You are sympathetic, Kind Visitor, I can see that. You’re not apt to judge me, as my countrymen might. It wasn’t your war, after all. Why don’t you join me at Karlshorst on Tuesday? Then you can see for yourself what I’m talking about. The photographs of Georgy are quite dashing. He was a giant of a man with a broad chest, but never broad enough for all his medals. Every winter I celebrate his birthday by baking sturgeon kulebyaka pies. And in June, I commemorate Georgy’s death by raising a glass or two to his memory. How is it possible that he’s been gone from us these thirty-nine long years?
Bitte, I beseech you: don’t go around telling anyone about me. I’m much too old to suffer reprisals. Ach du meine Güte, I hope I’m not making a mistake confiding in you . . .
Rodrigo Mejía
Bongos
Fifteen years ago, my goal was simple: to get the hell out of Cuba. It was the Special Period, and everyone was totally broke. The surefire way off the island was to marry a tourist. Planeloads of them arrived in Havana every day. My compays zeroed in on the desperate middle-aged chicks. A lot of them were divorced and rich enough, at least, to take a Caribbean vacation. Bueno, after a little island-style seducing and bureaucratic rigmarole, the luckiest of my friends took off for Sweden, Spain, Canada, even the U.S. If you were a musician, like me, a bongosero, and halfway presentable, this wasn’t impossible.
Fredi Milanés, the best timbalero in Old Havana, married a cincuentona from the French Riviera. When they split up a year later, he got a big cash settlement and became a blackjack dealer in Monaco. That bastard pulls in a fortune every night! The worst off of us is Pepito Alarcón, a phenomenal trumpeter. He ended up in Miami con una loca named Gladys. She’d already been divorced four times and wasn’t about to agree to a fifth, so she made Pepito’s life a pure misery. El pobre infeliz has been reduced to playing his trumpet for spare change outside the Versailles in Little Havana.
Gerta was forty-two when we met in Old Havana. She got pregnant immediately—with twin boys; I don’t mess around! This sped up my visa application. My wife isn’t exactly what you’d call a great beauty. She’s six feet tall and outweighs me by sixty pounds. Still, she was better than a lot of the old bats who flocked to Cuba. I could’ve done a lot worse is what I’m telling you. But the shit’s crazy here, corazón. Gerta’s family flipped out when their only daughter—a fancy divorce lawyer—married poor humble me. You know what they told her? Keep the babies and run! They call me “the Negro” and “the Mexican” to my face. Comemierdas. But what’s the use of my cursing out people who don’t understand a word I’m saying?
Mira, I survived the fucking Revolution, and I’ll survive this, too. I speak Spanish with my sons, but I can feel it evaporating, stranding me between two cultures, two languages. And it’s not just any Spanish, but Cuban Spanish. Who else knows what it means to comer un cable? You can say someone’s fucked over, but it’s just not the same thing. Or how do you translate that fulano de tal no tiene dos dedos de frente? It means the guy is stupid, sure, but who the hell else calls it “not having two fingers of forehead”? That’s right, like a Neanderthal. See, I’ve got you laughing already!
What hurts the most is that my sons are learning more about becoming men from their mother than from me. In Havana we might stand around all day arguing sports, but officially, at least, we had jobs. Gerta doesn’t get this. Equality, equality, she says. But it’s not all about equality between men and women! Where’s the dance, the push and pull of flirtation? This is high art in Cuba; I don’t have to tell you. That’s one thing the Revolution couldn’t take away from us. On Sundays, Gerta drops off the boys at her parents’ apartment and returns home to make love to me. Fifteen minutes is all it takes. Then we fix lunch and watch the news, like a couple of mannequins. Sí, muy triste.
You don’t know how good it feels to connect with you, corazón. It’s not easy to transplant, to rearrange my roots so radically. Sometimes I dream of returning to Havana, but I’m not a complete idiot. Why should I trade back one prison for another? Besides, nobody’s left for me there anymore. My compays are gone and my parents died six years ago—así, one after the other. Maybe I’ll leave Berlin when my boys are grown. By then Cuba will be different, the old guard dead. I don’t care what anyone says; until the Castros are six feet under, nothing’s going to change.
