The Weather in Berlin

by Ward Just

  Fischer had his vivid landscapes, and Rosing the girls. Rosing drew them alone and together, nude and clothed, indoors and out, with an erotic intensity that is nothing like what he had done before or would do later. Rosing and Wendt fell in love with the Sorb girls, so natural and playful, so ready for anything. Only Fischer was immune, faithful to his young wife back in Lübeck. This is what I have to know. What were they seeing? Did the Militärfriedhof set in motion a string of events, or was it only the first stop of their journey to the cabin on the lake? Of course it was the trigger—do you see how beautifully it will film? The light failing, the Gothic crosses surrounded by the forest, the artists moving slowly among the graves, the scrape of Wendt’s fingernail across the stones. And underground, a city of the dead, restless and inconsolable. Wendt would know this in his heart. In any life there’s much that’s unknown and unfathomable, remote from explanation. But a narrative can bring things a little closer.

  This was in 1921, she said.

  Yes, 1921.

  The war just over.

  They have money. The summer is free.

  A summer holiday, she said.

  Working holiday, Claire, but they don’t see it as work.

  With the girls along for comfort.

  Where do you suppose they found them?

  Does it matter?

  Of course it matters! Everything matters.

  Wendt found them, she said. Wendt found them—and she pointed beyond the gravestones to the spires of Heidelberg, the Schloss and the River Neckar beyond—in that café in the square near the Schloss. Winked at them from across the room. Chatted them up. Made them laugh. Asked if they wanted to come along on an adventure. Asked if they wanted to spend a long weekend at the lake in the hills to the south, not far. They giggled. Flirted some. But they were at loose ends, so they said, Why not? They saw three attractive boys, a little forward perhaps, but spirited, and they had a pink van and money to spend. They were going to the lake and the weather was fine.

  Rosing brought the van, Greenwood said. He borrowed the money from his mother.

  They came here, Claire said, to the military cemetery before going on. Everyone complained, the girls, too.

  But Wendt insisted, Greenwood said.

  The girls were impatient.

  They call out, Let’s go. What are we doing here?

  In a minute, Wendt says. Keep your shirts on. All in good time. He’s listening hard. He’s listening with all his might to the present moment, not the moment before or the moment due to arrive. He’s giving his full attention to the clutter in his ears. He’s separating sounds, the rasp of his fingernail across the stone, the voices of the girls, and somewhere far away the oompah-oompah of a German band. He is composing a picture. In his mind are fantastic shapes and vivid colors. The present moment has become the Marne.

  What are you hearing? Claire asked in a soft voice.

  Shhhh, he said. Be still.

  She hadn’t believed her husband when he began, or hadn’t believed that he meant what he said, about the significance of the military cemetery or much else. He said things all the time to judge their effect on whoever was listening; he adjusted his speed to the condition of the highway, a practical trait, often endearing. Dixon Greenwood regarded the spoken word the way musicians regarded notes on the score. Tempo was everything. But she found herself listening attentively as he filled out his screenplay, an impromptu performance spurred in part by her. She believed now that he had something valuable, if he didn’t carry things too far, as he often did, an unfortunate inheritance from his reckless father. She and Dix had been married only one year and she was still learning about his emotions, meaning what enchanted him. Now she sat silently watching as he stood by the side of the road, writing something in his notebook. He was smiling, and in his cap and boots and concentrated manner he looked like a patrolman writing a ticket.

  What are you hearing? she asked again.

  A chainsaw, Dix said.

  4

  NOW DIX WAS AWAKE. The time was just four, early for a drink. He stared out the window at the balcony, melting snow on its iron surface. The apartment was damp and chilly, and outside the wind was rising, yet he was perspiring, his skin humid to the touch. In the western sky he saw a southbound jet’s fleecy contrail; wherever it was going, he wished he were on it. He had been working on an idea, something he was unable to put into words. The idea was present but out of reach, a melody that he felt rather than heard. And the harder he sought it, the more indistinct it became. Maybe Werner had a point about the south, a spa or a beach somewhere, some soft climate.

  Dix rarely slept during the day when he was home, but in Berlin he took a nap every afternoon. Something about the city encouraged repose. So he had turned on the radio and stretched out on the long couch and closed his eyes, thinking of the girl who danced barefoot on a lawn in Winnetka and the North Shore dissolving into a street in Vienna and the dream that hovered over him. Why Vienna? He had never visited Vienna. He had no particular affection for Austria. He had an idea that his father was somehow involved, his father gone now many, many years and an infrequent visitor to his dreams. He could not remember the last time. He remembered reading somewhere that the Greeks believed that dreams had the power to heal, including the restoration of sight to the blind.

