A phone call, translated from German into English:
“Good afternoon, Pegasus Publications. This is Petra.”
“Good morning. Here is Mr. Arthur Less. There is a fence in my book.”
“Mr. Less?”
“There is a fence in my book. You are to correct, please.”
“Mr. Arthur Less, our writer? The author of Kalipso? It is wonderful to speak with you at last. Now, how can I help you?”
(Sound of keys on a keyboard) “Yes, hello. It is nice to speak. I call over a fence. Not fence.” (More keyboard sounds) “An error.”
“An error in the book?”
“Yes! I call over an error in my book.”
“I apologize. What is the nature of this error?”
“My birth year is written one nine sex four.”
“Again?”
“My birth year is sex five.”
“Do you mean you were born in 1965?”
“Exactly. The journalists write that I have fifty years. But I have forty-nine years!”
“Oh! We wrote your birth year wrong on the flap copy, and so journalists have been reporting that you’re fifty. When you’re only forty-nine. I’m so sorry. That must be so frustrating!”
(Long pause) “Exactly exactly exactly.” (Laughter) “I am not an old man!”
“Of course not. I’ll make a note for the next printing. And may I say in your photograph you look under forty? All the girls in the office are in love with you.”
(Long pause) “I do not understand.”
“I said all the girls in the office are in love with you.”
(Laughter) “Thank you, thank you, that is very very nice.” (Another pause) “I like love.”
“Yes, well, call me if you have any other concerns.”
“Thank you and good-bye!”
“Have a good day, Mr. Less.”
What a delight, for Arthur Less, to be in a country where he at last speaks the language! After the miraculous reversal of his Italian fortunes, in which he stood up in a daze and accepted a heavy golden statuette (which would now have to be figured into his luggage weight allowance)—the journalists shrieking as in an operatic finale—he is to arrive in Germany on the winds of success. Added to this: his fluency in German, and his esteemed position of professor, and how forgotten are the cares of Gestern! Chatting with the stewards, babbling freely with passport control, it seems almost possible he has forgotten that Freddy’s wedding is a matter of mere weeks away. How heartening it is to watch him speak; how disconcerting, however, to listen.
Less has studied German since he was a boy. His first teacher, when he was nine, was Frau Fernhoff, a retired piano instructor, who had them all (him, sharp-witted Georgia beanpole Anne Garret, and odd-smelling but sweet Giancarlo Taylor) stand up and shout, “Guten Morgen, Frau Fernhoff!” at the beginning of each afternoon lesson. They learned the names of fruits and vegetables (the beautiful Birne and Kirsche, the faux-ami Ananas, the more-resonant-than-“onion” Zwiebel), and described their own prepubescent bodies, from their Augenbrauen to their großer Zehen. High school led to more sophisticated conversation (“Mein Auto wurde gestohlen!”) and was led by buxom Fräulein Church, an enthusiastic teacher in wrap dresses and scarves who had grown up in a German district of New York City and who often spoke of her dream of following the Von Trapp trail in Austria. “The key to speaking a new language,” she told them, “is to be bold instead of perfect.” What Less did not know was that the charming Fräulein had never been to Germany, nor spoken German with Germans outside of Yorkville. She was ostensibly German speaking, just as seventeen-year-old Less was ostensibly gay. Both had the fantasy; neither had carried it out.
Bold instead of perfect, Less’s tongue is bruised with errors. Male friends tend to switch to girls in the Lessian plural, becoming Freundin instead of Freund; and, by using auf den Strich instead of unterm Strich, he can lead intrigued listeners to believe he is going into prostitution. But, even at four and nine, Less has yet to be disabused of his skills. Perhaps the fault lies with Ludwig, the folk-singing German exchange student who lived with his family, took Less’s ostensibility away, and never corrected his German—for who corrects what is spoken in bed? Perhaps it was the grateful, dankbaren East Berliners whom Less met on a trip with Robert—escaped poets living in Paris—astonished to hear their mother tongue working in the mouth of this slim young American. Perhaps it was too much Hogan’s Heroes. But Less arrives in Berlin, taxiing to his temporary apartment in Wilmersdorf, swearing he will not speak a word of English while he is here. Of course, the real challenge is to speak a word of German.
Again, a translation:
“Six greetings, class. I am Arthur Less.”
This is the class he will be teaching at the Liberated University. In addition, he is expected to give a reading in five weeks, open to the public. Delighted he was fluent in German, the department offered Less the chance to teach a course of his choosing. “With a visiting professor,” wrote the kind Dr. Balk, “we can often have as few as three students, which is a nice intimate room.” Less dusted off a writing course he had given at a Jesuit college in California, put the entire syllabus through a computer translation, and considered himself prepared. He called the course Read Like a Vampire, Write Like Frankenstein, based on his own notion that writers read other works in order to take their best parts. This was, especially translated into German, an unusual title. When his teaching assistant, Hans, brings him to the classroom this first morning, he is astounded to find not three, not fifteen, but a hundred and thirty students waiting to take his extraordinary course.
