by Craig Nova
“You,” he said. “I’m talking to you. Girl, come.”
“Girl?” she said.
“All right. Woman. Is that better? Come,” he said.
He was tall, heavy in the shoulders, tanned, with bright yellow hair. He held out his hand and beckoned to her. An approaching train made a whine, and overhead some pigeons flew into the air, their wings fluttering with an anxious sound.
“I won’t hurt you,” he said.
“What makes you think you could hurt me?” she said.
He smiled. Then he stepped closer, and as he did, she saw that one of his hands was swollen. He put it in his pocket and tried to look nonchalant.
“Why do you want to hang around with those people?” he said.
She stood there, thinking that she should slap him. She’d had enough. A hard, loud smack. Then she took an inventory of his features, his combed hair, which shone in the light, his rough, definite good looks, his broad shoulders, his smile.
The man glanced at her scar and watched as she turned her head a little to let him see it. He blushed.
“Come,” he said. “Let’s go downstairs.”
“Why should I go anywhere with you?” she said.
“Because you want to,” he said.
“And what are we going to do?” she said.
“We’ll have a glass of beer,” he said. “I want to talk to you.”
“And why do you want to do that?” she said.
He looked around.
“You know what kind of trouble I could get into, just being seen with you?”
“Yes,” she said. “I know.”
“Have you ever taken a chance? Done something you shouldn’t?”
He looked at the scar.
“Can I touch it?” he said.
She stared at him.
He looked around, too, and he wasn’t smiling either. “If I’m willing to take that chance, it means I really want to talk. Doesn’t that count?”
She took a step down the stairs, but he reached out and took her arm.
“No,” he said. “Not that way. Can’t you see the cops?”
They turned and went back to the other end of the platform, the two of them walking side by side. Then they went down the stairs and stood under the elevated tracks next to a support, which was a sort of steel pylon, four corners that were held together with metal Xs, all the way up to the tracks overhead.
He looked around.
“We shouldn’t be seen together,” he said. “You from your side, me from mine.”
They went into a restaurant that had a long bar at the back, parallel to the windows at the front. This made the place bright, and the surface of the tables, which was a black marble, gleamed under a cloud of cigarette smoke. Some tables were arranged on the sidewalk, but Gaelle and the man went by them, inside to a table as far away from the door as possible. The man went to the bar, where people got out of his way. He brought back two glasses, which he put down just like that. Bang.
“What’s your name?” she said.
“Aksel,” he said. “And yours?”
“Gaelle,” she said.
“Gaelle. And, Gaelle, where do you live?”
“On Fliegstrasse,” she said.
“There’s a park there,” he said. “I know the place.”
“It’s a small park. Kids and their mothers.”
She wanted to say something to insult him, to make this end. Why couldn’t she be more in control of things like that? She had another drink.
“So,” he said. “What are you doing with those guys?”
“I have my reasons,” she said. “What about you?”
“In the middle of the street fights everything is clear. That’s what I like.”
“And are you going to be doing some fighting someplace soon?”
“You think I am that stupid,” he said. “You come here with me, and then I tell you things? And you tell your pals?”
“I thought you wanted to talk,” she said. “That’s all.”
“And what about you? Don’t you want to talk to me? Isn’t there something eating at you?”
“No,” she said. “I have nothing to say to you.”
“You’re sure? You look worried,” he said.
The bar was filled with cigarette smoke, and down at the end someone laughed. It all seemed so ordinary, really, just a bunch of men having some beer while outside two uniformed policeman went by.
“I tried to give you a nice time. And what do you give me? Contempt,” he said. He looked right at her.
She leaned close to him and came into the slight odor of his hair and skin, and she knew that her perfume made him lean toward her. The perfume was muted and made a special scent, different on her skin than it was in the bottle. She leaned closer, and then said, “Thanks for the beer.”
“That’s all you have to say?” he said.
“No,” she said. She looked right at him. “You’re such an idiot.”
“Yes,” he said. “I know what you think about us on our side.” He put out his hand. “Well, I won’t forget you.”
She almost took it, but then stopped and turned into the smoke in the bar, which was as thick as a layer of fog near the ceiling. She tried for a businesslike gait, square shouldered, passing the men at the small round tables who read newspapers, smoked, and tried to discover something in the thin lines of print. She turned and looked back when she was outside.
Aksel was still looking at her, smiling, and when she was about to turn away for good, he blew her a kiss. It was so sudden a gesture that she almost felt it, like the touch of an insect against her cheek. And while she had been infuriated, she kept thinking about it. Then she went back up to the station to go one stop to the Zoologischer Garten station and as she waited for the train, she thought, Fuck them all.
After the delicious, momentary relief from thinking this way, her sense of fear came back almost as though it were a gas that seeped up from the ground and hung around her. Like something escaped from a sewer.
She thought of the slick texture of her mother’s dress, of the comfort of being there in her mother’s lap, and the attractions of going home were so enormous that she momentarily forgot her isolation. But she had already tried that, and so she stood on the platform and stared into the distance. At least she took some comfort that the desire to be loved was now carefully hidden, sealed off in the most secret and darkest of recesses.