What? Can you see me trying to divorce a divorce lawyer? Not to mention that Gerta is the best in Berlin. She’d cut my balls off without blinking. Eso mismo. She stays calm, nothing ruffles her, and then when you least expect it, she snaps you in two like a caimán.
Perdóname, corazón, but I have to pick up my sons from school. Detlev has a fencing lesson, and Lutz needs to go to his math tutor. Encantado de conocerte. Perhaps you’d like to go dancing sometime? ¿A mí con ese cuento? There’s no such thing as a cubana who can’t dance! I know a place in Mitte, a converted beer factory that has live salsa on Wednesday nights. ¿Que dices?
La Roswitha
Last Kaffee
You ask me if I would do it again? Jump off the truck evacuating us from Normandy? Ah, but that first sip of coffee was pure ambrosia, darling, pure ambrosia. How else could I have faced another jolting ride in that Wehrmacht jeep? My sweet Oskar, afraid that he’d be left behind, ignored my request for coffee and warned me against fetching it myself. Why, of course I forgave him. For in the very instant that missile hit, all was ecstasy! This surprises you? What would you rather have me say? Darling, our fates are quite precise. I’ve reached a state of bliss. There’s no future where I am, only a fully, deliciously endless now.
On her last morning alive, Roswitha wore a lavender corset under her sequined gown, which was also lavender and embroidered with lilacs. Though she had the stature of a nine-year-old, she lacked nothing of a grown woman’s attributes. To her admirers, Roswitha was all the more delectable for her proportions. A rare truffle, they agreed—bewitching, sublime. She specialized in introducing young men to the delights of the flesh. A new lover had to be trained, not tamed, his enthusiasms harnessed to please, please, please. How she’d enjoyed leaving her signature teeth marks around their nipples and knees. Oskar Matzerath would forever remember his affair with Roswitha as the happiest of his life.
Despite the panicked exodus from Normandy, Roswitha’s luggage had been neatly stacked in the jeep. Her lashes were curled, her cheeks smoothed with age-defying potions and a hint of rouge. On her feet were a pair of minuscule feathered mules. Roswitha was partial to kitten heels, and she’d worn these, her favorite, throughout the Eastern front, where soldiers carried her like a pint-size queen above the mud and carnage.
I used to unfold an ornate portable mirror and invite my lovers to gaze at themselves, handsomely naked beside me. We must be pleasing to ourselves before we can please others, n’est-ce-pas? Call me ritualistic, darling, but in the boudoir, I was anything but predictable. Nothing of significance can be expressed without the body. To praise and be praised; for this we were created. Illusion is the daily bread of artists—we live for illusion, cry for illusion—all the while remaining conscious of time’s slippage. For we know too well that mortality can strike from one moment to the next, like Churchill’s missile. In the end, it’s all theater. And I felt nothing but a blinding astonishment. Can you imagine a better exit?
Her name was Roswitha, and her life was dedicated to the immediacy of wonder, and to pleasure. For her there was no second act, only perpetual surrender. Why else would she have ignored Oskar’s warnings (and those of the lovesick Wehrmacht captain) and dashed for that last cup of coffee? Why else but to light up the skies with her spangled flesh?
Lukas Böhm
Tuxedo
Every morning begins the same way: with the dull thud of a bird hitting a window of my high-rise apartment in Mitte. Turkish coffee in
hand—a habit I acquired in the sixties—I await the sudden death of yet another wayward sparrow (they’re mostly sparrows). What do I have to look forward to today? Only an appointment with my eye doctor, a statuesque African woman who, except for her advancing pregnancy, looks to me like a wondrously handsome man. Dr. Alves will warn me again that my cataracts are hardening, that without an operation I’ll likely lose my vision.
