Leaving Berlin: A Novel Read online

  “No starving artists?”

  A joke, but Martin looked at him blankly.

  “No one starves here. Now tomorrow we have the reception for you. At the Kulturbund. Four o’clock. It’s not far, around the corner, so I will come for you at three thirty.”

  “That’s all right. I can find—”

  “It’s my pleasure,” Martin said. “Come.” Nodding to the driver to bring the suitcase.

  The functioning part of the Adlon was in the back, at the end of a pathway through the gutted front. The staff greeted him with a stage formality, bowing, their uniforms and cutaways part of the surreal theatrical effect. Through a door he could see the starched linen on the dining tables. No one seemed to notice the charred timbers, the boarded windows.

  “Alex?” A throaty woman’s voice. “My God, to see you here.”

  He turned. “Ruth. I thought you’d gone to New York.” Not just gone to New York, been hospitalized there, the breakdown he’d heard about in whispers.

  “Yes, but now here. Brecht needs me here, so I came.”

  Martin lifted his head at this.

  “I’m sorry,” Alex said, introducing them. “Ruth Berlau, Martin—”

  “Schramm. Martin Schramm.” He dipped his head.

  “Ruth is Brecht’s assistant,” Alex said, smiling. “Right hand. Collaborator.” Mistress. He remembered the teary afternoons at Salka’s house on Mabery Road, worn down by a backstairs life.

  “His secretary,” Ruth said to Martin, correcting Alex but flattered.

  “I’m a great admirer of Herr Brecht’s work,” Martin said, almost clicking his heels, a courtier.

  “So is he,” Ruth said, deadpan, so that Alex wasn’t sure he could laugh.

  She seemed smaller, more fragile, as if the hospital had drawn some force out of her.

  “You’re staying here?” he said.

  “Yes, just down the hall. From Bert.”

  Not mentioning Helene Weigel, his wife, down the hall with him, the geography of infidelity. He imagined the women passing in the lobby, eyeing each other, years of it now.

  “Of course a smaller room. Not like the great artist’s.” An ironic smile, used to servants’ quarters. “They’re going to give him a theater, you know. Isn’t it wonderful? All his plays, whatever he decides. We’re doing Mother Courage first. At the Deutsches Theater. He was hoping for the Schiff, but not yet, maybe later. But the Deutsches is good, the acoustics—”

  “Who’s playing Courage?”

  “Helene,” she said simply. Now finally Brecht’s star as well as his wife. Alex thought of the wasted years of exile, keeping house for him, ignoring the mistress, an actress without her language. “You’ll have to come to the theater. She’ll be pleased to see you again. You know Schulberg is here?” Wanting to gossip, California in common. She jerked her head. “In the army. Over in the West. Which is lucky for us. Food packages from the PX—he’s very generous.” Alex felt Martin shift position, uncomfortable. “Not for Bert, of course. They give him anything he wants. But for the cast, always hungry. So Helene gets food for them. Imagine what they would say if they knew they were flying in food for Weigel?” She looked up at him, as if the thought had jogged her memory. “So tell me, what happened with the committee? Did you testify?”

  “No.”

  “But there was a subpoena?” Asking something else.

  Alex nodded.

  “So,” she said, taking in the lobby, his presence explained. “Then you can’t go back.” Something else remembered, glancing behind him. “Marjorie’s not with you?”

  Alex shook his head. “She’s getting a divorce.” He raised his hand. “We should have done it years ago.”

  “But what happens to Peter? The way you are with him—”

  “He’ll come visit,” Alex said, stopping her.

  “But he stays with her,” she said, not letting go.

  “Well, with the way things are—”

  “You like a fugitive, you mean. That’s what they want—hound us all like fugitives. Only Bert was too clever for them. Did you see? No one understood anything he said. Dummkopfs. And what? They thanked him for his testimony. Only he could do that. Outfox them.”

  “But he left anyway.” His bridges burning too. “So now we’re both here,” Alex said, looking at her.

  “We’re so happy to have our writers back,” Martin said before she could answer. “A wonderful thing, yes? To be in your own country. Your own language. Think what that means for a writer.”

