HOLLY ANHOLT

Education

A SAMPLER of what I learned from Oksana.

That the biggest casualties of the Wall coming down were the love affairs, since the Wall had been the shield for Western husbands. As soon as the Wall fell, the East German girls came looking for their boyfriends. Utter terror was spread. I heard Oksana express this considered judgment, very definitively, to a French reporter eager to question her about East-West relations, at her wedding party, of all places. Oksana projected an air of unspeakable melancholy. She was frail, yet when she spoke, in a lilting soprano, it was often in terms so definite it seemed as if she were fighting back against something, mounting some veiled yet definitive rebuttal, or launching a surprise counterattack. Even when the “something” wasn’t apparent, as though the “something” must be confined in the precincts of her mind. And she wanted no part in politics at all. Everything was a stage for the personal. Politics had been enough in her life, and had only injured her. In this sense, perhaps, Simona Jastrow was no more than her distorted mirror image.

That in the Soviet Union everyone had bad teeth because there was no decent dentistry, and there weren’t any bananas which was as good a proof as any that it was not a normal country.

That the reason David was Nils’ friend was the German soft spot for oracular, posturing buffoons. She offered this in my defense at a moment when I’d only just met him and he was harassing me. But by the time I absorbed the lesson, she had grown rather fond of him, as someone who excited the antennae of her antipathy, which was better than no excitement at all. And I felt challenged to follow her suit, as I had a number of times with Oksana, the force of her frail, persevering personality working its way through me in an underground channel. I remember in particular a day the four of us rowed on the Wannsee. A December afternoon had turned unseasonably warm. We set out from the dock on Herbert’s property. Nils rowed in clean, strong strokes, Oksana trailed her fingers in the chilly water, and David sat next to her with his shoes and socks in his lap, a roly-poly city boy in the country, making a joke or two about how he alone might tip the boat but otherwise oddly subdued that afternoon, as if there were no one there to impress. And I remember thinking: Oksana has tamed him. We were like two old couples that afternoon. Though I don’t imagine she ever slept with him. For Oksana, sex functioned as some sort of junior lieutenant to her curiosity, something which I didn’t so much learn from her as yearn to understand. But I don’t think she was so curious about David. She seemed to know him too well already.

That it doesn’t take long to make a friend. She invited me to her wedding party on the first night we met at Anja’s. She must have identified me as part of her guild of exiles.

That the once-notorious spy Mischa Lander was another one who had a foolish crush on her, but his crush didn’t stop him from trying to shake her down. I was virtually there when it happened, one of those moments as cliché-ridden concerning Berlin as, say, seeing movie stars in restaurants in Los Angeles. On a rainy day in early March, I visited Oksana in her studio. The phone rang repeatedly until at last she picked it up, seeming to know who it would be. Her side of the conversation that followed was punctuated by resentments and objections. “My car is in the repair… I’m bored with your threats… What files? What files?… I don’t even know where he keeps such things… I assure you I will not… Well tell them then. Go to Axel Springer for all I care!”

I overheard all this, first with studied detachment, then with a rooting interest for my friend, and finally with fear. She hung up on him and went back to her dabbling brush, but within seconds threw it down. “I suppose I should see what he wants. Absorb his latest threats, I imagine will be more like it.” So I drove her over. We were always driving each other places. Something else I learned from Oksana, that a good way to develop a friendship is to be always driving with the other one somewhere. She would call me up and ask me to drive with her to this place or that, most often only because she didn’t wish to be alone. It was in this spirit, too, that I took her to meet Mischa Lander in a Grunewald laundromat where he was washing his clothes. On the way she was not embarrassed to tell me more. Lander had been well-connected in Moscow, she had once solicited him for help in locating her disappeared father (a solicitation which resulted in a brief affair), and he knew a lot about her past, which had had its inglorious aspects. She had been a translator for visiting businessmen, and a hostess as well, of very high morals, she said, which meant she didn’t sleep with her Western clients, she only arranged for them to sleep with KGB women who photographed their sleeping nakedness and rifled their attachés. It was how she met Herbert. Who in Lander’s estimation would not wish this bit, embarrassingly framed, to be known by Stern.

Oksana had no ulterior motive in telling me any of this, it wasn’t as if she expected me to pass it on to Nils or hold onto it just in case, nor did it seem she was telling me secrets the way people often tell secrets, to prove to themselves that they’re unafraid. She simply told me her life as a friend. And perhaps with, somewhere in there, the defiance of the fatally bored: what were they going to do, take her out and shoot her? She found all of it preposterous and trivial. But she had never quite put Herbert in the loop. Now Lander wanted, for sure, something to persuade Herbert to help him get out of Germany. “But he’ll get nothing from me, I assure you. Not even a smile,” she said.

I followed Oksana’s instructions to a commercial street in Grunewald. The light of day, such as it was, was gone. We stopped across the street from the fluorescent-bright laundromat. Through rain-streaked windows we could see Lander inside, in a dark coat and tie like some newly arrived ambassador-without-credentials from a tin-pot regime that had been overthrown, removing his clothes from a dryer and dumping them on a table. No one else was in the laundromat. The scene had the dreary clarity of an Ashcan School painting. Lander held up a pair of socks that must have shrunk. He scowled, attempted to stretch them. He scowled again. He stretched again. Oksana said, “Don’t wait for me.” “But how will you get home?” I asked. She answered with a little wave and got out of the car, jumping across puddles to the curb.

So I drove away. It was the last time I saw her, except for her body in the back of the mortuary van on the road where she died. Nils and I, choric figures with too few lines, identified her.

That she would forgive me if I once confused who she was. It happened later, as Nils and I argued, back in his farmhouse, over why Oksana had run away with Herbert’s files. “She was in love with you,” I said out of the blue.

“What?”

“She was in love with you and she stole those records for you. She was bringing them to you,” I said.

“I have an opposite, more realistic interpretation,” he said. “She was highly indifferent to me, and she stole them for her own protection.”

“Helena wasn’t like that,” I said.

“Helena?”

“Did I say ‘Helena’? Oksana.”

My friend, did you hear that?