Here in Berlin

by Cristina Garcia

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  How do I spend my days? With my modest disabilities pension, I’m free to simply wander Berlin. The city is both strange and vaguely familiar to me. Perhaps I feel as you might—a foreigner struggling to make sense of a new metropolis. The maps I carry are only of superficial use, wouldn’t you agree? For what can we discern of any place by its surfaces? Berlin’s modern architecture is striking, forward-looking, intent on expunging its past. Have you been to the German Historical Museum, by any chance? Perhaps you are aware then that the city is essentially built on a marsh? Ja, richtig. Every sizable building project here requires professional divers to secure its foundations. You know what soothes me sometimes? Thinking: West Berlin no longer exists, so why should I?

  What else might I offer you? Allow me to think for a moment. Nothing concretely useful, I’m afraid. Perhaps only this: that the greatest danger in life is certainty. Yes, I do believe that. Our last redoubt in the world is wonder. Wonder and unknowing. Now and then a random detail will stir me to faint recognitions: a row of dead beetles in the grass; the chapped knees of some dowager on the S-Bahn. Tantalizing signs reminding me that infinity billows out from every moment. That’s when I lean in, sniff the air, cock my ears like a foxhound—and listen.

  Theo Hass

  Antiques

  Time is our enemy, Dear Visitor, yours and mine; even now, as I try to hold your attention for our first few minutes together. Who cares for real stories nowadays? Titillation? Yes. Melodrama? Natürlich. But a lifetime’s regrets? Who wants to hear about that?

  My biological mother was Cuban, but I have no idea whether she’s dead or alive. I learned of her existence at my father’s funeral, which also happened to be my twentieth birthday. A colleague of his, a medievalist by the name of Helmut Popp, blurted the truth before passing out from an excess of schnapps. Er hatte einen Affen, everyone said. When I shook him awake an hour later, Popp denied what he’d said and begged me not to trouble him again.

  I harangued my poor mother—the one who raised me, that is—until she revealed everything that Father had made her swear to keep secret. That my birth mother was from Havana. That she’d come to East Berlin in the sixties to study agricultural engineering. That she’d taken a poetry seminar with my father and become pregnant by him. That one cold March night, when the snowdrops were in bloom, Mayda Acevedo surrendered her child (me) to her professor’s wife and left Berlin without a trace.

  Mutti cried as she told me the story. Her biggest regret was not my father’s infidelity—after all, it had produced me, the love of her life—but that she’d been unable to conceive. For her, this was a tragedy, as she’d been raised with the mantra of Kinder, Küche, und Kirche, auch genannt die drei K. She, too, had been my father’s student, a bright star who’d dropped out of college to become his third wife. In an ironic twist of fate, I grew to look like her—fair and big-boned, with the same pale, untidy mouth.

  Ah, Dear Visitor, I’m overwhelming you with the disorders of too much history. May I bring you some tea and ginger cake? Nichts zu danken. By now, you must be wondering: Well, then, who are you, Theo Hass? Nobody special, I assure you. Middle-aged, as you can see. An amateur violist. I’d even venture to say something of a flâneur. There’s nothing I love more than strolling the streets of this city. For me, the highlight of these summer weeks are the weekly lunchtime concerts at the Philharmonic. Yes, we must go together sometime.

  Just yesterday, a delightful quartet—bandoneón, violin, piano, and a sublime bass clarinet—played modern tangos. In the north end of the foyer, a striking couple danced to the music, precisely yet with abandon. The woman was statuesque, with lithe, expressive legs. Her partner, upon closer inspection, was also a woman, dressed as an Argentine sailor. The two were mesmerizing, hallucinatory, more than equal to the music.

  By all means, Dear Visitor, feel free to look around my shop. As you can see, I trade in silverware and curios from the Americas. War and revolution have offered me unparalleled commercial opportunities. Why deny it? I’ve made my living from others’ misfortunes, collected the plunder of the dispossessed. In Cuba, as you know, everything is for sale: women, antiques, even the cultural “authenticity” missing in capitalist societies, our own displaced nostalgias. In the nineties, I imported vintage American automobiles from Havana—fantastic, big-finned Cadillacs, Plymouths, and an unforgettable ’53 Studebaker Starlight Coupe that I sold for a fortune to a captain of industry in Düsseldorf. Na ja, that bit of business enabled me to buy this little shop on Suarezstraße.