  Ruth looked up at this, then retreated, like a timid animal poking its head through the bushes then skittering away, frightened by the scent in the air.

  “Yes, and here I am talking and you want to go to your room.” She put her hand on Alex’s arm. “So come see us.” But who exactly? Brecht and Ruth or all three? A hopeless tangle. She smiled shyly. “He’s happy here, you know. The theater. A German audience. That’s everything for him.” Her eyes shining a little now, an acolyte’s pleasure. The same look, oddly, he’d seen in Martin’s, both in thrall to some idea that seemed worth a sacrifice.

  “I will,” he said, then noticed the overnight bag at her feet. “But you’re going away?”

  “No, no, just to Leipzig. They want to put on Galileo. Bert doesn’t think they’re serious, but someone has to go. One day, two maybe. It’s all right, they keep my room for me here. You can’t make such arrangements by letter. You have to go.” So someone would.

  * * *

  The room, on the third floor, still had blackout curtains hanging heavily to the floor, and the bellboy, barely in his teens, made an elaborate show of drawing them, then demonstrating the light switches, the candle and matches, in case of power cuts. He nodded to the luggage rack with its single suitcase.

  “Are you expecting more bags?”

  “Not tonight. In a few days.” The rest of his life, sitting somewhere on a railway siding, waiting for the new flat to be ready. But why wasn’t it? It occurred to him, now that he’d seen the city, that flats must be prizes awarded by the Party. It wasn’t ready because someone was still in it, packing, being shuffled off somewhere else, the way Jews had been told to leave.

  “Is there anything else I can get for you?” A bottle from the cellar, a girl, a bellboy’s usual late night services, but offered now without innuendo, vice out of style in the workers’ state, the boy himself too young to know the old code. Maybe one of the boys defending the city with panzerfausts during the last days. Now waiting for a tip.

  “Oh,” Alex said, picking up one of the envelopes from Martin, his walking-around money. He handed a note to the boy.

  “Excuse me, perhaps you have Western currency?” Then, almost stammering, “I mean, you are coming from there.”

  “Sorry. I came through Prague. No West marks. Just these.”

  The boy looked at him. “Not marks. Do you have a dollar?”

  Alex stopped, surprised. The contact line, sooner than he expected. Not even a day to settle in. The boy was still staring at him. Speaking code after all, a new vice, not too young for this. Or was Alex imagining it all?

  He took out his wallet and handed the boy the folded dollar bill, watching as the boy looked at it, then handed it back.

  “You are from Berlin? From before?”

  Alex nodded.

  “Naturally you would be interested to see your old home? A matter of curiosity. It’s often the first thing people want to do. Who’ve been away.”

  “Lützowplatz,” Alex said, waiting.

  Now the boy nodded. “In the West,” he said, already another city in his mind. “You can walk there. Through the park. In the morning.” Instructions. “Early. Before eight, if you would be up.”

  “There’s no trouble crossing?”

  The boy looked puzzled for a second. “Trouble? To walk in the Tiergarten?”

  “At the sector crossing.”

  The boy almost smiled. “It’s a street only. Sometimes they stop a car. To i
nspect for the black market. But not someone who walks in the park.” He paused. “Early,” he said again. “So, now good night.” He held out his hand. “Excuse me. The East marks? Since you don’t have West? Vielen Dank,” he said, palming the note and backing toward the door, a practiced move, part of the Adlon touch. But did he have any idea what he’d done? Just delivering a message, pocketing a tip, no questions asked. Or something more, already part of it?

  Alex took off his coat and lay on the bed, too tired to get undressed, staring at the dim chandelier overhead. They’d told him the most likely places for bugs were telephones and lighting fixtures. Had the chandelier been listening? He thought over everything the boy had said, how it would sound. But what could be more innocent than a walk in the park?

  In the silence he could hear the planes again, muffled, as if he were listening from below in one of the hotel shelters. Some of the guests would have been in furs, not wanting to lose them if their rooms disappeared by the time the all clear sounded. Could you actually hear fire, flames licking at walls just overhead? Then the shelter became the cell in Oranienburg, not the barracks, the interrogation cell, airless, the old nightmare, and he willed his eyes open, short of breath, and went over to the windows.