“I am your Mr. Professor.”
He is not. Unaware of the enormous difference between the German Professor and Dozent, the former being a rank achieved only through decades of internment in the academic prison, the latter a mere parolee, Less has given himself a promotion.
“And now, I am sorry, I must kill most of you.”
With this startling announcement, he proceeds to weed out any students who are not registered in the Global Linguistics and Literature Department. To his relief, this removes all but thirty. And so he begins the class.
“We start at a sentence in Proust: For a long time, I used to go to bed early.”
But Arthur Less has not gone to bed early; in fact, it is a miracle he has even made it to the classroom. The problem: a surprise invitation, a struggle with German technology, and, of course, Freddy Pelu.
Back to his arrival at the Tegel Airport, the day before:
A baffling series of glass chambers, sealing and unsealing automatically like air locks, where he is met by his tall serious teaching assistant and escort: Hans. Though about to sit for his doctorate exam on Derrida and therefore, in Less’s mind, his intellectual superior, curly-headed Hans willingly takes all of Less’s luggage and brings him, via his beat-up Twingo, to the university apartment he will call home for the next five weeks. It is on a high floor of an eighties building whose open staircases, and open walkways, are exposed to the chill Berlin air; in its goldenrod-and-glass severity, it resembles the airport. Additionally, there is no apartment key but instead a circular fob with a button—like a mating bird, the door chirps in response, then opens. Hans demonstrates this quickly; the door chirps; it seems simple. “You take the stairs to the walkway, you use the fob. You understand?” Less nods, and Hans leaves Less with his luggage, explaining that he will be back at nineteen hours to take him to dinner, and then at thirteen hours the next day to take him to the university. His curly head bobs good-bye, and he disappears down the open staircase. It occurs to Less that the graduate student never met his gaze. And that he should learn military time.
He cannot imagine that the next morning before class, he will find himself hanging from the ledge outside his apartment building, forty feet above the courtyard, inching his way toward the only open window.
Hans arrives precisely at nineteen hours (Less keeps repeating to himself: seven p.m., seven p.m., seven p.m.). Unable to find an iron in the apartment, Less has hung up his shirts in the bathroom and run a hot shower to steam out the wrinkles, but the billowing steam somehow sets off the fire alarm, which of course brings a burly, cheerful, English-free man from the lower depths to tease him (“Sie wollen das Gebäude mit Wasser niederbrennen!”) and return with a sturdy German iron. Windows are opened. Less is in the process of ironing when he hears the Bach chimes of the doorbell. Hans bobs his head again. He has changed from a hoodie into a denim blazer. In the Twingo (evidence of cigarettes but no actual cigarettes), the young man drives him into another mysterious district, parking beneath a concrete railway where a sad Turkish man sits in a kiosk, selling curried hot dogs. The restaurant is called Austria and is decorated everywhere with beer steins and antlers. As is true everywhere else: they are not kidding.
They are shown to a leather booth where two men and a young woman are waiting. These are Hans’s friends, and, while Less suspects the grad student is cagily sponging from the department’s expense account, it is a relief to have someone other than a Derridean to talk with: a composer named Ulrich, whose brown eyes and shaggy beard give him the alert appearance of a schnauzer, his girlfriend, Katarina, similarly canine in her Pomeranian puff of hair, and Bastian, a business student whose dark good looks and voluminous kinky hairstyle make Less assume he is African; he is Bavarian. Less judges them to be around thirty. Bastian keeps picking a fight with Ulrich about sports, a conversation difficult for Less to follow not because of the specific vocabulary (Verteidiger, Stürmer, Schienbeinschützer) or obscure sports figures but because he simply does not care. Bastian seems to be arguing that danger is essential to sports: The thrill of death! Der Nervenkitzel des Todes! Less stares at his schnitzel (a crisp map of Austria). He is not here, in Berlin, in the Schnitzelhaus. He is in Sonoma, in a hospital room: windowless, yellowish, encurtained for privacy like a stripper before her entrance. In the hospital bed: Robert. He has a tube in his arm and a tube in his nose, and his hair is that of a madman. “It’s not the cigarettes,” Robert says, his eyes framed by his same old thick glasses. “It’s the poetry that’s done it. It kills you now. But later,” he says, shaking a finger, “immortality!” A husky laugh, and Less holds his hand. This is only a year ago. And Less is in Delaware, at his mother’s funeral, a hand softly pressing on his back to keep him from collapsing. He is so grateful for that hand. And Less is in San Francisco, on the beach, in the fall of that terrible year.
“You boys don’t know anything about death.”
Someone has said this; Less discovers it is he. This one time, his German is perfect. The entire table sits silent, and Ulrich and Hans look away. Bastian merely stares at Less, his mouth hanging open.
“I’m sorry,” Less says, putting down his beer. “I’m sorry, I do not know why I said that.”
Bastian is silent. The sconces behind him light every kink in his hair.
