HOLLY ANHOLT

Atonement

I MENTIONED PREVIOUSLY that it was through Anja that I met Oksana and it was at Oksana’s wedding that I met Nils.

But the circuits were busier than that.

The day of my second meeting with Anja, she invited me to her apartment for something which she described as “a little gathering.” It turned out it was to mark the conclusion of Yom Kippur. I hadn’t known it was the Jewish holy day. But here in the old East Berlin, on the fourth floor of a mouldering apartment building on a leafy, cobblestoned street, people were gathered to somehow take note.

It could have seemed like a little cabal, the thirty of us there to break a fast when few of us had been fasting, Jews coming out of nowhere, as if responding to a call that only they could hear, “Communism’s finished. Come on back. Check it out.” There was even a close-shaven rabbi from Illinois who fashioned himself a missionary. “These people wouldn’t know the Day of Atonement from Income Tax Day.” His mantra went something like that, and probably it was so. It certainly might have been so of me, if I’d known exactly what he meant by “Income Tax Day.” But then it turned out the mantra was mostly prologue to an invitation to dinner, which I declined, citing jet lag, though I’d only flown from Paris. As for the rest, I was bewildered. A city without Jews that had all these Jews in it, or this many anyway, enough to make a party of plastic cups and wine out of jugs in an apartment that if you squinted might have been on the West Side of Manhattan up by Columbia. Remnant Jews, secret GDR Jews, a few Soviet Jews. Jews who’d fled and come back with the victors, Jews who were lost mandarins now, Jews who’d believed in the universality of man and maybe still did.

It was as if one crisis of faith was begetting a flirtation with another, and as if the city that had lost one of its limbs was receiving a miraculous gift, a little bump under the flesh, where the limb was just beginning to grow back. Faith and miracles, not really things I knew much about.

But so many people who came to be what the city itself would be for me, its human geography, its insisting pulse, were there that night. Oksana, the beautiful Franz Rosen, and sweaty David Fürst. And Nils, who came late with David. Somehow we didn’t meet then, but I saw him across the room, spare, reserved, cool, not talking with anyone, or seeming to want to. It may have been on account of that first night that always afterwards I would dream of him with one hand in the pocket of his jacket. His left hand, holding something, holding something back.