Faith shook her head, crying—she didn’t want to go. Timidly she crossed the room, leaned down to the gun and put the safety back on. She stood up quickly but stayed there, gun at her feet. Wolf trembled in the night air, wishing he had clothes on. There were splinters on the floor near a moulding where the bullet had entered. After a while Faith squatted over the gun, and Wolf felt the battle in her, two things pulling opposite ways. Which ran deeper? That was the question. By then, somehow, he knew what it would be.
There was a long silence in Wolf’s living room. “Why didn’t you call my mom?” Phoebe said.
Wolf shook his head. “You didn’t do that—go running to somebody’s parents,” he said. “Plus, what could she do, your poor mom? Just get terrified.” He paused, lighting a cigarette. “I don’t know, though. Maybe I should’ve.” He turned to Phoebe. “You think I should’ve called her?”
But Phoebe was empty, a vacuum. “I have no idea.”
“Anyway, I left Berlin the next day,” Wolf resumed after a long pause. “I had a friend in Munich, Timothy, who’d lived with my family freshman year of high school. I nailed Tim’s address to the wall of the carpenter’s pad, went to Munich and waited.
“On the last day of September, I saw this giant headline: the RAF pulled off three bank robberies the morning before. Twelve people involved, three cars, they got something like 230,000 marks. I looked at that and I thought, Oh Christ.”
To Phoebe’s confusion, laughter rose in her chest.
“I know,” Wolf said, glancing at her, smiling uneasily.
Loose, tooth-chattering laughter overwhelmed Phoebe. “Why am I laughing?” she said.
“What else can you do?” Wolf said. “Bank robberies. Shit.”
“How many?”
“Three. Four, originally—one didn’t work out. Damn,” he said, finally yielding to his own mirthless laughter. “The thing is, it really wasn’t funny.”
The laughter drained from Phoebe suddenly, leaving her tired.
Wolf was working illegally by then, loading boxes at a shoe factory on the outskirts of Munich. He’d sublet a room in someone’s apartment, leaving word with his friend’s family on the off-chance that Faith would track him that far. Days passed, then weeks, Wolf scouring the paper on the streetcar to work, following news of a police raid on the Red Army, a few big arrests, but no mention of a young American female. It was early October by then, soon to be 1971; Janis OD’d on the fourth, Hendrix had died mid-September, in London. A lot of people were starting to head back home, but Wolf felt paralyzed. “My head was messed up,” he explained. “Reading about the Red Army every day, knowing Faith was part of that, I’d just panic sometimes, thinking I should be there, too, like I’d made the mistake of my life. She was in the world, you know? Out there doing something real, and here I was, following the story in the fucking newspaper.”
Phoebe shifted uncomfortably.
“I couldn’t disconnect myself from the thing,” Wolf said. “So I stayed, I waited. Then, out of the blue, she found me.”
It was late October, already getting cold, and Faith had none of the right clothes. Something was the matter with her. She was just—broken somehow. Wolf wrapped her up in sweaters, turned on the oven and burners full-blast so the windows steamed white. Faith shivered convulsively; it took all day before he could get her to talk, but finally she did.
“She was involved in the robberies,” he said. “Her job was to cut a hole through the fence behind a building next to one of the banks, so the gunmen could crawl through after they made the hit. Some of them thought she wasn’t strong enough to cut the wire, but Faith insisted she’d done it before. So they put her in a dress, gave her a little white purse with a book on Berlin inside it, a subway map—the ingenue tourist. Faith wanted to dye her hair like some of the other girls, but instead they decided she should cut it. Ulrike Meinhof thought long hair drew too much attention; she’d cut off her own weeks before. So Faith had no choice but to go along and have her hair cut short, the last thing on earth she wanted to do. Petra Shelm, a former hairdresser in the group, did the honors, spread Faith’s own shirt under the chair to catch what fell from her head. Faith stuffed some hair in her pocket when they weren’t looking, but later she threw it out.
“Anyway,” Wolf said, “it turned out she really wasn’t strong enough to cut the fence. She struggled wildly out there for about an hour, got so desperate she damn near asked some guy she saw down the alley to help her. Tried using her wrists, feet, ended up ripping the hem of the dress. When they came back to get her, she was all disheveled, the fence uncut; they totally freaked. Horst Mahler jumped out of the car and did it right there, everyone watching. Faith held the clippers for him while he wrestled with the wire.”
