The Weather in Berlin

by Ward Just

  Not all of it, Jana replied.

  The important parts, Dix said.

  He is my son. There are things mothers never tell their sons.

  That’s what’s between the lines, Jana.

  And he is not fond of me.

  No, he isn’t.

  He thinks of me as inferior. An accidental baroness.

  His father told him things—

  That when we met I did not know how to sit on a horse.

  Or set a table.

  He believes I am ruining his life.

  You are, Dix said.

  I am trying to preserve what is best for the family, its traditions and code of conduct, its location amid the remote Masurian Lakes. The baron’s reluctance to venture beyond the boundaries of the estate. His mistrust of the world outside. He knows his limitations but he does not see them as limitations. He sees them as virtues. And he is not entirely wrong. The world can bring only grief.

  And never forget your place in the family.

  I suppose that is also in the baroness’s mind, she said, and then, after a moment, she turned to look at Karl, still idly skipping stones while he thought about his lines. She said, He is so lumpish. So without wit. He is indulgent and soft, like an animal bred for the slaughterhouse. I think Rolf is quicker, quick on his feet, quick-witted. Karl is miscast.

  Rolf the dreamy aesthete, is that it?

  It would be more in character.

  It would not, Dix said. Karl’s clumsiness is part of the bargain.

  I see him as slippery, and brutal as marble.

  He is a beautiful dancer, Dix said with a smile.

  Yes, he has that. He is the sort of man who should be set to music. Jana raised her shoulders and let them fall, all the while watching Karl bend and throw, concentrating on achieving the fifth skip. She said, I think he is lazy also, dreaming great dreams without a sense of proportion as to how to attain them. These dreams are related to personal conquest. He is attracted to Italy but doesn’t know what it is that attracts him. Is it the weather? He likes the sun and the aqua sky. He likes the conversation and the wine. He likes the churches. But at the same time he’s thinking, Poor Italy, so undisciplined and without purpose. So operatic in its sorrows. He retreats to it as he retreats to a warm bed at night. Italy is a woman to be ravished. He is thinking in his heart that Italy is an inferior country, without a sense of destiny and mission. Without a desire to lead the world, living on the larger stage. Italy does not exist for itself but for him. He likes it for the dreams it gives him. Best of all, Italy is not Germany. Rolf values Italy the way certain Americans value France.

  Dix looked up when the makeup artist arrived and asked if she could begin to touch up Frau Jana. She arranged the pots and brushes on a little folding table and went to work on Jana’s forehead and cheeks.

  Dix said, You must use your voice like a musical instrument.

  Yes, you told me that. About a thousand times.

  So I did.

  You like to repeat yourself.

  So I do. Dix watched the makeup artist apply a thin coat of powder to the bridge of Jana’s nose. Her eyes were closed and the powder caused her nose to twitch like a rabbit’s. Dix said, Almost done. Are you ready?

  I wish it weren’t so cold, she said. I am wearing a sweater under my coat and two pairs of stockings and still I am cold. Has the mist gone away?

  Not yet, he said.

  I suppose it doesn’t matter, does it? We can improvise, no?

  You’ll forget about the cold when the camera begins to roll.

  You’ve written a beautiful script, Dix.

  I wrote it for you, he said.

  Only a few word changes, a new line here or there, one line dropped and another moved, and it’s as if the navigator changed course forty-five degrees and you land at one continent instead of the other. I love Karl’s line, You are trying to punish me, you do not have the right. Trying to dismiss me as you would a servant, and then I slap him hard and his hand flies to his face. Tears are in his eyes. He steps back and he is no longer looking at me in the same way. He did not imagine I could do such a thing. And then he looks away because he can no longer bear to see my face. Jana smiled, turning her head so that the makeup artist could attend to the mole on her left cheek.

  Leave the mole, Dix said.

  Karl said it was all right if I hit him hard, Jana said. He said he wouldn’t mind because he has a strong jaw.

  He’ll mind when it happens.

