by Dick Cluster
“Ach so, cowgirl! Sie möchte so gerne cowgirl sein.”
Her accent did wonderful things to the English consonants, too. In addition, she provided Alex with a name for Cynthia’s persona, a name that he too had been seeking, though without knowing it. “She wants to be a cowgirl,” was what Marianne had said. “Well, go on up,” she added. “She wants to discuss these things with you, not with me.”
Alex walked slowly down the carpeted hallway from which Marianne had come. He passed more posters, rooms with brass numbers, a telephone in a nicely hand-carpentered wooden booth. At the end of the hall, bare wooden stairs led down, and carpeted stairs led up. Alex found himself tiptoeing. Near the top he called, “Cynthia?”
“Herein.”
The room she was in seemed to be a study— desk, typewriter, a couch, books and papers scattered, a bright abstract painting on the wall. Cynthia stood up from the desk chair and handed him a postal delivery slip and a scrawled note.
“Both arrived yesterday,” she said. “The threat is what has Marianne upset. Mischling again, you see. Mixed-race subversive, leading German youth to the company of Communists and Schwarzen. Marianne says there has been a phone call, too, just before we arrived. They asked whether I had brought the wounded Jew from Hannover. She thinks they mean business.”
Alex read it over and started to hand it back.
“No, keep it,” she said. “What would I do with it, turn it over to the police? Keep it, as a Berlin souvenir.”
“Moselle’s people said I was to use diplomacy with you, but if that failed they had less gentle ways. If I’m right about what we’re picking up tomorrow, its cash value could be six figures, in dollars.”
“If that’s what it’s all about, then you can just get in touch with Jack and give the shit back. I don’t want the money, and I don’t need more enemies. Neither do you.”
“So, in the meantime, what do we do?”
“In the meantime we pass the time. Would you like to see Berlin by night, or listen to the album you were kind enough to bring me? Or, if you’ve had enough of my company, I’d be happy to show you to your room.”
Alex’s disappointment must have been plain on his face, because in return Cynthia flashed him a smile that was less crooked than usual. As he came tentatively closer, the crookedness came back and she said, “Do you think I embrace all the guests on top of the Kreuzberg?”
This time there was no interruption by either children or dog. From the study, the third-floor hallway led forward to a large bedroom into which the streetlamps of Mockernstrasse glowed faintly in the twilight. Their light blended with the light of an antique floor lamp with a marble base, and together these coaxed a shine out of the bars of a brass bedstead old enough to have belonged to a previous generation of Meyers.
Alex hoped that it had not. He did not try to see how this fact connected to that. He admired Cynthia, and he wished he could understand better what gap in her life he was filling. He was embarrassed, somewhat, to be just another cowboy passing by. He tried to get some or all of these feelings across, without words for once. When finally he felt her thighs around him as he had imagined in his hospital bed, he wanted to live that way forever, though of course he did not do so. When he was ready for words again he said, not very originally, “Wow. Cynthia…”
She said, “Wow, yourself… She ran the tip of her finger down his belly, stopping just at the base of his warm and wet penis. “You know, there are a lot worse ways to spend an anxious Wednesday evening in Berlin…”
Alex ran his fingertip down the same path on her belly, also stopping, as if it hadn’t already traveled this path, just when he got to the top of the blond-brown hair.
“Tomorrow we get our work done,” he said, “and… I feel kind of bad to be one more deserter.”
Cynthia pressed her hip tighter against his, sliding her hand up to turn his head toward her, by the chin.
“The last thing I need is for you to go around being ashamed or embarrassed about the time we spend. A lot of men mix up sex with power or with sin, because those are the things that excite them. I don’t think you are very excited by power, but I’m not so sure about sin.”
“No— it’s not that,” Alex said. By which he meant maybe it was that, but that wasn’t what he wanted to talk about. “I guess I just don’t like casting myself in the same role as Gerald Meyer. Here today, gone tomorrow. And I do get the feeling you might have sort of a preference for picking up American Jewish men.”
