Berlin Cantata (2 page)

Anyway, it's her life. But what's good for the goose, that's what I was trying to tell her, this was
my
life, so if I didn't want to go to the country, why should I?

I think she thought it could be cathartic. I tell her, at my age, I don't need cathartic.

What I don't tell her, which I will only say once, right here, but only to be divulged after my death: I am ashamed of something. This is correct. There, I said it. And what am I ashamed of, Dorothea Anholt, eighty-one years old? If I could just tell you like that, it wouldn't be too big a shame, right? Of course not. Believe me, it doesn't work like that. If you're ashamed of something, you barely know what it is. Of course you
know
what it is, but you don't like to say it to yourself. You say it's something slightly different from what it is. This is my lifetime's experience, and believe me I don't need some expensive therapist doctor at one hundred dollars an hour to tell me this. For instance, I'll give you a perfect for instance: I am ashamed of what I am ashamed of. Because I don't think I'm ashamed of the right thing. I should be ashamed for my daughter who died. Or this is what I say to myself, Doe, you should be ashamed for that. But I'm not ashamed. Sad, yes. I am as sad as the day it happened. I'll never get over it. It happened, it's done with, but it's never done with. But ashamed? No. What's there to be ashamed of? We did whatever we could. We did our best. It wasn't good enough, God help us. So I think, it's something I could be ashamed of, probably I should be, but I don't know why. You could almost say, I'm ashamed for not being ashamed. It was the other people. They should be ashamed.

I shouldn't have even started this. This is what happens, you start something, with the best of intentions, and then what happens? I tell you, I'm going one way and my mind's going the other. There. I'll just say it, in one word: Ute. Ute is what I'm ashamed of. You can figure out the rest.

“But Mother, Herr Bruno says you can go to the country. The restrictions are lifted. We can get somebody to drive us out there. It's less than an hour.” This is Holly again. She doesn't let up. She doesn't stop.

Finally I put my foot down. What can you do? You have to put your foot down. Who's the mother, after all?

I said to her, these words precisely, “Holly, if you mention the country one more time, I'm going home right now, straight back to Walnut Creek, no questions asked, the first flight.”

“Fine,” she said. Of course she would say that.

She went on to say that she didn't feel this city was too attractive anyway, in fact she said it was as ugly as something, I don't remember what exactly, but as ugly as something that's ugly, that much I do remember, and so if I wanted to leave right now, this instant, fine, it was fine by her.

“Eat your hamburger,” I said. It was a twelve dollar hamburger, even if we weren't paying, if she ordered it, she should eat it, right?

Anyway we didn't leave. But we also didn't go to the country. The next day we went to where Mama used to take me, on special occasions, I'd get dressed up and we'd go to Kranzler, the
old
Kranzler, for cream puffs. Every birthday, anything like that, or if we went to a museum or to buy new shoes, afterwards we'd go there. It wasn't the exact same, of course, this was the new Kranzler, they had a new modern building. I believe the old location was bombed. But we had cream puffs and they were so delicious. Mama used to say to me, it was like tasting a little bite of the moon. Everything came back to me, like in a flash. The day after that we left. Everyone was so nice, I just wanted to thank everybody. Herr Bruno was especially nice, a true gentleman. He was the one who showed us around and drove the van. He went where anyone wanted to go and he knew everything, even the old places that were gone.

OKSANA KOZLOVA

Wedding

HERBERT WAS A BIG CHEESE
. His construction business was among the largest in the city. He was a trustee of the Jewish community. He was said to be among the city's richest men. He was sixty-four years old and had never married and so it was only expected that he would have a big cheese wedding.

He hoped to introduce me to Berlin society. He perhaps even hoped that I would find myself at home in it, or help him to find a home in it. This was unwise fantasy on his part. I don't condemn him for it, but it was unwise fantasy. I had only a passing, sociological interest in the kind of wedding he planned, in his villa on Schwanenwerder, with the Brazilian band and thousands of strung lights and all the men with their stomachs and wives with frosted hair. It would have been better if it had been in a movie. Then I could have walked in and out. But there I was, the star of the show.

