The Weather in Berlin

by Ward Just

  When she heard a soft knock on the door, she did not reply. When the knock came again, louder, she said quietly, Go away. I will be down soon enough. I am dressing. Tell the baron to wait. And then she pulled on her long skirt and buttoned the silk blouse. She finished her half-tasse of wine and drew a wide leather belt around her waist, cinching it tight, and called for the maid to help her with her boots. All this time she was staring out the window at the hunters in the yard, shotguns on their shoulders, impatient for the baron’s signal. Her sons were there, too, the loud ones and the shy one. They were fine-looking boys except for the eldest, who had inherited his father’s heavy face and body; and in the way of life’s perverse comedy, Christian was the one who knew her best. They could read each other’s thoughts, announced by a raised eyebrow followed by a sly smile, I know what you’re thinking. A humorless boy, always seeking advantage. At times she wished nothing more than to see the last of him, but she thought also that Christian was dangerous outside the borders of the estate. The estate was his realm. Beyond its boundaries were lands to be subjugated or pillaged because their laws were not his laws, their people not his people. Christian would bring a world of trouble to himself and others, yet when the baron died he would not be a suitable heir. His stage was the army, and God knew how many German requiems would be sung in his name or on his order. She would do the world a favor by keeping him caged on his thousand hectares, allowing him to kill every beast within range. And perhaps he would kill her, too, in the end.

  The maid arrived to help her with her boots, and went away when she was finished.

  The baroness was closest in temperament to the middle son, who felt himself a stranger in the family. She and Rolf looked on life from the same wary angle of vision. Anything given could be taken away. Eternal vigilance was the price of happiness; perhaps privacy was the better word. Now she watched Christian dismount and strut restlessly, calling to his father to commence the hunt. They were physically alike, though the baron was two inches shorter and heavier in the chest and belly. Christian weighed nine pounds at birth, born in this bedroom where she stood. Jana was twenty-two. She was alone when labor began. The baron was in Königsberg buying a horse. Her maid summoned the doctor from the village, who arrived with Fritz Smit’s wife, childless herself and terrified, appalled by the blood and the screams of the baroness. Useless, a useless woman, unlike Jana’s own mother, who had great powers of healing. Her mother was fundamentally sympathetic, perhaps too sympathetic for her own good. Somehow Jana got through that day and the next day. She named him Christian Wilhelm, Wil. Her own joke but the baron was pleased, naming his firstborn after a relation, distant though that relation was.

  The baroness poured another half-tasse of wine and stood looking approvingly into her full-length mirror, remembering the births of her sons, each birth more difficult than the last. With the third, she thought she would die. At the end of it she felt her spirit ebb, drain like the tide. When she awakened she was alone in the bright light of early morning. Then she heard something stir, the baron at the window, holding his son, grinning like a half-wit. He rocked the infant in his arms, humming a sentimental German lullaby. She remembered that he rubbed the hunting horn against the infant’s cheek and laughed delightedly when the child closed its tiny fist around the mouthpiece. She shut her eyes and turned her face to the wall. She heard the sound of marching feet, and then she gave an involuntary gasp of pain. She fought for breath. Somewhere on the margins of her consciousness she heard the baby cry and her husband hurry from the room calling for Frau Smit.

  Come at once, my son is in distress. My son, he said again and again, is crying.

  But the infant continued to bawl, a howling that seemed to fill her sickroom. She heard more marching feet, the clump clump of infantry boots. When she opened her eyes, Christian and Rolf were peeking through the doorway. The doctor was at her side. She heard him mutter something. The baron’s whiskers touched her chin. He was holding the baby, and when he moved to give it to her, she shook her head. The doctor said, There, there, and caressed her arm. She felt pressure on her arm and in a moment she was asleep again, but the sound of marching feet would not go away.

