The Weather in Berlin

by Ward Just

  The German was standing under a fat linden, his shotgun resting against his thigh. He was trying unsuccessfully to light his pipe, all the while keeping his eyes on the thornbushes directly ahead of him.

  He’s in there, Reinhold said.

  I don’t see him, Greenwood said.

  He’s there. He’s hurt.

  I still don’t see him, Greenwood said, and as he said it the thornbush moved, parted like the curtain on a stage. The boar’s snout appeared, twitching, then settled almost delicately to the ground. He observed the arched tusks, ragged with long use, and the dull eyes and pointed ears, the great hump rising back of his head. The beast seemed spent and incurious; a bored audience, Greenwood thought. An unpredictable audience, preoccupied with its own wounds and fevers, its long day of combat, its many enemies, its need for food. But when he stirred, the bristles of his pelt flared in irritation. The pelt was matted and the bristles looked as tough as bone. A bad audience.

  Hundred fifty kilos, Reinhold said. More maybe.

  Greenwood nodded. The boar was breathing heavily, glaring at them, trying to gather himself and failing.

  Too old, Reinhold said.

  For what?

  For anything. No good for eating. Too old to be of use. Diseased, probably, or a wound that has not healed. Someone got to him first, there are good hunters in this district. We enjoy the chase. Not so many boar now, though. Not like before the war when there were herds of them, sporting men arriving from all over for a beat through the forest. Army generals, capitalists from Frankfurt and Munich. The head was the prize. Look here, Reinhold said, pointing. Blood spoor. Gut shot, I suppose. Herr Boar is done for, his days in the forest are ended. God knows how long he has lived here, perhaps forty, fifty years. Perhaps he was here the day the Russians invaded. Possibly he watched from his lair, a young boar full of fight and cunning. But his speed and strength did not count against artillery and mortars and bombs from the air. He was terrified, no doubt. So he took care, concealing himself. Retreating farther into the hills and ravines, waiting for the combat to end, then feasting on what remained. The war would be a puzzle to him, would it not? Invading his domain, the place where he ruled. And you would say this is logical; primitive animals can never defeat advanced arms and modern infantry and aircraft. Nevertheless he is alive and all the others who fought him are dead. It’s very droll, no?

  Reinhold backed away from the linden and picked up the rusted bayonet, hefting it in his palm. He spun it underhand at the boar. It bit the ground and stuck, quivering, a few inches from the beast’s snout. Reinhold laughed loudly, watching the bayonet sway like a metronome, then come to rest.

  A souvenir, he said. A souvenir of the war he avoided so successfully. And living to a fine old age, roaming the forests of the Fatherland.

  So, Reinhold concluded, now we can go.

  And leave him?

  Why not? Reinhold said.

  Greenwood said, I thought you finished what you started.

  Reinhold smiled unpleasantly. I didn’t start it. He started it.

  It’s his forest, Greenwood said.

  He’s dying, Reinhold said.

  But not dead.

  A sentimental approach, Reinhold said. I did not judge you a sentimentalist.

  What are you afraid of?

  Afraid?

  It’s only an animal.

  You finish him, then. Reinhold handed him the shotgun.

  You’re the hunter, Greenwood said, handing it back.

  You feel sorry for our boar, Reinhold said.

  As you say, he’s dying.

  So we kill him. That’s what you want?

  He’s in pain, Greenwood said. And as if to confirm that, the boar grunted, raising his huge head, continuing to glare. The light was going now and it was difficult to make out the shape of the body in the bush. The hump had disappeared into the thornbush, and it was easy to imagine a mighty animal, an ur-boar, survivor of the murderous century, and dying now as the century ended.

  Look at him, Reinhold said. What sort of nervous system do you think he has? Our boar feels no pain, only anger. Revenge. If he could attack, he would. He has lived by his wits for a very long time. Let him die in his own time.

  And how long will that be?

  How would I know? Two hours? Two days?

  And still dangerous, Greenwood said.

  Not anymore.

  And still in pain.

  Reinhold made a dismissive motion with the barrel of his shotgun.

