The Weather in Berlin

by Ward Just

  He flew to Spain with Billy Jeidels to scout locations for Anna’s Magic. Lou Kniffe had agreed to finance the film, so long as Dix was pronounced fit by his insurance company’s doctors. In two months they had started filming but Dix believed he was only half present; his other half was somewhere on a Tahoe mountainside. Each evening he would rewrite the next day’s lines, and explain that he wanted more spontaneity but on no account were the actors to ad-lib. Divided as he was, he felt the movie slipping away from him but was powerless to do anything about it. Ada complained that his set was no fun, too much tension and not enough uproar. You were so cool, Dix, and now you’re not. At times the pain in his leg was excruciating, and in an instant the pain would vanish. He brought the film in on time and on budget, but that did not make it a good film. It did well at the box office, but that didn’t make it a good film either. What he remembered of its making were nights with Ada and the days with his leg. For the rest of his life the circumstances of the accident would arrive in his mind, an old, though not especially welcome, friend who wanted only to stop and visit for a while, as if they shared a fond remembrance.

  Dix leaned against the window glass, watching the shadows darken the water of the lake. The vodka was cold in his hand and he took a short sip, returning at once to the present. The two-man scull changed course and headed for home, the boat sliding serenely on the water. He had met the scullers, two retired accountants in their fifties, fit as mountaineers, taciturn as owls. They always drank a beer in the tavern on the corner when they finished with the boat, and Dix was often there at the same time. The accountants were slick with sweat and exhilarated from their hour’s rowing, drinking their beer straight down and then waiting patiently for Charlotte to draw them another, a formal, deliberative process that consumed five minutes. The accountants had no interest in discussing their sculling, their families, or their accounting, and were incurious as to what drew Greenwood to Germany. They were happiest lecturing on the superior security arrangements of Europe, plans that allowed a faithful employee to work until he was fifty-five and then retire with enough money to live on, and time to scull whenever he wished and take vacations in Spain during the worst of the winter weather, and set aside money for the children as well. Wasn’t it prudent for the old to make way for the young? And the state provided, as it had every right to do. That was why there was such dissatisfaction and violence in America, too many old people working and the young idle, restless as cats, resentful at injustice. There was trouble of that kind among the young Ossies, people of the former East district, who were unable to find work owing to the fuckups of the older generation and its refusal to give way. Life was not easy in Germany. The Cold War was won and won bloodlessly, but who paid the bill for reconstruction? And continued to pay? We Germans. Greenwood complimented them on their English, fluent with an excellent command of idiom. It seemed pointless to inquire whether they missed their accounting. When eventually they asked Greenwood what he did before he retired—he was older than they were and surely drew a pension of some kind for his years of faithful labor—and he replied that he was a filmmaker engaged in accounting of a personal nature, they lost all interest.

  The scull disappeared. The water darkened as the sun set and the clouds lowered, and then Greenwood smiled, watching the little passenger ferry make its slow transit beyond the mallards. Its position meant the time was 4:06 precisely, fourteen minutes to go in the twenty-minute run from Wannsee to Kladow, the charming suburb across the lake, the one with two good restaurants and a wee island just offshore. This was usually the time he set aside his book or his correspondence and made for the tavern down the street from the S-Bahn, careful to swipe the International Herald Tribune from the library downstairs in case the scullers were not talkative, or talkative only with each other. Greenwood enjoyed sitting at the end of the long bar with his beer and his newspaper, a leisurely sixty-minute read, the first stirrings of the presidential campaign and the various lurid manifestations of the American empire; and in the air, Irish music, thanks to the beautiful barmaid Charlotte, who had taken her summer holiday in Connemara and had fallen in love with a handsome schoolteacher, six feet tall with hair the color of coal—ach, you should hear him talk, Herr Greenwood, such a comedy! Dix scoured the newspaper for accounts of the entertainment industry but found little worth reading. The reviews were short, the frequent resignations of studio executives not worth mentioning, and the subsequent litigation too complicated for easy summary.

