DAVID FÜRST

Tease

I AM UNFORTUNATELY AWARE of my own worst traits. I am a bully and I am a tease. Ask the American girl, ask Nils’ friend. Of course her vulnerability, her naïveté, disturbed me. Jews aren’t supposed to be so naïve. That’s what comes from living in a country where you’re hardly oppressed.

Yet what a delightful conversation I had with her in the back room of the Café Charlie. Johann and Heinrich were my witnesses, as I had brought them there to show them a bit more of all they had hitherto missed in life and might aspire to, techno girls and Gauloise smoke.

Holly had come in with Nils, but he was off on the phone, once more in pursuit of Franz Rosen, his great whale.

“And how are we doing on our psychotherapeutic ramble through the GDR countryside?” I asked good-naturedly. “Experiencing any epiphanies this week? Any crise?” I would not have been so facetious with her, but I was at a loss as to what else to say. Really, I was only trying to make conversation.

“Would you stop being such an asshole,” she replied, also good-naturedly, a response clever enough that I translated for my boys, who were suitably impressed with the ability of Western girls to curse.

“So what’s next? A little tour de Pologne, perhaps, for spice?” I asked.

“What are you talking about?” she asked.

“Auschwitz,” I replied. “No tourist of shame would want to miss that. Psychodrama guaranteed, the past rising up like a puff of smoke.”

“I can’t believe you think you’re being witty. Have you even been to Auschwitz?”

“Yes I have. When I was two.”

So I scored my cheap points. Nils returned and the conversation moved on, to the fate of his story on Franz Rosen, or the very survival of our old paper in the new penurious, post-unification era, or things of that nature. The West’s realization that it no longer had to support us like little kings. Holly stayed grumpy with me then, offering no more than a pout and a bout of silence – and not without justification, I would add. But later I came to believe that I had put the idea of Auschwitz in her head.