Phoebe tried to imagine her sister struggling, failing so publicly, but couldn’t. In her mind’s eye, Faith always found a way. “Was it, like, a disaster?” she said, feeling anxious.
“Not at the time, no,” Wolf said. “Faith said the whole experience of the robberies was incredibly intense. The adrenaline gets you high as a kite; for days everything had this LSD clarity. The gun, too, carrying it on your body, like having a second heart. Even being ‘wanted’ she liked; feeling marked, incognito when she walked around, thinking, if that grocer, that streetsweeper knew who I really was, they’d freak. Everything they did went straight into the news—instantly, this druggy out-of-body thing, seeing yourself from miles away, knowing zillions of people were following each little thing you did … I mean, imagine it.”
“It sounds incredible,” Phoebe said.
“It was. I mean, she said it was.” He was silent a moment. Phoebe felt a pull of regret in the room, like an undertow.
“She couldn’t read German, obviously,” Wolf said, “but Horst Mahler would translate for her. After the banks they’d never even had to count their take—it was all over the evening papers, down to the last pfennig. They sent Faith out to buy them. Her hands were shaking so hard she dropped the papers on her way back, got one wet in a puddle. No one even cared, they were too excited.”
Wolf fell silent. In the absence of his voice a dullness bore down upon them, Phoebe thought, as if some faint glow had been snuffed. They could laugh all they wanted.
“Anyway, the triumph was pretty short-lived,” he said. “About a week after the robberies, the cops busted two apartments and got four Red Army people, including Horst Mahler. After that, the RAF decided it was too dangerous to stay in Berlin, so they pared down their operations, started moving people into West Germany. At that point Faith was out, more or less.”
“Out?”
“You know, they cut her out. Sent her on some long errand to a suburb of Berlin, and by the time she made it back, after dark, the apartment was empty. Everyone had just split. Faith had no idea where to find them.”
“God,” Phoebe said.
“Yeah, it was awful,” Wolf said. “Faith just bottomed out, like coming down from a two-month high. Hung around that empty ‘safe house’ awhile, crashing on a bare mattress. Incredibly dangerous—the cops might’ve raided it any minute. I think she was almost hoping they would.”
Phoebe tried to imagine her sister left behind, abandoned to those empty rooms, but nothing came to mind. Or no picture of Faith anyway; the apartment she saw, littered with the dregs of their haste, half-open doors, a bottle of milk, cigarette butts heaped on windowsills. The only sound her own footsteps. “Poor Faith,” Phoebe said, an ache in her chest.
“She kept trying to find her mistake,” Wolf said. “Should she have been more bold with them, or the opposite? Was everything fine until the fence, or had they already written her off? It went on and on, she couldn’t let go. Meanwhile, she was down to three hundred dollars.”
Phoebe felt the air in the room against her skin. It was painful, as if her skin were raw. “I wonder why,” she said.
“Why what?”
“They left her.”
“Who gives a damn why?
They were assholes!”
They exchanged a hot look. Phoebe felt a swell of angry disappointment—in herself and Wolf for sitting uselessly in this dark room; in Faith, too, for failing to meet some expectation.
Faith had gone with Wolf to the shoe factory once, sat in the coffee room while he packed and loaded boxes. Afterward they’d stopped at the pub, a woodsy place with antlers on the wall, where the factory people went. Wolf thought it might revive her, flirting a little with the guys from work, and it did. But without her long hair Faith didn’t draw men’s attention the way she used to. She was thin, pale, both of which she’d been before, but with that gush of dark hair she’d always looked dramatic, wasted but spectacular. Now she looked more like any strung-out kid. Wolf liked it. It made her beauty his secret, not something every other guy could grope with his eyes as she walked by. But Faith despised the haircut, said she looked like an acorn. It sharpened her sense that the intensity of everything in the world—herself included—had been muted through some failure of her own. That night at the pub she had fun, though, was laughing on the streetcar home, and mid-laugh she turned to Wolf and said in this odd voice, “Maybe everything will be okay,” as if this were some crazy wish she hardly dared hope for.
