I was deep in the forest collecting mandrakes for one of Mama’s love potions when the Nazis found our camp. When I returned, everyone was gone, disappeared like stones dropped in a river. Little Sister, the Nazis hunted down gypsies the way they hunted down Jews. What did I do? Climbed a tree and stayed there until dawn, my stomach cramping with grief. That summer I survived on berries and the birds I felled with my slingshot. When the trees dropped their leaves, I had no place to hide and nothing more to eat. A farmer whose barn I snuck in betrayed me.
At Terezin, I worked in the bone-crushing mill and then in the rat-control service. The Nazis knew my worth in work, if nothing else. They flew into rages over numbers, the quotas to be filled—this many kilos of bones, that many thousands of exterminated rats, though to them rats and Jews were one and the same. Little Sister, no amount of gold could’ve saved the Jews in Terezin. Who you were before meant nothing. Let me ask you something: Have you ever seen a man beaten to death? No? Ah, then you’re lucky, very lucky indeed.
After the war, everything got a lot worse before it got better. One world was ending and the other hadn’t yet begun. Everyone was starving. People camped out where they could, their worldly possessions on their backs or in broken-down carts. Not so different from gypsies.
Dema Devla so me mangav. Chi mangav me barvalimo
Chi mangav me barvalimo. De man Devla zor, sastyipo . . .
My voice isn’t what it used to be, Little Sister. And where is that beautiful redheaded accordionist to accompany me? Have you seen her at the Turkish market? Call me an orphan, if you will, but aren’t we all orphans? For where do we exist but on the margins of history, where real lives are lived? Take a look around us. Summer is short but inviting here—and the parks welcome a wandering soul like me. You arrived in the spring, you say? How can you appreciate the spring without living through winter?
You’re here by yourself then? That’s how you like it, eh? Simple, I know. To own anything is a burden. You’re a scholar, you say? A storyteller? This doesn’t surprise me. Your language gives you away—crooked as my bad shoulder. No, it’s not so much your accent but the number of words you use. Three for every one you need. The fewer words the better, I say.
Run away with me.
Go to hell.
Pray for me.
I love you.
What more do you need? Poetry? Poetry is in the living, Little Sister, in the dreaming. Nobody in the world can teach you that.
The Visitor
The train shuddered through the gritty north of Berlin before giving way to horse farms and pasturelands, church steeples and peaked roofs. Mute and immaculate—this was the German countryside. An elderly woman entered the last compartment, her face frozen on startled. Her beige shoes perfectly matched her purse. Ordinarily, the Visitor would’ve struck up a conversation, but today she didn’t ask the woman a damn thing. She’d grown weary of history, of words.
At Sachsenhausen the Visitor learned that in the camp brothel, SS officers “tried out” the girls before allowing others use of them; that under the pretense of medical examinations, thousands of prisoners were shot with a bullet to the base of their skulls. By the killing trench, the Visitor felt short of breath. She’d read how most of Berlin’s trees were cut down during the war. So much fine wood consumed by cooking stoves, or for winter warmth, or to fuel the specially rigged wood-burning cars. At the camps, guards burned corpses on train-rail grills. Women’s fatty bodies burned best and so they were stacked at the base of the pyres. On cold nights the guards warmed themselves by the flames, and drank.
In the barracks, darkness gathered in the secret languages of absence. Faces etched in smoke. Facts and counterfeit truths. There was no end to the aftermath of war. “Succor,” the Visitor heard whispered at the infirmary, where Nazi doctors had conducted experiments on prisoners. People asked her: “Why are you here? What do you want?” Her reasons had changed. Now it was war that kept her here; also Eros and pathos, the impossibility of looking away. A different mission.
The Visitor stopped at a Catholic church on her way back to the train station. The altar gave off a wan light. In a spotless alcove, a saint she didn’t recognize was missing a wing. She lit a candle but couldn’t remember a single prayer. As a child she’d gone to Catholic school and Mass, and she missed its rituals. Who besides her daughter would miss her when she was gone? Outside a brisk wind blew. Time, she thought, was her mother in hot pants and too-beige pantyhose trying to win back her wayward husband. The mother had succeeded and failed. Her husband stayed, but he continued cheating on her for the next forty years.
