by Mandy Berman
“Are you all right?” Oliver Ash asked her, interrupting Liv in the middle of a monologue.
She hadn’t realized her anxiety was so obvious to an outsider.
“I’m fine,” she said. “Though I may go soon.”
Liv looked over at her, surprised.
“Why is that?” Professor Ash asked. “There’s free alcohol here, which there surely won’t be wherever else you are going. And the company is all right, too.” He said this last bit in a self-deprecating way.
“Because communal joy and merriment have the opposite effect on me,” Fiona said, “and if I don’t leave soon I might hurl myself out the window.”
This elicited a chuckle from Professor Roiphe.
“You can use my office,” Oliver Ash said without skipping a beat, pointing to one of the oak doors toward the quieter end of the hall.
Liv had also mentioned, on their walk to the party, Oliver Ash having been the subject of a controversy when he taught at Columbia, ten years earlier. Something to do with sleeping with a student.
She looked between the two of them now, confused.
Professor Roiphe pointedly turned to the girls. “You two should come to Professor Ash’s reading on Thursday. It’s rumored he’s going to read some new work.”
“Yes, it’s looking that way. In fact, perhaps it’s best you all stay home.” More polite laughs.
“I’ll be there!” Liv said.
At that point, some other professor came and tapped Oliver Ash on the shoulder, and Fiona took the moment to duck out of the conversation. Liv, seeming torn, eventually followed her friend.
“You okay?” Liv said.
“I’m getting my claustrophobia,” Fiona said, which Liv knew was a recurring theme. “Too close and hot up here.”
“Want me to come with you?”
Fiona knew that Liv only asked this because she was supposed to, not because she actually wanted to leave with Fiona.
“No, you’re having fun,” Fiona said.
Liv paused. “You sure?”
“Definitely.” Fiona truly wanted to walk home alone, to not have to talk for a minute.
“Let’s go to his reading on Thursday,” Liv said. She moved closer to Fiona, lowering her voice. “Isn’t he sexy?”
Fiona looked over again at the man, who was speaking with a new group of professors and students. She supposed he was attractive in a dark, brooding way. His eyes were quite focused on whomever he was talking to at the time, which had a sexy net effect.
“I don’t see it,” she said.
Liv shrugged and hugged her goodbye, then made her way toward the wine table to refill her cup.
Fiona walked quickly down the hallway, but she paused at the top of the stairs, noticing the office door, slightly ajar, that had Oliver Ash’s nameplate affixed to it. It was noteworthy that they had taken the time to make that, considering that he was only here for a year.
Fiona peered toward the professors and students in a clump at the other end of the hallway; Liv was now chatting with the Shakespeare professor at the refreshment table. Fiona slipped in through the open door and shut it quietly behind her.
The green banker’s lamp on the mahogany desk was turned on, illuminating a disorganized pile of papers and Post-its. There was an open paperback, facedown on the desk to save its place. She rounded the desk to see what it was: The Periodic Table, by Primo Levi. She pulled a Post-it from a clean stack and marked the page, then closed the paperback. You weren’t supposed to treat books like that. She peered at the papers on the desk, which were short stories by students with Oliver Ash’s notes in the margin, sloppily written. (“What do you mean by this? PUSH.”)
The bookcase behind the desk was filled with books by Jewish men: more Levi, Elie Wiesel, Saul Bellow. An entire row of Philip Roth, all the titles printed in the same font. She had never read any of the books in his bookcase, except for Night, which was required in high school. Everyone always told her to read Roth. She should really get on that.
There was also a single framed photograph, of Oliver Ash, a woman, and a young boy. The three of them were sitting on a couch, the boy between the two adults, looking up at Professor Ash, and the adults looking at each other, their hands clasped over the back of the couch behind the boy. The light was yellow and orange; the photo must have been taken in the evening, the space lit by soft lamps and a candle on the coffee table in front of the trio.
Where were these people—back in Berlin? Why weren’t they here with him? Was it possible he was no longer with the woman? Why would he leave a child for a whole year? Or maybe they were, in fact, here. No one had brought significant others to the party tonight, and none of them, in that short conversation, had discussed their personal lives.
She heard a door open and she froze, sure she was about to be caught. Then it clicked shut, and she relaxed; it was the office next door. She moved toward the door of Oliver Ash’s office and put her ear to it, to make sure no one was approaching. She turned the handle and slipped out; indeed, no one was on the other side, and no one spotted her as she left the door slightly ajar, the way it had been when she entered, and descended the four flights of stairs to the main entrance of the building. She pushed open the front door and breathed in the air of the unseasonably warm night. Her heartbeat, she realized, had slowed completely.
3.
BEFORE HER EYES could open, Simone smelled the distinct odor of fresh piss.
“I did it again, Mama.”
As she roused herself, she saw the boy standing at the foot of her bed, his blue-and-white-striped pajamas soaked around the crotch and down one pant leg.