  Now he recalled with a shudder that they had unscrewed his arm as you would unscrew a lightbulb from its socket, and that the process had been painless. He was en route to an expert to seek relief in the form of an explanation. Hypnosis was recommended. He was in a hurry, but in his haste he had lost his way. He was certain that his father was implicated; perhaps Harry was one of the friends who raced away up the narrow one-way street to disappear into the sinister Mexican church. So perhaps the dream had been based on actual events after all, a sort of grisly afternoon docudrama, locations altered, personalities altered, names changed to protect the guilty—and behind the scenes a pig of a producer who demanded that he speak plainly, without fear. A producer whose time was valuable. Wasn’t it an accepted fact that each character in a dream was some idealized version of the dreamer? It stood to reason. No dreamer went very far beyond himself. How could he?

  Dix poured a drink, Polish vodka over ice, lemon peel on top. He heard a door slam somewhere in the corridor, then the sigh of the elevator. He stood stiffly looking beyond the iron balcony to the water. The snow had ended and the light was failing. A two-man scull ghosted along a hundred yards out. A patch of mallards rose and skittered away, settling on the far side of the scull. Weather approached from the northeast as predicted on the morning network news, the blithe American woman with the long legs and leisurely-diction, all the time in the world to connect the Warsaw Low to the Bermuda High, and look what’s happening right here in Atlanta. It would be dark in a quarter of an hour, the sun too feeble to pierce the dark vein of cloud. Across the lake the lights came on in the villas back of the yacht basin, the yellow glow nervous on the waffling surface of the water. The wind rose. The masts of the yachts disappeared as the light failed, and as he completed this suburban audit, Dix took a heavy step backward, stumbling, closing his eyes because now he knew exactly where his dream came from. A part of every day was reserved for recognition of the unbearable, and to endure its visit for a half-second or a quarter-hour, however long it chose to remain. Its approach was neither visible nor avoidable. You felt a raindrop on your shoulder and looked up, startled to discover a thunderhead above. And in an instant it overtook the sun.

  He had driven up to Tahoe to discuss Anna’s Magic with Lou Kniffe. The producer owned a chalet the size of a hotel. Lou Kniffe—everyone called him Knife—was theoretically on vacation but his people were present, lawyers, accountants, his driver, and a masseuse. Dix arrived late on an October Wednesday and they spent that night and the following day discussing the script, the casting, and the budget. His people and their wives and girlfriends played backgammon while Dix and Knife talked. Knife’s people were never
consulted at the first meeting, in the event Knife changed his mind or was only fooling to begin with. He enjoyed toying with directors, and listening to his to-and-fro was part of the cost of doing business. When Knife decided he wanted no part of whatever it was the director was proposing, he could simply report that his people had advised against it. His accountants were against it. His lawyers had reservations. Sorry, Dix, I wish you luck. Try me again. Or, if you were low enough on the food chain, one of his people would make the call and say pleasantly, Forget it, Greenwood. Anna’s Magic is a piece of shit. Knife won’t touch it.

  Dix thought the meeting went well. The numbers were in line, and Knife liked Ada Hart. The subject appealed to him. Of course he had thoughts about the screenplay. The middle section’s slack, don’t you think? And the husband sounds like a pansy. Ada should have more to do, and the end is too damned talky. Also, wouldn’t Long Island do as well as Spain? I have a place on the South Fork and I’d like to drop in from time to time, see the shooting. But he didn’t demand a rewrite of the screenplay, something he usually required as a matter of course. He was surprised that Dix wanted to direct a comedy. Laughs aren’t your usual line of country, are they, Dix? He wasn’t convinced when Dix explained that that was the point. After Summer, 1921 he wanted something different. Something a little closer to home . . . Then why are you filming in Spain? And Dix had replied, The material, Knife. The material’s closer to home. American layabouts practicing sexual sorcery and feeling not the least bit guilty about it. It’s present time, Knife.

  Knife turned to his people but they had nothing to add.

  What’s the real reason, Dix?

  Breakthrough, Dix said.

  But it’s only a comedy. Lotta people waiting for you to fall on your ass, Dix. Lotta people think Summer, 1921 was a fluke. You picked some numbers at random and won the fucking lottery and now you think you’re Alfred Hitchcock.

  Truffaut, Knife. They think I’m Truffaut.

  Maybe you have a point, he said. Something closer to home. You want to begin thinking about your future, Dix.

  When can you let me know?

  I’ll call you next week, Knife said.

  Dix started back to Los Angeles at dusk. He enjoyed driving at night, wrapped inside his old green Karmann Ghia, listening to the radio while he thought about the meeting with Lou Kniffe. The sun was setting over the mountains, brilliant shafts of yellow light glittering on the surface of the lake, sailboats here and there. The road wound around the lake in long sweeping curves, the foliage gaudy in late autumn. He lit a cigarette and opened the window a crack. He was listening to Dr. John, wishing he knew more about the world of popular music, life on the road, the jam sessions and the groupies, the drugs, how it was to play before a lit-up crowd of fifty thousand people, the sweat and frenzy, the sexual charge. Dix drove into the dying sun, nodding his head in time with Dr. John’s music, when the car slipped from the pavement, sliding on gravel. He heard one bang and then another and the car seemed to break apart. He had never heard such noise, and when he tried to turn the wheel he found it was frozen. Back of the noise was Dr. John’s hot piano and then his cigarette was crushed in his palm. His head struck the windshield and bounced to the roof as the car continued to roll, window glass flying. His palm hurt where the cigarette burned it. He yelled something but could not hear himself above the noise, a terrible drumroll that went on and on. The car was in free fall, striking trees and rocks, settling, then beginning again. Branches flew into the car and out again. The grinding did not cease and Dix wondered if it would go on forever. The steering wheel was broken. The windshield was gone and suddenly it was quiet and he saw stars overhead.