  During his first week at the residence, Greenwood invited some of the others in the House to join him at Charlotte’s, but they rarely did, fearing distraction from their work and perhaps fearing also that such an occasion might become a habit or, worse, a ritual. Everyone knew that the winter months at Wannsee were disorienting, the sun disappearing for days at a time and the weather raw. A frigid mist arrived, the sullen breath of the Baltic, and at those times the weight of the past was palpable, the atmosphere a refugee gray.

  One afternoon he was able to collect three of them to visit the Wannsee Conference Center, the stone villa with its oval conference room and refectory table and high windows overlooking the pretty lake and the swimming club across the water. Not much had changed in the neighborhood then to now, so it was easy to imagine the weather in January 1942, Reinhard Heydrich presiding, Adolf Eichmann inconspicuous in a middle seat. Discussion turned to the unacceptable situation in the East, displaced persons who were a burden on Aryan communities. So they undertook an inventory of facilities, rolling stock and destinations for the rolling stock. The participants were officials responsible for transportation, specifically the railway system, and officials responsible also for food and clothing. A doctor was present to advise on medical matters, should they arise. At the end of the meeting, each participant had his orders. The minutes of the meeting were carefully filed. Framed facsimiles of the minutes were hung on the walls of the conference room so that visitors could inspect the spidery handwriting that methodically noted times of departure and arrival, so many on Mondays, so many more on Tuesdays, and so on, the trains traveling west to east, mostly.

  Greenwood, Anya Ryan, and the Kessels spent most of one afternoon at the Wannsee Villa, wandering its rooms upstairs and down, inspecting the many photographs and documents that described the domestic agenda of the Third Reich, returning always to the conference room itself and the ordinary refectory table. On the wall back of the table were official photographs of those present, most of them in business suits; they looked like directors of any industrial concern. Anya was drawn to a photograph in the corridor, Jews standing in the snow, waiting to board railway cars. German soldiers stood casually around them. The Jews carried suitcases, even the small children had bundles under their arms. Snow collected on the roofs of the railway cars and the wooden loading platform. Snow was in the air, soft, fat flakes—fragile, Anya thought, except for those on the platform. For the Jews moving to the railway cars, the snowflakes would seem as heavy as boulders. Unless no one noticed the snow, its whiteness in the gray of the surroundings. The adults would be thinking one thing, the children something else. And then Anya noticed a German soldier, his rifle slung, his palms raised as if in supplication; but he was only catching snowflakes. Anya turned away, thinking that in those times a life had the duration of a snowflake. In her mind she saw the Jews shuffling forward, climbing into the railway cars, men first, the men helping the women, both helping the children, and the snow continuing to fall. Greenwood, the Kessels, and Anya Ryan exited the villa and walked back down the charming suburban street and around the lake, hurrying now to the tavern, chilled to the bone when they arrived.

  Charlotte listened to their conversation from her perch at the end of the bar. She did not join in, even when Jackie Kessel said loudly that visiting the Wannsee Villa was like visiting the laboratory where God cooked up hell. Adam agreed, adding a thought of his own. Anya said nothing at all but drank her beer quickly and announced she was going back to the Ho
use, she had things to attend to. The Kessels went with her. Greenwood remained. Charlotte said quietly looking at a photograph of her handsome schoolteacher. At last she tucked it away in her purse, giving the purse a familiar pat, as if she were seeing the photograph off to bed. When she spoke at last it was from a distance, and quietly so that no one could overhear. Charlotte recommended that in the German winter one remain within oneself, living circumspectly, resisting temptation. Charlotte called the German winter breakable weather. Things broke easily in the hard northern winter.

  Don’t fall behind, she said.

  Stay warm.

  Here, let me fetch you a pilsener.

  The staff at Mommsen House told alarming tales of previous residents who disappeared as early as three in the afternoon, returning to dinner befuddled and hilarious, and sometimes not returning until late in the evening, accompanied by new friends trailing the usual noise and disorder. More than once the Polizei had become involved owing to altercations at Charlotte’s, a terrible embarrassment for the House. Rektor Henry Belknap was personally embarrassed, though no charges were ever filed.