“Thank you.” She lifted her own chin in that don’t-take-on-airs way. “Other doctors with better degrees have long since helped me to figure that out. You are well-attached to a British citizen, you were careful to say. I am just a part of this little adventure, please have no doubt. As to the picking up— you called me from America to tell me my father was dead and ask me for a date.” She tapped the bandage that covered his stitches. “Then you staggered off the train with a slash in your chest, and told me you needed a few stitches. On the way to the hospital, you told me that by the way you had this little cancer, too. You have a certain unusual charm that doesn’t depend on whether you are circumcised or not.”
Alex bit his lip, because her unasked question had been a long time in coming, and that made it, if anything, harder to answer. At the same time, her summary made him realize how many other questions she had not asked, questions she should have. Finally he took her hand and pressed it to the back of his neck, then returned it to his groin, this time just at the crease between belly and thigh. Her fingers stiffened.
“You know,” he said, “it has occurred to me that I have a God-given line for seducing women. I mean, could you say no to somebody who asks you to come up and feel his tumors sometime? No one does feel them, outside of Meredith— that’s the British subject— and the docs. My daughter did once, but she pretends not to find them too different from, I don’t know, mosquito bites. Sometimes to me they’re very different, and sometimes they’re not. Sometimes I say, ‘One day these are going to kill me.’ Usually I say, ‘Right now they’re not’.”
He stopped and considered, as always, whether what he said about this could possibly give the listener a clear enough picture of what he meant.
“Okay, okay,” she conceded. Her fingers did not relax immediately, but she moved them from the lump in his groin to the back of his hand. “I don’t mean to be your therapist, either. Your aren’t a monopolist in the country of illness, Liebchen. Others have been that way before. You’re going to bite your lip off, too, if you aren’t careful.”
She guided his fingertips to her vagina, tightening her thigh against his as she opened her legs to make room. “Now, no more serious thoughts,” she said very seriously, beginning to move against him as she kept up the pressure of her hand on his. Alex couldn’t tell whether she was making fun of him or not. He kissed her breasts slowly, all around the nipples but not touching them. Half-kosher nipples, he thought. There was something not quite kosher still. He could hear his ancestor, the slaughterhouse functionary, telling him that. But just now was no time to be contemplating rituals of slaughter. Just now was a time to comfort and be comforted, to make love in a city that could use all the love it could get.
He took one nipple in his mouth, feeling it rise against his tongue, and buried the rest of his thoughts in the softness of her breast. From then on she guided him very nicely through everything she wanted done, and Alex— Alex responded to some deep and perhaps ancient impulse to pretend to a clarity about life that no one really has. When she shuddered with pleasure, he held her tightly and kissed her everywhere he could reach, as if kisses could seal out all the past and all the future. He whispered that he was so glad to be spending this anxious Berlin night with her. And he told her, foolishly, that they made a great team and that tomorrow… tomorrow everything was going to be all right.
21. Cremation
Alex showered thoughtfully while enjoying the warm water and the feel of the soap on his skin.
His stitches were still tender but sealing up nicely. He found a bathrobe where Cynthia had said. Soft and long, it covered him with an intricate pattern of blue Chinese fans. He wiped steam from the window to reveal a brilliant blue day outside. When he returned to Cynthia, she was blowing dust off a framed photograph in her hand. She offered it to him, wordlessly.
Private Meyer— or Lieutenant, for all Alex knew, not being good at uniforms— stared straight into the camera. He had a bushy head of light brown hair, which made him seem taller and less vulnerable. His lips were fixed in a slight smile that could be either pride or stoicism, it was hard to say. He was good-looking in a young, untested way.
Gertrud Meyer, née Tronkel, laughed. She was thin and did not seem so young, maybe because she had just lived through a war. Her laughter was defiant, which was part of her appeal. He imagined her laughing at some wry joke by the photographer, whom he decided he’d like to be Marianne. Between the parents, Cynthia Meyer, aged perhaps a year, sat primly on the sofa, hands folded in her lap.