“Two days later we went to the Hofgarten,” Wolf said. “I had the ring in my pocket, turquoise and jade, her favorites. Maybe I picked the wrong day. The minute I dropped to my knee she knew. ‘Don’t,’ she said, before I could speak. ‘Don’t, Wolf, please, I’m going crazy. There’s nothing left in me.’ I told her fuck all that, fuck it, here we are now, in this moment—zam—the head of a pin, we can do anything! But she couldn’t hear me, like some other noise was louder in her head. She just wiped her eyes, saying, ‘Please, baby. Please stand up.’ When I got back from work the next night, she’d left.”
Phoebe and Wolf sat in silence. “And that was it?” she finally said.
Wolf struggled to his feet and switched on a light. The room pounced. He moved to the kitchen stiffly, legs obviously asleep. Phoebe heard the glassy thunk of bottles hitting the garbage.
“You don’t know anything else?” she said when he sat back down. “Nothing?”
Wolf looked away. Phoebe gazed at the square of black window, trying to absorb the fact that the story was over. But of course it wasn’t over. Faith had simply eluded her, vanished just when it seemed the story might finally be at an end. And here it was, the triumph Phoebe had longed for and dreaded and known would come: Faith had disappeared.
Phoebe looked around the bright room, colorless now to her eye, looked at Wolf and found him colorless, too, one more person her sister had left behind.
He suggested a walk. In silence they roamed among the painted antique buildings of Munich’s Old City. The air smelled of sugar-roasting peanuts. Above the central square, life-sized mechanical dolls assembled in cheerful jerks around a clockface, preparing to strike the hour. Phoebe saw all this through a kind of gauze.
“I wish you’d say something,” Wolf said as they left the square for darker, quiet streets.
But Phoebe had nothing to say. Her thoughts amounted to nothing, as did Wolf and Carla and all the festive beauty of Munich, nothing beside the spectacle of her sister’s life. Terrorism, suicide; like a fast, beautiful car plunging straight down a mountainside. No wonder their father had watched.
“This is a pretty church,” Wolf said. “You want to go in?”
He led the way. The church was small and oval-shaped, its interior more ornate than any Phoebe had seen in Europe, all whorls and curlicues and gold leaf. It looked like a bribe to God.
They sat in back. The light was dense with gold. “What I told you back there,” Wolf said carefully. “Obviously it upset you.”
“I’m not upset.”
“Phoebe, you’ve disappeared. It’s like you’ve gone underwater.”
“I’m thinking.”
“Thinking of what?”
“I have to leave Munich.”
He stared at her. “Why? Did I—is something—”
“I have to keep going,” Phoebe said, the words a monotone.
“Where?”
“I told you before.” But Wolf seemed not to remember. “Italy,” Phoebe said. “Corniglia. Where she did it.”
The name impacted on Wolf physically. “Will you listen to me, Phoebe?” he said. “Will you be with me here a second?”
The intensity of his gaze brought Wolf into sudden focus, upsetting the drift of Phoebe’s thoughts. She looked away. Wolf exhaled slowly, then stretched, arching his back over the pew, his spine cracking like knuckles.
“Fine,” he said. “I’ll go with you.”
Phoebe frowned.
“I’ll go. To Corniglia.”
“Oh no,” Phoebe said. “No.”
“Pretend I’m not there,” Wolf said. “I don’t care if we speak. But you’re not going down there alone, there’s no way.”
“I’m sorry,” Phoebe said. “I’m sorry, Wolf.” She shook her head, smiling, and it felt like so many other times, disengaging herself from a boy’s car, a party, leaving a football game when suddenly the shouts and bright pom-poms had fallen silent in her mind and she saw the empty truth of them. And then she left them behind. Again and again, she left them. It was only hard for a minute.
“I’m not asking you, Phoebe,” Wolf said.
He watched her eyes, his own flicking back and forth between them as if to find some route inside Phoebe’s head. She felt the warmth of him, Wolf’s physical presence beside her, breathing, watching.
