“And were you shocked, horrified?”
“You forget—I’m from New York.”
“Ah yes, a worldly American, even if the sound of that phrase has a profoundly oxymoronic feel to it. Well, you’d best get used to Mehmet’s presence here, as we have a rendezvous three days a week. Usually in the late morning. And he’s always gone after ninety minutes. He comes at no other time, as that might cause suspicion among his all-knowing, all-fascist Islamic family. Anyway, the arrangement perfectly suits me. Mehmet and I get exactly what we need from each other within carefully delineated boundaries. That means there’s no fuss, no trouble, no ties that bind.”
“Speaking of fuss . . . we need to talk about the music . . .”
“What music?”
“The music you were playing last night.”
“You object to my taste?”
“What I object to is being woken at two in the morning . . .”
“Well, I’m afraid that I do my best work from midnight to four. And I can’t paint without music blaring. So . . .”
“When we discussed this earlier, you assured me that there would be no blared music here if I moved in.”
He reached for his cigarettes and fired one up.
“I lied,” he finally said.
“Evidently. The thing is, I cannot sleep if you blare music like that.”
“Change your sleeping habits then. Keep vampire hours like me.”
“That’s not a satisfactory answer.”
“Do you expect me to care?”
“I want my seven hundred marks back.”
“It’s all spent. I had debts, you know. And now . . .”
“Now you have to keep your end of the deal.”
“I don’t have to do a damn thing, Tommy Boy.”
“Yes you do.”
“Are you going to get all legal on me, American? ‘ You’ll be hearing from my attorney’ and some such shit.”
He uttered that “attorney” line in the sort of reedy version of an American accent that a certain type of Brit always turns on whenever he wants to cut us colonials down to size. At that point I found myself getting angry—but anger with me is never expressed. Instead I go all quiet and begin to plot.
“The deal we had,” I said in a voice just barely above a whisper, “is that there would be no music playing while I’m here. I’m holding you to it.”
I turned and left the apartment.
Outside I had to fight off the desire to punch a window out with my fist. I get overly aggrieved when crossed—especially when I sense I have been treated unfairly or have been simply looked upon as a dupe. Standing outside my new abode, I pondered how to deal with Fitzsimons-Ross and his duplicitous tactics. There were several options here. I could return to the Pension Weisse and ask Madame if she was still willing to cut me a long-term residency deal. The problem with this was twofold: I would lose the seven hundred marks that I had already forked over to Fitzsimons-Ross, and I would also lose the chance of bearing eyewitness to all that went on at his place and in Kreuzberg. I could find another apartment in the district, but the fact was that my set of rooms here were absolutely ideal. Fitzsimons-Ross was right: I had been naïve handing over that sum of money to a junkie. But I think a very large part of me subconsciously knew I was asking for trouble by paying so much rent up front—and did so just to see how everything would play out. Now I had to find a way of getting what I wanted—silence at night—yet not compromising Fitzsimons-Ross’s work. So that afternoon, while taking an extended hike through the rarefied streets of Charlottenberg, I happened upon a hi-fi shop and bought a pair of decent headphones and a huge ten-meter extension cord for them. The shop assistant looked at me warily when I asked for such a long lead.
“It’s a big room.”
Then, toward the end of the afternoon, I stopped in at the Istanbul and asked Omar if I could use their phone . . . and, indeed, if I could have people leave messages on their number (as I sensed it best to not have anyone trying to contact me fall into conversation with Fitzsimons-Ross).
“You willing to pay a little money for the service?” he asked.
“How much?”
“What I charge the five or six other people for whom I take messages: five marks a week. You get good service, I promise that. And you get to make five local calls a day, no extra charge.”
“That sounds like we have a deal then. Can I make one of those five phone calls right now?”
Omar motioned for me to come over to the bar, where he pulled up a heavy black Bakelite phone from the lower depths behind him. I dug out my notebook, into which I had copied the name and phone number of Jerome Wellmann, the Radio Liberty station head in Berlin. Dialing the number I reached the switchboard and was put through to Mr. Wellmann’s secretary—who was very no-nonsense.
“Does Mr. Wellmann know what this is about?” she asked.
“Huntley Cranley suggested I call.”
The fact that I answered her back in her language and also dropped the name of a very serious honcho at Radio Liberty back in Washington seemed to make her pause for thought.