The bill comes, and Hans pays with a department credit card, and Less cannot be persuaded a tip is unnecessary, and then they are out on the street, where street lamps shine on black lacquered trees. He has never been this cold in his life. Ulrich stands with his hands in his pockets, swaying back and forth to a private symphony, Katarina clutching him, and Hans looks at the rooftops and says he will bring Less back to the apartment. But Bastian says no, it is the American’s first night, and he should be taken for a drink. The conversation takes place as if Less were not there. It feels like they are arguing about something else. At last, it is decided Bastian will bring Less to his favorite bar, close by. Hans says, “Mr. Less, you can find your way home?” and Bastian says a taxi will be simple. It is all happening very quickly. The others vanish into the Twingo; Less turns and sees Bastian looking at him with an indecipherable frown. “Come with me,” the young man says. But he does not lead him to a bar. He leads him to his own apartment, in Neukölln, where Less—to his surprise—spends the night.
The problem comes the next morning. Less, sleepless from his evening with Bastian, sweating out all the alcohol he’s been served over the past twelve hours, still dressed in the black shirt and jeans grease-spotted from dinner, is able to climb the stairs to his building’s exterior walkway but unable to work the lock to his apartment. Over and over he presses the button on the fob, over and over he listens for the chirp of the door. But it is mute. It will not mate. Frantically looking around the courtyard, he sees birds gathering on the balcony of an upstairs maisonette. Here, of course, is the bill for last night. Here is the shame built into living. How did he imagine he would escape it? Less pictures himself sleeping in his doorway when Hans arrives to take him to the university. He imagines teaching his first class stinking of vodka and cigarette smoke. And then his eye falls upon an open window.
At ten, we climb the tree higher even than our mothers’ fears. At twenty, we scale the dormitory to surprise a lover asleep in bed. At thirty, we jump into the mermaid-green ocean. At forty, we look on and smile. At four and nine?
Over the walkway railing, he rests one scuffed wingtip on the decorative concrete ledge. It is only five feet away, the narrow window. A matter of flinging out his arm to catch the shutter. The smallest of leaps to the adjoining ledge. Pressed against the wall, and already yellow paint is flaking onto his shirt, and already he can hear his audience of birds cooing appreciatively. A Berlin sunrise glows over the rooftops, bringing with it a smell of bread and car exhaust. Arthur Less, minor American author known mostly for his connection to the Russian River School of artists, especially the poet Robert Brownburn, took his own life this morning in Berlin, Pegasus’s press release will read. He was fifty years old.
What witness is there to see your Mr. Professor dangling from the fourth floor of his apartment building? Throwing out a foot, then a hand, to edge himself toward the kitchen window? Using all his upper-body strength to pull himself over the protective railing and to fall, in a cloud of dust, into the darkness beyond? Just a new mother, walking her baby around her apartment in the early morning. Seeing a scene perhaps out of a foreign comedy. She knows he is not a thief; he is clearly just an American.
Less is not known as a teacher, in the same way Melville was not known as a customs inspector. And yet both held the respective positions. Though he was once an endowed chair at Robert’s university, he has no formal training except the drunken, cigarette-filled evenings of his youth, when Robert’s friends gathered and yelled, taunted, and played games with words. As a result, Less feels uncomfortable lecturing. Instead, he re-creates those lost days with his students. Remembering those middle-aged men sitting with a bottle of whiskey, a Norton book of poetry, and scissors, he cuts up a paragraph of Lolita and has the young doctoral students reassemble the text as they desire. In these collages, Humbert Humbert becomes an addled old man rather than a diabolical one, mixing up cocktail ingredients and, instead of confronting the betrayed Charlotte Haze, going back for more ice. He gives them a page of Joyce and a bottle of Wite-Out—and Molly Bloom merely says “Yes.” A game to write a persuasive opening sentence for a book they have never read (this is difficult, as these diligent students have read everything) leads to a chilling start to Woolf’s The Waves: I was too far out in the ocean to hear the lifeguard shouting, “Shark! Shark!”
Though the course features, curiously, neither vampires nor Frankenstein monsters, the students adore it. No one has given them scissors and glue sticks since they were in kindergarten. No one has ever asked them to translate a sentence from Carson McCullers (In the town there were two mutes, and they were always together) into German (In der Stadt gab es zwei Stumme, und sie waren immer zusammen) and pass it around the room, retranslating as they go, until it comes out as playground gibberish: In the bar there were two potatoes together, and they were trouble. What a relief for their hardworking lives. Do they learn anything about literature? Doubtful. But they learn to love language again, something that has faded like sex in a long marriage. Because of this, they learn to love their teacher.
It is in Berlin that Less begins to grow a beard. You could blame the approach of a certain wedding date. You could also blame his new German lover, Bastian.
