NOW DIX WAS AWAKE. The time was just four, early for a drink. He stared out the window at the balcony, melting snow on its iron surface. The apartment was damp and chilly, and outside the wind was rising, yet he was perspiring, his skin humid to the touch. In the western sky he saw a southbound jet’s fleecy contrail; wherever it was going, he wished he were on it. He had been working on an idea, something he was unable to put into words. The idea was present but out of reach, a melody that he felt rather than heard. And the harder he sought it, the more indistinct it became. Maybe Werner had a point about the south, a spa or a beach somewhere, some soft climate.
Dix rarely slept during the day when he was home, but in Berlin he took a nap every afternoon. Something about the city encouraged repose. So he had turned on the radio and stretched out on the long couch and closed his eyes, thinking of the girl who danced barefoot on a lawn in Winnetka and the North Shore dissolving into a street in Vienna and the dream that hovered over him. Why Vienna? He had never visited Vienna. He had no particular affection for Austria. He had an idea that his father was somehow involved, his father gone now many, many years and an infrequent visitor to his dreams. He could not remember the last time. He remembered reading somewhere that the Greeks believed that dreams had the power to heal, including the restoration of sight to the blind.
Now he recalled with a shudder that they had unscrewed his arm as you would unscrew a lightbulb from its socket, and that the process had been painless. He was en route to an expert to seek relief in the form of an explanation. Hypnosis was recommended. He was in a hurry, but in his haste he had lost his way. He was certain that his father was implicated; perhaps Harry was one of the friends who raced away up the narrow one-way street to disappear into the sinister Mexican church. So perhaps the dream had been based on actual events after all, a sort of grisly afternoon docudrama, locations altered, personalities altered, names changed to protect the guilty—and behind the scenes a pig of a producer who demanded that he speak plainly, without fear. A producer whose time was valuable. Wasn’t it an accepted fact that each character in a dream was some idealized version of the dreamer? It stood to reason. No dreamer went very far beyond himself. How could he?
Dix poured a drink, Polish vodka over ice, lemon peel on top. He heard a door slam somewhere in the corridor, then the sigh of the elevator. He stood stiffly looking beyond the iron balcony to the water. The snow had ended and the light was failing. A two-man scull ghosted along a hundred yards out. A patch of mallards rose and skittered away, settling on the far side of the scull. Weather approached from the northeast as predicted on the morning network news, the blithe American woman with the long legs and leisurely-diction, all the time in the world to connect the Warsaw Low to the Bermuda High, and look what’s happening right here in Atlanta. It would be dark in a quarter of an hour, the sun too feeble to pierce the dark vein of cloud. Across the lake the lights came on in the villas back of the yacht basin, the yellow glow nervous on the waffling surface of the water. The wind rose. The masts of the yachts disappeared as the light failed, and as he completed this suburban audit, Dix took a heavy step backward, stumbling, closing his eyes because now he knew exactly where his dream came from. A part of every day was reserved for recognition of the unbearable, and to endure its visit for a half-second or a quarter-hour, however long it chose to remain. Its approach was neither visible nor avoidable. You felt a raindrop on your shoulder and looked up, startled to discover a thunderhead above. And in an instant it overtook the sun.
He had driven up to Tahoe to discuss Anna’s Magic with Lou Kniffe. The producer owned a chalet the size of a hotel. Lou Kniffe—everyone called him Knife—was theoretically on vacation but his people were present, lawyers, accountants, his driver, and a masseuse. Dix arrived late on an October Wednesday and they spent that night and the following day discussing the script, the casting, and the budget. His people and their wives and girlfriends played backgammon while Dix and Knife talked. Knife’s people were never consulted at the first meeting, in the event Knife changed his mind or was only fooling to begin with. He enjoyed toying with directors, and listening to his to-and-fro was part of the cost of doing business. When Knife decided he wanted no part of whatever it was the director was proposing, he could simply report that his people had advised against it. His accountants were against it. His lawyers had reservations. Sorry, Dix, I wish you luck. Try me again. Or, if you were low enough on the food chain, one of his people would make the call and say pleasantly, Forget it, Greenwood. Anna’s Magic is a piece of shit. Knife won’t touch it.