  Why have blackout curtains now, live in the dark? In California you could keep the windows open, never be shut in. He pushed the heavy drapes apart, then felt the first draft of cold air seeping through. Still, better than living in a tomb. Anything was better than that.

  The view faced the back, the hills of rubble that had been Wilhelmstrasse off to the left, an empty stretch of wasteland ahead, barely visible by moonlight. The new view from the Adlon. Maybe that’s why the curtains. Inside, cocooned, you could still imagine the ministries lined up in their grave permanence, not the ghost town that was actually there, a faint ashy gray in the pale light.

  What Lützowplatz would be like too. The world of his childhood already belonged to memory, to old photographs. Bicycles by the Landwehrkanal, afternoons in the park, Aunt Lotte’s fussy visits—you didn’t expect any of these to survive. Things changed. Cars in the photographs looked faintly comical. But now the city itself was gone, streets no longer there, wiped not just from memory but from any time, the standing ruins like bones left behind, carrion.

  And he’d come to feed on it too, a prize catch, already caught, the bargain he’d had to make. Do whatever they wanted. And what would that be? Not just a walk in the park. He lay there, the room getting colder, seeing Ruth’s cautious eyes. Did you testify? In exile you learned to get by, principle an extravagance you could no longer afford. A lesson he thought he knew, all those years of it, and then thrown away in one heedless refusal. Would it have mattered, giving them names they already had? What if he’d done the practical thing, cooperated with the committee? But no bargain had been offered, not then. And he’d seen the faces before, the jowls and smirks, when they’d been Nazis, the same bullying voices, and he couldn’t do it. An act of contempt, cause for deportation, and then a different bargain, the one the committee would not know about.

  “It’s perfect,” Don Campbell had said when they met in Frankfurt. “Telling the committee to go fuck themselves? Not even Brecht did that. Talk about lefty credentials. The Russians would never think— Perfect.”

  “Perfect,” Alex had said, a monotone.

  “And they want you. They think they’re pulling a fast one, getting you.”

  “But I’m pulling the fast one,” Alex said, his voice still flat.

  Don looked up. “That’s right. A fast one on them. And a fast one on the committee. Work with us, we’ll get you back in. New papers from State.” He nodded. “A guarantee. Uncle Sam takes care of his own.” He paused. “And you see your kid.”

  The closing argument, why it was perfect, Alex’s cuffs.

  “How long do I do this?”

  “They’ll give you privileges,” Don said, not answering. “They do that with writers. Like they’re movie stars. Extra payoks.”

  “What?”

  “Food packages. Off ration. You’ll need them too.” He lowered his voice. “Wait till you see it. The Socialist paradise.”

  “I am a Socialist,” Alex said, a wry turn to his mouth. Fifteen years ago, before life had tied him up in knots. “I believe in a just society.”

  Don looked at him, disconcerted, then brought things back. “That’s why you’re perfect.”

  He drifted into a half sleep, eyes closed but his mind still awake, sorting through the long day, the mayor’s welcoming speech, posing for Neues Deutschland, and now there was tomorrow’s reception to get through, and all the days after that. His picture would be in the papers. Irene would know he was here, if she was still alive. But why would she be? Any of them? You still have family in Germany, Martin had asked. His parents’ deaths at least had been confirmed.

  “We had to check, if you had any people left,” Don had said. “The Russians use that sometimes. If the family’s in their zone.”

  “Use them how?”

  “Pressure. Bait. Make sure you cooperate.”

  “Imagine,” Alex said.

  Don looked up at him. “But it’s not an issue here. We have the records. They’re both gone, your mother, your—”

  “I could have told you that.”

  “We like to make sure.”

  “I had an aunt. Lotte. She married into a Gentile family, so—”

  “I wouldn’t hold out a lot of hope.” He took out a pen. “What’s the married name? I can put a query through the OMGUS files.”

  “Von Bernuth.”

