Here in Berlin

by Cristina Garcia

  This rooftop solarium is one of my favorite places in Berlin. Here, even the octogenarians are naked. No matter the side-sliding breasts, areolas distended by time, the blue veins marbling bellies and thighs. Who gives a damn about any of it? We’re alive, aren’t we? And, deliciously, nudity is required in the Jacuzzi. Yes, required. No offense, my dear, but why are you still wearing that silly bathing suit? You say these sunbathers wouldn’t be naked where you’re from? A pity. Ach, the young are much too anxious in their beauty to remove their clothes.

  I’m not sure why my background matters to you now. But if you insist, my dear, I came of age during the chaos and uncertainties of the Republic and the rise of National Socialism. For the record, my paternal uncle, a grandee military officer, was involved in the plot to assassinate Hitler. He was executed, of course, and our family estates in Silesia were confiscated and later subjected to Russian retaliations. Rich or poor, we were all left destitute. How could you possibly fathom the havoc and displacement near the end of the war? Hordes of starving refugees from the East arrived in Berlin every hour, crowding the railway stations, straining what was already beyond repair.

  For me personally, the worst tragedy struck during one of the last air raids. I’d gone dancing at a nightclub near Wittenbergplatz. Natürlich, the clubs were open to the bitter end. How else could we have survived? A British waltz was playing—Mrs. Miniver, I remember this exactly. A chandelier fell, as if in slow motion, onto the crowded dance floor. Imagine for a moment the shattered glass, the panic, the sirens, the spattered blood. Days later, I woke up in the hospital with a crushed foot. And just like that, the war was over. With everything in shambles, I received scarce medical attention. Most of the doctors and nurses disappeared—to where, nobody knew.

  I endured four operations over the next eighteen months, but these only exacerbated the limp that plagues me to this day. My dear, I suffered a depression so severe I considered throwing myself in the Spree River. Thousands of Germans committed suicide just after the war—survivors who’d lost loved ones in the bombings, women and girls gang-raped by Russian soldiers. I pictured river algae draping these girls’ skulls, their sallow cheeks, the perch pecking at their lifeless eyes.

  Implausibly, I reinvented myself as a modern dancer. Such was the disorder of the times and the grim mania to rebuild that even a crippled ballerina like me could succeed. Nearly overnight I became a symbol of postwar resilience, considerably more glamorous than those dreary Trümmerfrauen. Soon I was transfixing audiences throughout Europe with what one critic called my “choreography of the broken.” Against power you play the politics of weakness, no? Nobody wanted to talk about the war, or the horrors we’d suffered. All hope lay in the future. But watching me dance permitted audiences a catharsis.

  I assume you’ve seen clips of my performances? My limp was noticeable only when I wanted it to be, for dramatic effect. My costumes were a blinding white—a form of visual absolution—and I danced against a pitch-black backdrop. Very stark. Very startling. A deliberate amnesia. The music? Discordant, unpredictable, in keeping with the times. I danced my signature piece to Nielsen’s clarinet concerto—a brooding, conflictual composition that mirrored the madness of the musician for whom it was written. Offstage, I treated my crushed foot with Chinese unguents and balms and drank enough gin to sleep soundly.

  Only M., the American modernist dancer, was my equal in those days. She, too, performed to an advanced age, despite her arthritis. How we feared the ordinary like the plague! Both of us were obsessed with Greek myths and the idea of Jung’s collective unconscious. Eagerly, we interpreted our dreams, submitted to lengthy psychoanalysis, and ate several apples daily for our health. During the war, I was in contact with a farmer who secretly supplied apples to me at steep prices, defying the Ablieferungspflicht.

  In the fifties, despite our rivalry, M. and I premiered a piece at the Gran Teatro in Havana. You’ve heard about it? Die Beiden Mädchen was quite scandalous for its time. A pas de deux for women who danced, romantically, in a world without men. Ohne Frage, my dear, it was taboo-breaking. We performed at the behest of Fulgencio Batista, the Cuban dictator, with whom I had a memorable dalliance. He was quite taken with me, with the near transparency of my skin, and obsessively kissed what he called my pié de loto, my “lotus” foot.

