My dear, let’s not enclose ourselves indoors today. The lilacs are in bloom, and the acacias nearly so. Soon my life will be over, but you’re still a young woman. Do you have a husband? No? Why, fifty-four is the prime of life! Just wait until you reach my age. We may wish to avert our eyes from decay, but it’s our natural state. After all, what is more ravaging than time? In truth, my own life feels no longer than this languorous spring day. Tell me, how is that possible?
Most mornings I stroll the grounds of the Charlottenburg Palace as I once did the Tiergarten. Its faded grandeur reminds me that everyone and everything, however sublime, must pass.
María Elena Molina
Reichstag
Dr. Molina: Do you know what the eighth wonder of the world is?
The Visitor: No, what?
Dr. Molina: Un cubano que no hable mierda.
Even for an academic specializing in modern Europe, it was a complicated story, or at least it grew more complicated than she expected. Dr. Molina was in Berlin doing research on the Blue Division of the German SS, which had been comprised largely of Spanish soldiers. While poring over archival military records, she discovered that her maternal grandfather had fought among them. The citation noted that one Alfredo Molina García of Zaragoza had been decorated by the Blue Division for singlehandedly disabling a T-34 tank near the Brandenburg Gate and killing seven Red Army soldiers of both sexes.
This was a radically different story than she’d heard growing up in Hialeah, in the heart of the Cuban exile community. Her family had toasted Abuelo Alfredo’s war heroism without fail at birthday parties, christenings, Noche Buenas. Every New Year’s Eve, when they counted the grapes, threw a bucket of water out the window, and shouted “Next Year in Havana!” her grandfather’s exploits would be loudly extolled. Dr. Molina assumed this meant that he’d fought with the Allies, but nobody bothered to correct her. She tried to imagine how a man of his convictions might’ve reacted to such a distortion of his legacy.
Dr. Molina provided the Visitor with essential historical context. In 1941, she said, General Franco called for volunteers to help the Nazis fight Soviet Bolshevism, and forty-eight thousand Spaniards signed up in two days. Like her grandfather, many of the volunteers were former Falangists, who continued to wear their telltale blue shirts. Battle-hardened Fascists, they’d fought not only in Spain but also in Italy and North Africa before signing up with the Nazis to fight the Russians. These mercenaries were credited with taking Stalingrad—and holding the city, against all odds—for the Germans, at least for a time.
As the tide of the war turned, Franco recalled his men, but almost none withdrew. A hardcore group (along with some French SS) stayed on long enough to defend the Reichstag. On the day Berlin fell to the Red Army, the Spaniards knew they were dead men and fought to the bitter end—mano a mano, stairwell to stairwell, with grenades, knives, everything they had. Dr. Molina assumed that since her grandfather had made it as far as Berlin with the remnants of the Blue Division, he, too, must’ve perished in the Reichstag.
In the basement where the worst of the fighting took place, the historian slid her hands over the old bullet holes in the pillars and walls. She translated the faded Russian graffiti for the Visitor—victory slogans and florid curses, she explained, which had made Gorbachev laugh out loud on a visit some years ago. Dr. Molina said she’s tried to picture her Abuelo Alfredo—eyes wildly bulging, bearded, stinking, determined—battling his Bolshevik enemies to the last. He was forty-two when he disappeared.
“The upheavals of history,” Dr. Molina told the Visitor, “create the most improbable of human consequences.”
Her grandfather, she continued, was survived by his wife, Raquel, and their three daughters, the youngest of whom was the historian’s mother. In 1947, when Alfredo Molina still hadn’t returned from the war, his wife agreed to marry Diego Mosqueda, an ambitious tradesman who immigrated with her and the girls to Havana. Dr. Molina’s mother became 100 percent Cuban and, at seventeen, eloped with a young revolutionary who died fighting with Fidel Castro in the Sierra Maestra. (“What is it about these women and their politically extreme soldiers?” Dr. Molina asked.) The mother subsequently fled to Miami, where she worked as a maid at a beach resort. Eventually, she met her husband—also a Molina—who, after waiting tables, fixing cockfights, and trafficking in illegal rhino horns (for their purported aphrodisiacal properties), became the air-conditioning king of Hialeah.