  The boar moved his head again. His haunches trembled, then lay still. Reinhold was busy filling and lighting his pipe, the flame dancing from the tremor in Reinhold’s fingers; and suddenly Dix knew that Reinhold was one of the infantry holding the line at Seelow, his frenzied retreat from the Oder earning the usual reward, shell shock. The cloying odor of tobacco mingled with the boar’s rancid scent. The beast appeared benign, as harmless as a cave drawing. Reinhold was the dangerous one, cradling the shotgun, breaking it and removing the cartridges, fumbling them, muttering all the while. When he snapped the breech shut and stood with it at port arms, Dix was reminded of the eerie photograph of Lee Harvey Oswald in the back yard of the apartment house on Neely Street in Dallas. Reinhold’s expression was as unreadable as Oswald’s but the weapons were equally lethal. Dix took a step backward.

  I allow them to live, Reinhold said.

  Even wounded?

  Wounded most of all, Reinhold said.

  Give me the gun.

  With pleasure, Reinhold said. I doubt if you can do it.

  Dix accepted the shotgun along with the two cartridges. He broke the gun, inserted the cartridges, and moved toward the thornbush.

  Aim for the heart, Reinhold said. The shoulder. A head shot doesn’t work so well because our boar’s brains aren’t so well developed. For Herr Boar, the brain is a numb muscle. So you want to avoid the brain and aim for the heart. The heart is the engine. Our boar is the one the poet had in mind when he said, Fate determines character.

  Dix looked at him.

  So you see, Herr Greenwood, our beast is not so easy to kill. No doubt he can smell your fear. Mine, too. It gives him confidence, the smell of fear. So get close, you don’t want to have to take a second shot.

  He heard Reinhold walking away and in a moment he was gone and the tobacco smoke with him. The forest was silent, the birds vanished, the beast quiet, though continuing to settle. Close up, Dix was able to observe the animal’s great bulk, its yellow tusks and scarred pelt. He had never seen an animal so large, with such—he supposed the word was “potential.” The last time he had fired a shotgun he and his father had gone with friends to the Chesapeake. They had waited from daybreak for a duck but had seen nothing; and, at last ready to quit, his father had taken a passing shot at a mallard and crippled it. The bird flew away in a stutter, falling, then rising, finally settling in the middle of the cove. With a discouraged sigh, Harry had launched the dory and rowed to the place he thought the bird was. But the mallard had disappeared, scauped or swam away or flew into the rising sun. The old man paddled about for fifteen minutes, returning to the blind in a foul humor. He hated to leave anything crippled. Against the rules, he said. Against the code. So he unscrewed the thermos and they sat for another half-hour, drinking vodka and hot bouillon and admiring the sunrise, waiting for the crippled duck to return for the coup de grace.

  Dix turned the gun this way and that, looking for the safety catch. When he found it, he eased it back. He had never enjoyed using firearms. He liked the aesthetics of the hunt, rising always before dawn, the feel of rough clothes, the walnut stock against his jaw, the first faint glow of the sun on the horizon. Missing one bird after another, he waited for his father’s sigh, Oh, Dixon. But this execution did not require marksmanship, only a desire to get it over with.

  Cradling the shotgun, he hung his cane from the thick branch of a fir and limped the few feet to the thornbush. He pointed the shotgun at what he thought was the boar’s
shoulder. It was hard to tell in the half-light of dusk, the shoulder dissolved into the hump and the belly, the head out of sight now, hidden by the thornbush. The animal made no sound and he wondered if it knew what was in store; or perhaps it had merely withdrawn into itself. He imagined it forty miles wide and four thousand miles long, reaching through Poland to the vast interior of Russia, beyond the Urals to the steppes and farther, to the marshes of central Asia, governing the region in a lavish, indolent embrace. He heard the boar grunt and heave, the thornbush breaking apart. He slid forward, unsteady, feeling his way with the barrel of the shotgun. Darkness closed in and the air was full of drizzle, the forest pristine and sweet-smelling. Something touched his foot. When he fired, the noise was appalling in the deep forest silence. Dix stepped forward, gunpowder in his nostrils. When he pushed aside the branches of the thornbush, he heard movement far away. The animal had vanished.