Dix thought the meeting went well. The numbers were in line, and Knife liked Ada Hart. The subject appealed to him. Of course he had thoughts about the screenplay. The middle section’s slack, don’t you think? And the husband sounds like a pansy. Ada should have more to do, and the end is too damned talky. Also, wouldn’t Long Island do as well as Spain? I have a place on the South Fork and I’d like to drop in from time to time, see the shooting. But he didn’t demand a rewrite of the screenplay, something he usually required as a matter of course. He was surprised that Dix wanted to direct a comedy. Laughs aren’t your usual line of country, are they, Dix? He wasn’t convinced when Dix explained that that was the point. After Summer, 1921 he wanted something different. Something a little closer to home . . . Then why are you filming in Spain? And Dix had replied, The material, Knife. The material’s closer to home. American layabouts practicing sexual sorcery and feeling not the least bit guilty about it. It’s present time, Knife.
Knife turned to his people but they had nothing to add.
What’s the real reason, Dix?
Breakthrough, Dix said.
But it’s only a comedy. Lotta people waiting for you to fall on your ass, Dix. Lotta people think Summer, 1921 was a fluke. You picked some numbers at random and won the fucking lottery and now you think you’re Alfred Hitchcock.
Truffaut, Knife. They think I’m Truffaut.
Maybe you have a point, he said. Something closer to home. You want to begin thinking about your future, Dix.
When can you let me know?
I’ll call you next week, Knife said.
Dix started back to Los Angeles at dusk. He enjoyed driving at night, wrapped inside his old green Karmann Ghia, listening to the radio while he thought about the meeting with Lou Kniffe. The sun was setting over the mountains, brilliant shafts of yellow light glittering on the surface of the lake, sailboats here and there. The road wound around the lake in long sweeping curves, the foliage gaudy in late autumn. He lit a cigarette and opened the window a crack. He was listening to Dr. John, wishing he knew more about the world of popular music, life on the road, the jam sessions and the groupies, the drugs, how it was to play before a lit-up crowd of fifty thousand people, the sweat and frenzy, the sexual charge. Dix drove into the dying sun, nodding his head in time with Dr. John’s music, when the car slipped from the pavement, sliding on gravel. He heard one bang and then another and the car seemed to break apart. He had never heard such noise, and when he tried to turn the wheel he found it was frozen. Back of the noise was Dr. John’s hot piano and then his cigarette was crushed in his palm. His head struck the windshield and bounced to the roof as the car continued to roll, window glass flying. His palm hurt where the cigarette burned it. He yelled something but could not hear himself above the noise, a terrible drumroll that went on and on. The car was in free fall, striking trees and rocks, settling, then beginning again. Branches flew into the car and out again. The grinding did not cease and Dix wondered if it would go on forever. The steering wheel was broken. The windshield was gone and suddenly it was quiet and he saw stars overhead.
He was outside the car. His legs were beside him but they seemed far away. They were unfamiliar, as if they belonged to someone else, his feet without shoes, his trousers torn. His legs were so far away, his hips and torso also, that he knew with cold certainty that he had been decapitated in the accident. His head was in one place and his body in another. He lay on the downslope looking up, his vision unnaturally acute. He saw each hair on his leg. His mind was clear. It was only that his head was separated from his body and this was evident from the quantity of blood leaking and pooling where he lay. Blood was on his hands and legs, on the ragged glass of the windshield and the leaves stuck beneath his fingernails. Now that his mind was severed from his body he experienced an inhuman tranquillity, the surroundings in sharp focus. A chalet, its windows dark, broke the treeline in the distance, and that was the only sign of civilization. He listened to the tick-tick of the car’s engine and knew that he had but a few moments to live. How long could a human being exist in such a state? Not long, certainly, though in numerous cases observed during the French Terror, heads had spoken for some seconds after the guillotine fell. Time moved in close formation, a second had the weight of an hour. In Place Concorde there were tears also, and in at least one recorded instance, a smile. So he did not have long to contemplate his separated body, distraught as it was, his legs in such an awkward attitude, at right angles to each other. In the reflected glare of the headlights, he saw his shinbone, white as the shell of an egg. His body was gone, and now he knew his spirit was following. His head moved then, lolling, unattached. His body receded until all he could see were his feet and his shinbone. To this he was indifferent, though he regretted the loneliness of the mountainside, nature spoiled by the acrid smell of gasoline. Dix vividly remembered the moments before his blackout, the separation of mind and heart, his head in one place and, as he now conceived it, his soul in another, desperately hoarding the seconds that remained to him.
