The Weather in Berlin

by Ward Just

  We applauded, of course.

  The white elephant, ever so much nearer.

  Even the monk seemed content.

  And the crone. She was very content.

  Then—you can wait your whole life long and never find a moment as filled with possibility as this one—Knife extends his left arm and brings his fist to his mouth. He sights along his arm and moves his index finger. He swings left, swings right, searching for his two-hundred-thousand-kyat owl. At that moment he was aiming his Purdey twelve-gauge; and the owl was as good as mounted under the itty-bitty Matisse in his study, stuffed to within an inch of its life, his latest effort, merit gained. And then he realized what he was doing and turned to face us, and with his usual snarl announced we were returning to the hotel.

  He left early this morning by army aircraft, bound northeast into the Shan States. He won’t say what he’s doing there—“scouting locations,” which we know is a lie. What do you suppose he’s doing, Dix? My guess is, it’s ten-year-old virgins or yesterday’s opium crop. He says he’ll return close of business tomorrow, and then it’s back home.

  I’m sure it’s opium. The monk is with him, so it wouldn’t be girls, would it?

  I hope not. The thought of it makes me sick.

  So that’s my news.

  We’ll be home in a couple of days.

  Oh, one last thing. Ada Hart made Knife the executor of her estate. And do you know what? She left everything to charity. Ada hadn’t a single living relative, isn’t that sad? So Lou Kniffe will supervise the disbursements to the Girl Scouts, the cancer fund, NARAL, and the Audubon Society.

  I remember what a good eulogy you gave for Ada. Everyone said so.

  You talked about a life as uncompleted action, “however long or short, the arbitrary interval governed by a malicious sovereign.” I wasn’t sure what you meant by that, but now I think I do. You can never know another’s spirit. Isn’t that right?

  19

  THE WEATHER had turned warm overnight, a false spring that brought Café tables and chairs onto the sidewalks of Berlin. Patrons drank beer in the sun in their shirtsleeves. In the glare of the sun their winter faces appeared waxy and pale as soap. Willa Baz was in high good humor as she and Dix collected the Mercedes at the Avis downtown and began the two-hour drive east, out Karl-Marx-Allee, the streets crowded with bicycles. Dix knew where he wanted to film, so they were en route to meet Reinhold and Sophie Lenord. Spring rushed in through the open windows and Willa talked on, saying again and again how delighted she and her producer were that Dix had agreed to direct the season’s climactic episode of Wannsee 1899. He had described to her some of the changes he wanted to make in the philosopher’s script and she agreed without hesitation. Whatever you want to do, Dix, it’s fine. We only insist that the material be historically accurate. Within limits.

  Within limits, he said.

  And Jana has agreed to appear?

  I think she will, Dix said.

  What a coup, Willa said.

  They were stopped at a traffic light, enormous concrete buildings looming over them. The street was choked with diesel fumes.

  What limits? Dix asked with a smile.

  The usual limits, she said. Sometimes we can’t afford what we need.

  Understood, he said.

  I know the script isn’t all it should be. Yet our philosopher has interesting ideas. He believes Germany is the first modern state. Oh, yes. Germany is the cradle of Marxism, after all. Marxism was our great export in the nineteenth century.

  Sophie Lenord explained that her owners would rent the big house for one month, reluctantly, and only after conditions stipulated by the estate agent, Herr Erfurr in Potsdam, were agreed to. Of course a substantial deposit would be required. Anything damaged must be replaced in the original, and that included any damage to the fields and outbuildings. Herr Erfurr had a full inventory of fixtures and fittings; there were to be no structural alterations whatever, and no disturbance of the streams and woodlands. Frau Lenord was to be present at all times. Herr Greenwood and Frau Baz would have one morning to look at the house and grounds to see if the location was suitable.

  Sophie recited this while standing under the porte-cochere, holding the iron latchkey in both hands, her fingers crossed.

  Do they want final cut, too? Dix asked.

