NILS SCHREIBER AND DAVID FÜRST

Comanches

Nils:

My favorite place in the city isn’t there anymore. The Potsdamer Platz isn’t what it used to be. It used to be a Cold War frontier. It used to be a weedy, bombed-out wasteland where kids lived in the back of trucks getting stoned all day waiting for the millennium and there was one ramshackle Turkish café out-of-doors with broken chairs to sit on and a construction crane from which for a few marks you could bungee-jump. I don’t know what happened to that crane. It may have been used to build one of the corporate towers that stand there now. The kids were waiting for the millennium because according to the logic of their lives something miraculous was supposed to happen then.

My son Erich was one of those kids. He lived there from when he was seventeen. He was dark and mopey like his mother and he had soft eyes and, yes, I was proud enough of him, being out there, taking his chances. Every time I saw him I thought what a big, goofy question mark he was. Once again the world could be anything. His stoned mysticism gave way to stoned politics, and he became a Comanche, one of the anarchist groups that fought the police in Kreuzberg every weekend and half the time won. I got him his first job on the old Potsdamer Platz, eighty marks to jump off the crane and write it up for the paper. The angle being, as Erich put it, Mr. Average Degenerate Citizen Goes For It. He got the jump paid for too. It was another one of those half-breathless moments when it looked like the paper was about to go belly up and I thought if I didn’t get him a chance soon, I’d never be able to give him one at all. But the paper is still around and Erich survived the jump and his article was pretty good, he got the rush and the fall and every bounce, though he never wrote another one. Of course he doesn’t live on the Potsdamer Platz anymore.

David:

My dear friend Nils neglected to mention that there was also an old MiG fighter that lay among the trucks, ruined, scavenged, and graffitied by the kids. Personally that MiG was my favorite part, because you could climb in the cockpit and because of the mess the kids made of it. The Ozymandias of the no man’s land, the Cold War’s freakiest emblem.

My dear friend Nils also neglected to mention that it was his son Erich’s Comanches who firebombed my car workshop. How did I know this? It wasn’t so hard. They left a note that said, “We the Comanche faction of Autonome gives fair warning. By the destruction of the so-imagined ironic skin car project, we announce: fascists, beware, next time we set fire to your bodies, and you can burn in a hell on earth!” It was the end of the shop.

I never reported them to the police. What would have been the point? I was sick of the shop by then, and so were my charges, and we were sick of each other. Her Stuffiness Anja Mann had come to me to complain that two of my boys had been involved in an attack on an asylum-seekers’ barracks. I preferred to deny this, because it was blatantly against all the rules I’d set up, but once again, as in the matter of the fire-bombing, the proof was not utterly dismissible: she had a dark but clear photograph of Johann and Hermann running off, even wearing the shirts with our shop’s name on it. Wear the shirt to a pogrom, you shits! Some people never learn. I would include myself in this last statement.

So the Comanches did us a favor. The world works as it should. After a lively physical combat, in which one of them broke my nose and I managed to inflict a bit of damage myself, I duly wrote up the story of my boys and the final failure of my efforts to reform them in a more capitalistic mode, just as they predicted I would. As they would be quick to point out, only one of us got paid. I am not sorry that it was me. I was broke.

Self-disgust took its usual back seat.

Nils:

It was also where I met Holly for the last time, sitting on the least-broken folding chairs we could find, sipping our coffee, the crane hovering over us, under a long gray sky. She wasn’t ready to leave Berlin yet, but she was getting closer. Thinking about jobs, thinking about places. No longer the real estate queen of Velden, no longer the plucky adventurer. Not that she was ever exactly either of those, but surely she feared that she was.

We talked about Franz Rosen, as we so often did, as if he were the secret cypher that linked us. I told her about my rage, how I’d been in a rage towards him for weeks after I interviewed him. She wanted to know why. Holly, my love, the eternal straight man. Because I felt seduced by him (I said), made a fool of, and the rage came when I realized I kind of liked it.

Then she took a small brown envelope out of her jacket pocket and pushed it my way. Inside was a pin with a sky blue background, a few Cyrillic letters, and an antique fighter plane manned by a tiny man in goggles. It was an old Soviet aviator’s pin, she said, an airman first class pin, that she had bargained off a hustler near Checkpoint Charlie, near my office. She was quite proud of it and I loved her for being quite proud of it. Genuine, no counterfeit, yeah sure, she said. But she thought I might like the blue sky background. I did. It was like the sky in Oksana’s paintings.

David:

Friendships need never be explained. But if I had to do it, if some dragon with claws and a tongue of fire stood over us and our lives depended on it, I would say the friendship of Nils and myself had to do with a shared understanding: that beneath the fine rebuilding of our city there was the whiff of unburied bodies, or improperly buried bodies. But what to do about it, morbidity not being an entirely acceptable option? A friendship arising from a quandary.