Recently, the Visitor heard that her mother had found evidence of yet another affair. The mother drove to the twenty-four-hour chapel on Key Biscayne and prayed to La Virgencita de la Caridad del Cobre, to whom she was devoted, to keep her from planting a fancy German cleaver in her husband’s back. It didn’t work. She returned home after midnight and approached him from behind (he spent most of his waking hours online). With a swift movement, she struck her husband cleanly between the shoulder blades. This stunned, but didn’t kill, him. Graciously, he didn’t press charges.
On the return trip to Berlin, the Visitor recited a partial list of the cities she’d visited: La Paz, Saigon, San Salvador, Kyoto, St. Petersburg, Mérida, Barcelona, Stockholm, Tokyo, Palermo, Manaus, Hue, Guatemala City, Hong Kong, Santiago, Jaipur, Port-au-Prince, Buenos Aires, Oaxaca, Montevideo, Belgrade, Lima, Naples, Havana, Quito, New Delhi, Belém . . . In all these cities, she’d lost herself, disappeared for a time, resurfaced as a new version of herself.
That night, the Visitor dreamt of a procession of old women in a church, her mother among them. They wore loose white gowns and sang in atonal voices. The mother ambushed her in the basement. It was only the two of them in a stark white corridor. An elevator appeared in the wall and the daughter urgently pressed the call button. The mother tried to speak, but the daughter drowned her out, shouting: “The gloaming! The gloaming!” The mother receded down the corridor, as if pulled by a powerful force.
Dreams, the Visitor thought upon waking, were the mind’s invisible broom.
Volkhard W.
Mirror
Without the mirror, he doesn’t exist. He’s hostage to it, spends hours gazing at himself in the faintly speckled glass, combing what’s left of his hair. The baroque oval frame encircles his face, sagging with pockets of fat and displaced flesh. He’s much older than he could’ve ever imagined becoming. As a young man, he’d denied himself nothing—women, booze, drugs—without ill effect. Now he resembles everyone else in this rundown nursing home, with their cataracts and dental plates, with their hearing aids clasped to their ears like clams.
In the 1940s, his was among the most recognizable faces of the Third Reich. Every inch the Aryan ideal, Volkhard W. played soldiers in propaganda films, paid visits to infantrymen in France and on the Eastern front (though he didn’t do any fighting himself), consoled wounded civilians in hospitals. Nothing so hypnotized him as a movie camera pointed in his direction, a glimpse of his miniature face in its oversized lens. In Eastward Wind, his most celebrated role, he played a Great War veteran and double amputee who finds true love with a young widow in Berlin.
During the spring of 1945, an heiress named Kikka von Siewert sequestered Volkhard W. in her villa in Reinickendorf. Each time a squadron of Allied bombers droned overhead, the two scurried down to the cellar, where the hag insisted that the actor make love to her for the duration of the attack. To die, if we must, she said, but in the throes of ecstasy.
Once, Volkhard W. got caught in the capital during an air raid and fled to the Zoo Station shelter with thousands of others. Above ground, escaped chimpanzees screeched in the trees. Not a single person recognized Volkhard W. in the dark. The graffiti on the station walls told the truth: Stalin is
winning! Outside, the antiaircraft guns thundered, and the devouring winds grew dangerous with shrapnel. When he emerged from the shelter, body parts were strewn everywhere, shriveled by fire. He forced himself to ignore the victims trapped under the smoldering debris.
After the war, the actor found work as an arsonist for failing businessmen. When asked his profession, Volkhard W. cheerfully answered: Fireworks! It seemed senseless to him that any citizen would deliberately destroy his property amid the devastation. As a sideline, Volkhard W. sang at funerals. His passable baritone and still-handsome face inspired the bereaved. Their most common requests: Brahms’s German Requiem: Wie lieblich sind deine Wohnungen and Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, which the actor sang with such emotion that it moistened the eyes of even the most war-hardened listeners. Occasionally, at private parties and for an extra fee, he performed the Horst Wessel Song.