“Anyone can mention Herr Cranley’s name. We have people looking for jobs here all the time, and they always tell us the same thing: that they met with someone high up in the organization in Washington, whereas the truth is . . .”
“Mr. Cranley informed me that he was writing Mr. Wellmann himself on my behalf.”
“Then I will read through all telexes that Herr Wellmann received recently from the head office. If it turns out you are telling the truth . . .”
“Are you implying that I might be lying?”
“For reasons that I am certain are evident to you, were you to ponder them with care and intelligence, we must be very careful when it comes to vetting any potential employee, or indeed anyone who simply wishes to see Herr Wellmann for an appointment. You should understand that, given the nature of our work, we must be vigilant at all times . . . especially in this city.”
“Point taken,” I said, then added that messages could be left for me at the following number—and I read off the six digits printed in the plastic holder on the center of the phone.
“And what is this place where we are to leave messages . . . that is, if we even do leave a message for you?”
“It’s a café in Kreuzberg called the Istanbul,” I said, knowing immediately that the very name and locale of this joint probably sounded like some sub-Cold War spy rendezvous center.
“Why are you having messages taken for you there?”
“Because it’s around the corner from where I’m living . . . and because I don’t have a phone.”
“If you don’t hear from us within forty-eight hours, then this means that Herr Wellmann has chosen not to get in touch with you. Good day.”
So much for that avenue of possibility. The woman made officiousness her creed, her raison d’être. If she had her way I was certain she would block any work possibilities at Radio Liberty—and, as such, access to an entire world of narrative possibilities for my book. Naturally, I would inevitably fall into other worlds while here in Berlin. But I so wanted the chance to work among Cold Warriors playing the propaganda game for the West.
“Doesn’t sound good,” Omar said as I handed him back the phone.
“You’ll let me know if they phone back,” I said, handing over the first four marks for the Café Istanbul telephone exchange.
“You pay for a service, you get a service.”
And, I could have added, a deal is a deal. Or, at least, that how I viewed the world . . . and, more specifically, the arrangement I had with Fitzsimons-Ross when I rented his upstairs rooms. So when I returned back to the apartment that night, I discovered him still out and deposited the headphones and the ten-meter lead by his stereo, alongside the following note:
I bought you these. I sense the lead should be long enough for you to move around the studio without encumbrance. The sales guy assured me they produce very high-quality sound. Happy listening . . . Thomas.
Then I went upstairs and decided to make it an early night, falling into bed by eleven.
The music cranked up just after midnight. Only tonight it wasn’t Bartók or John Coltrane or something in a similar rarefied vein. No, tonight it was the loudest heavy metal imaginable—the sort of sonic screech that was the aural equivalent of a five-car pileup and chosen, no doubt, to let me know that Fitzsimons-Ross had rejected the headphones compromise. I sat up and reached for my robe and walked downstairs. Fitzsimons-Ross was already fully engaged in front of his canvas, with his back to the place where his hi-fi equipment was stacked. So he didn’t see me approach the turntable and lift the tone arm off the record. The sudden silence made him spin around just as I yanked the turntable free of its cables and approached the window. As I hauled it open he screamed:
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
“We had a deal.”
“You wouldn’t fucking dare . . .”
“Will you keep your part of the deal?”
“I don’t go in for blackmail.”
“And I won’t negotiate with a bully. You either abide by what we agreed, or you return me the seven hundred marks, or your turntable takes the plunge.”
“Do you think you can tell me how to fucking behave?”
“Have it your way then.”
And I tossed the turntable out the window.
Suddenly Fitzsimons-Ross’s face fell. He looked genuinely stunned by what had transpired. Sitting down on the floor in front of his half-finished canvas he stared ahead, saying nothing. There was now something Little Boy Lost about him. I felt strangely guilty about playing so rough, causing him evident distress, even though I also knew that if I hadn’t called his bluff, the music would have continued at a deafening volume all night long.
I crept upstairs, leaving him sitting there on the floor. I drank several glasses of red wine and smoked two roll-ups. I paced by the door, trying to discern if he was creeping up the stairs with a hammer in his hand. All right, I was bit paranoid . . . but the guy was a junkie and an emotional pinball, so (I told myself) anything was possible. I decided, then and there, to move out the next afternoon.