  You Fellows must get hold of yourselves, he said.

  You don’t want to see the inside of a Berlin jail.

  Yes, our winter is difficult. But Germany is a normal country after all, with laws that must be obeyed.

  Of course there was no publicity because the House was under the protection of the government, all courtesies extended to the writers, scholars, musicians, and other intellectual authorities from America. But there was no mistaking the police lieutenant’s smirk as he laid out the disagreeable facts, witness intimidation, lawyers told to go away, evidence lost or mishandled. Under the influence of drink, American intellectuals were worse even than the Stalinist thugs of Baader-Meinhof and the scuffles in Dahlem in the eighties. Your intellectuals are without discipline, the lieutenant said.

  The Rektor promised to punish the offenders, but he never did.

  Fuck them, Henry Belknap said, and for a moment Dix did not know if he meant the police or the intellectuals.

  Dix returned to his kitchen, broke more ice, cut a lemon, poured two fingers of vodka, and stood glaring at the telephone, willing it to ring. Claire had promised to call from the set, but perhaps her promise was as idle as the Rektor’s. And when you were on the set, if things were going well, promises were neglected; they were neglected equally when things were going badly. Dix stood at the window sipping vodka, sorry now that he had not taken a walk in the neighborhood and revisited the villa, if only to end up at Charlotte’s, with or without the newspaper.

  These afternoons, he said aloud, these afternoons are stretching to eternity.

  5

  THE KESSELS were quarreling. They quarreled every afternoon, regular as teatime. The disputes had to do with Adam’s frequent visits to Hamburg and his refusal to accompany Jackie on her excursions around Berlin, a movie in the afternoon, shopping at KaDeWe, a drink at Kempinski’s. He was no more enthusiastic about evenings out at the Berliner Ensemble or cabaret in Mitte—

  Truth is tough and hard as nails

  That’s why we need fairy tales

  —so retrograde and beside the point. Weimar’s dead and gone, Jackie. Weimer’s a dead letter.

  Adam’s voice was deep and did not often carry beyond the walls of their apartment but Jackie’s soprano was clear enough, so Dix mainly heard her side of the argument. He knew that Hamburg archives were essential to Adam’s research, something to do with German emigration in the nineteenth century, all the hopeful boatloads bound for America. Adam taught at the University of Texas and Jackie tutored German. She had been his student once, and reminded him often of the carefree times they had had in the bars and restaurants of Austin, the Longhorns football games on Saturday and the impromptu flights to Cuernavaca or Denver, that year when they were newly together and trying to keep things under the arm. Such fun they had. And you were so cute!

  Now they were in Berlin and a life she hadn’t counted on, Adam all the time in Hamburg, a city with the charm and vivacity of Brownsville. She should have stayed in Austin, where she had friends and where in winter the temperature was benign, mostly. She missed her friends, and she had three months to go in this this this place, where you had to work so hard to have fun and he refused to help out. She said, If you aren’t careful you’ll have another emigrant to write about. Everyone else was taking French leave, the Whytes to Madrid for a week and the Ellmans to Venice, and they never went anywhere except that snowy Sunday with young Bloom and the Ryan woman to the ghastly Soviet memorial in Treptower Park, thirty feet of marble to commemorate the three hundred thousand Russian dead during the Battle of Berlin, five thousand unknown corpses entombed under the marble, for God’s sake, Sunday afternoon at the ossuary. Then a sound like a cello, and Greenwood knew that Adam Kessel was speaking in his reasonable professor’s voice, promising—promising something, perhaps a trip to Lübeck or merry Ulm the following week, Frankfurt the week after, and Munich in March if she was good.

  The Kessels’ door closed. He could hear footsteps and the thud of the elevator door, Adam retreating to his office in the basement for another hour of work before Werner’s three-course evening meal, followed by a lecture from an Australian agronomist lately returned from a journey to the farms of Prussia, deteriorating each day because while you could take the boy out of the collective farm you could not take the collective farm out of the boy, and each and every one of those boys (and girls as well) had to be reeducated as to the value of an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay, and because of the globalization of the food market, another capitalist scheme to destroy the rural life.