  But then it won’t matter, she said. Can you tell me one thing? Where did you get such an idea?

  Weimar, Dix said. I spent the weekend in Weimar, at a hotel just down the street from Goethe’s house. Such a warren of a house, passageways everywhere, rooms smaller than you expect. A skull on the mantel. Goethe was productive in Weimar. And so was I.

  The idea, she said impatiently.

  I saw a woman slap a man on the street. And then he slapped her back, knocked her down.

  Jana looked at him doubtfully. And what happened then?

  He walked away. I helped her up. When I spoke to her, she was mortified. An American, a foreign tourist, witnessing such a thing. It was as if I had broken into their bedroom. She turned her back and walked off without a word.

  The makeup artist finished, wished Jana good luck, and went away.

  I thought it was a good idea to leave Wannsee, Dix said. All the commotion in the newspapers. Then someone told me about your interview and I knew the story would die. You took away their oxygen. But I went to Weimar anyhow. I needed a change of scene, to go to a place I had never been.

  Why doesn’t Rolf slap me? Jana asked suddenly.

  Because he is afraid of you, Dix said.

  She said, I am not sorry I had no children.

  It’s only a movie, Jana.

  You say that? You of all people.

  Actors don’t have to believe what directors believe.

  Children betray you, Jana said.

  Not always, Dix said.

  Mine would have, she said softly.

  Let’s talk about something else, she added.

  Dix heard a sound behind him and looked up.

  Five minutes, Herr Greenwood, the cameraman said.

  Greenwood nodded at him and said to Jana, That was quite an interview.

  He was a pig, Jana said. They all are. Full of themselves, television babies.

  A spur-of-the-moment idea?

  I had it all along, Jana said.

  And the story itself—

  Who knows? she said.

  You were the only one who knew it, Dix said.

  People know things, Jana said vaguely.

  Not that, Dix said. No one knew about that except you. Then you told me.

  There are no secrets in this world, Jana said.

  If you say so, Dix said.

  Amazing what people will believe sometimes.

  Who did the telling, Jana?

  Karen Hupp, Jana said. She’s fierce, that one. She loved doing it. Confusion to the enemy, she said. Karen has causes and the Sorb cause was new to her, a downtrodden tribe she had barely heard of. She was sympathetic, naturally.

  So she called someone she knew, someone at the networks or a newspaper.

  Yes, she did, Jana said.

  You caused a stir, Dix said. When she did not reply, he said, Answer this. Which is true, fifteen or twenty?

  Jana shrugged and turned her head to look at Karl. He was standing at the water’s edge, his hands behind his back. In his heavy coat and boots he looked like a mariner. She said, There are things that happen to you in your life that you’re tired of keeping to yourself. It’s exhausting. And so you try to find a way to bring things to light, and mischief is one of the ways. People should know what men are capable of, given the right conditions. A certain atmosphere, an unfamiliar situation, no rules, and a desire to exercise authority. She drew her scarf tight across her knees. What difference does age make? Men should be held to account. They want to
live in a certain way, there’s a payment for it. There’s an American expression, “Living loud.”

  I think the expression is “Living large,” Dix said.

  Is that what it is?

  In America, he said.

  I thought it was the other, Jana said.

  He looked at her as she turned away, her smile brief as a heartbeat. She was made for mischief in the way that other women were made for childbirth or the cello. She lived in a realm of mischief, pranks and escapades, exaggerations and provocations. This was how she kept herself apart. Her world was not anchored. She believed she lived as a guest in someone else’s house. So she was elusive, often insincere, waiting for the knock on the door, inhabiting the shadows, and when anyone inquired too closely—well, then, she put them off, turned their heads by making something up, and if in the making-up she was able to settle a score, so much the better. She wasn’t malicious, merely guarding what was hers. She believed that once she shared what was important to her, it was no longer hers. Dix remembered Billy Jeidel’s dull, drunken voice, mos’ lovely lovely girl.

  Jana sighed, leaning forward in her chair, shivering slightly.