  The island’s prima ballerina, though notorious for cold-shouldering her competitors, befriended M. and me. She invited us to her mansion at Varadero Beach, where we consorted with handsome, confident, undamaged men. Very unlike our German men, who were utterly destroyed by war—hopeless as partners, as men with power or pride (except the sick ones who carried on with their misplaced inflations). By necessity, many German women turned to our former enemies, and to each other, for comfort. After the extreme privations we suffered, who would dare judge us? Luckily for me, I had more options than most.

  A husband? My dear, what possible use could I have had for a husband?

  S. Benedikt Kohl

  Missing

  Though it was summer, Benedikt Kohl was buttoned up in wool, as if he feared disappearing through an accidental gap in his suit. What he remembered most, he said, was the sense, as a little boy, of having been born to the wrong family. The smells were wrong. The games and lullabies were wrong. For a time, even German itself felt wrong on his tongue. But so thorough was his family’s deceit that Benedikt mistrusted his own perceptions. The shadow life that haunted him, that mysteriously rose up in his dreams, had the air of a distant music, like an unseen bird in the woods. Gradually, this ghostly life receded, leaving only a persistent discontent.

  Benedikt was raised in the Bavarian Alps, in a sleepy village whose men had been swallowed up by two wars. His father, Jürgen, was the barkeep of the sole pub, a man to whom everyone owed money or a favor, neither of which he insisted they repay. Nearly blind from a Great War injury, he discerned little more than shadows. Jürgen put his son to work in the pub at a tender age, serving beer and simple snacks. Customers treated Benedikt with a formal warmth, as if he existed behind glass. He reddened when they stared at him too long.

  Benedikt’s mother, resented by the villagers, was nonetheless civilly treated as Jürgen’s wife. Martina was beautiful, much younger than Jürgen, and had won the dubious prize of becoming his bride. Two husbands by age twenty-six (she’d lost her first husband to a sniper in Czechoslovakia) was more than any local woman could’ve hoped for. But Martina behaved as if she were the unluckiest of them all. After Germany’s defeat, the villagers gossiped about her new stockings and the foreign cigarettes she smoked in a tortoiseshell holder. As for her son, Benedikt, she mostly forgot he existed.

  When Jürgen died of a brain embolism, Martina sold her husband’s pub for a pittance and moved with Benedikt to Munich, where the world was converging for the purpose of reconstruction. She found work as a secretary to an American general with whom she became amorously involved. Tangible benefits resulted from their liaison: a requisitioned apartment, ample groceries (boxed cereals, bananas, canned cream of tomato soup), and a bilingual education for Benedikt. General Douglas Pitt had grown up in Chicago and spoke reverentially of the Cubs, its accursed baseball team, which narrowly missed winning the World Series in ’45. He signed up a reluctant Benedikt for Little League as part of the Americans’ denazification campaign of German youth.

  It was at General Pitt’s army base that Benedikt heard Russian for what he believed was the first time. It stirred him in a way he couldn’t comprehend. Benedikt trailed the visiting Soviet officers to the dining hall, surprised that he understood a few of their phrases. What’s for dinner? The rations are better here. Chicken! When he asked his mother about this, she responded by slapping his face. At university, Benedikt studied Russian history and language and completed his doctorate in record time. Few German students, understandably, were studying Russian then. Benedikt’s early research focused on imp
erial Russia’s nineteenth-century expansionist policies (he wrote two well-regarded books on the subject). And, in time, he became a history professor in West Berlin.

  Before Benedikt’s mother succumbed to emphysema, she’d enclosed a sealed letter to him as part of her will. In her childish hand and Bavarian dialect, Martina informed Benedikt that he was not, in fact, her biological son but a Russian orphan. As far as she knew, he’d been kidnapped somewhere on the Eastern front. About his origins, or the fate of his biological parents, Martina knew nothing; only that his name had been Sergei.

  Benedikt reeled from the news. He embarked on extensive archival investigations and tracked down dozens of surviving orphans like himself. The resulting book, Stolen Children—a product of six years’ furious work—was recently published to critical acclaim. For many orphans like him, the truth about their early lives finally made sense. During the course of his research Benedikt met his wife, Ottelie Kappel, a watercolorist who rendered dreamy, naïf recreations of her native Ukrainian village. Raised by a Methodist family in Münster, Ottelie suspected that her real parents had been Jewish. But neither she nor Benedikt had any living relatives whom they could question.