Already my eyes have the luster of the mother-of-pearl buttons on my old dress shirts, which hang in the closet alongside my tuxedos. The next time I wear a tuxedo, Dear Visitor, will be at my funeral. I’ve specified this in my will. And I’m to be buried with my A clarinet, a vintage Buffet I inherited from my father. Decades ago, he was the much-heralded principal clarinetist of the Berlin Philharmonic (the youngest in its history). He took his own life as the Russians stormed Berlin. I was just thirteen then and had been playing the clarinet for five years but never, my father admonished me, with sufficient fervor.
Attired in his spotless concert dress, Father hanged himself with a length of knotted silk cravats, which he’d fastened to our half-shattered chandelier. It was I who found him in the shambles of our music room. The bombs had fallen with metronomic regularity for months, but, thankfully, we’d been spared a direct hit. Our flat was on the outskirts of Berlin and only moderately damaged—walls cracked, the plaster fallen. I can still recall the din of the air raids that so flattened the city. Without the smoke, we could see for fifty miles in every direction. Father’s neck was bruised a deep mauve—a color I’ve since detected only in rare tropical orchids. In that moment, I understood that my life was no longer my own.
The previous winter, my mother and I had grown alarmed at Father’s escalating histrionics, his fits of melancholy, the dramatic gestures she ascribed to the temperament he’d inherited from his Galician grandmother, who’d run off with a common garrison soldier during the Spanish-American War. Some days Father would lie in bed, inert and speechless; on others, he maniacally repaired the cracks in the walls with candle wax and curses. His nerves worsened after he listened to foreign radio reports, a highly illegal pastime. I believe now that he was searching for a reason to live. When I discovered his body, Mother was off in the countryside with my brother, Herbert—not quite two at the time—bartering our silverware for root vegetables.
Dear Visitor, it’s crucial to understand that the Philharmonic was the cultural crown jewel of the Third Reich. Its conductor then, Wilhelm Furtwängler, did everything in his power to protect his Jewish musicians. The orchestra revered him, my father included. Furtwängler declined numerous offers to immigrate, including the directorship of the Chicago Symphony. Instead he chose to remain with the German people in their darkest hour. For how could he have left our music—the music of Brahms, and Beethoven, and Mahler—in the hands of the Nazis? When bombs destroyed his concert hall, Furtwängler proceeded to conduct at the Staatsoper and then at the Admiralspalast. My father noted the final program in his diary: “Die Zauberflote ov., Mozart Symph. no. 40 (1st 2 mvmts), & Brahms 1st.”
In his suicide note, Father blamed the emotional strain of performing Bruckner’s Symphony no. 7 in E Major as the bombs fell on Berlin. He fretted over Russia and its genius composers—Shostakovich was a forbidden favorite. Father was terrified of a Soviet invasion and the vague, subjugated future that awaited us under Bolshevism. Nonetheless, he was imperiously specific regarding my musical education: how often I was to practice and perform; where and with whom I should study (with Torsten Niederberger in Vienna when I turned fifteen); and the precise order of pieces I was to master, culminating, surprisingly, with Nielsen’s contemporary masterwork, Clarinet Concerto, op. 57.
Dear Visitor, how can I convey to you the extent of Germany’s ruin? From the delusional heights of the so-called master race, we were reduced to living like rats in the rubble. Our once great capital had become a veritable necropolis. To this day, I suffer night terrors, flinch at the clap of lightning or an unexpected clash of cymbals. After the war, nobody dared complain about the devastation either. Was our shame so great that it silenced us? Or was our resistance to shame the greater silencer?
My mother, a resourceful woman, was fluent in English and French. This served her well in our post-apocalyptic world. With help from Father’s music connections, she shipped me off to study in Vienna. She and Herbert moved to Paris—a miracle in itself—and eventually opened what became the finest lingerie shop in the city. The pent-up demand for luxury goods and the quality of her inventory soon made her a very wealthy woman. Little Herbert grew up without the privations that had plagued my childhood. For him, our father’s absence was mitigated by Mother’s remarriage to a childless widower, a kindly bicycle manufacturer of stable means.