The man on the train from Moscow to Berlin was Russian, but he was traveling under the name “Gerhard Schmidt.” He was over six feet tall and wore dark pants and stylish shoes made of very thin leather, which he got through the Italian embassy. His jacket was European, too, but his topcoat was Russian, long, heavy, and with a skirt that came down below his knees. He was vain about his broad-brimmed hat. He had emerged from steam on the platform of the Moscow train station as though materializing out of a dream, one hand carrying his small suitcase in which there were two shirts, two changes of underwear, his razor, a badger shaving brush, and a pistol. There was no need to worry about the pistol, since he traveled on a diplomatic passport. He had one other suitcase, too, which was filled with reichsmarks. Fresh, new, just printed. They were well made, and he doubted if someone from the German mint would be able to tell the difference between these notes made in Moscow and the ones produced in Berlin.
He turned and looked through the steam to the entrance of the platform. The streets had been almost deserted, just some hungry people who were trying to find something to eat. He thought about the days just after the revolution in Moscow when wooden houses had been pulled down for firewood. And when the peasants in the countryside had withheld food, the army had been sent to collect what was needed. The Russian peasant was going to have to be dealt with, and the question was how. Hunger. That was one way. In fact, as he smelled the machine-scented steam, he thought it was probably the best way to deal with them. Hunger was something they should be able to understand.
He tho
ught about the Moscow River, too, and how, when it was still and reflected the city, it gave him a moment of clarity. Nothing moved then. Just the mirror of river, which showed the buildings on the other side, the bridges, the sky. It was the only memory that made him homesick when he was away, and while he had been sent to many places in Russia recently, he wasn’t so comfortable leaving Moscow just now. People like him had gone to Italy or France, and then when they had come back, they had been destroyed because they had seen how people lived in Europe. Or just because they hadn’t been able to keep up with developments in Moscow. And so while it was an honor to be chosen to go to Berlin, he still looked uneasily at the steam, the glistening engines, the lighted train cars. Gerhard Schmidt thought about the people the police had been pulling out of the Moscow River recently, officials of one kind or another. Then he shrugged and got on the train.
He didn’t read. He sat upright, hands folded in his lap, occasionally looking out the window at the landscape. It was spring now, but he thought of fall, when the stands of popple around the fields were a haunting yellow. He liked to think about that color, as though if he could just remember it clearly enough, why then he couldn’t ever really feel that he was too far away. And there was another aspect of those fields around Moscow in the fall. Some afternoons the light had a yellow, smoky quality, and while it was like a warm fog, it suggested a kind of ghost of spring, or perhaps it was just the promise of spring. Still, he liked the ghostlike association. That was probably closer to the truth.
He checked to make sure the pistol was still in his bag. He was surprised that he needed to do this, since the bag was never out of his sight, but even though he knew it was there, he still began to feel uneasy. He imagined the trouble he would have if it got out of his hands, and even though he knew this was unlikely, every hundred miles or so, maybe a little more when he tried to resist, he got up and took the suitcase down from the rack and looked inside, glancing at the sheen of black metal, touching it once and then, after he had put the suitcase away, smelling the gun oil on his hand. This was like the scent of fate. Or the scent of fate prettied up, since not only was it machinelike, but it also had a slight, sweet perfume. From time to time, when he wasn’t worrying about the pistol, he thought of the man he was going to see in Berlin.
Gerhard Schmidt didn’t eat much. In the pocket of his coat he had a couple of rolls and a piece of sausage, wrapped in paper stained with grease, and every three hundred miles he took out his pocketknife, cut a piece of the sausage, and tore off a piece of bread, chewing slowly, watching the countryside go by. He ate with a steady, repetitive motion, more like a man making something in a factory than actually eating. He had his orders, and he supposed he wouldn’t have too much trouble. People in Berlin had to understand that changes were being made in Moscow, and that the factionalism in Russia needed to be settled, and if the other parties in other countries like Germany didn’t give their support, then they would have to be informed of the dangers. No factionalism. What was good for the Soviets was good for everyone. That was his job. He had his methods.
About halfway to Berlin, a young woman sat down next to Herr Schmidt. Her hair was very dark, and her skin was so pale that he thought she was Ukrainian. He hoped that she didn’t have any relatives there, since he knew what was going to happen soon, not to mention things that had already been done. No nationalism, of any group, no desire for independence was going to be tolerated. When she tried to strike up a conversation, he just looked at her. Yes, he thought, she was probably Ukrainian. Then he went back to keeping an eye on his bag or looking out the window.
He slept sitting straight up, hands in his lap. He closed his eyes, pushed his head back a little, and as he slept he could still feel the movement of the train. He dreamed of the Moscow River in the evening when the wind had died down and the surface was as smooth as a ground lens. He knew that the secret to doing what he had to do was to believe very few things. The names of people he had to see. The details of his job. If he cluttered up his head with too much theory and policy, then he would just have to forget it later when it changed. It was better to try to remember that power existed with its own beauty and clarity, like the surface of the river, and that it was his job to act on its behalf. That was all there was to it. It was difficult to see power when it wasn’t being used, and so he thought of it as a shiny and beguiling surface of a river, although one that could wash over anyone who got in its way.
