notorious, but meaninglessly so and twice removed. It’s difficult not to sound melodramatic, but I blame my likeness to Eva for ruining my youth. By the time I was thirty-three—the age my doppelgänger cracked that cyanide vial between her pretty teeth—I’d divorced three husbands and suffered multiple suitors, all of whom were wracked with distorted longing for her.
My third husband, Gerwald, was a biscuit manufacturer who used to blow kisses at me like a schoolboy. But he, like the others, was too terrified to touch me. For our wedding night he’d had a special altar built on which he instructed me to lie naked, motionless as a corpse, and strewn with rose petals. Then Gerwald lit a halo of candles around my head, muttering Hail Marys and gazing at me for hours. Fortunately, our divorce settlement left me financially comfortable enough to purchase this Charlottenburg flat. I’m right around the corner from all the lovely antique shops on Suarezstraße. You know, I’m quite susceptible to knickknacks—I can’t help myself.
Anyway, after the disaster of my last marriage, I put a stop to the Eva charade by dyeing my hair black and penciling on a facial mole. Then I promptly gained ten kilos by gorging on cured meats and hazelnuts. It was a relief, finally, to be invisible. I returned to my job selling perfume at KaDeWe, where I remained until I retired sixteen years ago. You know, I broke every sales record for my French company and was twice awarded vacations in Paris.
Here in Berlin Page 5