  12

  WILLA WANTED to visit friends, so the next day they drove south to the vicinity of Tannenberg. Dix tried to sleep but was peppered with questions about the hunt. What happened in the forest? Nothing happened in the forest. Reinhold said something happened in the forest and that you were responsible. That’s right, I was. No harm done. That wasn’t what Reinhold said. Reinhold said you insisted on killing a wounded boar. He said there was an argument and he gave you the shotgun, and you refused to tell him what happened—

  Your uncle Reinhold spent too many years in the war, Dix said.

  He was never in the war, Willa said.

  Then where did he get the shakes?

  Schnapps, Willa said. He got the shakes from schnapps.

  Did you really kill a boar? Anya asked.

  No, Dix said. I didn’t.

  Reinhold was so upset—

  I don’t know why you think Reinhold was in the war, Willa said. Hunch, Dix said.

  You must understand that we are not all Nazis, Karen said.

  They were late for lunch. Willa’s friends spoke no English so the meal was an agony of translation and mistranslation until Willa finally gave it up, leaving Dix happily silent, eating sausages and reading the Herald Tribune, the artillery rumble of the German language in the background. Later, when Willa apologized for the inconvenience, he told her about the actress who traveled to Oslo at her own expense to attend productions of Ibsen’s plays, two dozen of them in a single fortnight. She spoke no Norwegian but she knew the plays so well—her portrayal of Rebecca in Rosmersholm was considered definitive in English—she followed them with little difficulty. That is foolish, Willa said, what was the point? Sound, Dix said. The sound of the Norwegian language, the way the syllables fell, and the pace of the long lines as opposed to the short, and the gestures that went with them. She wanted to hear the sound of Norwegian laughter, though there was little enough of that in Ibsen. When the cycle was complete, she booked passage on a boat that visited the fjords, and by the time she returned she had a passing knowledge of Norwegian, and Ibsen’s achievement seemed all the greater. She had visited him at home.

  Why are you telling me this? Willa asked.

  I like the sound of German, Dix answered.

  After lunch, they turned north for Berlin and it was not until late in the evening that he deposited Willa and Karen at the Zoo station, then motored through Grunewald to Wannsee, the streets there deserted, the suburb quiet at midnight. Charlotte’s was open but when Dix suggested a nightcap, Anya said, No thanks. She had to call her father in Rügen.

  Papa has been ominously silent, she said.

  Anya said good night and hurried inside Mommsen House but Dix lingered. A light snow was falling and the big house and its floodlit lawn looked like any North Shore stockbroker’s million-dollar white elephant. He had begun to think of the villa as home; in any case, it was where he returned to. Dix remained in the cold for a while, watching the snow fall on the fountain and the iron sundial nearby, thinking of snowflakes as a procession of seconds, time advancing in the silent German night, accumulating on the fountain and the blank sundial, anonymous and without premonition, merely a snowy evening in a glass paperweight. Time was never lost, only reserved. And it did not advance, it retreated. This was the winter retreat. The boar came to his mind and went away. He scanned the floodlit lawn and realized that only yesterday the actual streets were crowded with retreating infantry, their disorganization, their shouts and the clump of their boots the announcement of the chaos to come. Snow continued to fall, heavier now, dry flakes that flew like dust, whirling around the fountain and the sundial. He thought of Reinhold’s brother and his comrades, the brother fifteen years old with a SIG 710 on his shoulder, grateful to be asked to serve, without remorse. There were hundreds of them at the end of the war, roaming the German countryside. The Allies called them wolfpacks, teenage boys armed to the teeth with nothing to lose and a nation’s honor to avenge. How delicious it was to be so outnumbered yet so feared by the armies of occupation. American soldiers were terrified of them, the war almost over and the Wehrmacht defeated, except these boys hadn’t heard that news. They lived outside of time. They were in love with night. They were without fear and determined to kill any enemy soldier they saw. They lived in the wild like animals, emerging in the dark to kill someone, anyone—a sentry or a careless truck driver, an infantryman asleep in his tent or the sympathetic lieutenant who rummaged in his pack for a Hershey bar or a stick of gum. Cigarettes were what they craved. The war ended but the wolfpacks remained, disbanding eventually and returning to wherever they chose to return, inventing some story or not bothering to invent any story. Reinhold had not mentioned his brother’s name, nor whether he was older or younger. No doubt he died as Reinhold said he did. Reinhold did speak with a certain pride along with sadness. Dix supposed it was sadness. As he said, you could replace a wife but not a brother.