In Germany he looked out the window with that same green-eyed indifference, as though the landscape here were not pretty or ugly or anything at all except as a stage, a location, a site where something was going to happen.
Everything else was secondary. Just when he came into Berlin, he took the piece of paper out of his pocket, unwrapped it, and looked at the last piece of sausage and the last piece of bread. He had made it come out perfectly, and so he ate the last part of it, watching as the train went through the outskirts of the city, which he saw as a smear of smoke above the buildings that manufactured stopwatches. Bicycle tires. Gears. Cable. Sheets of metal.
He stood up and took his suitcases from the rack and then walked along the aisle between the seats. He went down the steps to the platform, where he emerged again from the steam as though he had not taken the train but had been transported by some new process from Moscow. Then he started walking toward the station, where he smelled the sweet strudel, the cinnamon, the beer from the café, and when he came up to the door, he looked in. But that was it. He stood there, resisting it, feeling good that he could control himself even after the days he had been on the train. Instead, he put his bags down and brought his fingers up to his nose and smelled the scent of gun oil. He could still smell it as he walked from the train station to his hotel, a small, cheap place on a side street in the middle of the city.
The living room in Armina’s apartment had a sofa, a padded chair, bookcases, pictures done in a precise, hyperrealist style, a piano and a desk. The piano had belonged to her mother, a concert pianist who had died of a disease of the nerves, a painful condition that had been made worse by morphine. Her father’s desk was here, too, in the corner, the top of it lined with pigeonholes where he had kept his papers, all of the square spaces appearing as though birds could nest in them, or, at least, they looked empty. The green blotter on the desk was still covered with ink stains. He had been a biochemist with a specialty in pain medication, and when Armina’s mother had been sick, he had tried one compound after another, the lack of effect making him even more exasperated, and near the end, he hardly slept. He had sat at this desk, where he made notes, wrote formulas, consulted his notebooks, wrote letters to colleagues. What did they know about a particular preparation of opium? Did anyone know of analgesics found in the jungles of South America?
Armina had put flowers in the room, white and pink peonies with centers that were flecked with red. Now she sat with a glass of brandy and looked at the piano. Then the desk. Then she had a sip.
Each night recently when she came home from work she had the impulse to write a letter. At first, she laughed at herself and thought, Grow up. Don’t be a fool. Don’t act like a schoolgirl. But these interior remarks and lack of empathy for herself only made her get up and pour herself another drink.
The letter was to a man she didn’t know and yet in whose existence she still believed, if only by the proof of the silence of her apartment, which seemed not just an emptiness, but also a potential that referred to a specific human being. She imagined this as one of the varieties of silence. Well, she thought in her own self-mockery, maybe the silence is proof of something else: that I’m filling my head with nonsense.
She resisted writing the letter on the first night, and then the second, her reports, files, crime scene descriptions on the table in front of her. At least she didn’t have to hide them—there was no one to be appalled by the photographs, the descriptions of wounds, the statements of people who had found a woman in the park.
On the fourth
night, she didn’t open her files. She took a pen, dipped it into her black official ink, and wrote, the metal nib on the paper a sound that barely scratched the silence in the room,
“Of course it is silly for me to want to write to you, and just putting these words on paper makes me feel my embarrassment. Still, I want to do it, if only to be clear to myself about what is happening to me. Frankly, I am not sure—not really, since I seem to be in the middle of it—but I know that I crave—is this the word?—crave your understanding. I know you are here, in this city, and yet why can’t I find you? And what do I have to offer you, as though what I feel could ever be part of a bargain? Loyalty. I am loyal. I am understanding. If you need something, I will try to get it. If you want something from me (a touch, a look, a gift, a surrender, a frank offer) I will give it. I am not easily frightened.
“And what do I want? Well, I will recognize it when I see it. I wonder if I pass you on the street, if you will recognize me—would we hesitate, glance at one another, shocked by the other’s sudden presence. Would it be frightening? Embarrassing? Would we know what to do? Or would we just pass along, too stupid and ridiculous to take advantage of the moment?”
Then she stopped, reached the pen tip for the ink, but sat that way, arm extended: this note had explained nothing and only provided justification for her contempt, a neat trick in which she used her needs as an accusation. She ripped the paper, threw it away, the pieces of it falling like blue-gray confetti into the trash can. The record she put on was one of her mother’s performances, Mozart’s Piano Concerto no. 12, and as the music came into the room she had another drink. Her father’s desk sat in the corner, appearing as though he would come into the room and go to work on the desk beneath the pigeonholes.
In the morning she got up and went to work as always.
Two Greek columns supported the roof of Precinct 88 and between them a bronze door led to the dim interior. Armina walked through the marble lobby and up the stairs where the brass banister was cold. On the second floor the common room for Inspectorate A was filled with desks, the papers on them square as a geometry lesson. The walls had two tones, a dark crème up to shoulder height and a lighter one above. Milk glass globes hung from the ceiling, and everything about the place was oversize and left her with the feeling of a nightmare of being a child in which everything is too large and difficult to reach. Here the doorknobs were the size of bowling balls.