I would say that while our marriage was not an altogether unlikely thing, yet, for all the logic in its support, it was strange. That is to say, there was an irreducible strangeness between Herbert and myself. We could come close, we could almost touch, you could even say that we understood each other, and then there would be a falling off, as back to our respective places we tumbled, with who knew what sort of divide or gulf or electrified fence between us. Surely part of it was due to our age difference. I have heard a Muslim rule of thumb that a wife should be half her husband's age plus seven years. In that case, I should have been thirty-nine or Herbert forty-six. If you do that little math puzzle, you will know the actual difference in age between us. And we came from different, if equally illegitimate, aristocracies. Herbert's one might call the aristocracy of suffering. He came out of the camps weighing forty kilos, an orphan of the war. This pedigree became a kind of virtue. If nothing else, it proved to the American occupiers he was not a Nazi. And he spoke English, and was not afraid of dirty work, and soon he was running a string of bars for the Americans. These bars, not surprisingly, specialized in prostitution. But Herbert was an honest whoremaster – on this I must take his word, yet I do. He has remained an honest man, from that day to this. It has been always a matter of honor with him, to show the Germans something, to refute the old lies. And, of course, that too brought him business. He bought up buildings that were still destroyed. He worked with his bare hands beside his workmen. He fashioned a life out of dust. Now enters into that life, many years later, the Soviet princess manquée. What else shall I term myself? My grandfather, my mother's father, was Comrade Brezhnev's munitions minister. It was he who raised me, after my father disappeared on a trade mission to Switzerland and my mother took flight to Finland. I led almost exactly the life that our criminal regime was instituted to abolish. I worked little, I flitted around embassy parties, I gained preferential entrance to university, I married a fellow child of the
nomenklatura
who believed only in Count Tolstoy, so we settled in a government
dacha
and lived a life of “purity” in the birch woods. Russian hippies, if you can believe such a thing. Our marriage, my first marriage, ended, but it was not because we were not bound at the hip. Quite likely it ended because we were. And then all of it ended, the regime, the privileges, the lies, and I wound up here, and with Herbert. I won't trouble you with certain of the details of how this came about. There was no “cute meet.” But I will say this, about what divides us. Part of it has to do with “the Jewish question,” or rather, the fact that Herbert perceives that there
is
a Jewish question, perceives it quite acutely, in Berlin in 1991. Whether he denies it or not, and sometimes he does and sometimes he doesn't quite, Herbert's life achievement is bound up with being a Jew in Germany, and with the peculiar wrestling with history that this begets. It's as though he's constantly saying, with his achievement, his power, his money: you haven't defeated us, not quite. Here I am, flying a certain kind of flag, the flag of Herbert, he seems to say. Whereas I, with my decades of Soviet education not all of which was lies, and perhaps even my inability to shed parts of it which probably were, don't particularly blame the Germans for anything, despite being what the Nazis would have called a “mischling.” I continue to see the world as full of structural defects, historical defects, which produced the catastrophe of Germans killing Jews but many other catastrophes as well. The numbers matter to me, but I don't keep count that way. The Soviet Union was evidently not a competent instrument to correct these defects, but to deny the critique is to invite all such future catastrophes elsewhere. And so this business of “the Germans this,” “the Germans that,” as if fascism and the technical mastery of butchery were simply their homegrown crops for export, I don't buy it. I think it's sentimentality and hogwash and people whistling past their own moral graveyards. Well, much of it, anyway. There are some Germans I could do without.

In the meantime, one thing between Herbert and I is certain: we are both short. Standing together, I'm afraid we can sometimes look like a short father with his short daughter.