  He was outside the car. His legs were beside him but they seemed far away. They were unfamiliar, as if they belonged to someone else, his feet without shoes, his trousers torn. His legs were so far away, his hips and torso also, that he knew with cold certainty that he had been decapitated in the accident. His head was in one place and his body in another. He lay on the downslope looking up, his vision unnaturally acute. He saw each hair on his leg. His mind was clear. It was only that his head was separated from his body and this was evident from the quantity of blood leaking and pooling where he lay. Blood was on his hands and legs, on the ragged glass of the windshield and the leaves stuck beneath his fingernails. Now that his mind was severed from his body he experienced an inhuman tranquillity, the surroundings in sharp focus. A chalet, its windows dark, broke the treeline in the distance, and that was the only sign of civilization. He listened to the tick-tick of the car’s engine and knew that he had but a few moments to live. How long could a human being exist in such a state? Not long, certainly, though in numerous cases observed during the French Terror, heads had spoken for some seconds after the guillotine fell. Time moved in close formation, a second had the weight of an hour. In Place Concorde there were tears also, and in at least one recorded instance, a smile. So he did not have long to contemplate his separated body, distraught as it was, his legs in such an awkward attitude, at right angles to each other. In the reflected glare of the headlights, he saw his shinbone, white as the shell of an egg. His body was gone, and now he knew his spirit was following. His head moved then, lolling, unattached. His body receded until all he could see were his feet and his shinbone. To this he was indifferent, though he regretted the loneliness of the mountainside, nature spoiled by the acrid smell of gasoline. Dix vividly remembered the moments before his blackout, the separation of mind and heart, his head in one place and, as he now conceived it, his soul in another, desperately hoarding the seconds that remained to him.

  Days later, in the hospital bed, his left leg entombed in plaster and elevated eighteen inches by a pulley device, he believed his life was provisional. He was not entirely certain that he was not in some heavenly infirmary, and when he mentioned this to the surgeon, the surgeon laughed and said he would send an expert to discuss the matter but that he should have no fear; he was in the county hospital and well cared for and would recover fully except for a limp. You’re lucky, luckier than you know; by rights you should be dead. Back on location before you know it, Mr. Greenwood. When the priest arrived, Dix commenced a rambling account of his thoughts and emotions during the accident, and the appalling moment when he realized that he had been bisected, with only seconds to make himself—the word he used was “understood.” He had visions of the guillotine and the heads of the dead talking to one another. He was alone in the world, the last survivor of a calamity. The phrase he used was “the last member of the audience.” The priest assured him that these were normal fantasies that would disappear in time. Do you believe in God, Mr. Greenwood? And in order to cut short the interview, Dix replied, Of course. That very afternoon, the hospital psychiatrist arrived with a list of ambiguous questions and a Rorschach test. Dix fell silent then, refusing to speak to anyone except Claire. He believed she was the only one with the ability to listen, as if they shared a code unintelligible to others, and in that he was surely correct. Never had he spoken to anyone as he spoke to her, and she listened with all her heart.

  He told her he was one person before the accident and another person now, and that the two did not agree. He was an equation out of balance. He was divided and would remain forever divided. The long hours on the mountain had taken something from him that could never be returned—refunded, as he said. Was this something he himself had willed? The car had drifted off the road of its own accord. The image of his severed head—he thought of it as a fragment of film rolling in slow motion, the frames vivid and formal in composition—was before him at all times. He assured her that he had remained calm, almost nonchalant as he scrutinized his body, so far away, so—untouchable. He could feel his heart beating and the throbbing pain in his legs, and when he lost consciousness he was certain he was gone. He had erected a fortification, a whole-souled wall against the terror that was just out of sight, and it had crumbled like sand. He searched her face. She was silent, and he believ
ed that he had frightened her. She murmured something about getting home, she had promised the babysitter.

  He said, I’m not myself.

  She said, No, you’re not. But you will be.

  Not so sure about that, Claire.

  She said, Go back to work.

  He said, Work isn’t the solution to everything.

  It is for you, she said. Me too. It’s the way we’re built.

  He started to say something, then began to laugh. He had to close his eyes.

  Dix remained in the hospital for four weeks, emerging on crutches, gaunt and unsteady, convinced that he had had an experience so intense it could not be described. Perhaps that was the case with any experience of enduring value. The moment was not meant to be shared, except with Claire at specific times, and never in its entirety. Then she flew off to Toronto to make a film. Normal life, she said. When you have a contract, you honor the contract. Tell the truth, Dix. Aren’t you itching to get back to work? But the truth was: not really. He wondered then if they were built in the same way after all.