  1

  Ilse Schlusser

  Sachsenhausen

  Most visitors come to Sachsenhausen to walk on the dead, to shake their heads and look down at us Germans. They’re foreigners, like you—artists, historians, Holocaust tourists, a few Jews who dare to show up where their relatives perished. Those who survived the camp never return. As you know, my dear, not all the prisoners were Jews. There were gypsies and homosexuals, Communists, Russian soldiers—Stalin’s own son died here—and others who ran afoul of the Reich. Even a famous Cuban transvestite known as “Silvia.”

  Stimmt. The camp did contract workers from the surrounding communities. These people grew potatoes for the prisoners’ soup, delivered supplies, extracted gold from the dead Jews’ teeth. Ordinary people, like my mother, neither brave nor evil, just trying to survive in difficult times. You mustn’t forget that Mutti’s generation grew up poor and humiliated after the Great War. Without hope, she used to say, only the worst can happen. Is it any wonder the Führer grew so popular?

  Mutti was among the first guards hired here in 1936, and one of just a few women. At the time, she had no idea what Sachsenhausen would become. To her, it was a job—and it paid a decent wage, though a portion of her earnings went to compulsory dues and the Winterhilfswerk. She was tall, with a slim figure, and soon the Nazi officers were vying for her attentions. Of her many suitors, she chose my father because he alone promised to let her continue working after they married.

  Things went well for them, at first. I was born in 1939, and my brother two years later. But as the war dragged on, my parents grew increasingly despondent. I remember my otherwise logical mother turning to an astrologer for advice and praying aloud that Goebbel’s promise of a miracle weapon might be true. To imagine not winning, she said, was far worse than battling on. For her and millions of others, it was either fight or freeze to death in Siberia.

  My dear, what kind of question is that? How could she have done things differently? You can’t escape the times you live in! As the Russians marched on Berlin, it was my father who swallowed the cyanide. Other officers shot themselves, dreading revenge. They feared that what had happened on the Eastern front would be repeated at home. The irony was that for most Nazis, the biggest punishment turned out to be trying to resume a normal life.

  After I retired—I was a hairdresser for forty years in the next town over—I decided to volunteer at Sachsenhausen. Why? It’s not complicated, really. Working here reminds me that I’m alive—of little consequence, perhaps, but alive. You know why else? It gives me a reason to get dressed up every day, unlike most retirees, who let themselves go.

  Even so, summer is an extremely fatiguing season. The weather changes abruptly; one day fine, the next schrecklich. Look how the sky is darkening right now. But nothing stops the tourists this time of year, not even torrential rain. Ja, they come to the camp in droves. Sometimes I get irritated answering their morbid questions, or untangling the headphones from their sweaty hair. My dear, if I still had my salon, I’d make a killing passing out coupons for my wash-and-cuts.

  2

  Stefan Hasenclever

  Großmutter

  Stefan is the least settled in his family. That’s why he lives with his grandmother in Lichtenberg. He’s twenty-nine but has none of the usual markers of success: no regular job (except caring for his Oma); no steady partner (he’s bisexual but leans toward men); and in every way, the opposite of his brother, a pedantic postal worker. In college, Stefan studied architecture but dropped out to travel across Tunisia. It was there he discovered his love for men. Until then Stefan had dated only dumpy hometown girls who knit him scarves for Christmas. Gemütlichkeit is no longer part of his vocabulary.

  Stefan’s love life has been trending toward high drama of late. He’s seeing two men, on and off, as well as a married woman, whose husband works in Paris for weeks at a time. Occasionally, he sleeps with a tourist for a meal. He jokes that he’s a cheap date: pea soup with bacon, bockwurst, potato salad. Basic stuff.