“I don’t want you,” she said, and stood, leaving the pew and then the church, not running, hardly walking even, just releasing herself to the peaceful drift of her solitude. But Wolf was right beside her. On the street he suddenly took Phoebe in his arms, like that first day on the staircase. She held still, hands at her sides.
“Come back,” he said. “Please, Phoebe. Come back.” And she felt the pain in his voice, distantly at first, then right in her chest. She looped her arms around Wolf and rested them there.
They stood in silence. From somewhere came the sweet, oily smell of fried bread. Wolf’s heart beat loud in her ear. Phoebe thought of him hugging Faith, the gun between them, and was stricken by a grinding, painful sense that her sister had gone away, left the two of them here to fend for themselves. And maybe it was right, Wolf coming with her, maybe it would help. His chin rested on top of her head, he was that tall.
seventeen
High in the Italian Alps, midway through their drive, Phoebe and Wolf stopped for lunch. The town was like an afterthought of the road: a single restaurant, a store with shutters tightly closed, a tiny bruised-looking church. The cold dry air pinched Phoebe’s nostrils and throat. She and Wolf stepped from the car into whispery silence, as if the clouds, which seemed only inches away, were gently buffing the tinny sky.
The restaurant smelled of woodsmoke. The proprietress was an elderly woman whose lively face and hands made her age seem accidental, something that had befallen her in a moment of carelessness. To Phoebe’s surprise, she spoke German. Wolf explained that this region had been joined to Italy only since World War I. The squat clay jug on their table was filled with red wine.
The restaurant’s sole customer was an elderly man wearing oversized black trousers hitched to his chest by a pair of startling red suspenders. A great playfulness seemed enfolded like a prize among the wrinkles in his face. To Wolf and Phoebe he raised a tiny glass filled with clear liquid, grappa, Wolf said, pretty powerful stuff. They toasted him and drank.
Their trip had begun that morning, after a week’s delay while Wolf completed the scoliosis manual. At first he’d seemed present in body only, uttering scarcely a word as they drove south from Munich over fat green hills into Austria. The air turned bracing, tangy; blunt speckled rocks nosed their way up from beneath the soil. The tallest mountains veered straight into clouds, like columns of stone reaching up to the portals of palaces miles overhead. Ph
oebe had never seen Carla again; Carla was working, Wolf kept saying, but his strained tone made Phoebe wonder if all was well between them. He’d spent every remaining night at Carla’s apartment, leaving Phoebe his bed, made up for her with fresh striped sheets.
They skirted Innsbruck and then crossed the Brenner Pass, where a handsome, mustachioed Italian checked their passports and waved them into his country. Soon after, they shifted onto a smaller road. The slower pace seemed to relax Wolf.
“I hope it’s okay,” Phoebe said. “You coming with me.”
“Sure it’s okay.”
“I mean, with Carla.”
“It worked out all right,” Wolf said, hesitant. “It’s a tough situation.”
“Because of Faith?”
Again Wolf paused, his wariness giving Phoebe the sense that his fiancée was nearby, within earshot. “Unfinished business is tough,” he said, and glanced at her. Phoebe felt his life tip open just slightly, in a way it hadn’t before. She crept gingerly toward the opening.
“How much did Carla know about her?”
“Everything, pretty much,” Wolf said. “Early on I kind of laid the whole thing out for her. But after that I never talked about it—we never talked about it. Even though I wanted to, sometimes.”
Phoebe waited, afraid of stopping him. “Why didn’t you?” she said.
“I felt awkward, I guess, bringing it up. I thought, Hey, you’re in love, you’re not supposed to be thinking about all that. Even when Carla asked me about Faith, I’d resist, tell myself it was self-discipline, putting the whole thing behind me. But I’m seeing now it’s the opposite, I wasn’t letting go.”
He shook his head, as if the discovery confounded him still. Phoebe felt a peculiar warmth. Wolf hadn’t let go.
They began a slight descent. It felt like exhaling. Something had finally loosened between them, a change even the landscape seemed to reflect: gentler mountains, exposed rock, yellowish and crumbly-looking like something baked. Punishing turns exposed views of staggering beauty; often Phoebe would stare in confusion before she could even react. “Look,” she cried. “Oh my God, look!” By lunchtime she was exhausted.
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