I finally crawled into bed at two and passed out. When I woke it was nearly midday. A rare winter sun was shafting in through the venetian blinds. After the usual first befuddling moments of consciousness, I began to assemble a mental checklist:
I need to go to the Café Istanbul within the hour and call the Pension Weisse and negotiate that long-term rate, then phone Radio Liberty and tell Frau Charm that the phone number to reach me on has changed, then come back here and pack up, leaving Fitzsimons-Ross a good-bye note, telling him that I hoped the seven hundred marks would buy him a better turntable (and simultaneously salve my conscience).
After the morning ritual of cheese on pumpernickel bread, followed by two strong espressos and the first roll-up of the new day, I gathered up my coat and headed downstairs. As I moved toward the front door, I caught sight of Fitzsimons-Ross. He was already at work, standing in front of his easel, his brush dancing across the canvas as he layered and relayered a new azure blue rectangle. On his head were the headphones I bought him. The lead stretched across the room to his bank of hi-fi equipment, which now included a replacement turntable.
As I shook my head with bemusement, Fitzsimons-Ross spun around and caught sight of me. Pulling off the headphones he uttered one word:
“Cunt.”
Then he favored me with the smallest of smiles.
“Lunch on me at the Café Istanbul?” I asked.
He thought about this for a moment.
“I suppose I have nothing better to do.”
It looked like I wouldn’t be moving out just yet.
FIVE
O
NE OF THE
many intriguing aspects of Fitzsimons-Ross was his ability to exist totally in the present. I envied him this talent—and the way he let things go so quickly, never dwelling on past grievances or perceived inequities. Yes, he could groan about an unkind review or one of the many Dublin “begrudgers” (a favorite word of his) who hated him for “the nominal success I’ve had to date.” But he rarely railed against life’s manifold injustices or his place in the world. During our détente lunch at the Café Istanbul he never once mentioned the unpleasantness of the previous night, his subsequent distress, or how he had managed to find a new turntable before twelve noon today. On the contrary, his countenance was ironic, witty, engaged. The fact that we were sitting in a public arena seemed to engage some sort of self-censorship device that simply stopped him from uttering the stream-of-consciousness scatology that so marked his normal conversational style. As we began to demolish a liter of the house wine that the Istanbul served up, I asked a question that I had been wanting to pose for several days:
“So how long have you been a junkie?”
The question didn’t faze Fitzsimons-Ross whatsoever. Instead, lighting up a fresh Gauloises, he smiled and said:
“Four years.”
“And it doesn’t impede your work?”
“Clearly not. In fact I would say that my dependence on smack has aided and abetted my career.”
“By which you mean ‘creatively’?”
“Hardly. But let me ask you this, as someone who’s evidently never tried smack, have you ever experimented with hallucinogenics?”
“I did LSD once in college.”
“And?”
“Well, besides being up for around twenty-three hours, yes, it was very trippy, very Technicolor.”
“Smack is anything but that. What it does is send you to a most sedate and splendidly introverted space and encourages you to feel nothing . . . which, given the horror that is so much of life, is no bad thing. And I don’t want to sound like a salesman for the drug, but it is the most profoundly blissful high going.”
“Except for its equally profoundly addictive qualities.”
“My, my, Tommy Boy, you really do have Calvinistic tendencies.”
“Maybe that’s why I’m not a junkie.”
“Do yourself a favor and never get involved with it. You’re far too structured to be a junkie.”
“You’re not structured?”
“In a surface way, absolutely. But I can give in to my dissolute side—because I have worked out a way of being anally retentive at the same time. Which must make me unique among junkies . . .”
“Perhaps you should give motivational speeches on being such an organized addict.”
“Perhaps you’ll write them for me. But you can’t do unbridled, can you? I’m certain you smoke a little dope from time to time, and you drink a bit. But there’s a part of you that simply doesn’t like being out of control. Too bad you’re not Jewish. You have that Yid responsibility thing.”
“That’s because I’m a Yid.”
Fitzsimons-Ross looked like he’d just walked into an empty elevator shaft.
“You are joking, yes?” he asked.
“In Judaism the mother carries the religion . . . and as my mother was Jewish, that makes me
a Yid.”