  You’ve been to Havana, of course? Then you already know that it’s a city of braggarts and parasites, of exquisite illusions. It reflects back whatever a stranger needs. My first visit “home” was the most difficult. Suffice it to say that I spent a long, scorching summer not finding my mother. In the end, Cuban police had to escort me to the Miramar Psychiatric Hospital. Dear Visitor, nothing derails a man faster than unrequited love. For the whole month of September, I wandered the hospital’s lavishly unkempt grounds, napped under its ceiba tree, and watched streams of cranes fly overhead. In the evenings, a schizophrenic hairdresser named Abelardo wrapped himself in bed sheets and sang boleros.

  It was hurricane season, and I dreamt more than at any time in my life. One dream still replays like a broken record, un disco rayado—isn’t that how you say it in Spanish? In the dream, I’m naked and have a young boy’s body. I stand alone in a desolate field, digging a hole with a tarnished silver spade. My back is a sundial, registering the day’s hot progress. The hole grows deep and its walls tower over me. When I’m done digging, I lie down on the cool dirt, grateful to rest. My muscles twitch with exhaustion, but the earth holds me in place, humming and soothing. It’s always at that very moment that I wake up.

  I’ve returned to Havana more than a dozen times since, praying like an altar boy for the miracle of my mother’s appearance behind a gate, or sitting majestically on the crumbling seawall of the malecón. Over the years, a fair number of Cuban women, no doubt seeking financial gain, have claimed to be Mayda Acevedo. But not a single one ever convinced me that she’d studied in Berlin, or possessed what I imagined to be my mother’s cool intelligence.

  It’s difficult to find bargains in Havana anymore. The great fire sale of the nineties is over. Yet somehow amid all this salvaged detritus—that silver serving spoon, these lorgnettes, those highball glasses from a long-forgotten party—I feel just a little closer to my mother.

  The Visitor

  By June, most of Berlin’s lilac blossoms were dead, but the bees still sought entry, secret passages to the sweet. The Visitor took to frequenting cemeteries, reading tombstones for portents, imagining the uplifted arms of the dead. Time here was sleepy, geological. She heard dry flutterings in the trees, lone syllables, whisperings she couldn’t decipher. At times it seemed to her that the dead were more conversational than the living. Was she meant to escort a few of them to the page?

  Berlin had risen from its own devastation, from Jahr Null—Year Zero—through feverish productivity and forgetting. Every day the Visitor walked by the end of worlds, stopping to read the Stolpersteine embedded in the city’s sidewalks.

  When she wasn’t in cemeteries, she often went to museums and art exhibits. The Visitor studied Paul Klee’s works at the Berggruen. His was a peculiar genius of intricacy and color and erratic, anarchic patterns, each painting a small exodus. The more Klee’s scleroderma spread, strangling his heart and lungs, the more radiance he produced. Thankfully, the disease spared his hands. Decades later, his last drawings would inspire the tattoo that graced the hollow between her own daughter’s shoulder blades.

  At the Hamburger Bahnhof, Martin Kippenberger was pulling the wool over everyone’s eyes with his posthumous exhibit. Amid the careful nothingness, a museum guard sang in her best church voice: “This is propaganda . . . you know, you know . .
.” In another wing of the museum, the Visitor stumbled upon the work of Swedish painter Hilma af Klint, who’d created lush, mystical abstracts in the early 1900s, years before abstraction officially “began,” years before its male practitioners were hailed as geniuses.

  On the museum’s café patio, a breeze ruffled the canal waters. Sparrows plucked crumbs from the Visitor’s Linzer torte. A standard poodle pranced across the bridge. The summer heat was settling on the city like a damp cloth. Buildings looked glazed, huge lozenges in the sun. The Visitor felt increasingly scattered, as if she were losing parts of herself to others’ memories. Who would collect all her pieces and reassemble her again? Feed her fears their daily slab of meat? The more the Visitor believed she understood, the less she noticed. Better to simply keep seeing, to hold her gaze. With any luck, understanding might come later.