  Dix turned up the radio and glanced around the apartment, trying to draw confidence from the things that were familiar, his Olivetti, the Heckel and Kirchner posters on the wall, personal stationery and thesaurus stacked neatly on the shelf under the window, the files scattered willy-nilly, and the photograph of Claire and the children on his writing table, all of it reflected in the mirrors. There were books also, but he was too unsettled of mind to read them, preferring instead the news of the world on CNN and American music on the radio when he was not collaborating in the afternoon quarrels of the Kessels. He was aware suddenly of fractured Sinatra, static caused by the wintry breath of the Baltic or aircraft interference or conceivably the dying rads of Chernobyl, and then the radio went silent altogether and he was left with Jackie’s laughter and the long evening ahead with the Australian who knew everything there was to know about collective farming in Prussia.

  Billy Jeidels had given him the name of an actress.

  A great admirer, Billy said. She wants to meet you.

  She’s a wild one. She looks like Romy Schneider.

  Call her up, take her out.

  You’ll go crazy in Wannsee, Dix.

  But when Greenwood called, she was out of town. Due back in a week. Can I give her a message?

  Tell her Dixon Greenwood called.

  No prob, the man said.

  Dix was thinking now about his oral history, how much to divulge. Naturally Herr Professor Doktor Blum would want to hear about Summer, 1921, how it came to be written and cast. Where did Jana come from? Do you hold with Truffaut that improvisation is the soul of filmmaking? That, and the emotional bonds among the members of the cast. In other words, like life itself. Ensemble or auteur? Spare us no detail, Herr Greenwood.

  Dix began to make notes on a white pad. It was difficult enough defending who you were, and exhausting defending who you were not. The critics thought the work led to the personality. They wanted the personality and the defects that went with the personality, as that would give them special insights into how the director made the movies. They did not understand that every creative endeavor was an act of rebellion against that which had gone before. They did not understand that Truffaut’s great task in The Four Hundred Blows was not to make the boy into himself but to make himself into the boy, not autobiograph
y but anti-autobiography, even the mischievous look-alike Jean-Pierre Leaud, and all the incidents taken from life and acknowledged to have been taken from life but that only meant a faithful recollection of the emotion involved. Not the fact but the emotion from the fact. And while personality was not an innocent bystander, it was not fundamental to understanding, either. God help anyone who tried to deconstruct the magician’s art.

  Plus, the witnesses did not understand their own part in the scheme of things. The audience liked to believe they were controlled by the artist, it flattered their sensibilities, their connoisseurship and discernment. Any work of art that deeply affected them flattered them also. The artist was pleased to believe that the audience was irrelevant to the undertaking. The artist alone was afire with inspiration—the moment, according to Nietzsche, when something profoundly convulsive becomes visible with magisterial exactitude. The author’s aplomb derived from God’s will. When Nietzsche discovered that Thus Spake Zarathustra was completed during the precise hour of Richard Wagner’s death in Venice, he called it the Hallowed Hour.

  Dix was smiling to himself, making notes on the pad. If asked, he would not have been able to say whom he was writing to, other than the empty room in which he sat, the one where the lamp cast long shadows on the ceiling and walls.

  Often it was necessary to wait for the audience, but unlike an orchestra conductor you could not raise your baton and demand silence. You listened to the restlessness in your own way and took from it what you could. That was what distinguished one artist from another. A story that was incomprehensible in one decade was indispensable the next. The audience demanded the story not knowing they demanded it. They recognized it only when the story was in front of their eyes, and then they praised the prophetic genius of the storyteller. They called you a genius for giving them what they wanted when they did not know they wanted it, and had they been asked would have replied, I don’t see the point. Mahler booed off the stage, Matisse banished from the salon. And when you told them they were accomplices, they refused to believe it. They thought you were renouncing your talent. They thought you were hiding something or refusing to take responsibility. They refused to believe that the story would fail utterly if the audience—either the present audience or some future audience—was not prepared to receive it.