My invitation to California had arrived when I had almost given up hoping for it. He had announced that he had quit his job and was about to do something different, somewhere else in the U.S., but before leaving San Francisco he intended to show me around. He couldn't spare much time, but an extended weekend would be fine. The plane tickets? It would be his pleasure. He had always been a show-off.
* * *
I might have forgotten some of the details if I had not kept a diary in those days. We had never been able to afford major trips. The flight to the U.S. was the most exciting event of my life. I simply had to write it down. There I was, standing on the Golden Gate Bridge, together with my brother and Nick Mintford, his landlord, and with Parker, the guide dog. Mintford was about my brother's age. "I am Nick," he had introduced himself. We all called each other by our first names, which was completely new for me. I felt part of a big family.
"Over there, I think that is Fisherman's Wharf, and the tiny island in the middle of the Bay, that is Alcatraz." Nick pointed exactly in the right direction. I was impressed. Of course, my brother had told me in advance that Nick was blind. Nick, the freelance journalist and landlord of a little appartment in the attic of his house in Oakland. I was impressed at how independently he could find his way around. Only after a closer look did I grasp that his seeming independence was carefully orchestrated. Part of his freedom of movement, of course, he owed to Parker, his mongrel guide dog. His ability to point out the tourist spots to us, however, he probably owed to the fact that he had not been blind all his life. Right now he was holding on to the railings for orientation, and I was sure that he had not made this tour for the first time, and he might well have rehearsed his act with Marie, his wife.
Nick was clearly proud to show me his town. To be honest, I was pretty tired after the twelve hours' flight and would have preferred to get some sleep first. However, Nick's enthusiasm just carried me along.
Our sightseeing tour ended abruptly, when all of a sudden a heavy shower of rain poured down upon us. I had seen the clouds well in advance, but my brother had swept away my concern saying "Not at this time of year!" Obviously, there were exceptions, and even my big brother did not know everything. We were completely drenched by the time we reached our car. Parker shook his coat and jumped onto the backseat. Nick took the seat next to his companion. My brother pushed back his wet hair and sat down behind the wheel. Probably only I could hear that he was humming at a very low key: "It Never Rains in California."
* * *
Marie I did not meet before the evening. She was a nurse. We collected her at the hospital and drove to a small Afghan restaurant near the university to have a meal. After dinner we went to Nick and Marie's place.
The house was over in Oakland, halfway up the hill, and from the back you had an astounding view of San Francisco and the Bay. Nick moved about in his house like a seeing man. Without hesitating he found the right drawers, and I would not have been able to open a bottle of wine more expertly than him. We drank Californian red wine. Nick knew all about it. I liked the wine; we emptied several bottles.
We talked about all sorts of things. Of course I had to appreciate Nick's column that had appeared in
The New Yorker
a year ago. The central part was the description of a sunrise in San Francisco. Those guys over in New York apparently had been unaware that their author was blind.
Later I helped Marie with the washing up. "That is one of the things Nick hates to do," she said. "He is afraid of breaking something. To be honest, he probably doesn't drop any more plates than I do. But it doesn't bother me much. Just carelessness, nothing more. But he always blames it on his blindness."
"I think he takes it marvelously," I said.
Marie smiled. "A lot of it is just facade. He tries to make it all look light and easy, but really it bothers him a lot. You can see that from the fact that he drinks too much."
I fell silent, because I had also drunk too much. Did that show? Did I talk too much? Was Marie's remark aimed at me rather? I watched her putting the glasses up onto the highest shelf. She was a beautiful woman, although she must have been well beyond thirty which was old for me at the time. How lucky Nick had been to have found such a companion!
"Was Nick already blind when you first met?" I asked.
She nodded.
"Some kind of illness?" I asked. At that moment I sensed already that she did not want to talk about it.
She answered in a single word: "Vietnam."
I fell silent. What could I possibly say? All of a sudden I became fully aware of the wonderfully innocent country I was living in. Eternal peace all my life. Other people had been less lucky. But at least Nick was still alive, and he had found Marie. I envied him for Marie.
* * *
America is the land of firearms. Nick had one, too. He showed it to us the same evening, when we touched on the question of security. Him being in the house on his own most of the day, what if a burglar came?
Nick grinned. "I would shoot him! Just like this!" He had jumped to his feet. His chair fell over. Just two steps to the sideboard and he had pulled open the drawer and produced a gun, which he now trained at us. Not just vaguely in our direction, but at every single one of us, one after the other.
We had all jumped up. I held my breath. After all, Nick had drunk a lot, and we had to assume that the gun was loaded. It seemed rather large and menacing, but I had never seen a gun before. Except on TV, of course.
For a few seconds we all stood as if frozen. I do not know why, but all of a sudden I felt the urge to test Nick. Very cautiously I slid sideways. Inaudible, as it seemed to me. But not so for Nick. The muzzle followed my move.
"It's not easy to trick you," I said. My voice sounded strange.
"No." Nick put the gun down. "And it is not advisable to try." He felt for the chair that he had pushed over. Uneasy silence.
"How about a cup of coffee?" asked Marie. The spell was broken. We spent a long evening in easy chat together.
* * *
It was well after midnight when we clambered up the stairs to my brother's flat. I was dog-tired. Right next to me the springs creaked when my brother flung himself on his bed. "Nick is quite a character, isn't he? By the way, do you know how he became blind?
"Vietnam," I said. I had nearly been asleep.
My brother looked at me. "Good joke!"