My pronunciation of that expression made it clear how detestable I found it. Fitzsimons-Ross’s unease was a pleasure to behold.
“It’s just a turn of phrase,” he said, reaching for his cigarettes.
“It’s an ugly word. And it makes me think you’re an anti-Semite.”
“You want an apology, don’t you?”
“Why should a ‘Yid’ like me ask such a thing from a fine gentleman like yourself?”
“I will excise that word from my vocabulary immediately. But I need to ask you something: do you regret being circumcised?”
I shook my head and failed to repress the smile that was crossing my face. Fitzsimons-Ross was, at worst, ever amusing.
“I don’t think I’m going to answer that question,” I said.
“And my gaucheness still doesn’t get you off the hook for lunch.”
“You mean, the way a ‘Yid’ would naturally try to stick you with the check?”
“Touché.”
Our lasagnas arrived. They were most edible. Fitzsimons-Ross even seemed impressed.
“This is bloody good. Don’t know why I managed to bypass this place before.”
“Perhaps you have enough Turks in your life already.”
“My, my, we are a bitch.”
“You still haven’t explained to me how you manage to work with smack.”
“‘
How did the devil drug take possession of me?’
You should write dime-store novels, Tommy Boy.
Smack Faggot Unchained!
”
“I’m stealing that title immediately.”
“I tried the Big H shortly after I moved here. Smoked it initially—and then the biker boy, Martin, whom I was with at the time, turned me on to the needle. When that first rush hit me . . . well, there is a damn good reason why it is so addictive. Now I started shooting up in 1980. And I must bow the knee toward Papa who, for an out-of-control member of the failed squirearchy, still imposed on me the idea that ‘appearances must be maintained.’ You can destroy your family fortune, you can kill all the things you love, but never,
never,
appear in public with an unpressed pair of trousers and scuffed shoes. Anyway, courtesy of Papa, I was rather scrupulous when it came to junkie hygiene. So I never got into sharing needles. Which, as it turned out, saved my life and cost poor Martin his. I speak of ‘the plague,’ of course. I must have lost a good two dozen friends here and elsewhere because of it. Then again, I was also rather rigid—pun intended—when it came to the use of French letters. So, Papa,
Vielen Dank
. You turned me into a facsimile of you—and, in the process, saved my life.”
“When did your father die?”
“Three years ago. Cirrhosis of the liver, not that there isn’t much of that in County Wicklow.”
“Were you close to him?”
“Immensely, even though he hardly approved of my sexual predilections. But, to his credit, he did rate me as an artist. In his final year—and he was only fifty-eight when he left this life—he did try to, shall we say, make amends for all the absurd tirades, the name-calling, the general dissolution and dissatisfaction which so characterized the major part of his life. By this point my mother—who was totally Anglo and the epitome of cold bitchdom—had long since left him. With what little money he had left, he was living in the gate lodge of the big house of one of his old chums down in Roundstone. When the doctors told him that he had, perhaps, three months tops, he wrote to me here in Berlin and asked if I would ‘come home’ for a while and ‘see him through.’ Which, of course, I did—and fortunately had a painter friend in Dublin with a contact on the north side of the city who kept me supplied with smack. Not that I ever once let my dying father in on my nasty little habit. Then again, had he known, I think he would have been more sad than furious. Papa was, at heart, a rather nice man who just wanted to love and be loved. But that eluded him during the course of his life. Just as it eludes most of us.”
He stubbed out his cigarette and lit another.
“You’ve never been in love?” I asked.
“Only about ten times. And you?”
I paused, trying to think this one through. And that troubled me.
“Your silence speaks volumes,” Fitzsimons-Ross said.
“There was one woman who was very much in love with me.”
“And—let me guess—she was far too nice for you?”
“Perhaps.”
“So you too had a mother who found your presence the gravest mistake of her life . . . outside, that is, of marrying your father. And ergo, here you are in Berlin, still running away from the woman who found you wanting . . .”
“‘The woman’ in question smoked herself to death seven years ago.”