One would not expect them to become lovers. Less certainly did not. After all, they are not well suited. Bastian is young, vain, arrogant, and incurious, even contemptuous, of literature and art; instead, he follows sports avidly, and Germany’s losses leave him in a depression not seen since Weimar days. This, despite the fact that he does not consider himself German; he is Bavarian. This means nothing to Less, who associates this nation more with München’s beer fests and lederhosen than with the graffiti heaven of Berlin. But it means a great deal to Bastian. He frequently wears T-shirts proclaiming his heritage, and these, along with light-colored jeans and a puffy cotton jacket, are his typical costume. He is not intellectual about, interested in, or kind with words. But he is, Less is to discover, surprisingly softhearted.
It so happens that Bastian visits Less every few nights. Waiting outside Less’s apartment building in his jeans, neon T-shirt, puffy jacket. What on earth does he want with your Mr. Professor? He does not say. He merely pins Less against the wall the moment they are inside, paraphrasing in a whisper from the Checkpoint Charlie sign: Entering American Sector.…Sometimes they don’t even leave the apartment, and Less is forced to make dinner from his meager fridge: bacon, eggs, and walnuts. One night two weeks into the Wintersitzung, they watch Bastian’s favorite TV show, something called Schwiegertochter gesucht, about country people looking to play matchmaker for their children, until the young man falls asleep with his body wrapped tight around Less’s, his nose docked in Less’s ear.
Around midnight, the fever begins.
It is a puzzling experience, dealing with a stranger in his illness. Bastian, so confident as a young man, becomes a sickly child, calling for Less to pull his covers down, then up, as his temperature soars and plummets (the apartment comes with a thermometer, but, alas, it’s in alien Centigrade), asking for foods Less has never heard of and ancient (possibly fever invented) Bavarian remedies of plasters and hot Rosenkohl-Saft (Brussels-sprout juice). And Less, not known for his bedside manner (Robert accused him of abandoning the weak), finds himself heartsick for the poor Bavarian. No Mami, no Papi. Less tries to banish the memory of another man, sick in another European bed. How long ago was it? He gets on his bicycle and rides the streets of Wilmersdorf in search of anything to help. He returns with what one usually returns with in Europe: powder in a folded packet. This he puts in water; it smells atrocious, and Bastian will not drink it. So Less puts on Schwiegertochter gesucht and tells Bastian he has to drink every time the lovebirds remove their glasses to kiss. And when Bastian drinks, he stares into Less’s eyes with his own: each as light brown as an acorn. The next day, Bastian has recovered.
“You know what my friends call you?” Bastian asks in the morning light, tangled in Less’s ivy-patterned bedsheets. He is his old self, red cheeked, alert with a little smile. His wild hair seems the only part of him still asleep, like a cat on the pillow.
“Mr. Professor,” Less says, toweling himself from a shower.
“That’s what I call you. No, they call you Peter Pan.”
Less laughs in his backward way: AH ah ah.
Bastian reaches for the coffee beside him. The windows are open and blowing the cheap white curtains around; the sky is foxed and gray above the linden trees. “‘How is Peter Pan?’ they ask me.”
Less frowns and makes his way to the closet, catching a glimpse of himself in the mirror: his flushed face, his white body. Like a statue pieced together with the wrong head. “Tell me why I am this called.”
“You know, your German is pretty terrible,” Bastian tells him.
“Not true. It is not perfect, perhaps,” Less tells him, “but it is excited.”
The young man laughs freely, sitting up in bed. Brown skin, reddened on his shoulders and his cheeks from his time in the solarium. “See, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Excited?”
“Excited,” Less explains, pulling on his underwear. “Enthusiastic.”
“Yes, you talk like a child. You look and act very young.” He reaches one hand out to catch Less’s arm and pulls him to the bed. “Maybe you never grew up.”
Maybe he never did. Less knows so well the pleasures of youth—danger, excitement, losing oneself in a dark club with a pill, a shot, a stranger’s mouth—and, with Robert and his friends, the pleasures of age—comfort and ease, beauty and taste, old friends and old stories and wine, whiskey, sunsets over the water. His entire life, he has alternated between the two. There is his own distant youth, that daily humiliation of rinsing out your one good shirt and putting on your one good smile, along with the daily rush of newness: new pleasures, new people, new reflections of yourself. There is Robert’s late middle age of selecting his vices as carefully as ties in a Paris shop, napping in the sunlight on an afternoon and getting up from a chair and hearing the creak of death. The city of youth, the country of age. But in between, where Less is living—that exurban existence? How has he never learned to live it?
“I think you should grow a beard,” the young man murmurs later. “I think you would be very handsome.”
So he does.
A truth must now be told: Arthur Less is no champion in bed.
Anyone would guess, seeing Bastian staring up at Less’s window each night, waiting to be buzzed in, that it is the sex that brings him. But it is not precisely the sex. The narrator must be trusted to report that Arthur Less is—technically—not a skilled lover.