She sat up, put one foot on the ground. “C’est pas grave, mon chéri.” She knew not to fuss. It was common at this age, especially for children with separated parents. Not that she and Oliver were separated. Not technically. To a five-year-old, though, a month without a parent was an eternity; Oliver’s presence was probably such a distant memory to Henri that he might as well no longer exist at all.
Simone peeled herself out of bed, her bones aching the way they did every morning. This never used to be a problem. It was as if she’d woken up on her fortieth birthday a few months earlier and suddenly felt that her entire infrastructure was cracking. Forty wasn’t all that old, but she supposed living in this city, surrounded by young people and knowing she no longer had viable eggs, had something to do with it.
She knelt down to her son’s height, one of her knees making a quick popping noise, and kissed him on his forehead.
“Can you take those off for me, love? Mama needs to wash them.”
He peeled them off, one leg and then the other. The underwear followed. As he crumpled both damp articles into a ball, he began to sob.
“Shh,” Simone said, taking the soiled clothing from him. She looked at his tear-streaked face. Though she was partial, she knew he was pretty, feminine in his beauty. He was tall for his age, but hadn’t lost his fat pink cheeks yet, which got pinker in the cold. His eyelashes were long and glossy, so thick that in the right light, it looked like he was wearing eyeliner, and his lips were so comically plump that when he pouted, she couldn’t help but laugh at her luck. This was the boy she had been given. She must have done something right.
“Little boys have accidents all the time,” she said. “Even your father did when he was your age.”
This was a mistake. The wails got louder. Henri, naked from the waist down, flopped his head heavily onto Simone’s shoulder, as if his neck could no longer sustain its oppressive weight.
“I miss Papa,” he managed to say into her shoulder between hiccups and sobs.
“Breathe, my love,” Simone said, stroking his head while biting her tongue. Who knew it was so hard to keep your true feelings from a five-year-old? “Do you want to take a bath with Mama?”
“No.” He
nri pouted. “I want to take a bath with Papa.”
“Okay, we’ll shower then,” she said, snapping into action—all traces of maternal sweetness abruptly gone from her—taking him by the wrist as he wailed all the way.
* * *
—
He wailed all the way through breakfast, too, and on their walk from their apartment in Neukölln to the U-Bahn, and throughout the fifteen-minute U-Bahn ride—commuters rolling their eyes and tsking endlessly at Simone as the train ambled over the canal. He kept screaming as they got off the train, down the wide tree-lined streets of Kreuzberg, the leaves turning toward their first hints of oranges and yellows and reds, past mothers with their well-behaved children, mothers who looked upon Simone with a mix of smugness and pity. She knew this look because it was one she had often employed when Henri was a younger, more agreeable boy. Glad that’s not me, she used to think when the roles were reversed, passing a little girl throwing a temper tantrum in the middle of the sidewalk and squeezing her own son’s hand a bit tighter. How quickly mothers forgot to be sympathetic when their own children were having a good day.
Simone had never been so relieved to get to Henri’s school, a French école hidden behind a canopy of trees and a tall wrought-iron gate. She handed him off to his teacher, a kindly, stout woman, at the entrance of the classroom.
“I’m sorry. We’ve had a rough morning.”
“Not to worry,” the teacher said. “We’ll have a good day today, won’t we, Henri?”
Almost instantly, a friend pulled Henri away for an arts-and-crafts activity, and his tears dried up. As he disappeared into the sea of children, Simone felt near-immediate sorrow and regret. Now she had to go to work.
* * *
—
Simone and Oliver had moved to Berlin four months earlier, following a particularly rough period in Paris. When Simone was offered a fellowship through the Berlin Museum for Jewish Studies, it felt like ideal timing. She needed to leave Paris, for that was where she’d had three miscarriages. It had become almost regular, the cycle of grief and hope and grief again: the initial physical pain, the realization, and the fallout, sinking depression one day and dissociation the next and the manic need to scrub down every centimeter of the apartment the day after that; the eventual rehabilitation (never complete; she was never quite herself after each one) and the cautious desire to try again; Oliver’s growing distance after each loss, the gulf widening between them; and the final verdict from the doctor after miscarriage number three that, at Simone’s age, it might be in their best interest to start pursuing alternative options. Had they ever considered adoption?
Oliver supported the choice to take the fellowship and said, in fact, that he’d had a book rattling around his brain for a while that took place in Berlin. So they went in June, to enjoy the summer before her fellowship and Henri’s new school started, subletting their apartment in the Marais for an unthinkable amount of money to a British couple, and renting the spacious, airy place in Neukölln, in the former West, for a fraction of the cost. And then came Oliver’s job offer from Buchanan College, a tiny but prestigious school in the middle of Pennsylvania. It was extremely last-minute, after the unexpected death of a beloved tenured professor. The head of the English department had been a colleague of Oliver’s at Columbia ten years earlier, which already gave Simone pause, considering how things had ended for him there.
“Why would someone from Columbia want to hire you?” she’d asked at their new kitchen table in Neukölln. Henri was asleep, and they shared a bottle of wine as Oliver broke the news to her, still-unpacked boxes surrounding them.
“The man was a major scholar in contemporary Jewish lit and Ruth thought I could teach the seminar he was slated for in the fall,” he’d said. “Plus a writing workshop.”