  The Visitor struggled with balancing what she found with what eluded her. On fortuitous days, stories dropped like gifts out of the windless skies, typically prompted by loneliness, or happenstance. Other stories—the forgotten, interstitial ones she’d come to Berlin to collect—she coaxed from the grist of history. Why was apocalypse so compelling? What did war keep offering that ensured its survival? At an old-age home off Karl-Marx-Allee, the Visitor spoke for hours with a desiccated ballerina who’d survived the fall of Berlin and later consorted with a Cuban dictator. A brilliantly plumed bird escaped the dancer’s mouth, flightless for decades, eyes darting and desperate, only to die at her feet.

  Berlin was altering the Visitor, carving out space for silence, hallucinations, distortions. Sundays were her hardest days. The families were out, picnicking in the parks, strolling down the fine avenues or along the Spree River. The Visitor was reminded of her own childhood, where none of that ever happened. To her mother, she was primarily free labor for the family restaurant. Even after the Visitor became a mother herself, Sunday was the day her own daughter went off with her father to the suburbs of Los Angeles for sushi and TV. If she could, she’d turn every Sunday to a Monday.

  Self-pity was a costly distraction, and the Visitor tried to avoid it at all costs. Better to keep moving, to splash in the pool with the tough old Frauen in her water aerobics class. She was growing strong from all the walking and exercise. In fact, she was barely recognizable to herself—leaner and harder, inside and out. Who was that in the mirror? Her body wasn’t done, not yet.

  Dieter Fuchs

  Preachers

  Nobody knows my identity here. And if by some chance they learned it, they’d probably soon forget it. This nursing home is as obsolete as Karl-Marx-Allee over there—once the pride of East Berlin. My secret has little to do with East or West, and it predates my current misery by many decades. It’s not my secret alone but one from the Reich’s early years.

  Tomorrow I turn one hundred. Ja, you heard that correctly. I was born in 1913 and have lived my whole life right here in Berlin. Except, of course, for those three summer months of 1935. That’s when I went on special assignment to the United States on a false visa arranged by the Ministry of Propaganda. My mission? To study the oratorical styles of black preachers in the South. Precisely, Dear Visitor. Even in Germany they were famous as masters of rhetoric, men who spellbound audiences with their electric “preachifying.”

  How did I come by the job? Quite by accident, I assure you. As a linguistic anthropologist working on my dissertation (I’m fluent in seven languages, including Russian, Polish, and Old Norse), I got tapped on the shoulder by one of my professors, a committed Nazi. He’d recommended me to the authorities, thinking he was doing me a favor. Naturally, I was flattered—young and stupid, I would say now—but it did lead me to the greatest adventure of my life.

  After the briefest of preparations, I was sent off to the segregated South. The Great Depression was still entrenched in rural America, the people thin and in rags, their shacks barely weathering the mildest of rains. But the land was like none I’d ever seen, lush with strange hanging mosses and immense trees. And the dusk was alive with fireflies. I drove around in an old Nash roadster procured by my German contacts and presented myself as a student of the “Negro vernacular.”

  It was unprecedented for a white foreigner like me to take an interest in black churches, sermons, and ceremonies. It helped that my accent was pronounced, my eyeglasses thick, and that I gave away box after box of Butterplätzchen. I was a novelty at church socials and pie contests, for which I was recruited as an “impartial” judge. At one small-town bake-off, I awarded the top prize to a novice’s sweet potato pie, to the vehement disgruntlement of the veterans.

  That hot magical summer, I flattered the velvety-voiced men of the cloth and listened to their tales of Jesus bargaining for their souls. I accompanied them as they presided over baptisms, funerals, family disputes, and weddings, and I withstood a heat so fierce it often felt three-dimensional. I asked questions, took copious notes in my leather binder, and promised to profile the preachers in my “forthcoming book,” which, needless to say, never materialized. To my surprise, most of them cooperated fully and permitted me to film and record them, on and off their pulpits.