Volkhard W. married four times, but the unions didn’t last. By his account, his wives—Heidi, Aida, Rutilia, and Warda—simply talked too damn much. One had been lovelier than the next, but after the honeymoons, not a single one ever shut up. The more they yapped, the less desire he felt. To cope, the actor drank and gambled. And the more he drank and gambled, the louder he regretted not having fled to Hollywood when he could have. His most enjoyable days were spent as a member of the Heinrich Böll Motorcycle Club, a group of aging performance artists who took summer road trips around Germany.
After the collapse of his fourth marriage, Volkhard W. moved by himself to a ground-floor flat on Bismarckstraße. It was perfect for storing the mirrors he began amassing in the flea markets of Berlin. At its peak, his collection numbered over three hundred. Its highlights included a rare nineteenth-century French neoclassical wall mirror and a blood-red Murano in mint condition that he’d bought for a song. Most importantly, Volkhard W. was visible to himself day and night—and from every angle.
When ill health forced his move to the nursing home on Karl-Marx-Allee, only the baroque mirror with speckled glass went with him. He mourned the loss of his other mirrors and slept poorly without them. Over time, glaucoma deteriorated his vision until he could see only a tight cameo of his face. His sole friend at the nursing home, an unrepentant Nazi named Jochen Fick, fondly remembered Volkhard W.’s films, though he didn’t recognize the actor himself.
On a recent overcast morning, Volkhard W. reached for his comb and gazed into the baroque mirror with speckled glass. What looked back were not his familiar, slackening features or his red-rimmed eyelids, but a much earlier version of himself. As he watched, transfixed, the image gradually metamorphosed into a soundless, newsreel loop of his virile youth.
Ricardo Soto
Geology
1.
Ricardo Soto propped one arm on his pillow and blinked into the darkness. It wasn’t yet time to wake up, but there was no point in going back to sleep. He sat up and drank the tepid water on his nightstand. Slowly, he pushed himself out of bed and snapped open the shade. Across the courtyard was the former bedroom of Frau Althoff, his deceased neighbor, who’d performed fan dances for him in the eighties. “Buenos días, Mayi, buenos días, Paquito,” Dr. Soto cooed as he removed the frayed towel from the lovebirds’ cage.
His breakfast consisted of café con leche, cholesterol medicine, blood-pressure pills, and too many vitamins to keep straight. Dr. Soto pricked his finger to measure his blood sugar. For years, he’d smoked moderately, and though he gave it up twenty years ago—excepting an infrequent cigar—he was recently diagnosed with a choroidal melanoma. His ophthalmologist, Dr. Alves, told him that the cancer was random, that smoking had nothing to do with it. But in his experience, every pleasure in life was paid with commensurate grief.
Dr. Soto had grown up in Oriente, the easternmost province of Cuba, a place of serene mountains if not serene anything else. For all its tumultuous provincial history, the island was far from the Ring of Fire, a horseshoe-shaped string of volcanoes edging the Pacific basin. Cuba meant little to him anymore. Dr. Soto had left the island in 1963 to pursue his doctorate in East Germany and never returned, not even for the death of his father, whom he’d respected more than he’d loved.
Nearly every surface of Dr. Soto’s apartment was cluttered with pyroclastic debris. In his day, he’d been a respected volcanologist. Most of what was known about ground deformation resulted directly from his research at Gunung Merapi in Indonesia. A faded photograph on the mantelpiece showed him on the Sakurajima volcano with his mentors, Katia and Maurice Krafft, who perished on Mount Unzen in 1991. Next to them was a picture of Dr. Soto’s daughter, Camille, receiving her nursing school diploma in Berlin. Of her mother, Valentina Becker, or their years in Chile, there was no trace—only the black insistence of her absence.
2.
Those disastrous months after the fall of President Allende, the rise of General Pinochet—an admirer of Hitler—produced in Chile a surfeit of hysteria, paranoia, and blood-freezing fear. Valentina, who wasn’t Dr. Soto’s wife nor, he suspected, ever would be, was two months pregnant at the time. As dedicated as Valentina had been to her oceanographic work, she proved the opposite in love. It was Dr. Soto who’d been madly in love with her, not the other way around.