“Surely there are other writers out there who also study Jewish literature? Why you? Especially in light of what happened last time.”
He shot her a look as if to say, Don’t go there, even though they had, of course, gone there many times before.
“That was ten years ago.”
“Have you even interviewed at this school before?”
“You know how American universities are,” he said. “It’s timing and politics. She said she thought of me first. They’re offering an insane amount of money.”
Their money situation was thus: they were running out of it. Once, Oliver had had seemingly unlimited funds from his first book and film royalties. Over the past year or so, though, the checks had slowed. Were for smaller, sometimes laughably minuscule amounts. Oliver’s place in the cultural canon was becoming less and less relevant. It would be unwise not to take the job.
“We just moved here, though,” Simone said. She knew this would be good for Oliver’s career, too. He was being given another chance in the States. But he would need to be there and she would need to be here. What about this new start, which was meant to be taken together? It had all been so easy these first few weeks, like Berlin had wiped the grief from Paris clean.
“Should I not go?”
She shook her head. “You have to.”
Later, she looked up the program and clicked on the link for Ruth Alpert, the head of the English department at Buchanan College. Ruth Alpert was a name for an old Jewish lady, but she looked to be around Simone’s age. In her headshot, she wore a swipe of red lipstick and a sleek dark braid over one shoulder. Her areas of study were feminist theory; twentieth-century English literature and culture; modernism; Virginia Woolf. In another life, they might have been friends.
* * *
—
The museum was within walking distance of Henri’s school, and she took her favorite route down Schöneberger Ufer, a winding street with wide sidewalks that ran along a canal, where weeping willows dipped their branches into the water. They’d had such a good summer here, before Simone’s fellowship started, before Oliver left, picnicking in Körnerpark, a Neo-Baroque garden with fountains and manicured hedges. (It was incredible how many green spaces there were in this city, nearly everywhere you turned.) She remembered a summer day watching Oliver chasing Henri across the grass and feeling, for the first time since the miscarriages, a sense of contentment. That maybe her one son, screaming with glee as his father spun him in the air, was exactly enough.
Now Simone took Henri to parks on the weekends, but she was never as much fun as Oliver. She was a single mother for the first time in her life, and she had little energy to chase Henri around when the workweek was over. It was probably why he resented her so much—she was no fun. And now there was starting to be a chill in the air; Berlin moved quickly from summer to winter, and the sun set so early these days, and soon they wouldn’t be able to play outside at all. She worried about the onslaught of the deep freeze, which apparently lasted from October to May, often unceasingly. She might go crazy shuffling from one indoor space to the other, with no one to call a friend besides her five-year-old son. Maybe she should try talking to some of the other moms at the école or in the playground. But she was shy. And tired. Wasn’t it strange, how loneliness begat loneliness?
She crossed the canal and passed an abandoned brick building on the other side, covered in graffiti. She cut through a park and came to a busier road, turning onto one of the side streets that were so characteristic of Kreuzberg: eighteenth-century residential buildings, almost Parisian with their wrought-iron balconies, French windows, and carved façades, juxtaposed with brutalist Cold War–era structures, with their slate-gray exteriors and their rectangular, ornament-free windows. Berlin’s lack of identity was, in many ways, its identity: a long history of libertinism followed by decades of chaos, of Nazi and Soviet rule, of bombings and ruins, and then of rehabilitation, and shiny modern buildings erected as replacements amid the vestiges of Fascism and Communism. And it thrived amid the turmoil: the city was constantly building and rebuilding itself, thrumm
ing with sexual energy beneath a gray and green expanse. The people were in charge, the gorgeous young people, like the blond woman who rode her bicycle past Simone now, or the man in black leather crossing the street who managed to look handsome with a septum ring. They seemed to come here from every corner of the world—not necessarily for the history of this place, but for the weirdness, for the repurposing of spaces and identities, for the parties in Soviet bomb shelters and the art museums in Nazi bunkers. They came, too, because it was cheap. The city itself was their blank slate.
And Simone, the forty-year-old mother, she of the unviable pregnancies, she who did not have the courage to make friends, felt impossibly weary, and impossibly old.
* * *
—
The Berlin Museum for Jewish Studies was a giant Baroque complex with a stone walkway and a burnt-red roof. It had been used as Prussia’s supreme court in the 1700s, and was most recently repurposed as the largest Jewish museum on the continent. Simone went through the metal detector, past the front doors, as she did each morning, and waved at the guard as she gathered her bag from the X-ray machine and took the elevator to the top floor. She used her ID card, on a lanyard around her neck, to get into the library.
“Guten Morgen, Greta,” she said to the archivist, who was reading a newspaper behind the front desk. Greta grunted and did not look up.
Simone passed rows and rows of stacks and long, unoccupied reference tables, until she came to her office, hidden in the back. She closed the door and sat down at the desk, settling in and opening her laptop, preparing to review what she’d written the day before. She already knew, without looking at it, that it was going to be crap. This project was, so far, complete and utter crap.