  The mist is burning off the lake, she said at last.

  We’re ready now, Herr Greenwood, the cameraman said from a distance.

  Dix rose, offering his hand to Jana.

  He said, Two hours more, that’s all.

  And what happens to Jana then?

  Dix said, Whatever she wants.

  And do you have an idea what that will be?

  To go away again, Dix said.

  23

  JANA’S SLEEP was troubled. She sat with her fists clenched in her lap, her face taut, her forehead damp. Now and then she muttered No, pleading, her fingers fluttering, then returning to her lap, clenched. They were stalled in Karl-Marx-Allee, Berlin rush-hour traffic. Dix watched her and listened to Bach on the car radio. He wondered about her dream, where the no came from and what it signified, if it signified anything. He hoped she wasn’t disappointed. She had brought off her scene in fine style, her voice a steady oboe, always within the range of one octave. She had summoned tremendous expression in her face by the movement of her eyelids and by the parting of her mouth. Her hands were motionless except when she thought to link her forefinger in the gold bracelet she wore on her wrist. Rolf seemed mesmerised, watching her with his sullen expression, his body unquiet. When he moved his hands on the oars, anyone would think he meant to strike her, swinging the oar like a baseball bat. She wore him down with the remorseless monotone of her voice.

  This is the life I have led. This is what it has come to, and I will surrender no part of it. She never pleaded, and indeed what she had to say was, in the strictest sense, impersonal. This is what you must do because you must do it, find a woman of means and return with her here, to this place, and settle all debts—and then she ridiculed his preference for warm weather, for languid afternoons and pretty Italian gardens. Did he have fear of the vast and unsettled German forests? It is from the mystery and sovereignty of the forest that we acquire our courage and our way of looking at the world, what we expect of it. You may take up your travels at a later date. No doubt you will have ample opportunity to do so, and I shall hate the day when it comes because you are dangerous outside your own realm. You should follow your father’s example, but I know that is impossible.

  And when he said, You are trying to punish me, you do not have the right, the sound of her slap could be heard by the cameraman on the shore fifty yards distant. Rolf recoiled, gathered himself, sat brokenly a moment, then moved the oars, and the boat silently made its way to the long wooden pier at the edge of the water. The baroness alighted, and without a word moved off up the path through the forest to the unseen house beyond. The forest swallowed her up and she was lost to view, all but a sliver of the crimson scarf. And the frame froze.

  Jana was awake now but settled low in the seat, her knees resting on the dashboard. When Dix asked if she had had a bad dream, she shook her head, no comment, and he turned his attention to the traffic, flashing lights ahead, a commotion of some kind. The line of cars began to move. Rain fell in Karl-Marx-Allee, darkening the huge apartment buildings on either side of the boulevard. Something caught his eye and he looked up to see a young woman in one of the apartments waving a red bandanna; he thought of a switchman at a railroad crossing. A stationary figure in the window of the apartment below stood impassively watching the traffic in the street. There were other observers in windows above and below. Somebody’s audience, Dix thought; not Jana’s, perhaps mine, an apathetic balcony crowd looking at their wristwatches and waiting for the play to end. The car was stalled again, and now through the rain he saw a plume of white smoke rising and flowing away almost at once. From a distance came the waa-waa of sirens, and when he lowered the window a crack he could hear angry voices and snatches of a martial melody; and how odd that it sounded like a stately phrase from Bach. When his eyes began to water, he knew the white smoke was tear gas and that he had run into a demonstration—farmers, students, workers, teachers, Nazis, Reds, he had no idea who they were. And then he heard breaking glass and a thin animal roar from the demonstrators, who were now marching between the cars, banging hoods and roofs with clubs. A brick sailed through the air and struck the car next to him. A woman cried out and her children began to scream, but the demonstrators came on, not very many of them, marching in a kind of slow-motion swagger. Their grievances were serious but he did not know what they were. He could not read the placards, which had been discarded in any case.