He possesses, first of all, none of the physical attributes; he is average in every way. A straightforwardly American man, smiling and blinking with his pale lashes. A handsome face, but otherwise ordinary. He has also, since his early youth, suffered an anxiety that leaves him sometimes too eager in the sexual act, sometimes not eager enough. Technically: bad in bed. And yet—just as a flightless bird will evolve other tactics for survival, Arthur Less has developed other traits. Like the bird, he is unaware of these.
He kisses—how do I explain it? Like someone in love. Like he has nothing to lose. Like someone who has just learned a foreign language and can use only the present tense and only the second person. Only now, only you. There are some men who have never been kissed like that. There are some men who discover, after Arthur Less, that they never will be again.
Even more mystical: his touch casts a curious spell. There is no other word for it. Perhaps it is the effect of his being “someone without skin” that Less can sometimes touch another and send the spark of his own nervous system into theirs. This was something Robert noticed right away; he said, “You’re a witch, Arthur Less.” Others, less susceptible, have paid no attention, too intent on their own elaborate needs (“Higher; no, higher; no, HIGHER!”). But Freddy felt it as well. A minor shock, a lack of air, a brief blackout, perhaps, and back again to see Less’s innocent face above him, wreathed in sweat. Is it perhaps a radiation, an emanation of this innocence, this guilelessness, grown white-hot? Bastian is not immune. One night, after fumbling adolescently in the hall, they try to undress each other but, outwitted by foreign systems of buttons and closures, end up undressing themselves. Arthur returns to the bed, where Bastian is waiting, naked and tan, and climbs aboard. As Less does this, he rests one hand on Bastian’s chest. Bastian gasps. He writhes; his breathing quickens; and after a moment he whispers: “Was tust du mir an?” (What are you doing to me?) Less has no idea what he is doing.
Less assumes, during the fourth week, that his assistant is heartbroken. Already serious in demeanor, Hans is positively morose, sitting through the lesson with two hands holding up a head that seems as heavy as bronze. Surely a girl problem, one of those beautiful, witty, chain-smoking bisexual German girls in vintage American clothes and ironed blond hair; or a foreigner, a beautiful Italian in copper bracelets who flies back to Rome to live with her parents and curate a modern-art gallery. Poor, bruised-looking Hans. Less realizes the truth only while diagramming the structure of Ford Madox Ford on the board, when he turns around to find Hans has fainted onto his desk. From his breathing and his pale complexion, Less recognizes the fever.
He calls the students to take the poor boy to the Gesundheitszentrum and then goes to visit Dr. Balk in his sleek modern office. It takes three repetitions before Dr. Balk, wading through the stuttered German and then sighing “Aha,” understands Less needs a new teaching assistant.
The next day, Less hears Dr. Balk is down with a mysterious illness. In class, two young women quietly faint at their desks; as they collapse, their twin ponytails fly up like the tails of frightened deer. Less is beginning to see a pattern.
“I think I am a little spreading,” he tells Bastian over dinner at his local Kiez. Less initially found the menu so baffling—divided into Minor Friends, Friends Eaten with Bread, and Major Friends—that nightly he has ordered the schnitzel over vinegary potato salad, along with a tall shimmering beer.
“Arthur, you’re not making sense,” Bastian says, cutting himself a piece of Less’s schnitzel. “Spreading?”
“I think I am a little illness spreading.”
Bastian, mouth full, shakes his head. “I don’t think so. You didn’t get sick.”
“But everyone else is sick!” The waitress comes over with more bread and Schmalz.
“You know, it’s a weird sickness,” Bastian says. “I was feeling fine. And then you were talking to me, I felt light-headed and started burning up. It was terrible. But just for one day. I think the Brussels-sprout juice helped.”
Less butters a piece of dark bread. “I did not give Brussels-sprout juice.”
“No, but I dreamed that you did. The dream helped.”
A perplexed look from our author. He changes the subject: “Next week I have an event.”
“Yes, you told me,” Bastian says, reaching to take a sip from Less’s beer; he has finished his own. “You’re doing a reading. I’m not sure I can make it. Readings are usually boring.”
“No no no, I am not never boring. And next week a friend of mine is getting married.”
The German’s eyes roam to a television set, where a football match is playing. Absently, he asks, “A good friend? Is she upset that you’re not going?”
“Yes, good friend. But it is a man—I do not know the German word. More than friend, but in the past.” A Friend Eaten with Bread?
Bastian looks back at Less, seemingly startled. Then he leans forward, taking Less’s hand, smiling with amusement. “Arthur, are you trying to make me jealous?”
“No, no. It is the ancient past.” Less squeezes Bastian’s hand and lets it go, then tilts his head so that the lamp lights his face. “What do you think of my beard?”
“I think it needs more time,” Bastian says after some consideration. He takes another bite of Less’s meal and looks at him again. He nods and says, very seriously, before turning again to the television: “You know, Arthur, you’re right. You’re never boring.”
A phone call, translated from German into English:
“Good afternoon, Pegasus Publications. This is Petra.”
“Good morning. Here is Mr. Arthur Less. I have concern about tonight.”