  Later, the doctor advised against more children; and she remembered his surprise at her too quick assent, and then his sardonic smile. Your hips are too narrow, he said. They are normal hips, she replied. There are other ways, he went on, and she answered that she knew that. She knew what they were. The doctor stepped back, alarmed, appraising her as if seeing her for the first time; at any event, he was listening closely. Jana said nothing more, but did not take her eyes off the doctor, who tried unsuccessfully to avoid her gaze. He coughed and stopped smiling, having blundered into something—the word he said to himself was “unwholesome.” He had known the baron for many years, doubting always that he would marry. He seemed content on his estate and rarely traveled from it. He had never spoken of a desire for a wife and children. Then he turned up with Jana-whatever-her-name-was, a companion of wretched cousin Wil, a careless boulevardier. The doctor debated having a word with Alex, but Alex was not the sort of man you “had a word with” on a personal matter, so he remained silent; if Jana was the woman he wanted, Jana was the woman he would have. Of course she was agreeable. Why wouldn’t she be agreeable, Miss Nothing from Nowhere. In a stroke she had the big house and horses for riding and whatever other country pleasures she wanted for herself, and all she had to do was agree to live permanently in the country because the baron hated cities, Berlin especially. She took to it and became something of a woman of mystery, aloof, difficult to reach, often abrupt. The men in the village called her the Tatar princess because of her high cheekbones and almond-shaped eyes and strange accent, an accent no one could quite place. But she was no more a princess than he was. She was a Sorb from top to bottom, with the usual Sorb resentments. Of course the doctor had heard rumors about their life together, but rumors were the inevitable small change of rural life, and Prussians ran things to suit themselves. Who knew what she wanted really, besides the big house and horses and a full larder and the rest of it.

  Wasn’t it always a mistake to mix the races? The Sorbs were a sinister people. Who was this Jana anyhow? Where did she come from? And now that she had done her connubial duty, what would she expect as her reward? Whatever it was, the baron would gladly pay it. No question who was in charge of things at the estate. Just then the doctor wondered if Alex was afraid of her.

  Jana remembered the conversation, looking at the doctor and apprehending what he was thinking, but maintaining her level gaze. She said to him, Who is marching outside? Tell them to go away.

  He didn’t care for her tone of voice, and he had no idea what she was talking about. Then he noticed the rhythmic beats. Smiling broadly, he told her it was the baron’s idea. Fritz and the men were building a rail fence around the house.

  She said, To keep bandits out, or me in?

  It is for the children, Baroness.

  He thinks they will run away?

  The baron was worried.

  Of what?

  He did not say, Baroness.

  I will have it torn down, she said.

  But it is almost finished.

  Anything done can be undone, she said, and closed her eyes, turning her back on the doctor.

  Jana tied an ascot around her neck and checked the window one last time. Herr Smit had brought her horse around and stood with it now in an attitude of boredom. She caught the baron’s eye and waved. She hurried downstairs and emerged into the sunlight and greeted her guests. The baron raised his horn and blew a long note, a rising note in a single breath that seemed to last forever. She smiled blandly at her husband as he marched off, favoring his bad leg. The hunters gathered their gear. The girls reined their horses, waiting for the baroness to lead the way. The beaters moved off to the east, their dogs racing ahead, and suddenly it was silent, the quiet of the graveyard.

  Willa cleared her throat and said, Dixon? What a
re you doing?

  I’m imagining a life, Greenwood said.

  20

  SO YOU’RE REUNITED with Jana after all these years, Henry Belknap said. Isn’t it remarkable how people show up years later, and right away you’re plunged back into the time when you first knew them? And now you have an episode of Wannsee 1899 and that never would have happened if you hadn’t come to Berlin. Jana either. Who would believe it? Not me. When you arrived in January I gave you three weeks, maximum. Then you were back to L.A. on some hoked-up errand, bye-bye Dix. Whereupon Jana arrives and you’re back in business. Who’s she playing?

  The baroness, Dix said.

  There isn’t any baroness in Wannsee 1899.

  There is now, Dix said.

  Can she do it?

  Beautifully, Dix said. If she wants to.

  And does she?

  I think she does, Dix said.

  Tell me this one thing, Henry said. You speak no German. Have no feel for the language that I can see. How do you work it out with the actors? How do you know when they’re speaking correctly, inflections and so on.