According to Dr. Molina, her grandmother kept a worn photograph of her first husband in her nightstand drawer. The historian showed it to the Visitor. Alfredo Molina wore civilian clothes, and his right hand rested on a holstered pistol at his hip. His eyes seemed to emerge from his temples, giving him a vaguely amphibian air. On the short side and ostentatiously muscled, he was nevertheless an attractive man. It was said he’d had to shave twice a day to control his stubble. Alfredo Molina had tried factory work, farming, and shoemaking, all unsuccessfully. In the end, only soldiering had suited him.
Dr. Molina pointed to the self-satisfaction in her grandfather’s expression, “as if he knew his missions were holy.” Her grandmother, the historian said, often tucked this same photo into her brassiere for comfort, or held it pressed to her ear for advice. Do you hear him, María Elena? Do you hear him? Abuela Raquel used to murmur, fluttering her husband’s black-and-white face close to her granddaughter’s. Sí, Abuela, she always lied.
“Cubans,” Dr. Molina said with a shrug, “frequently have trouble distinguishing the living from the dead.”
Anonymous
Tango
It’s your birthday, Hilde. I know this because everyone congratulates you. You’re popular here, yet you remain aloof. Taller than everyone but exceedingly feminine, too, with a snug red dress that flares at the knees. Your legs are long, your hips child-bearing wide. I can only imagine your scent. It’s my first time at this gathering by the Spree River. It’s a dazzling afternoon in June, the weather so perfect it banishes memories of February. Along the river, tour boats play their recorded histories. Tourists stop to watch the dancing, to take photographs with their monstrous lenses. Later, they’ll show their friends back home: Look at the queer tango dancers in Berlin!
I’m dressed as an Argentine sailor, with a striped shirt and a beret. Women tell me I have a masculine grace, predatory eyes. Today I hold my gaze for as long as it takes for you to notice me, to understand that you won’t escape. Hilde! Hilde! Your friends call your name. Your hair gleams with every turn of your head. Others flirt with me, but I ignore them. I have a reputation in certain circles as a good dancer, a better lover. Nobody goes down like I do, though my fingers are more precise than my tongue. Would you want your eye doctor performing surgery with her tongue?
Most of the city’s new architecture—dazzling, sleek—has sprung up along these riverbanks. Berlin longs to define itself by the future, yet it remains a hostage to its past. Who knows this better than us, liebe Hilde? Not long ago, we couldn’t have danced in the open like this, legs intertwining, torsos twisting in sexy ochos. Do I detect a hint of grief in your eyes? Perhaps your family migrated from Poland and suffered, as many Poles have, for the better part of three centuries. Or did they hail from the Ukraine, another eternally suffering region, where cannibalism flared during Stalin’s Great Famine? What was an orphan then but a child whose parents hadn’t eaten her?
The cigarette burns close to my lips. Soon it will be time to make my move. You’ll want to know my name. It’s Anke Weitz. My profession? Forensic pathologist. Yesterday, I removed three golf balls from the stomach of a businessman fished out of the Kreuzberg canal. His life is over, but, for me, his story has just begun. How did you learn to tango? you’ll certainly ask me. I completed my internship in Buenos Aires, I’ll say, where a distant uncle had fled after the war. It was there, liebe Hilde, that tango took hold of me.
I’m guessing you’re a librarian, a star among the city’s dreary archivists. The zipper down your back glints in the sun. You wear velvety black, t-strap heels without a single scuffmark. They’re new, and it appears you’re breaking them in. Later, I’ll remove those shoes, unsheathe the arches of your feet. Your toenails will be painted a hopeful pink. I’ll kiss them one by one, the way your Oma used to kiss them when you were a child, counting backward from ten . . . vier, drei, zwei . . . You’ll cry as you remember this. Then I’ll soothe you with soft kisses, restore the piece of your heart your first girlfriend stole, she of the pierced labia and thigh-high boots.