Valentina had grown up in a remote Chilean village, in the shadow of the Puyehue volcano, where days lasted an eternity and the araucaria pines howled in the winds. Her parents, as teenagers in the 1940s, had escaped Colonia Dignidad, a depraved enclave of German expatriates, where boys were sexually enslaved to its Nazi-sympathizing founder. Eventually, the colony became part of a notorious archipelago of torture centers that dotted the Chilean countryside during Pinochet’s long reign.
Dr. Soto met Valentina at the University of Santiago, where she was in her second year of studies. Although the oceanography and geology departments were in the same building, Dr. Soto first spotted Valentina dancing with a folkloric troupe on a mottled quadrangle of grass. In those days, it wasn’t unusual for professors to consort with their students. Everything happened so fast: her pregnancy, the birth of Camille, their brief lives together. Yet the more Dr. Soto grappled with his memories, the more unfinished their story became.
On February 2, 1972, Valentina was abducted from a bus stop in Santiago. Witnesses recalled seeing nothing out of the ordinary. (Chileans had much in common with the see-nothing Germans of World War II.) Dr. Soto often wondered what Valentina had done to get arrested, or if her abduction was simply an unfortunate collision of destiny and chance. Months later, he learned that Valentina had been wearing green, elbow-length gloves and smoking an American cigarette. Apparently, she’d come from her new lover’s studio—a mediocre artist who went on to paint official portraits of Pinochet and his generals.
What did Dr. Soto have to report in the forty-one years since? Monotonous seasons as a geology professor (now emeritus) in Berlin; an amateur’s devotion to birds; the intermittent joys of being father to their daughter. Camille looked enough like her mother to startle him each time they met at “their” Chinese restaurant on Kantstraße for the exact same meal: spicy shrimp and cashews for her; wonton soup and moo shu pork for him.
Dr. Soto never married—much too gloomy, his former lovers complained—though he once fell for a crippled German ballerina who’d danced in Havana in the fifties. As usual, their affair was brief and ended badly. His own daughter was childless, with two failed marriages behind her. Creatures of habit, he and Camille lived separately in their solitudes, their birdsong (they kept parrots, lovebirds, and African parakeets between them), and their inability to sustain a long-term interest in others. The two were never so compatible as when they were melancholic together. It was as if Valentina’s absence continued to exert on them an unrelenting, placental hold. This was their curse, their morbid loyalty to her.
3.
Valentina was neither spontaneous nor extravagant, yet people often remembered her
as such. In fact, she’d meted out her energies precisely. If, for example, she decided that baby Camille was crying for no discernible reason, Valentina ignored her without a shred of guilt. She had many fine qualities, but a maternal instinct wasn’t one of them. It was Dr. Soto who’d fed Camille, changed her diapers, entertained her with silly faces and songs. And, at Valentina’s insistence, he agreed to have another child with her.
“The biological imperative,” Dr. Soto told the Visitor, “is stronger than any sensible man’s ability to evade it.”
When Valentina disappeared, Chileans of her generation had enjoyed the luxury of democracy—a flawed democracy, but democracy nonetheless. When the Revolution had swept to power in Cuba, the euphoria was short-lived. Thugs and innocents alike were dragged to the firing squads without trials or due process. Dr. Soto’s father’s leather factory was confiscated, and he was forced to attend the ceremony transferring cueros de soto to the state. What most galled the elder Soto were the shoddy belts and handbags produced under the new “management.” On the day he whitewashed his name off the factory sign, he was put under house arrest.
As a Cuban national, Dr. Soto was at a disadvantage working in Pinochet’s Chile. Castro was blamed for everything in those days: exporting Communism, brainwashing students, the collapse of Chile’s faltering economy. At one point, Dr. Soto was briefly jailed for attacking a precinct captain who’d called Valentina a whore. Dr. Soto assumed that she’d been murdered, but how could he prove it? Nobody could prove anything in those days and live to tell about it. Seven months after her abduction, Dr. Soto fled with their daughter to East Berlin. He accepted a teaching position at Humboldt University, his alma mater.
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