“Oh, hello, Mr. Less! Yes, we talked earlier. I assure you everything’s fine.”
“But to double…triple-check about the time…”
“Yes, it’s still at twenty-three hours.”
“Okay. Twenty-three hours. To be correct, this is eleven at night.”
“Yes, that’s right. It’s an evening event. It’s going to be fun!”
“But it is a mental illness! Who will come to me at eleven at night?”
“Oh, trust us, Mr. Less. This isn’t the United States. It’s Berlin.”
Arranged by Pegasus Verlag, in association with the Liberated University and the American Institute for Literature, as well as the U.S. Embassy, the scheduled reading takes place not in a library, as Less has expected, or in a theater, as Less has hoped, but in a nightclub. This also seems a “mental illness” to Less. The entrance is under U-Bahn tracks in Kreuzberg and must have been some kind of engineering shaft or East German escape route, for once Less is past the bouncer (“I am here the author,” he says, sure that this is all a mistake), he finds himself inside a great vaulted tunnel covered in white tile that sparkles with reflected light. Otherwise, the room is dim and full of cigarette smoke. At one end, a mirrored bar glows with glassware and bottles; two men in ties work behind it. One seems to be wearing a gun in shoulder holster. At the other end: the DJ, in a big fur hat. The loud thrum of minimal techno beats is in the air, and people on the floor wag back and forth in the pink and white lights. In ties, in trench coats, in fedoras. One carries a briefcase handcuffed to his wrist. Berlin is Berlin, Less supposes. A woman in a Chinese dress, her red hair held up in chopsticks, approaches him with a smile. She has a pale sharp powdered face, a painted beauty mark, and matte red lips. She speaks to him in English: “Well, you must be Arthur Less! Welcome to Spy Club! I’m Frieda.”
Less kisses her on each cheek, but she leans in for a third. Two in Italy. Four in Northern France. Three in Germany? He will never get this right. He says, in German: “I am surprised and perhaps delighted!”
A quizzical look, and laughter. “You speak German! How nice!”
“Friend says I speak like a child.”
She laughs again. “Come on in. Do you know about Spy Club? We throw this party once a month in some secret spot or another. And people come dressed! Either CIA or KGB. And we have themed music, and themed events, like you.” He looks again at the dancers, at the people gathered near the bar. In fur caps and hammer-and-sickle badges; in fedoras and trench coats; some, he thinks, seem to be carrying guns.
“I see, yes,” he says. “Who are you dressing to be?”
“Oh, I’m a double agent.” She stands back for him to admire her outfit (Madame Chiang Kai-shek? Burmese seductress? Nazi camp follower?) and smiles winningly. “And I brought this for you. Our American. That polka-dot bow tie is perfect.” From her purse she produces a badge and pins it to his lapel. “Come with me. I’ll get you a drink and introduce you to your Soviet counterpart.”
Less pulls at his lapel so that he can read what is written there:
YOU ARE ENTERING
THE AMERICAN SECTOR
Less is told that at midnight, the music will go silent and a spotlight will turn on over the stage where he and his “Soviet counterpart” (really a Russian émigré, beard and ochki, gleefully wearing a Stalin T-shirt under his tight suit) will be waiting, and they will then present their work to the Spy Club crowd. They will read for four fifteen-minute segments, alternating nationalities. It seems an impossibility to Less that club-goers will stand still for literature. It seems an impossibility that they will listen for an hour. It seems an impossibility that he is here, in Berlin, at this moment, waiting in the darkness as the sweat begins to darken his chest like a bullet wound. They are setting him up for one of those humiliations. One of those writerly humiliations planned by the universe to suck at the bones of minor artists like him. Another Evening with Arthur Less.
It is tonight, after all, on the other side of the world, that his old Freund is getting married. Freddy Pelu is marrying Tom Dennis at an afternoon ceremony somewhere north of San Francisco. Less does not know where; the invitation only said 11402 Shoreline Highway, which could mean anything from a cliffside mansion to a roadside honky-tonk. But guests are to gather for a 2:30 ceremony, and, considering the time difference, he imagines that would be about, well, now.
Here, on the coldest night yet in old Berlin, with the wind howling down from Poland and kiosks set up in plazas to sell fur hats, and fur gloves, and wool inserts for boots, and a snow mountain built on Potsdamer Platz where children can sled past midnight while parents drink Glühwein by the bonfire, on this dark frozen night, around now, he imagines Freddy is walking down the aisle. While snow glistens on Charlottenburg Palace, Freddy is standing beside Tom Dennis in the California sun, for surely it is one of those white-linen-suit weddings, with a bower of white roses and pelicans flying by and somebody’s understanding college ex-girlfriend playing Joni Mitchell on guitar. Freddy is listening and smiling faintly as he stares into Tom’s eyes. While Turkish men shiver and pace in the bus stop, moving like figures on the town hall clock, ready to strike midnight. For it is almost midnight. While the ex-girlfriend finishes her song and some famous friend reads a famous poem, the snow is thickening. While Freddy takes the young man’s hand and reads from an index card the vows he has written, the icicles are lengthening. And it must be, while Freddy stands back and lets the minister speak, while the front row breaks into smiles and he leans forward to kiss his groom, while the moon glows in its icebow over Berlin—it must be now.