  I don’t understand, Sophie said.

  Herr Greenwood’s joke, Willa said.

  Dix smiled. It’s fine, Sophie.

  Willa said, Where’s Reinhold?

  Hunting, Sophie said. She paused a moment and added, Reinhold does not approve.

  Why not?

  Sophie shrugged and looked away down the gravel road to the Lenord gatehouse. A thin line of smoke rose from the chimney but nothing else moved. Reinhold advised against it, she said.

  Dix said, Shall we go inside.

  Why not? Willa said again.

  Reinhold does not think Americans should be in charge of Wannsee 1899. He does not like Americans on the property, Sophie said, unlocking the door and standing aside so Willa and Dix could enter.

  The downstairs—large foyer with its iron chandelier, large rectangular dining room, larger living room, narrow staircase leading to the upper floors—was unsuitable, the furniture of an indefinite contemporary style, appearing almost weightless in the torpor of the room, its dark walls, high ceilings, and narrow windows, an exact space of suffocating formality and rectitude. The furniture made it ludicrous, Bismarck in Capezios—low-slung glass cocktail tables, Eames chairs, white-bordered mirrors, and a scythe-shaped sofa, an ensemble suited to a condominium in South Florida. The art on the walls was Titian-sized and aggressively abstract. Of course substitute furniture could be rented, but even so, a country baroness—even a turn-of-the-century country baroness—would never put up with a fireplace so shallow, with a mantel of beige marble, the Chinese yin-yang ideograph chiseled into its veined face. The darkwood floors and paneled walls seemed set in the frown of a profoundly disappointed German governess.

  Dix said, What do they do, the owners?

  I don’t know, Sophie replied. They never said. For them it is a weekend house. They come down on weekends with their young children, sometimes with friends. We pick them up at the airport. They keep to themselves. On Sunday mornings they take long walks, the children, too. Sometimes they ride their horses. They have a big lunch and then we take them back to the airport. They own a small plane and he flies it.

  Where do they live? Greenwood was looking at a portrait on the wall above the sofa, a young girl in blue jeans and a jersey sitting on a bench, her dog beside her.

  Düsseldorf, Sophie said.

  That explains it, Willa said.

  Not very promising, Greenwood said. The furniture, the look of the room. It’s all wrong. The fireplace . . . And then he realized that the house he had in mind was the manor of the Anglo-Irish, the one near the River Shannon where he had dined so long ago with his father, a house just this side of threadbare, but gallant.

  Impossible, Willa agreed.

  It’s a fine house! Sophie protested.

  I want to see the master bedroom, Greenwood said.

  He opened the window, admitting a warm breeze with a breath of chill from the dormant fields, a barn in the near distance, various small farm buildings farther out. Hills rose in a low swell, woodlands divided by fields, rail fencing here and there in long thin lines. A twisted shoelace of a stream meandered through the hills. The sun was low on the horizon of the southern sky. In the misty light, patches of gray snow clung to the hollows. All was as it would have been in 1899 at a country estate in Prussia in the fresh morning hours before a hunting party set out, so quiet you could hear ice melt. And then a collie dog wandered out from the barn, the dog in the portrait. Greenwood stood on tiptoe and tried to pick out the woods where he and Reinhold had cornered the boar. But the woods and hills looked identical, as undifferentiated as the trees themselves and the terrain that rolled away to the Oder. The field
s were utterly vacant and idle, it was only March after all, and weeks remained before the first signs of spring. He stood with his forehead pressed against the cold glass, trying to imagine things through a camera’s lens. He watched the sky for hawks but there were no hawks, no obvious point of reference except for the branches of trees against a pale sky, a sinister aspect.

  He heard a noise behind him, Sophie or Willa moving about. The room was large enough to give an echo and small enough so that the aroma of beeswax was sharp in his nostrils. He turned to see Willa sitting on the bed, a handsome four-poster with a lace canopy, indisputably a woman’s bed. A comforter was neatly folded at its foot, a book lay open on the bedside table among framed photographs of the children and a reading light with a Tiffany shade. Willa was staring at the ceiling and shaking her head.