  Tempo, Dix said. The timbre of the voice. What they’re doing with their hands and their mouths. The look in their eyes, so that I can know when they’re faking and when the audience will know they’re faking. There’s an aura when the gears mesh. And I do have some feel for the language.

  They were sitting in Henry’s crowded office, books and manuscripts stacked on the long table and piled on the floor. The walls were decorated with photographs of Isaac Babel, Walter Benjamin, Richard Strauss, and Max Beckmann. A bronze bust of Willy Brandt rested on the mantel. Henry’s assistant arrived with a bucket of ice and a bottle of Polish vodka, warned Henry that he had a dinner engagement at eight, and went away, returning almost at once to say that New York was on the line, an urgent conference call. Dix poured two glasses while Henry shifted his huge bulk and reached for the telephone. Mostly he listened, and the expression on his face did not convey urgency. Dix examined the photographs, each in turn, and discovered that Babel, Benjamin, Strauss, and Beckmann all bore a mild resemblance to Henry Belknap. Brandt didn’t, except for the heavy pouches under his eyes. Dix turned to the window and watched the scullers struggle against the chop until they gave it up and drifted, collapsed over their oars. He decided that when he left Mommsen House he would remember the scullers more than any other thing but the weather. The false spring had ended the week before. Cold weather returned as the days lengthened. Each morning a thin glaze of frost covered the lawn, and the trees were as bare as the day they were born.

  Why no women? Dix said when Henry finished on the telephone.

  Who do you suggest? Henry asked.

  I can imagine Rosa Luxemburg and Madame Blavatsky flanking Benjamin.

  Get me one of Jana, Henry said. I’ll put her next to Beckmann. But first tell me about her. What’s changed?

  Her voice has changed, Dix said. It’s deeper, rich as an oboe. Willa says her accent is a little hard to understand sometimes but that may be an asset. She’s sometimes slurred around the edges, so you have to listen. You have to watch her when she talks. She seems to carry the world with her. You have the feeling she’d be difficult to surprise. Everyone’s nervous around her, as if she were fragile and might break or throw a tantrum or a bomb. It’s as if Garbo came out of retirement, looking as she looked when she was twenty, except for the eyes.

  Henry raised his eyebrows and nodded.

  Not far-fetched, Dix said. Jana could have been Garbo. She has Garbo’s presence and integrity. Of course when she showed up on the set of Summer, 1921 she had no idea who Garbo was. She had never seen a movie. She knew what they were but she had never seen one, and the idea of being in one was—startling. Everything was new to her, the paraphernalia, the lights, cameras, microphones, a script, lines to read, and a cameraman and a director, all new. For Jana and her friends it was like being asked to be queen for a day, not knowing exactly who a queen was or what she did, only that it was surely desirable. If you had grown up in a village in Lusatia, among people whose fate was to be alone and disregarded, then to suddenly find yourself in a movie was—miraculous.

  Sorbs, Henry said. Not much is written about them. Scholars study them, but no one else is interested.

  And I was the miracle worker, Dix said.

  Henry was sipping his drink, looking uncomfortable.

  Jana was fifteen, Dix added.

  Fifteen? Henry said.

  Jeidels was sleeping with her. One of the actors was sleeping with her. I think she was tired of being slept with.

  That’s monstrous, Dix. She was a child.

  Not unusual in Hollywood, Dix thought but did not say. In Hollywood, fifteen would not raise an eyebrow. He said, She played nude scenes in the film, and played them convincingly. No one ever played them better. She played them as if she were born to them. She didn’t look fifteen. She didn’t act fifteen. When she told me she was twenty, I believed her. Why not? Simple ignorance of the ways of the world is not the property of the young only. I didn’t inquire closely because I had a movie to make, and Jana was the centerpiece.

  You took her at her word, Henry said.

  I didn’t ask. She volunteered.

  Everyone who saw the movie fell a little in love with Jana.

  That’s true, Dix said. But she didn’t like it.

  Is that why she disappeared?

  Partly. But mostly, she said, because she was tired of being told what to do. She said she was tired of acting someone else’s life.