The music stops. The spotlight comes on; Less blinks (painful scattering of retinal moths). Someone in the audience coughs.
“Kalipso,” Less begins. “I have no right to tell his tale…”
And the crowd listens. He cannot see them, but for almost the entire hour the darkness is all silence. Now and then lit cigarettes appear: nightclub glowworms ready for love. They do not make a sound. He reads from the German translation of his novel, and the Russian reads from his own. It seems to be about a trip to Afghanistan, but Less finds it hard to listen. He is too confused by the alien world in which he is residing: one where writers matter. He is too distracted by the thought of Freddy at the altar. It is halfway through his second reading when he hears a gasp and a flurry in the crowd. He stops reading when he realizes that someone has fainted.
And then another.
Three go down before the club raises its lights. Less sees the crowd, in their Cold War Nostalgie, their Bond-girl and Strangelove chic, caught in bright lights as in an old Stasi raid. Men come running over with flashlights. Suddenly the air is full of restless chatter, and the room seems barren with its white tile—a municipal bathhouse or substation, which, in fact, is what it is. “What do we do?” Less hears behind him in a Cyrillic accent. The Russian novelist pulls his lush eyebrows together like the parts of a modular sofa. Less looks down to where Frieda is approaching in a clatter of mincing steps.
“It’s all right,” she says, resting her hand on Less’s sleeve while looking at the Russian. “It must be dehydration; we get that a lot, but usually much later in the evening. But you started reading, and suddenly…” Frieda is still talking, but he is not listening. The “you” is Less. The crowd has lost its shape, clotting into politically impossible groups by the bar. The lights on the tile create the awkward feeling of a night’s end, though it is not even one in the morning. Less feels a tingling realization. Then you started reading…
He is boring people to death.
First Bastian, then Hans, Dr. Balk, his students, the crowd at the reading. Listening to his tedious conversation, his lectures, his writing. Listening to his terrible German. His confusions of dann with denn, of für with vor, of wollen with werden. How kind they have all been to smile and nod through his sentences, wide eyed, as if listening to a detective announce the killer before he lands, at last, on the wrong verb. How patient and giving these people are. And yet he is the killer. One by one, with his mistaken blau sein for traurig sein, (“I’m drunk” for “I’m blue”), das Gift for das Geschenk (“poison” for “gift”), he is committing little murders. His words, his banalities, his backward laugh. He feels drunk and blue. Yes, his gift to them is a Gift. Like Claudius with Hamlet’s father, he is ear poisoning the people of Berlin.
Only when he hears it echoing from the tiled ceiling, and sees the faces turning toward him, does Less realize he has sighed audibly into the microphone. He takes a step back.
And there, in the back of the club, standing alone with his rare smile: Could it be Freddy? Fled from his wedding?
No no no. Just Bastian.
Is it after the minimal techno starts again, that sound that reminds Less of old New York apartments, with the pounding of pipes and the throb of your own heartbreak—or perhaps after the organizer hands him the second “Long Island”? —that Bastian comes to him with a pill and says, “Swallow this.” It is a blur of bodies. He remembers dancing with the Russian writer and Frieda (two potatoes together, and they are trouble) as the bartenders wave their plastic guns in the air, and he remembers being handed an envelope with a check in the manner of a briefcase being delivered over the Potsdam bridge, but then somehow he is in a cab and then is on a kind of shipwreck where various levels of dancers and young chatting Berliners sit in clouds of cigarette smoke. Outside, on a plank deck, others hang their feet over the filthy Spree. Berlin is all around them, the Fernsehturm rising high in the east like the Times Square New Year’s ball, the lights of Charlottenburg Palace glowing faintly in the west, and all around the glorious junkyard of the city: abandoned warehouses and chic new lofts and boats all done in fairy lights, concrete Honecker residential blocks imitating the old nineteenth-century buildings, the black parks hiding Soviet war memorials, the little candles somebody lights each night before the doors where Jews were dragged from their houses. The old dance halls where elderly couples, still wearing the beige of their Communist lives, still telling secrets in the learned whisper of a lifetime of wiretapping, dance polkas to live bands in rooms decorated in silver Mylar curtains. The basements where American drag queens sell tickets for British expats to listen to French DJs, in rooms where water flows freely down the walls and old gasoline jugs hang from the ceiling, lit from within. The Currywurst stands where Turks sift sneezing powder onto fried hot dogs, the subterranean bakeries where the same hot dogs are baked into croissants, the raclette stands where Tyroleans scrape melting cheese onto the bread and ham, decorating it with pickles. The markets already setting up in local squares to sell cheap socks, stolen bicycles, and plastic lamps. The sex dens with stoplights signaling which clothing to remove, the dungeons of men in superhero costumes of black vinyl with their names embroidered on them, the dark rooms and back alleys where everything possible is happening. And the clubs everywhere, only just getting started, where even middle-aged married folk are sniffing lines of ketamine off black bathroom tile, and teenagers are dosing each other’s drinks. In the club, as he later recalls, a woman gets onto the dance floor and really lets go during a Madonna song, really takes over the floor, and people are clapping, hooting, she’s losing her mind out there, and her friends are calling her name: “Peter Pan! Peter Pan!” Actually, it isn’t a woman; it’s Arthur Less. Yes, even old American writers are dancing like it is still the eighties in San Francisco, like the sexual revolution has been won, like the war is over and Berlin has been liberated, one’s own self has been liberated; and what the Bavarian in his arms is whispering is true, and everyone, everyone—even Arthur Less—is loved.