  She said, Hopeless.

  He said, Not entirely.

  When he turned back to the window she muttered something and left the room, her footsteps noisy in the corridor. He concentrated hard and imagined that the woman sitting on the bed was Jana, the baroness rising late, stepping barefoot to the window to observe the hunters already gathered in the field beyond the barn. She stood watching until someone called to her and she waved from the window, We do not begin until noon. And the baron raising his voice in mock protest, then giving up, tapping the timepiece he kept in his waistcoat. Servants were passing drinks. The dogs were charging in circles, eager to start. Jana stood at the window in her nightdress, watching the men gathered in groups, talking, checking their shotguns.

  The baroness’s three sons stood off to one side, waiting at a respectful distance; the girls were nowhere to be seen. The baron was not to be disturbed in the moments before the hunt was to begin. He was in conference with his head gamekeeper, who was nodding doubtfully at something the baron was saying, the direction of the wind or the line of march or the location of the stag, the weak shots and the marksmen and the necessity of overseeing them all, especially the women. The gamekeeper, with his Slavic eyes, his wiry build, and his suspicious manner, reminded her of her father. He was quick to anger and quick with his fists, like her father. He was proud of his stamina, able to walk all day long without rest and in the evening eat everything that was put in front of him. When he finished, Jana and her mother were invited to take what was left. While they ate, he told long stories detailing his grievances. Over the years the grievances accumulated, but it never occurred to him to do anything about them. Her father had the imagination of an ox. For many years, Jana had sent money to her mother, hoping she would summon the courage to leave her father. But she never did, so the money had gone for the care and feeding of the ox. She never called the gamekeeper Fritz, always Herr Smit, and never with a smile. She found disagreeable tasks for him to do, and now and then she caught him glaring at her with a sullen expression of —she supposed it was recognition. And when she glared back, Herr Smit was always the first to shift his gaze. Now, in the field below the window, the gamekeeper touched his forefinger to the bill of his cap—the gesture was just this side of insolence, but the baron was too dim to notice—and ambled off to do whatever it was that the baron wanted done. All these thoughts ran through Jana’s mind as she stood at her bedroom window watching the preparations for the hunt.

  Yes, Dix thought, this is where the story begins, in the morning as days begin, the baroness in her bedroom thinking about her life, what had been and what was to come. No one ever knew how such a day would end, and if its end was forecast by its beginning; only the audience was in on the secret. He wondered if Mahler’s adagio began in the bedroom or later when the hunt was under way. It would be later, he reasoned, because the scenes would roll into one another, starting in the bedroom from the baroness’s point of view, and next the panorama of the hunt, the funeral, and the family conference. The adagio would begin with the hunt.

  She stood in the shadows and undressed as she watched the men prepare, sighting down their barrels, checking ammunition with the diligence of infantrymen. She listened to the fragments of conversation that drifted up to the window where she stood. Rough laughter, too, for bets were being placed. She paused in her dressing and slowly reached for the carafe on the chest of drawers behind her, her fingers light and smooth on its glass neck, easing the stopper from its mouth as she poured a half-tasse, the wine cold on her teeth and tongue. The room was chilly but she barely noticed; it was always drafty in the big house, and she had grown up in cold. She savored the wine, allowing it to gather in her mouth, swallowing slowly, so cold in her throat and scratchy farther down. Now she watched the girls strolling into view. They walked like Berlin girls, all hips and arms, except for the plain one, who was not flirtatious, at least in this company. City girls had a loose gait, it came from walking on pavement, in groups, always dressed up, a kind of ceremony, their eyes always watchful. A groom held their horses and the girls mounted, arranging themselves in the saddle. When the groom let go, the horses reared briefly, then cantered off, one following the other. The girls seemed unconcerned, but Fritz Smit, returning from the baron’s errand, loudly instructed the groom to bring the animals under control. By then the horses had cantered away into the field, where they stood now, shaking their great heads, imperious. The girls were laughing, excited by the ride and the prospect of the hunt and the gay supper later on, the long table in candlelight, roast venison and champagne, and conversation with the baron’s handsome and most eligible sons.