Thanks to Father’s careful instructions, my tone and technique grew flawless (please permit me this immodesty). He’d often said that music was the principal tonic for the disorders of civilization, that nothing could be expressed without it. But for me, it became the grammar of submission. In due course, I took his place as the second youngest clarinetist ever appointed to the Berlin Philharmonic. The other musicians welcomed me warmly on my first day—tapping their bows, shuffling their feet—in homage to my legendary father. And there I remained for the duration of my career.
On my fiftieth anniversary with the orchestra, the city’s musical elite threw me a grand party, and, regrettably, the ancient business about Father was dredged up. A crone with unblinking eyes and sporting a cherry-red bowler (I’d never met her before, or seen her since) disclosed that she’d known him in her youth, intimating that she and my father had been lovers during the war. All I could think to say, before turning on my heels, was: You stupid, stupid woman! I repented my hastiness. For who knew what she might’ve revealed to me about him?
No sooner were the anniversary festivities over than our conductor persuaded me to retire. In truth, he was attempting to make room for a young clarinetist (also a product of the Niederberger dynasty) for whom many notable orchestras were vying. His movie-star looks are plastered on posters all over Berlin. Haven’t you seen them? Dark hair, smug expression, eyes deliberately smoldering. In one of his shameless promotional videos, he traipses around the city ogling women and wielding his clarinet like a priapic baton. Yes, Dear Visitor, it is quite unseemly.
My apartment faces east, and the view is perpetually congested with gargantuan red and yellow cranes. Those of us in the West persist, as we have for twenty-three years, in bringing East Berlin into the twenty-first century. This effort, I’m afraid, has wholly bankrupted our city. (Personally, I could live without the monumentally oppressive Alexanderplatz.) Yet I understand very well the resistance to change, the longing for stasis and familiarity. Now I, too, am collapsing from age and neglect. My eyes are clouded, my hands no longer steady. And I wait for death, without Father’s courage, to end it on my own terms.
Dear Visitor, upward of two hundred sparrows a year die against my windows, blinded by what they can’t see.
Epilogue
It was August, and the Visitor’s time in Berlin was nearing an end.
She bought a cheap point-and-shoot and began taking photographs, longing for a higher incidence of happy accident. She’d come to Berlin for stories, and the city had been more than generous. Mostly, she’d listened. There was, she knew, poetry in the listening. She didn’t belong here, but there was room for her. Maybe that was enough.
Her daughter came for the Visitor’s last weeks in Berlin. Summer was in its full glory, the twilights prolonged, the parks alive with music. They lingered in the city’s flea markets and coffee shops, ate Russian borscht, attended fashion shows and concerts, rode bikes in the Tiergarten, watched movies under the stars. They went to the aquarium and studied the puffer fish and a “false map” turtle sunning itself on a rock. One evening, her daughter jokingly gave her a check for a million dollars. In the subject line w
as a small, hand-drawn heart.
In a taxi on their way to the airport, the Visitor received word that her mother had died swimming in Key Biscayne Bay. It wasn’t indifference she felt, but a sad wonderment. The mother was dead, and yet she was still alive. How was that possible? Here in Berlin, the Visitor had listened to others’ histories and was finally released from her own. And now? What did she want? Quiet, resplendent days in the light. Her daughter a breath away. And a butterfly net with which to swipe the air, trapping bits of flying color here and there. Yes, she might spend the rest of her life doing nothing more than that.
Acknowledgments
Mil gracias to Alfredo Franco, who encouraged me to spend time in Berlin, regaled me with irresistible stories, and read this novel over and again with insight and generosity. A shout-out to Scott Brown, whom I’ve had the privilege to know for over half my life and whose friendship and editorial acuity I value ever more with the years. Deep gratitude to Dan Smetanka, my editor at Counterpoint Press, whose eye is unfailing—and from whom I simply couldn’t ask for more.
I had the great pleasure of meeting Werner Sollors and benefited enormously from his tales and his extraordinary book The Temptation of Despair. Timothy Snyder’s monumental Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin opened the floodgates of a complex, tragic history that informs these pages, as did Antony Beevor’s The Fall of Berlin 1945, W. G. Sebald’s On the Natural History of Destruction, and Wendy Lower’s Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields, among other titles.
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