Almost sixty years ago, just after midnight, a few feet from the river where they danced, a wonder of modern engineering occurred: overnight, the Berlin Wall arose. It was the night of August 15, 1961. Berliners awoke on the sixteenth to this marvel, more of a fence at first, concrete posts driven into the streets and festooned with barbed wire. They knew trouble would come but expected it in degrees. Life so often arrives all of a sudden. And who knows which side you will find yourself on?
In just such a way, Less awakens at the end of his stay to find a wall erected between his five weeks in Berlin and reality.
“You’re leaving today,” the young man says, eyes still closed as he rests sleepily against the pillow. Cheeks red from a long night of farewell, someone’s lipstick kiss still smudged there but otherwise unmarked by excess, in the way only the young can manage. His chest as brown as a kiwi, slowly rising and falling. “We are saying good-bye.”
“Yes,” Less says, steadying himself. His brain feels like it’s on a ferryboat. “In two hours. I must to put clothes in the luggage.”
“Your German is getting worse,” Bastian says, rolling away from Less. It is early morning, and the sun is bright on the sheets. Music comes from the street outside: beats from nonstop Berlin.
“You still to sleep.”
A grunt from Bastian. Less leans down to kiss his shoulder, but the young man is already asleep.
As he rises to face the task of packing again, Less endures the ferryboat’s tumble within himself. It is just possible to gather all his shirts, layer them carefully as pastry dough, and fold the rest of his clothes within, as he learned how to do in Paris. It is just possible to gather everything in the bathroom and kitchen, the mess of his middle-aged bedside table. It is just possible to hunt down every lost thing, to pinpoint his passport and wallet and phone. Something will remain behind; he hopes it will just be a sewing needle and not a plane ticket. But it is just possible.
Why didn’t he say yes? Freddy’s voice from the past: You want me to stay here with you forever? Why didn’t he say yes?
He turns and sees Bastian sleeping on his stomach, arms spread out like those of the Ampelmännchen who signaled East Berliners: walk or don’t walk. The curve of his spine, the glow of his skin, pimpled across the shoulders. In the big black iron bed of these last hours. Less goes into the kitchen and starts the water boiling for coffee.
Because it would have been impossible.
He gathers his student papers to grade them on the plane. These he carefully slips into a special compartment of his black rucksack. He gathers the suit coats, the shirts; he makes the little bundle that an earlier traveler would have hung from a stick over his shoulder. In another special place he puts his pills (the Head was right; they do indeed work). Passport, wallet, phone. Loop the belts around the bundle. Loop the ties around the belts. Stuff the shoes with socks. The famous Lessian rubber bands. The items still unused: sun lotion, nail clippers, sewing kit. The items still unworn: the brown cotton trousers, the blue T-shirt, the brightly colored socks. Into the bloodred luggage, zipped tight. All of these will circle the globe to no purpose, like so many travelers.
Back in the kitchen, he loads the last of the coffee (too much) into the French press and fills it with the boiling water. With a chopstick, he stirs the mixture and fits it with the plunger. He waits for it to steep, and as he waits he touches his face; he is startled to feel the beard, like someone who has forgotten they are wearing a mask.
Because he was afraid.
And now it’s over. Freddy Pelu is married.
Less pushes down the plunger as with cartoon TNT and explodes coffee all over Berlin.
A phone call, translated from German into English:
“Hello?”
“Good morning, Mr. Less. This is Petra from Pegasus!”
“Good morning, Petra.”
“I just wanted to make sure you got off okay.”
“I am on the airport.”
“Wonderful! I wanted to tell you what a success it was last night and how grateful your students were for the little class.”
“Each one became a sick one.”
“They all recovered, as has your assistant. He said you were quite brilliant.”
“Each one is a very kind one.”
“And if you’ve found you’ve left anything behind you need, just let us know, and we’ll send it on!”
“No, I have no regrets. No regrets.”
“Regrets?”
(Sound of flight being announced) “I leave nothing behind me.”
“Good-bye! Until your next wonderful novel, Mr. Less!”
“This we do not know. Good-bye. I head now to Morocco.”
But he does not head now to Morocco.