  “Tell it till your throat’s on fire!” That’s how the Reverend “Buddy” Fisk described his oratorical style. His hair, combed with brilliantine, smelled of coconuts, and he chewed mint leaves to mask his moonshine breath. Inside his clapboard Baptist church, his Georgia congregation urged him on: “Preach it, preacher, preach it!” Reverend Fisk was as passionate an orator as I’d ever heard—furioso, unfailingly inspiring. At times he pounded a fist into his palm, calling down the Lord to the modest assembly, or lowered his voice to a whisper so faint that the whole congregation had to lean forward to catch his words.

  During one stifling Sunday Mass, when even the flies were barely stirring, I watched as a handsome woman—in a seersucker suit, she might’ve easily been mistaken for a man—collapsed in the aisle in her egg-yolk-colored dress and matching hat, shouting, “Praise be to God, I’ve found the Lord! O Jesus, sweet Jesus, one mo’ sinner is acomin’ home!” All the while, the choir sang:

  If you cannot preach like Peter, if you cannot pray like Paul,

  You can tell the love of Jesus and say, He died for all.

  The Carolinas, north and south, were populated with an impressive number of fiery preachers. One of the best, Reverend Filmore P. Gaines of Chester County, cultivated—and freely distributed—what were reputed to be the hottest hot peppers in the known world, much hotter than the Scotch bonnets of Jamaica. His parishioners credited his blistering homilies to these same peppers, and they bravely fried them in pork fat, or chopped them into their grits. One sampling had me facedown in the holy water. How his parishioners loved to boast: “Ain’t nothin’ hotter than the word of our Lord comin’ out the mouth of Reverend Gaines.”

  Farther west in Alabama, I sweated through the endless sermons of another legendary preacher, the Reverend Cato Singleton, much beloved by his flock for his exceptional ability to exorcise demons, be the afflicted man or beast. He was credited with banishing Satan from the high school biology teacher and an unruly donkey on the very same Good Friday. Despite the Reverend’s gifts, garden-variety sinners blamed their moral turpitude on his lukewarm brimstone.

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  Upon my return to Berlin that autumn, I submitted my research to the Nazi authorities. Quickly enough, I saw how the Führer and his inner circle incorporated the preachers’ techniques into their own speeches to further hypnotize the German people. The rhetorical talents of decent religious men—their cadences and use of tremolo, their grand gesticulations, the call-and-response with their devoted flocks—were harnessed for the Reich’s machinery. If only I could claim to have behaved courageously, or engaged in acts of sabotage, or attempted to withdraw my research from the Nazis. Instead I faded back into the woodwork of academia, kept to safe subjects (problems of linguistic relativit
y), and managed to survive the war by translating intercepted military communiqués from the Reich’s many enemies (my extreme myopia saved me from conscription).

  Years later when I met your Cuban writer friend, I knew the time had come to share my story. It was a relief to unburden myself. Dear A. kept me alive during the worst of the eighties, when the Eastern bloc went bankrupt. In his stylishly flared trousers and trench coat, he smuggled in an occasional bottle of rum, and he sustained me body and spirit. Once, he brought me a beautiful pair of oxfords from a Ku’damm shop. Though they pinched his feet, A. wore the shoes to East Berlin and exchanged them for my beat-up Polish loafers. Regretfully, I forced myself to scuff up the oxfords to avoid unwanted attention.

  When will you be seeing A. again, Dear Visitor? I’m expecting him back in Berlin later this summer. Yes, with his wife. A charming woman, do you know her? Do please tell A. that I prefer dark chocolate to Havana Club these days. Ach, but I know him well enough. He’ll insist that we go out for one last drink, always one last drink. And you know what I’ll tell him? Mañana, amigo, mañana.

  Frida Krechel

  Breeder of Gods

  Thank you for the tulips, my dear. So, we finally meet face-to-face. Won’t you sit down? The audio book you sent inspired me, as I expect you knew it would. My eye doctor—she’s an African, you know—says my glaucoma has grown worse. There’s not much I can do except use these drops to lower the pressure. Here, I’ve made us some tea. Would you care for a slice of plum tart? I bought it fresh from the bakery downstairs. It’s their specialty. Bitte, forgive my lack of ceremony, but if I don’t begin right away, I’ll lose my courage.