  Occasionally, he works weekends at an antique kimono shop in Friedrichshain. The kimonos sell for a fortune to the city’s elite, who have taken to wearing them as bathrobes. More and more, Stefan says, Berlin is becoming a haven for the graceless rich. This summer he’s been hiring himself out as an art guide and charging sixty euros for a three-hour tour of alternative galleries. Just one of these tours keeps him eating for two weeks.

  “What’s the point of working if it interferes with enjoying your life?” he tells the Visitor. “It’s freedom that makes you free, right?”

  

  Stefan’s grandmother, Wilhelmina Hasenclever, grew up in the village of Buchenwald. This summer, like every other, she works ten or more hours a day in her garden. It’s the envy of the neighborhood. She grows apple trees and flowering vines, lilies, potatoes, haricots. Her roses win prizes; her plums ripen to a midnight blue. Upper arms quivering, Wilhelmina digs in the dirt with remarkable strength, moving her stool from the white asparagus to the strawberry patch, tucking loose strands of hair beneath her canvas hat. When her peonies are in bloom, their beauty is almost unbearable.

  Stefan’s grandmother interrupts her labors only to dispatch her daily liter of beer with Herr Toller, the long-winded butcher, who’s on crutches after breaking his leg slipping on chicken fat. She and the butcher are old friends. Stefan suspects the two were sweethearts in another age, disturbing as it is for him to picture his grandmother with that bulbous-nosed dolt. Every afternoon, Herr Toller retells the same joke: how his father, a butcher before him, hung a sign in his window after the war that said: imagine raising meat rations now that we’re so short of paper! Then, like clockwork, Herr Toller laughs so hard he chokes.

  Oma’s husband was killed in France, leaving her with two boys to raise. This she did unimaginatively, as a devout Catholic—an affliction that’s become more concentrated with age. Her oldest, Stefan’s father, is the “good son”—hardworking, a family man, fearful of excess. The younger one, in contrast, wore a madman’s beard and died of a morphine overdose in his thirties. Stefan’s parents’ biggest worry is that he’ll end up like his Uncle Felix. Already, rumors about Stefan are scandalizing the neighborhood: that he’s a drug dealer, a pedophile, a cross-dresser—the latter stemming from his Marilyn Monroe costume for Mardi Gras last year. Stefan says the worst of the gossips is an old spinster, Ulla Gräf, who everyone knows is madly in love with Zhukov, the dead Russian general from WWII.

  Recently, Stefan read in a history book that Buchenwald prisoners were sometimes hung from trees by their elbows. The locals called the excruciating result the “singing forest.” In his family not a word was ever said about this
singing forest, or anything else about the war, except for the same sanctioned tales of hardship: Oma’s legendary three-day hunt for a lump of coal; her skill at scraping flour from the beds of flour trucks to make flour soup. These stories play like a flickering reel of horrors in the back of Stefan’s brain.

  His grandmother speaks very little nowadays, especially in winter, when she petrifies before the television. Her sphinx of a cat, Minka, sits beside her, slowly dying of kidney disease. On those cold lifeless days, Stefan wonders if Oma dreams of spring, of her lily bulbs detonating deep in the earth.

  Yesterday, as she weeded her garden, she made Stefan promise that when her time came he would bury her in the garden under her peonies. Then she leaned toward him conspiratorially and said: “You’re the only one in our entire bourgeois family who I can trust.”

  3

  Yanko Petulenegro

  Gypsy

  Come summer, I live in the parks of Berlin. I’m no longer young but not at death’s door either. I’ve noticed you on your morning walks around the Lietzensee, Little Sister. I don’t suppose you smoke, eh? You’re kind to leave me coffee on the park bench—black, the way I like it. Ah, well. I always say people need time to trust and be trusted, like animals. When I was a boy, I took care of a lot of animals: camels, horses, doves (I trained them to ride toy bicycles), and a crazy ostrich named Lala who was more trouble than the rest.

  Yes, we were a traveling circus. My mother, Vioka, told fortunes while my father and sisters—Analetta, Florica, and Mala—ran the show with my uncles and cousins. The spring before the Germans came, our Lala buried her head in a hole for a fortnight and refused to show her face. Father developed itchy patches on his chest that wouldn’t heal. Mama predicted that only I would survive the trouble through hard work and silence. Silence will save you, she told me with tears in her eyes.