Days later, in the hospital bed, his left leg entombed in plaster and elevated eighteen inches by a pulley device, he believed his life was provisional. He was not entirely certain that he was not in some heavenly infirmary, and when he mentioned this to the surgeon, the surgeon laughed and said he would send an expert to discuss the matter but that he should have no fear; he was in the county hospital and well cared for and would recover fully except for a limp. You’re lucky, luckier than you know; by rights you should be dead. Back on location before you know it, Mr. Greenwood. When the priest arrived, Dix commenced a rambling account of his thoughts and emotions during the accident, and the appalling moment when he realized that he had been bisected, with only seconds to make himself—the word he used was “understood.” He had visions of the guillotine and the heads of the dead talking to one another. He was alone in the world, the last survivor of a calamity. The phrase he used was “the last member of the audience.” The priest assured him that these were normal fantasies that would disappear in time. Do you believe in God, Mr. Greenwood? And in order to cut short the interview, Dix replied, Of course. That very afternoon, the hospital psychiatrist arrived with a list of ambiguous questions and a Rorschach test. Dix fell silent then, refusing to speak to anyone except Claire. He believed she was the only one with the ability to listen, as if they shared a code unintelligible to others, and in that he was surely correct. Never had he spoken to anyone as he spoke to her, and she listened with all her heart.
He told her he was one person before the accident and another person now, and that the two did not agree. He was an equation out of balance. He was divided and would remain forever divided. The long hours on the mountain had taken something from him that could never be returned—refunded, as he said. Was this something he himself had willed? The car had drifted off the road of its own accord. The image of his severed head—he thought of it as a fragment of film rolling in slow motion, the frames vivid and formal in composition—was before him at all times. He assured her that he had remained calm, almost nonchalant as he scrutinized his body, so far away, so—untouchable. He could feel his heart beating and the throbbing pain in his legs, and when he lost consciousness he was certain he was gone. He had erected a fortification, a whole-souled wall against the terror that was just out of sight, and it had crumbled like sand. He searched her face. She was silent, and he believed that he had frightened her. She murmured something about getting home, she had promised the babysitter.
He said, I’m not myself.
She said, No, you’re not. But you will be.
Not so sure about that, Claire.
She said, Go back to work.
He said, Work isn’t the solution to everything.
It is for you, she said. Me too. It’s the way we’re built.
He started to say something, then began to laugh. He had to close his eyes.
Dix remained in the hospital for four weeks, emerging on crutches, gaunt and unsteady, convinced that he had had an experience so intense it could not be described. Perhaps that was the case with any experience of enduring value. The moment was not meant to be shared, except with Claire at specific times, and never in its entirety. Then she flew off to Toronto to make a film. Normal life, she said. When you have a contract, you honor the contract. Tell the truth, Dix. Aren’t you itching to get back to work? But the truth was: not really. He wondered then if they were built in the same way after all.
He flew to Spain with Billy Jeidels to scout locations for Anna’s Magic. Lou Kniffe had agreed to finance the film, so long as Dix was pronounced fit by his insurance company’s doctors. In two months they had started filming but Dix believed he was only half present; his other half was somewhere on a Tahoe mountainside. Each evening he would rewrite the next day’s lines, and explain that he wanted more spontaneity but on no account were the actors to ad-lib. Divided as he was, he felt the movie slipping away from him but was powerless to do anything about it. Ada complained that his set was no fun, too much tension and not enough uproar. You were so cool, Dix, and now you’re not. At times the pain in his leg was excruciating, and in an instant the pain would vanish. He brought the film in on time and on budget, but that did not make it a good film. It did well at the box office, but that didn’t make it a good film either. What he remembered of its making were nights with Ada and the days with his leg. For the rest of his life the circumstances of the accident would arrive in his mind, an old, though not especially welcome, friend who wanted only to stop and visit for a while, as if they shared a fond remembrance.