When I say the “wedding,” what I am really referring to is our wedding party. Our exchange of vows was civil and private. I got through the vows by not listening too closely. It was the prospect of the big party which made me uneasy. I resolved to “stretch,” to “make it work.” These are ordinarily contemptible phrases to me, phrases a marriage counselor or advice columnist might offer, so one could say it was a measure of my willingness to “stretch” and “make it work” that for this one night I embraced them. Herbert wanted a big bash, so I would stretch and see how this was important to him, to show me off, to make our debut. Herbert wished to invite his fellow businessmen, so I would stretch and see how this was necessary and appropriate for business. Herbert spent money on this party that could have fed ten thousand poor, but I stretched and remembered that Herbert, too, had been poor, and the bitterness of it, and his glory in overcoming it.

And when you stretch towards another, you of course wonder if the other is stretching towards you. I could imagine Herbert being dismayed over some whom I invited. My students from the emigré center were of course the shabbiest, with their poor Russian clothes and clueless style. One could have hoped, because they were Russians, that they would drink too much and liven up the proceedings, but because they were also, all of them, either Jews or pretending to be Jews in order to obtain a German visa, they weren't really much good at loutish partying. For the most part they huddled together as if they'd just gotten off some immigrant ship, their eyes dazzled by the display around them. As for my other invitees, one was working up a story for his newspaper and the confluence of Berlin power brokers was convenient for him, another announced he would bring, as his “dates,” his skinhead acolytes from the East, from Marzahn, in order to show them what the other half looked like, and then there was my new American friend, the only one I could point to who perhaps had no motive at all to be there except to wish me well. Or what am I saying? She doubtless wished to
meet
people. To none of these did Herbert raise so much as an eyebrow.

It was a warm September evening. The Wannsee sparkled in the moonlight. The thousands of little strung lights announced to all satellites, aliens, and deities above that right here on this spot on the earth something of note was going on. “Intelligent life,” what a phrase, the pseudo-scientists' phrase. Our guests flowed out of the house, forming ever-shifting eddies and pools in the grass. Intrigues, romances, snubs, disappointments, all these doubtless were germinating, flowering, withering, everywhere I might have looked, but it was not mine that night to be too curious. I was floating above it all, saying my hellos, being kissed and danced with, paying as little attention to all of it as I had to my marriage vows. Herbert and I occasionally collided. I don't mean this in a metaphorical sense. He would go his way, I would go another, and occasionally we would bump. He wore a smoking jacket that night, and a foulard, and carried a cane. Later he would tell me how ridiculous he had felt, but I thought he looked the essence of himself that night, and quite dapper as well, and I was touched by it. Each time we were together, someone snapped our picture.

There then came the moment of the car. It was then that the vulgarity of the entire event came back to me with heavy force. Herbert had bought me a very expensive automobile, but as if that weren't enough, he had it driven out onto the patio so that he could present me with it. It was a silver Mercedes sports coupe with the largest engine imaginable, sitting there as if waiting to be filmed for a television advertisement. I am not one to blush, but there I was, skinny little Oksana from Moscow with the bad Russian teeth only recently fixed, blushing in embarrassment and rage. Herbert made a little speech, which truth be told he read in a monotone from notes, praising me and welcoming me. The five hundred guests who gathered around clapped politely as if bored. I felt called upon to say something. I had nothing prepared. I coaxed myself, I coached and urged, “Stretch, Oksana, make this work.” But what came out was this: “Really, I have no idea how to drive this. In Moscow we took taxis. Herbert must want to kill me.”

These were words that I heard first only when they were already aloft in the warm evening air. They hadn't preverberated in my mind. What dreadful words. People laughed nervously, then a bit more heartily. I laughed as easily as I could, as if to confess certainly it hadn't been the best of jokes, but it was, at least, a joke. This morale-building didn't quite work. At a little distance I saw Herbert, slunk into the background behind the car, laughing and clapping with the others. The eternal good sport, the avoider of the limelight, the puller of the strings. I ran inside as soon as it was feasible, and went upstairs where I felt no one else would go. The party went along smoothly without me. I watched from the corner of a window. It was a magnificent organism, a flowing dragon of humanity. The car still sat there, in the middle of it, rather ignored now, a kind of prop, beautiful yet jilted. Later I came down to say my polite good-nights to one and all.