The imported Malbec they’re serving is acceptable, but the chicken empanadas are unforgivably bland. Most of the women here are accomplished professionals: lawyers or researchers like you, professors reexamining the past through a feminist lens. You’ll find the latest in self-pleasuring devices on their nightstands. But you won’t need yours, liebe Hilde. Tomorrow when you wake up after making love with me all night, you’ll find it difficult to concentrate. For I am the woman who will disquiet your life.
Anything can happen on this humid day along the Spree. I might lose you from one moment to the next—lose that perfect poise, the press of your hand in mine. At last you grace me with your gaze, calm and inviting as the cloudless skies. An obvious visitor to Berlin—wearing sneakers, good God—asks you to dance. Short and mousy, she’s an interloper, a curiosity seeker. She doesn’t belong here with us. Startled, you settle into her arms. The visitor moves awkwardly, fumbles with the rudiments of tango’s intricacies. You follow her as best you can.
You’re compliant, Hilde, that is evident. You resist making decisions about your life. When the wave comes in, you ride it to shore—for the heat rising from your nipples, for the eddies of pleasure between your legs. Tango is an intimate conversation.
Ich hab an dich gedacht
Als der Tango Notturno
Zwischen abend und morgen
Aus der Ferne erklang
I have a recording of Pola Negri singing this in 1937. Ah, we will listen to it together, very soon. I run my thumbs along my suspenders, light another cigarette, blow smoke rings to the trees. They linger in the branches like miniature wreaths. I want to remember this moment, register this light, the ripe river scent mingling with the sweat of so many dancing dykes. Already, I could shape lumps of clay to the precise dimensions of your knees.
They say it’s going to rain tonight, though the skies remain a two-dimensional blue. Come here. Closer. Now closer still. Listen to me: I promise to shield you from the storm, from the dust of your past, from those etchings of wolves in the volume of Grimm’s fairy tales that frightened you as a child. But first, meine liebe Hilde: May I have this dance?
Tran Thi Bich
Flowers
The program in metallurgy was supposed to last five years. There was a demand for this knowledge in Vietnam. I was nineteen and would have done anything to get out of Saigon. All I had known of life was hunger and war: hunger during the war; hunger after the war. My father, two of my brothers, and six cousins sacrificed their lives in the fight. That kind of freedom has no meaning for me.
A high school teacher recommended me for the work-training abroad. Although I was first in my class in mathematics, I was denied entrance to the university. Why? Because my mother had been branded an enemy of the State for refusing to join the Communist Party. Those coveted university seats went to the children of loyal Party members, no matter how brainless.
I asked my mother: “Since when is logic a crime?”
“It has always been a crime,” she said.
East Germany was on the other side of the world. They could have told me, You are going to Mozambique, and I would have gone just the same. My hope was to return to Vietnam a full-fledged engineer and rehabilitate my mother through my accomplishments. (“You took all my men!” Ma had screamed at Party officials. “I have nobody left to give!”) She took to growing chrysanthemums in a scratch of dirt behind our hut.
In East Berlin, I was immediately put to work in a munitions factory and received the barest of stipends and food. They took 12 percent of my meager earnings. I lived with other foreign laborers in freezing barracks. Fraternizing with Germans was forbidden. I was one of only three women at the factory. The other workers viewed me as a China doll, a girl to dominate. Püppchen, they teased me, with a mixture of curiosity and scorn.
I befriended two Cubans on the assembly line. They were homesick, like me, an affliction I could not have imagined back home in Saigon. Osvaldo and Benito—black-skinned as the Angolans we worked with—professed their love for me. But I could not have returned to Vietnam with either one. If innocent war babies were shunned, their mothers treated like dirt, what would happen to me?
In the end, my boss raped me. It happened after the annual picnic, where everyone got drunk. Herr Stüber insisted on walking me to my barracks and then pushed me onto a corner cot. With one hand he clutched my throat and forced himself on me. There were no witnesses. Three months later, my condition became evident. I was given two choices: abort the baby, or face deportation. I had come for training, I decided, and would leave fully trained—or not at all.
During my second year in Berlin, the Wall came down. I did what other stranded foreigners did: applied for asylum and sold contraband cigarettes. Between this and selling fake Hong Kong diamonds, I earned enough money to eventually buy this kiosk at the Charlottenburg S-Bahn station. I am a fixture here now, like the announcer’s voice, or the ground-floor bakery with its mediocre pumpernickel bread.