  This was the vision he had conjured from the snow. Now Dix took a deep breath and walked toward the bright cone of light on the porch. His head was down and he was otherwise preoccupied but he did not fail to notice that on the second floor the curtains of Anya’s bedroom window parted, Anya on the telephone. He watched her hand rise and fall, a gesture of frustration or despair. She stared from the window into the courtyard, and when Dix made a gesture of encouragement, she gave no sign of recognition.

  Claire’s message was on the answering machine. Her voice had the breathless timbre of a golf announcer describing the doomsday putt on eighteen, the undulations of the green, the spike marks around the cup, the weather at dusk, the odds against. Claire was describing betrayal, betrayals everywhere, producers’ betrayals, betrayals of agents, publicists, the costar and her wretched husband, the cinematographer, others too numerous to mention. What was there about the set that brought out the worst in everyone, when rumor piled upon rumor, and all rumors were believed. Things collapsed in a wreckage of incompetence. The commissary was incapable of supplying a hot lunch. The hairdresser was drinking before breakfast. The company was more conspired against than Hamlet, with the result that “they”—and here she paused, and when she resumed her voice had acquired a sudden excitement, putt made—had decided to take well-deserved French leave, destination Maui, to give the producers a little something to think about, and half the crew is down with a virus anyhow. Howard’s triple pissed, Dix.

  So. Someone had an airplane.

  They were meant to leave yesterday, but when the pilot checked the weather he discovered an El Niño—related storm—actually, the word he used was “hurricane”—and so they decided to fly much farther west, she didn’t know exactly where. But they intended to refuel at Guam and check the weather in the South Pacific. Java, Borneo, the Celebes, one of those sultry destinations. And they’d take their sweet time and not be in any hurry to let Los Angeles know where they were, what they were up to, and for how long.

  She said, You have no idea how awful they’re being, the demands they’re making and the interference. Howard calls them baby-faced hoods. Howard’s fed up and so am
I. We’re not being allowed to do our work as professionals. Howard’s lost confidence, and he’s not the only one. Everyone’s in a bad temper. We’re in a coal mine and the canaries are dying. Soooo. That’s the story so far. We’ve decided to play hooky in the South Pacific.

  Tell me this, Dix.

  Are things more serious in Berlin?

  He rolled his eyes at that.

  So, she said, things are on hold until the creative issues are worked out.

  Money, Dix said aloud. When they said “creative issues,” what they meant was money. He broke ice cubes into a glass and quickly filled the glass with vodka and drank half of it. Now her voice had lost its lilt, the words coming between long pauses. Her voice was false, leaking around the edges, unfamiliar to him. In the background he heard an electrical hiss.

  That’s where I am now, she said. High above the Pacific. The sun is shining but I can see yellow clouds below. Do you know how I feel? I feel marooned. We’re three hours out and it’s a smooth ride and everyone is playing cards in the salon. Except me. I’m talking to you in nasty Berlin and feeling marooned on an airplane. Did you have a nice day? A good dinner? How’s the weather? You’re never there when I call. Why are you always out? Your message is so impersonal. Dixon Greenwood, leave your number. So inhospitable. So gruff. So—not wanting to hear from anyone. Leave your number, I dare you.

  Oh, honey, she said, things have gone to pieces.

  Claire, he said aloud, wheeling to face the machine, hearing only the electrical hiss. She had never called him honey in her life. Honey was the word she used for colleagues, or the children. He was suddenly at a loss, alone in a foreign apartment on the other side of the world, his drink frigid in his hand.