Aged perhaps forty, hands loose in her lap, she watched Alex. She was wearing the “Reagan Go Home” T-shirt again, sitting up with her back resting on the brass bedstead, her legs extended under the covers. In the morning light, the brass bars had a dark shine to them. She said, “I dug that out because I thought you might want to see it. Now you are giving me an evil and suspicious look.”
“I want to know why you haven’t asked me a single question about your father,” he said. “What did he look like when I met him? Did he ever remarry? Was he happy or sad? What did he tell me about you or your mother? Why do I think he sent you the goddamn treasure that belonged to Jack? Why do I think he changed his mind and wanted it back?”
“Oh. So that’s it. I didn’t need to ask about the man, because I met him myself this past spring.” She pointed toward the hallway and the study beyond. “In there. Believe me, Alex, after that I didn’t want to know any more.”
“When were you planning to tell me about this?”
“When you asked, and not before. Come on, sit down, don’t stand there taking notes like that cop in the hospital. All right. I answered the door to find a woman, an American. Younger than me, I suppose, though she seemed older. Straighter, as you would say. Echt suburban American: a velour running suit, hair just so, a Fodor’s guidebook under one arm and a gift under the other.”
“A gift?”
“Yes, I asked if she was looking for a room— she didn’t seem the right type— but she said no, she was looking for Fräulein Meyer. The gift was for me. An art book. She had bought it at the Dahlem the day before. The art museum. The Museum of Prussian Cultural Possessions is its official name. An expensive present but impersonal, like a bottle of fancy cognac to a client at Christmas. She stuck out her hand like a queen’s to be kissed, and announced she was my half-sister. She said our father— emphasis on the pronoun— was in Berlin also.”
“Really? He implied to me that his second marriage didn’t end so differently from his first.”
“That was supposed to give us something in common. ‘I’ve got more reasons to hate the bastard than you do,’ she said. ‘You’re clear of him. But our father’s our father, even if he is a prick. He wants to see you, but he was afraid to come like this, out of the blue. So he sent me to do his dirty work.’ Words like that, anyway. She claimed that now he was growing old and wanted to patch things over with us both.”
“What happened?”
“I didn’t like her manner. It didn’t feel… sisterly, not at all. It felt like she was his… his robot, I don’t know. I said if he wanted to talk to me, that was up to him.”
“And he came?”
“The next evening. We went in there to catch up on old times over two cups of tea. He began to ramble about how it felt to be back in Berlin. He tried to tell me his version of what it had meant to him the first time, after the war.”
“What did it mean?”
“It might matter to you, but I have to say I didn’t listen. There was something about the city being a combination of horror and possibility. What was I supposed to make of that? That my mother filled him with horror? The ‘possibility’ I understood. The occupying army has rights to the women of the conquered people. The Russians raped, people say. The Americans bought with chocolate.”
“I thought he and your mother were in love, at the time.”
“Oh, probably. I’m talking about the man I met in the spring. It seems his idea was to buy my love, or my forgiveness.”
“Did he say anything about that? About providing for you in a material way?”
“I didn’t give him much chance. Now you tell me that this was just a tactic in some sordid power struggle with Jack? Stags locking horns until the loser dies. I don’t want any part of it, except”— she looked down and picked at the hem of the T-shirt— “except I suppose I do want the pictures.”
“The pictures?”
“Oh yes, I think that part of what he told you was true. That picture I showed you, that’s the only one I have.” She reached for it, studied it, and shook stray hairs from her face and stray thoughts from her mind. “The family saga, as told by Mother, agrees with yours. He took the other pictures with him, God knows why. Do you know what Sitting Bull is supposed to have said— about the Americans?”
Alex shook his head. If she’d been about to reveal more, she’d retreated behind history once again.