I hated it when he talked down to me like that. After all, I was almost twenty, and apart from that in this case I was pretty sure. "Marie told me so."
"All right, it had to do with Vietnam," he conceded. And then he let me in: Nick had not been wounded in the war, as I had assumed. He had not been to Vietnam at all. He had fired a bullet through his head when they had come to draft him.
"My God," I said.
Again I thought of myself. How easy had it been to dodge the draft in Germany, even for me, who had only half believed in being a conscientious objector. And the risk of ever having to go to war had appeared so remote that I had never considered it seriously.
Again my brother looked down at me. "You think now that it's ever so cool to protest against war like that. Kill yourself in order to avoid killing others."
Indeed I had thought along those lines. "But— couldn't he have simply gone to Canada? I mean, others have done that, as far as I know."
He had gone to Canada. Staying with friends near Ottawa. But then his mother had died and he had thought it essential to be present at her funeral. That was not in San Francisco but someplace in the North, the name of which I have forgotten. Nick's father was the mayor. They say he had not agreed with his son's decision to flee to Canada. They say he hadn't known that he would come down for the funeral, just for the day. The family reunion took longer than he had expected, and eventually Nick was talked into staying overnight. And then, next morning, there was the police.
"Nick assumes that his father had turned him in. That in the course of the night, all of a sudden, he had realized that as mayor he had no choice but to enforce the law. And after all, everybody had seen that his son was back. Nick locked himself into his father's study. When the cops threatened to force the door open, he had taken the pistol out of his father's desk, put the muzzle at his temple and pulled the trigger."
He had been lucky. The bullet had penetrated his skull too far to the front and caused no lasting brain damage. Only that he was blind. And at that, of course, unsuitable for military service. He was lucky twice. At the hospital where he was nursed he met Marie. She was a young probationer then, and of course she was also fervently against the war. They got married three months later.
* * *
After breakfast my brother and I went out to explore. The university and botanic gardens. Nick did not want to join us. The sun was shining. Only too soon would I be on my way back home to Hamburg. To drizzling rain and 17 degrees centigrade. I congratulated my brother on his wonderful life here in California. If I were him, I would never leave the place.
My brother looked at me. "You wouldn't believe how lonely I felt over here for the first few months. Sure, all the people I had met were nice and friendly, but most relationships are rather superficial. If it hadn't been for Nick and Marie, I would have despaired." That was something he had never mentioned in his phone calls. But there had been frequent calls during the first months. Suspiciously frequent calls, I would say with hindsight. When the calls got less frequent, our mother concluded that he had found new friends. Or a friend rather.
"You have really been lucky with Nick and Marie," I said. "Such nice people. I think it's marvelous how compatible they are."
My brother nodded. "So it seems, doesn't it? But all the same they will split up later this year!"
I thought I couldn't trust my ears. "What do you mean by that?"
"Marie will leave him," he said.
I stared at him.
"You can't see it yet, can you? She's pregnant, into the fourth month. And not by Nick."
No, I had not realized that. "And she chose you to confess that to?" I could not get over it.
My brother nodded. "Of course. It is my child, after all."
"Your child!" I exploded. Oh, yes, I could easily imagine how it had happened. My brother, the charming boy, the heartbreaker. Whenever he wanted a woman, he just had to look at her with his big dark eyes. Irresistible. At least that's how it seemed to me. He had once demonstrated this glance to me, just for fun, and I had spent hours in front of the mirror afterward, practising. I had no chance. My eyes were lighter, smaller, and on top of that I lacked his maturity, as I know now, which gave him this air of superiority. Sure, he was a good-looking guy and an able scientist. Why else would they have called him to Berkeley?
I might have hit him. In fact, I should have done it, although it would have been futile because it would not have changed anything. And on top of that he was the stronger, so in the end I would have got a beating.
"You consider me a pig?"
I spared him my reply.
My brother lit a cigarette. He had never smoked back home. He was nervous. "Dear little brother, you must know that it always takes two," he said. "To make love, I mean. And I can assure you, I didn't rape Marie."
I said nothing. Not raped but seduced, I thought. With your eyes. That was something poor Nick was unable to compete with.
"You're outraged, I can see that." That didn't require much. I blush easily when I'm excited, and apart from that my lips get quite thin. My brother tried hard to explain that Marie would have left Nick anyway; it was just a matter of time. That their marriage had been a romantic mistake from the very beginning. Only later had it occurred to Marie that his attempted suicide had not been a heroic act at all— otherwise he would not have run away to Canada in the first place. Grabbing the gun had been nothing but a panic reaction.
And the relationship between my brother and Marie, that was no romantic mistake? Wasn't it perhaps just an easy escape from her unattractive everyday life with a cripple? Because a cripple he was, regardless of all his skills and his charm. But I didn't mention it, as it was too late anyway. The baby was on its way; the decision had been made. "When are you going to tell him?" I queried.
My brother could not conceal a hint of uncertainty. "In a few weeks, I think. At least we didn't want to bring the issue up before your visit. We wanted to show you a little bit of California without any problems."
* * *
The next few days passed like a dream. We rode the cable car, took a short and very cold bath in the Pacific and payed a visit to the sea lions at Fisherman's Wharf. In the evening, drinking wine in Nick's living room, we talked and laughed a lot, and during all this I nearly forgot the dark clouds that were gathering over the three of them. When on the last evening late at night a hailstorm swept over the house, Nick and my brother sang loudly and rather out of key "It Never Rains in California". My brother shouted so loudly that Parker, the dog, looked at him reproachfully. I have no idea what became of Parker afterward.