  Probably she was tired of taking off her clothes for the camera.

  Yes, she mentioned that.

  And now she’s back.

  She said she changed her mind.

  About taking her clothes off?

  Not about that, Dix said. As far as I know.

  Baronesses are famous for taking their clothes off, Henry said.

  I told her I could write it in. She said not to bother.

  Henry looked at the clock on the wall, then rose to refill their glasses with ice and vodka, shaking his huge head in amusement. He poured slowly and handed Dix his glass, murmuring, Prost.

  After being alone all these years, maybe she wants to be a celebrity. She’s tired of being unknown and wants to be known.

  A star once again, Henry said.

  She’s tried one, now she’ll try the other. Maybe the idea of celebrity appeals to her, a foreign country, one she’s seen but briefly. Maybe she thinks she didn’t give celebrity a fair chance. And she’s thinking now of her picture in fan magazines, being interviewed on television. Asked her opinion of the events of the day. She’ll be the most famous Sorb in Germany. Joschka Fischer will invite her to lunch. Boris Becker will offer tennis lessons. But the main thing is the foreign country, celebrity a remote and exotic land, like Burma or Uruguay. Except once you arrive, you’re there for keeps. No exit visas from Celebrity.

  Do you believe that?

  No, Dix said. I’m glad she’s back.

  You never believed she was dead, did you?

  Never did, Dix said.

  A few of us thought that was wishful thinking, you avoiding responsibility for the accident. Looking on the unlikely sunny side of things. The sunny side was not your side, Dix. It was out of character.

  Claire agreed with you, Dix said. Billy Jeidels, too. And I’m sure they were right. But I had no doubt in my mind that she was alive somewhere, living anonymously. I thought she had heard some summons, an appeal, and felt obliged to disappear back into the Sorb world, wherever that was. I had no idea. I thought she went away as if she were in a dream. I thought she was tired of living among foreigners. Tired of looking at a camera’s lens. Tired of Jeidels and tired of me. Tired of the script and tired of being ordered around, reading lines that had been written for a character in a story. One of the things she did when she went away was to join a carnival troupe. She put on makeup and a false face and played clown for a while, and when she tired
of that she worked in shops. She told me everyone had the right to go away when they wanted. And we had no right to interfere.

  She was clever about it, Henry said.

  She never thought there would be an inquiry. She couldn’t imagine anyone caring about what happened to a Sorb girl, certainly not the authorities. The authorities thought Sorbs were garbage and she was part of the garbage.

  And you begin tomorrow.

  Can’t wait, Dix said.

  What is it, then? You haven’t found anything you liked in fifteen years. Scripts arrived, you’d throw them away. You said your audience had vanished. So it must be Jana.

  Not only Jana, Dix said. It’s the script. A good one, and when I get finished with it, it’ll be very good.

  Here’s luck, Henry said, raising his glass. You know what Babel’s mother said to Babel? You must know everything. Know everything, Dix.

  Dix smiled but did not reply. Knowing everything was not in his bag of tricks.

  Still, Henry said. I don’t understand you. Some half-assed television drama—

  Not a half-assed television drama, Henry.

  But not a real feature film, either.

  For Christ’s sake, Henry. It’s Germany.

  And that explains it?

  Just keep your mouth shut about Jana, please.

  Henry was silent a moment, then moved to extract a sheet of paper from the foot-high pile on his desk. He held it at arm’s length with one hand while he sipped vodka with the other. When he spoke, it was with apparent reluctance.

  He said, I checked around in Hamburg. Herr Mueller died a few months after we visited him. The firm, Mueller and Sons, was sold to one of the Hamburg banks. A sale of assets only, so the name Mueller and Sons ceased to exist. No one I spoke to seems to remember the old man. His firm was nothing special, just a small private bank with limited—and here Henry looked at Dix with a wry smile—“footings,” as the bankers say. I asked Adam Kessel to give me a hand. Adam knows everyone worth knowing in Hamburg but he drew a blank also. When the old man died, his reputation seems to have died with him. It’s a pretty closed world, Hamburg banking.