“He said, ‘The love of possession is a disease with them.’ So now we might as well go and find out if he got cured of that disease. I think you will find that Marianne has delicately left your bag at the bottom of my stairs. We should stop and visit her on our way out.”
Alex crept down the stairs, collected his clothes, and crept back up. He dressed as an inconspicuous tourist, in corduroys, a striped dress shirt, and the windbreaker with bloodstains only on the inside. Cynthia emerged, hair wet from the shower, in baggy white pants and a black sweater.
Down the two flights, the stairway door opened onto a modern, Formica-topped kitchen where Marianne, Cenap, and a young German man waited over fresh cooked rolls and empty coffee cups.
“Alex from America,” Cynthia said in German. “Hans, Wolf’s brother, a former student of mine from Frankfurt. Turned carpenter”— she waved around the room— “and Berliner.”
“Very nice job,” Alex told him, shaking hands. He nodded credit to Marianne, as well. “Um, is the house very old?”
“Not very, but more than a century.” Marianne spoke slowly and precisely for his benefit. Her inflection once again made the harsh edges of the language silvery and smooth. “When Gertrud got it, it was bombed out. Over the years we have done nice things. I raised my children here, when I came from the East Zone.”
“Alex would like to visit the Jewish Cemetery,” Cynthia said. “He believes that my father left some sort of secret message there.”
Alex flashed a quick look around the table to see how that went over. Cenap didn’t meet it, but Hans was watching him with open curiosity. Had he never seen a Jew before? Alex wanted to know. Or a man who looks for messages left by the dead?
“It is on the Schonhauser Allee,” Marianne said. “Just down from the Kollwitzplatz. It’s a quiet neighborhood, residential, a peaceful place.”
Hans laughed a young laugh. It welcomed knowledge, but protested seriousness.
“If you find a neighborhood on the East Side that’s not quiet, Alex, you tell me. Marianne takes children to the puppet theater, and she drags all of us to the Brecht. Nobody goes across for the lively atmosphere.”
“I go,” Marianne said, “because to me it is all still Berlin.” She gathered coffee cups for refills and added, “A very bad recipe. Equal parts Prussian culture and Stalin’s revenge, plus a pinch of what was left of the German workers’ movement after the camps. You may have my story this evening, if you like. Now I wish you two would stop being polite, and take care of your business instead.”
* * *
The Kreuzberg post office was only a five-minute drive away, on the Mehringdamm, the main commercial street. Yet Cynthia and Alex had trouble filling the time. She explained that Marianne’s parents, Communists, had died in a concentration camp, of hunger. Marianne had been taken in by less exotic relatives, who stayed in line. Alex, suddenly not wanting to know this, attempted to chat about the mechanical history of Cynthia’s VW bug. She parked the bug in front of a vacant storefront on whose soaped-up window competed graffiti of the right and the left: a black Turken Raus, and a peace symbol in green. It was half a block to the post office— a quaint brick building sandwiched between a furniture showroom on one side and videocassette rentals on the other. The sidewalk in front was crowded with shoppers and loafers, Aryan and not.
The remodeled interior reminded Alex of a suburban bank at home. Everything was glass, plastic, and hushed. He stared up at a photo of Chancellor Helmut Kohl. He wondered whether Kohl was surprised, staring down, to find in the pristine lobby this bearded, wandering Yid.
Cynthia presented herself at an opening in the glass. Alex watched her sign a form, offer identification, and receive Gerald Meyer’s flat corrugated box. She stepped aside, resting the parcel against the white countertop and a pane of clean, sparkling glass, while she slit the strapping tape with a penknife from her bag. She opened the flap and looked inside. Only then did she turn toward Alex and surprise him with the tears welling from her eyes. They glistened in pouches and then dripped onto her round cheeks. He kicked himself for being surprised. She brushed at the tears, not very effectually, with her soft black sleeve.
Alex found tissues in his jacket pocket and went toward her, but she shook her head no, sniffled once, hard, and handed him a manila envelope like the one in which Gerald Meyer had sent him his fee.