  Don raised an eyebrow. “Really? Von?”

  “Really. They got it from Friedrich Wilhelm himself. After the Battle of Fehrbellin.” Then, seeing Don’s blank stare, “It’s an old name.”

  “Nice. Rich relatives.”

  Alex smiled. “Not anymore. They went through all the money. Lotte’s too, probably.”

  “Where was this? Berlin?”

  Alex nodded. “And Pomerania. They had property there.”

  Don shook his head. “Commies broke up all the big estates. If she’s still alive, she’s probably somewhere in the West. A lot of them left after.”

  “That would make her easier to trace then.”

  “Easy. Try to find records in that—”

  “But if you do turn anything up—on any of them.” He caught Don’s expression. “I knew the family.”

  “But they’re not related. Just the aunt.”

  “That’s right, just the aunt.”

  Not related. Everything else.

  But nothing came back on Lotte. Old Fritz had died and Erich’s army records listed him as taken POW in Russia, which probably meant the same thing. But Irene and Elsbeth had vanished. The final downfall, even the name itself gone now.

  It was Elsbeth who had kept the family genealogy, in a large leather book that sat on a sideboard in the country house.

  “The christening records go back to the thirteenth century,” she had said, a caretaker’s pride.

  “Ouf,” Irene said, “and what were they doing? Getting drunk and planting beets. What else is it good for?” This with a wave of her hand to the flat fields stretching toward the Baltic. “It’s still beets. Beets and beets. Farmers.”

  “What’s wrong with farmers? You should be proud,” old Fritz said.

  “Anyway, the Poles do all the work. Nobody in this family ever did anything.”

  Lazily picking up her lemonade and leaning back against the lawn chair, as if offering herself as living proof. One of those summer afternoons, the air too still to carry the smell of the sea, just the baking fields. Irene in shorts, her long leg propped up, making a triangle.

  “Well, now is your chance to do something then,” old Fritz said, already sipping beer. “Instead of hanging around with riffraff. Drug addicts. Pansies. Out every night.”

  Irene sniffed, an old complaint, not worth answering. “But still living at home.”

&nbs
p; “Of course living at home. A girl not yet married.”

  “So what should I do? Drive a tractor maybe.”

  Alex smiled, imagining her up on the high seat, her hair a braided crown, like the model worker in a Russian poster. Women with wrenches, rolling up their sleeves. Not languidly painting her toenails, as she had been doing earlier, each stroke a kind of invitation, looking up and meeting his eyes, even the nail polish now part of the secret between them.

  That had been the summer of sex, hanging thick in the air like pollen. The first time, every guy feels like a conqueror, a producer in California had once told him, but that hadn’t been how it had felt. A buoyant giddiness he was afraid would show on his face, a heat rising off his skin, like sunburn, flushed with it. The furtive pleasure of being let in on a secret no one else seemed to know. People just kept doing what they’d been doing before. As if nothing had changed.

  No one suspected. Not Erich, not old Fritz, not even Elsbeth, usually aware of the slightest change in Irene’s moods. The risk of being caught became part of the sex. Her room at night, trying not to make a sound, gasps in his ear. On the stairs, a maid’s footsteps overhead. An outbuilding on the farm, smelling of must, the hay scratchy. Behind the dunes, naked to the sharp air, with Erich only a few yards away, at the water’s edge, the wind in his ears so that he couldn’t hear Irene panting, her release. Every part of her body open to him, his mouth all over her, and still he couldn’t get enough. Not that summer, when they were drunk with sex.

  “Do? You can marry Karl Stolberg. That would be doing something. The Stolbergs have a hundred thousand acres. At least a hundred thousand.”

  “Oh, then why not a von Armin? They have even more. Twice that.”

  “There’s no von Armin the right age,” Fritz said, not rising to the tease.

  “Then I’ll wait,” Irene said.

  Fritz snorted. “You think a girl has forever to decide this?”

  “Anyway, who needs more land? Why don’t you auction me off? Get some cash. Good Pomeranian stock. Untouched.” She looked over at Alex, a sly smile. “How much for a bridal night?”