Dix leaned against the window glass, watching the shadows darken the water of the lake. The vodka was cold in his hand and he took a short sip, returning at once to the present. The two-man scull changed course and headed for home, the boat sliding serenely on the water. He had met the scullers, two retired accountants in their fifties, fit as mountaineers, taciturn as owls. They always drank a beer in the tavern on the corner when they finished with the boat, and Dix was often there at the same time. The accountants were slick with sweat and exhilarated from their hour’s rowing, drinking their beer straight down and then waiting patiently for Charlotte to draw them another, a formal, deliberative process that consumed five minutes. The accountants had no interest in discussing their sculling, their families, or their accounting, and were incurious as to what drew Greenwood to Germany. They were happiest lecturing on the superior security arrangements of Europe, plans that allowed a faithful employee to work until he was fifty-five and then retire with enough money to live on, and time to scull whenever he wished and take vacations in Spain during the worst of the winter weather, and set aside money for the children as well. Wasn’t it prudent for the old to make way for the young? And the state provided, as it had every right to do. That was why there was such dissatisfaction and violence in America, too many old people working and the young idle, restless as cats, resentful at injustice. There was trouble of that kind among the young Ossies, people of the former East district, who were unable to find work owing to the fuckups of the older generation and its refusal to give way. Life was not easy in Germany. The Cold War was won and won bloodlessly, but who paid the bill for reconstruction? And continued to pay? We Germans. Greenwood complimented them on their English, fluent with an excellent command of idiom. It seemed pointless to inquire whether they missed their accounting. When eventually they asked Greenwood what he did before he retired—he was older than they were and surely drew a pension of some kind for his years of faithful labor—and he replied that he was a filmmaker engaged in accounting of a personal nature, they lost all interest.
The scull disappeared. The water darkened as the sun set and the clouds lowered, and then Greenwood smiled, watching the little passenger ferry make its slow transit beyond the mallards. Its position meant the time was 4:06 precisely, fourteen minutes to go in the twenty-minute run from Wannsee to Kladow, the charming suburb across the lake, the one with two good restaurants and a wee island just offshore. This was usually the time he set aside his book or his correspondence and made for the tavern down the street from the S-Bahn, careful to swipe the International Herald Tribune from the library downstairs in case the scullers were not talkative, or talkative only with each other. Greenwood enjoyed sitting at the end of the long bar with his beer and his newspaper, a leisurely sixty-minute read, the first stirrings of the presidential campaign and the various lurid manifestations of the American empire; and in the air, Irish music, thanks to the beautiful barmaid Charlotte, who had taken her summer holiday in Connemara and had fallen in love with a handsome schoolteacher, six feet tall with hair the color of coal—ach, you should hear him talk, Herr Greenwood, such a comedy! Dix scoured the newspaper for accounts of the entertainment industry but found little worth reading. The reviews were short, the frequent resignations of studio executives not worth mentioning, and the subsequent litigation too complicated for easy summary.
During his first week at the residence, Greenwood invited some of the others in the House to join him at Charlotte’s, but they rarely did, fearing distraction from their work and perhaps fearing also that such an occasion might become a habit or, worse, a ritual. Everyone knew that the winter months at Wannsee were disorienting, the sun disappearing for days at a time and the weather raw. A frigid mist arrived, the sullen breath of the Baltic, and at those times the weight of the past was palpable, the atmosphere a refugee gray.
One afternoon he was able to collect three of them to visit the Wannsee Conference Center, the stone villa with its oval conference room and refectory table and high windows overlooking the pretty lake and the swimming club across the water. Not much had changed in the neighborhood then to now, so it was easy to imagine the weather in January 1942, Reinhard Heydrich presiding, Adolf Eichmann inconspicuous in a middle seat. Discussion turned to the unacceptable situation in the East, displaced persons who were a burden on Aryan communities. So they undertook an inventory of facilities, rolling stock and destinations for the rolling stock. The participants were officials responsible for transportation, specifically the railway system, and officials responsible also for food and clothing. A doctor was present to advise on medical matters, should they arise. At the end of the meeting, each participant had his orders. The minutes of the meeting were carefully filed. Framed facsimiles of the minutes were hung on the walls of the conference room so that visitors could inspect the spidery handwriting that methodically noted times of departure and arrival, so many on Mondays, so many more on Tuesdays, and so on, the trains traveling west to east, mostly.