  Jana watched this without expression, remembering her own tense school days, the shabbiness, the drudgery, the taunts of her classmates, and the ox always somewhere in the wings. She ran her fingers through her hair and muttered something to herself, an oath or a prayer, it was hard to tell which. She was remembering the difficulty she had had, learning to ride when she visited the baron for the first time. It was a weekend party and she was with a new friend, a distant cousin of the baron’s, perhaps a bit irresponsible. They had met at the circus, a métier he understood and approved of. He was full of life, that one, and apologetic when he invited her to come with him to his cousin’s estate. He promised a boring weekend, except when they were together at night. You’ll like Alex, Wil said, somewhat old-fashioned in his ways, not at all worldly. He belongs to old Prussia—often irascible but he has a good heart and a first-rate wine cellar inherited from his father. He is ill at ease with women because his mother was strict, a humorless disciplinarian. Do you know how to ride, Jana? No, she did not. The horses she was familiar with were not horses you rode but horses you walked behind, heavy reins in your hands, stepping carefully to avoid the steaming shit. She had difficulty staying on and twice was almost thrown. The baron found her discomfort amusing but she was mortified; and mortified, too, that her riding costume, her habit, was just the slightest bit off-key. Much was off-key in those days, not that the baron noticed. He likes you, Wil said, and if you work at it you might come to like him and the life he leads. Is that what you want? You have to think of the future, Jana, and where you want to be in ten years’ time. How do you see yourself in the world? Alex was a country baron and unconcerned with life in society, as he put it. He enjoyed hunting and managing the farm. Not a socially adept baron at all, and he had no one to advise him. His parents were dead and he had no brothers or sisters, only an elderly uncle who served in the diplomatic corps abroad.

  My father, Wil said.

  They don’t get along. City baron, country baron, Wil added with a laugh.

  Alex was attracted to her at once and found it charming that she was awkward on horseback. He taught her to ride and he taught her to shoot, but that was all he had to teach her. Jana was a quick study, and she discovered soon enough that Wil had not exaggerated when he had described the baron as not at all worldly. The world was a mystery to him, and he had no interest in it. She continued now to watch the Berlin girls manage their mounts. They looked as if they had been born to it and their clothes were impeccable, including the hats, gloves, boots, and braided riding cr
ops. Mornings on horseback in Grunewald.

  The baroness tied up her corset and a silk blouse over it and a tailored wool coat over the shirt. Then she thought again and removed the coat and the shirt in order to unlace the corset. She liked herself loose, liked the watery feel of silk against her skin. She combed her hair in the reflection of the window glass, one short stroke after another, smiling at the memory of the dissolute Wil, married now to a condessa and living in Estoril. What a time they had had, watching the acrobats and then imitating the acrobats. He asked her often, How do you see yourself in the world, Jana? She always laughed and said she did not see herself poor; and beyond that, who knew? But the truth was, she did not see herself in the world at all. Where did Sorbs belong? Wherever Sorbs lived, they were among strangers. Her mother sang a lament that ended, You are a dead people, you are few, learn to be silent, stretch in your graves. She believed there was no natural place for her. She had always lived by her wits because the world was a cold place, vagrant and untrustworthy. She had always moved on before the knock on the door. She grasped the baron’s country life but did not know if that was what she wanted for herself, for the remainder of her days. In time she grew accustomed to weekends at the estate, and in time became fond of the baron. When he proposed marriage, she found herself agreeing. She knew that on the estate she would be secure, and her privacy maintained. Wil announced he was leaving for Portugal, but as his last act of friendship promised to give her away on her wedding day.