My customers know that my flowers are fresh-fresh—no next-day wiltings for them. Frau Trapp prefers my blue hydrangeas, though she always considers the pink. And Herr Willhaus buys two mixed bouquets every Friday—a bigger one for his mistress; the other for his wife. I slip a chrysanthemum in to each bouquet, to honor my mother. Today, it is Herr Willhaus’s twentieth anniversary, and so he includes an embossed card with his wife’s flowers.
“No extra charge,” I say. “Schönes Wochenende.”
“Danke!” he shouts as he climbs the stairs to meet his train.
Kaspar Seidel
Amnesia
Show us your sun, but gradually.
——Nelly Sachs
I’m told my name is Kaspar Siedel and that I was once a well-known photojournalist. Last September when a Good Samaritan extracted me from the Spree River, I still had my (soggy) identification and clutched my ruined Hasselblad. Uncharacteristically, I was wearing a fine English suit. Of course, I remember none of this. During my lengthy stay at the hospital then at the asylum on the north edge of Berlin, my personal memories proved irrecoverable. Without a history, I grew to believe that my life was pointless; in a word, expendable.
When at last I was released to the custody of my sister, Henni, and her surly teenaged daughter, I felt no more kinship to them than to their screeching parakeets. Henni, a devout Catholic, remains convinced that my amnesia is willful. Her resentment toward me is inestimable. She believes I tried to kill myself, a mortal sin she appraises as unforgiveable. Her house abuts a church cemetery interred with illustrious Berliners. Their sarcophagi are in a shambles. Big enough to hide in, they are now chipped and desecrated with graffiti and swastikas. Yet it’s here, among the dead, that I feel most at home. With my cheek pressed to a tombstone, I can ponder, undisturbed, the nature of time and our feeble attempts at marking its passage. For what can time mean to me, a man with no past?
Dear Visitor, the ghosts in Berlin aren’t confined to cemeteries. Listen. Don’t you hear their whisperings? Feel their tugs on your sleeves? Their stories lie beneath the stories that nobody wants to talk about. They haunt the present like palimpsests, shaping it with their hungers. Sometimes it takes an outsider—and I’ve become one—to see what we refuse
to acknowledge: the secrets buried by shame, effrontery, intimidation, revenge. When one no longer belongs to a tribe—or is a newcomer, a visitor, like you—everything reveals itself. The patterns we miss through familiarity. The normalized horrors of the everyday. Dear Visitor, we learn our blindness as surely as we learn how to hold a spoon, or recite our childhood prayers.
By chance, have you heard the story of the lone trombonist? No? Well, he used to haunt the no-man’s-land on the Western side of the Wall before it came down. Nobody ever saw him, but his listeners grew accustomed to his mournful, late-night serenades. When, inexplicably, he stopped playing, everyone missed the music.
In recent months I’ve been reviewing my archives, particularly the series I did on post-genocide Rwanda. I shuffle through the photos impassively, as I might a deck of cards: men without arms; women missing eyes and breasts; children broken by unspeakable loss. What words could possibly express their grief? My sister tells me that our parents died when we were teenagers, and that I have no children of my own. Photographs from before my “accident” show me heavier, my face bronzed by the sun. In one picture, I’m wearing a turban and smoking an enormous Cuban cigar. A stunning African woman, a head taller than me, stands at the edge of the frame. Above us, vultures cross-stitch the obliterating light.
My former agent, Werner Voigt, regales me with tales of our carousing on four continents. He informs me, rather gleefully, that I drank to excess (single malt scotch but I wasn’t particular) and nurtured an on-again, off-again heroin addiction. My amnesia, it seems, has banished these afflictions. Former lovers—Katje, Renata, and the very pretty Steffi—have seduced me anew, believing their kisses will reawaken me like some slumbering prince. I’ve had to invent my ardor (not at all difficult with Steffi) in order not to disappoint them. Even so, the women agree in their complaints of me—diffidence, self-absorption—which, they contend, haven’t changed one bit.
Here in Berlin Page 6