  Lock the doors, Jana cried.

  Who are they?

  Reds, I think. Mostly.

  He locked the doors of the Mercedes and watched a loose-limbed teenager take aim at the hood ornament and send it flying with one swing of his club. The boy rushed past them and beat a tattoo on the rear window, the glass caving but not shattering. When other demonstrators surrounded the car, Dix moved to cover Jana with his body. He pushed her onto the floor and lay over her, and it was then that he could feel her trembling. She said something to him but he could not hear her words. Bits of glass fell on them and the noise was terrible. Then he heard police whistles and more shouts and the pop-pop of tear-gas canisters. The demonstrators still came on, pursued now by the police. His eyes began to water and he raised himself on his elbows to give Jana air. She coughed, her hands to her throat, her face white with—not fear, for just then she mustered a grim smile. He felt glass on his shoulders and in his hair and he could see blood on Jana’s coat but he did not know whose blood it was. One contorted face and then another appeared at the window. He could see their teeth and the whites of their eyes as they screamed and pounded on the windows and doors. Jana was quiet under him, her eyes closed. The clamor seemed to decrease, its pitch wavering, and then Dix wondered if this was how Europe would end, grievance washing from nation to nation, remorseless as the tides, marching to Bach’s tempo. He turned off the radio and touched Jana’s forehead. He felt no life at all. He noticed silence inside and outside the car, and the droning of sirens far away, and then the clump of the boots of green-suited police. When he looked up he saw the girl in the window fold her bandanna and slip back into the interior of the apartment.

  He touched Jana’s cheek and her eyelids fluttered open. When she turned her head he saw she had a gash on her temple, blood leaking down her neck and clotted in her hair and ears. Her eyes were dull and unfocused and she seemed not to recognize him. He told her to be still and he would find a medic.

  Can you talk, Jana?

  She drew her mouth down in a clown face but did not reply.

  He moved to open the door but it would not budge. Then he remembered he had locked it, but when he threw the switch it still refused to open. Helmeted police were all around them but they were too busy to respond to his signal, even when he banged on the window with his cane. One of them looked at him and said something but he had no idea what it was. Dix sat back then, cradl
ing Jana. She tried to speak but no words came and she gave it up with a long sigh, leaning her head against his shoulder. He held her with a tissue against her wound, feeling the beating of his own heart. She murmured something and nestled into him, her eyes closing. When he looked up again he saw a crowd, a television camera, police, motorists who had freed themselves from their cars. They looked at him incuriously, an older man with a young woman in his arms, apparently at peace with the world. The camera closed in, a foot or so from the shattered side window, and Dix turned his back to shield Jana. When a fireman began to work at the car door with a crowbar, Dix put his mouth next to her ear.

  You must not die, he said.

  I won’t, she whispered.

  The police are here.

  She recoiled, her eyes wide with fear.

  They’re here to help, he said. You have a nasty gash.

  Yes, I know, she said, and settled in again.

  He was still holding her when the door flew open and she was taken from him.

  They put Jana into an ambulance and drove her to a private hospital in Dahlem, not far from the Brücke Museum. Dix remained behind to make a report to the police commander, a sympathetic Berliner of about his own age, who cluck-clucked over the condition of the Mercedes and offered to have it towed away. The commander asked a few obvious questions, then ordered one of his men to take Herr Grunewald at once to the hospital where his—and here the policeman looked at him with raised eyebrows until Dix replied, Friend—friend was in surgery. When the police returned his papers, Dix nodded his thanks. He said, Very kind of you. You are at Mommsen House? the policeman asked with a suppressed smile. Dix said, Do you know Mommsen House? Oh, yes, the policeman said. I have had many, many dealings with the intellectuals at Mommsen House. Always trouble, he went on. So it was good to see an intellectual in trouble not of his own making and be able to help. When Dix asked him the identity of the demonstrators, he replied that they were a coalition of the disaffected. Angry disaffected, Dix said. Very angry, the policeman agreed. And likely to remain so.