“And you’re still running. Let me inform you this: it never goes away. You’re always fighting it. I haven’t seen my mother in fifteen years. She walked out on my father to marry some Colonel Blimpish retired army type and live in one of those repulsive Cotswold villages named Chippendale-on-Tweed—where she was, as she always put it, ‘among people of her own standing’ . . . the implication being, us Paddys were so beneath her. The thing was, my father was dependent on her. She fulfilled his ‘mummy’ needs—because, from what I gathered about my paternal grandmother, she was as cold and disapproving as my mother. So . . . let me guess: the woman who loved you—”
I interrupted.
“Have you ever considered reducing your financial outgoings by, perhaps, weaning yourself off smack?”
“It’s very intriguing to see how deftly you attempt to change the subject whenever it crosses into something painful or awkward. No, I have no interest in freeing myself of the proverbial ‘monkey on my back.’ That’s what you Yanks call it, right? It keeps me working, and it keeps reality tolerable.”
“Because you too are resistant to love?”
A deeply ironic smile from Fitzsimons-Ross.
“You are a most talented evader, monsieur. Perhaps that’s a key construct in the life of a writer—an ability to evade. On which note . . . please excuse me, but I have a rendezvous chez moi with Mehmet in just under half an hour. Which means—unless you want to hear us in action . . .”
“I’ll take a walk.”
“I thought you’d say that. I know your type all too well. Liberal, creative, open-minded, even a couple of faggot friends. And privately repulsed by it all.”
“You mean, reading minds is another one of your manifold talents?”
“Absolutely. And what do you have planned for the afternoon?”
I reached inside my jacket for my pouch of tobacco and rolling papers, and noted that my American passport was lodged next to my smoking materials. I glanced at my watch. It was only twelve thirty.
“Maybe I’ll go to a foreign country,” I said.
“You mean . . .
over there
?”
“Well, it is just five minutes away.”
“But if you’ve ever been over there . . .”
“I haven’t.”
“Then go on, have a look at it. But I promise you that you’ll be back here by six p.m., thinking there’s no need to ever set foot in that place again.”
“It’s that bad?”
“I suppose if you’re a member of the Dublin or London branch of the Workers Revolutionary Party, the People’s Paradise across the way is a many-splendored thing . . . especially as you also possess a Western passport that allows you to jump ship anytime. But for the rest of the internees over there . . . as I said, go have a look. Perhaps I simply have a problem with all things excessively monochromatic—and am not seeing the virtues behind the relentless drabness. Perhaps I am simply not as insightful as you are.”
“Irony noted.”
“But, by the way, if you do meet some fraternal socialist brother from Cuba or Angola who’s selling decent grade smack . . .”
“You’re hilarious.”
“So I’ve been told. But do get back safely. And now if you will excuse me . . .”
He was out the door.
Was this the most opportune moment to make my first crossing to “the other side”? Perhaps not, given that I had already lost the morning and the sky was pregnant with impending snow.
Still I took the U-Bahn up to Kochstrasse. I could have made a far more convenient border crossing just down the street from here at Heinrich Heine Strasse. But thinking as always about the future narrative I would be writing, I knew that I really did have to commence with the essential Cold War experience: the border crossing at Checkpoint Charlie. As the U-Bahn slowed into the Kochstrasse Station a wave of apprehension hit me—rooted in nothing but the fear of the totalitarian that had been embedded in me since the days when Russian missiles had been pointing at us from Cuba, and later on in high school, when we read Solzhenitsyn, and even on into college when the films of Andrzej Wajda articulated the Stalinism of Polish society. But most of all there was the voice of my father during the height of the Vietnam War protests:
“These peaceniks haven’t got a clue about how easy they have it here, how, if this was Moscow and they dared assemble on the streets to protest something, they’d all end up in some Siberian slave labor camp. They play rough over there. They know how to shut people up.”
Even if I felt at the time that Dad’s comments were nothing more than knee-jerk banalities, something did take hold in my imagination. It’s a bit like the time when I was eight and we visited the house of one of my mother’s aunts near Ossining. It was a very Grant Wood house—and besides being unnerved by the
American Gothic
style of the place and the fact that my aunt Hester looked like a walking mummy, my father decided to really unnerve me by saying that if I opened the door to her attic I might be in for a nasty surprise. Perhaps the parental logic behind this warning was to scare me off from poking around her things. Perhaps Dad just wanted to creep me out. Whatever the reason I did begin to imagine an entire plethora of horrible things
behind that door.
From that moment on a fear was instilled in me about entering places that had been deemed off-limits.