Greenwood, Anya Ryan, and the Kessels spent most of one afternoon at the Wannsee Villa, wandering its rooms upstairs and down, inspecting the many photographs and documents that described the domestic agenda of the Third Reich, returning always to the conference room itself and the ordinary refectory table. On the wall back of the table were official photographs of those present, most of them in business suits; they looked like directors of any industrial concern. Anya was drawn to a photograph in the corridor, Jews standing in the snow, waiting to board railway cars. German soldiers stood casually around them. The Jews carried suitcases, even the small children had bundles under their arms. Snow collected on the roofs of the railway cars and the wooden loading platform. Snow was in the air, soft, fat flakes—fragile, Anya thought, except for those on the platform. For the Jews moving to the railway cars, the snowflakes would seem as heavy as boulders. Unless no one noticed the snow, its whiteness in the gray of the surroundings. The adults would be thinking one thing, the children something else. And then Anya noticed a German soldier, his rifle slung, his palms raised as if in supplication; but he was only catching snowflakes. Anya turned away, thinking that in those times a life had the duration of a snowflake. In her mind she saw the Jews shuffling forward, climbing into the railway cars, men first, the men helping the women, both helping the children, and the snow continuing to fall. Greenwood, the Kessels, and Anya Ryan exited the villa and walked back down the charming suburban street and around the lake, hurrying now to the tavern, chilled to the bone when they arrived.
Charlotte listened to their conversation from her perch at the end of the bar. She did not join in, even when Jackie Kessel said loudly that visiting the Wannsee Villa was like visiting the laboratory where God cooked up hell. Adam agreed, adding a thought of his own. Anya said nothing at all but drank her beer quickly and announced she was going back to the House, she had things to attend to. The Kessels went with her. Greenwood remained. Charlotte said quietly looking at a photograph of her handsome schoolteacher. At last she tucked it away in her purse, giving the purse a familiar pat, as if she were seeing the photograph off to bed. When she spoke at last it was from a distance, and quietly so that no one could overhear. Charlotte recommended that in the German winter one remain within oneself, living circumspectly, resisting temptation. Charlotte called the German winter breakable weather. Things broke easily in the hard northern winter.
Don’t fall behind, she said.
Stay warm.
Here, let me fetch you a pilsener.
The staff at Mommsen House told alarming tales of previous residents who disappeared as early as three in the afternoon, returning to dinner befuddled and hilarious, and sometimes not returning until late in the evening, accompanied by new friends trailing the usual noise and disorder. More than once the Polizei had become involved owing to altercations at Charlotte’s, a terrible embarrassment for the House. Rektor Henry Belknap was personally embarrassed, though no charges were ever filed.
You Fellows must get hold of yourselves, he said.
You don’t want to see the inside of a Berlin jail.
Yes, our winter is difficult. But Germany is a normal country after all, with laws that must be obeyed.
Of course there was no publicity because the House was under the protection of the government, all courtesies extended to the writers, scholars, musicians, and other intellectual authorities from America. But there was no mistaking the police lieutenant’s smirk as he laid out the disagreeable facts, witness intimidation, lawyers told to go away, evidence lost or mishandled. Under the influence of drink, American intellectuals were worse even than the Stalinist thugs of Baader-Meinhof and the scuffles in Dahlem in the eighties. Your intellectuals are without discipline, the lieutenant said.
The Rektor promised to punish the offenders, but he never did.
Fuck them, Henry Belknap said, and for a moment Dix did not know if he meant the police or the intellectuals.
Dix returned to his kitchen, broke more ice, cut a lemon, poured two fingers of vodka, and stood glaring at the telephone, willing it to ring. Claire had promised to call from the set, but perhaps her promise was as idle as the Rektor’s. And when you were on the set, if things were going well, promises were neglected; they were neglected equally when things were going badly. Dix stood at the window sipping vodka, sorry now that he had not taken a walk in the neighborhood and revisited the villa, if only to end up at Charlotte’s, with or without the newspaper.
These afternoons, he said aloud, these afternoons are stretching to eternity.