Back to his arrival at the Tegel Airport, the day before:
A baffling series of glass chambers, sealing and unsealing automatically like air locks, where he is met by his tall serious teaching assistant and escort: Hans. Though about to sit for his doctorate exam on Derrida and therefore, in Less’s mind, his intellectual superior, curly-headed Hans willingly takes all of Less’s luggage and brings him, via his beat-up Twingo, to the university apartment he will call home for the next five weeks. It is on a high floor of an eighties building whose open staircases, and open walkways, are exposed to the chill Berlin air; in its goldenrod-and-glass severity, it resembles the airport. Additionally, there is no apartment key but instead a circular fob with a button—like a mating bird, the door chirps in response, then opens. Hans demonstrates this quickly; the door chirps; it seems simple. “You take the stairs to the walkway, you use the fob. You understand?” Less nods, and Hans leaves Less with his luggage, explaining that he will be back at nineteen hours to take him to dinner, and then at thirteen hours the next day to take him to the university. His curly head bobs good-bye, and he disappears down the open staircase. It occurs to Less that the graduate student never met his gaze. And that he should learn military time.
He cannot imagine that the next morning before class, he will find himself hanging from the ledge outside his apartment building, forty feet above the courtyard, inching his way toward the only open window.
Hans arrives precisely at nineteen hours (Less keeps repeating to himself: seven p.m., seven p.m., seven p.m.). Unable to find an iron in the apartment, Less has hung up his shirts in the bathroom and run a hot shower to steam out the wrinkles, but the billowing steam somehow sets off the fire alarm, which of course brings a burly, cheerful, English-free man from the lower depths to tease him (“Sie wollen das Gebäude mit Wasser niederbrennen!”) and return with a sturdy German iron. Windows are opened. Less is in the process of ironing when he hears the Bach chimes of the doorbell. Hans bobs his head again. He has changed from a hoodie into a denim blazer. In the Twingo (evidence of cigarettes but no actual cigarettes), the young man drives him into another mysterious district, parking beneath a concrete railway where a sad Turkish man sits in a kiosk, selling curried hot dogs. The restaurant is called Austria and is decorated everywhere with beer steins and antlers. As is true everywhere else: they are not kidding.
They are shown to a leather booth where two men and a young woman are waiting. These are Hans’s friends, and, while Less suspects the grad student is cagily sponging from the department’s expense account, it is a relief to have someone other than a Derridean to talk with: a composer named Ulrich, whose brown eyes and shaggy beard give him the alert appearance of a schnauzer, his girlfriend, Katarina, similarly canine in her Pomeranian puff of hair, and Bastian, a business student whose dark good looks and voluminous kinky hairstyle make Less assume he is African; he is Bavarian. Less judges them to be around thirty. Bastian keeps picking a fight with Ulrich about sports, a conversation difficult for Less to follow not because of the specific vocabulary (Verteidiger, Stürmer, Schienbeinschützer) or obscure sports figures but because he simply does not care. Bastian seems to be arguing that danger is essential to sports: The thrill of death! Der Nervenkitzel des Todes! Less stares at his schnitzel (a crisp map of Austria). He is not here, in Berlin, in the Schnitzelhaus. He is in Sonoma, in a hospital room: windowless, yellowish, encurtained for privacy like a stripper before her entrance. In the hospital bed: Robert. He has a tube in his arm and a tube in his nose, and his hair is that of a madman. “It’s not the cigarettes,” Robert says, his eyes framed by his same old thick glasses. “It’s the poetry that’s done it. It kills you now. But later,” he says, shaking a finger, “immortality!” A husky laugh, and Less holds his hand. This is only a year ago. And Less is in Delaware, at his mother’s funeral, a hand softly pressing on his back to keep him from collapsing. He is so grateful for that hand. And Less is in San Francisco, on the beach, in the fall of that terrible year.
“You boys don’t know anything about death.”
Someone has said this; Less discovers it is he. This one time, his German is perfect. The entire table sits silent, and Ulrich and Hans look away. Bastian merely stares at Less, his mouth hanging open.
“I’m sorry,” Less says, putting down his beer. “I’m sorry, I do not know why I said that.”
Bastian is silent. The sconces behind him light every kink in his hair.
The bill comes, and Hans pays with a department credit card, and Less cannot be persuaded a tip is unnecessary, and then they are out on the street, where street lamps shine on black lacquered trees. He has never been this cold in his life. Ulrich stands with his hands in his pockets, swaying back and forth to a private symphony, Katarina clutching him, and Hans looks at the rooftops and says he will bring Less back to the apartment. But Bastian says no, it is the American’s first night, and he should be taken for a drink. The conversation takes place as if Less were not there. It feels like they are arguing about something else. At last, it is decided Bastian will bring Less to his favorite bar, close by. Hans says, “Mr. Less, you can find your way home?” and Bastian says a taxi will be simple. It is all happening very quickly. The others vanish into the Twingo; Less turns and sees Bastian looking at him with an indecipherable frown. “Come with me,” the young man says. But he does not lead him to a bar. He leads him to his own apartment, in Neukölln, where Less—to his surprise—spends the night.
The problem comes the next morning. Less, sleepless from his evening with Bastian, sweating out all the alcohol he’s been served over the past twelve hours, still dressed in the black shirt and jeans grease-spotted from dinner, is able to climb the stairs to his building’s exterior walkway but unable to work the lock to his apartment. Over and over he presses the button on the fob, over and over he listens for the chirp of the door. But it is mute. It will not mate. Frantically looking around the courtyard, he sees birds gathering on the balcony of an upstairs maisonette. Here, of course, is the bill for last night. Here is the shame built into living. How did he imagine he would escape it? Less pictures himself sleeping in his doorway when Hans arrives to take him to the university. He imagines teaching his first class stinking of vodka and cigarette smoke. And then his eye falls upon an open window.
At ten, we climb the tree higher even than our mothers’ fears. At twenty, we scale the dormitory to surprise a lover asleep in bed. At thirty, we jump into the mermaid-green ocean. At forty, we look on and smile. At four and nine?
Over the walkway railing, he rests one scuffed wingtip on the decorative concrete ledge. It is only five feet away, the narrow window. A matter of flinging out his arm to catch the shutter. The smallest of leaps to the adjoining ledge. Pressed against the wall, and already yellow paint is flaking onto his shirt, and already he can hear his audience of birds cooing appreciatively. A Berlin sunrise glows over the rooftops, bringing with it a smell of bread and car exhaust. Arthur Less, minor American author known mostly for his connection to the Russian River School of artists, especially the poet Robert Brownburn, took his own life this morning in Berlin, Pegasus’s press release will read. He was fifty years old.
What witness is there to see your Mr. Professor dangling from the fourth floor of his apartment building? Throwing out a foot, then a hand, to edge himself toward the kitchen window? Using all his upper-body strength to pull himself over the protective railing and to fall, in a cloud of dust, into the darkness beyond? Just a new mother, walking her baby around her apartment in the early morning. Seeing a scene perhaps out of a foreign comedy. She knows he is not a thief; he is clearly just an American.