Less is not known as a teacher, in the same way Melville was not known as a customs inspector. And yet both held the respective positions. Though he was once an endowed chair at Robert’s university, he has no formal training except the drunken, cigarette-filled evenings of his youth, when Robert’s friends gathered and yelled, taunted, and played games with words. As a result, Less feels uncomfortable lecturing. Instead, he re-creates those lost days with his students. Remembering those middle-aged men sitting with a bottle of whiskey, a Norton book of poetry, and scissors, he cuts up a paragraph of Lolita and has the young doctoral students reassemble the text as they desire. In these collages, Humbert Humbert becomes an addled old man rather than a diabolical one, mixing up cocktail ingredients and, instead of confronting the betrayed Charlotte Haze, going back for more ice. He gives them a page of Joyce and a bottle of Wite-Out—and Molly Bloom merely says “Yes.” A game to write a persuasive opening sentence for a book they have never read (this is difficult, as these diligent students have read everything) leads to a chilling start to Woolf’s The Waves: I was too far out in the ocean to hear the lifeguard shouting, “Shark! Shark!”
Though the course features, curiously, neither vampires nor Frankenstein monsters, the students adore it. No one has given them scissors and glue sticks since they were in kindergarten. No one has ever asked them to translate a sentence from Carson McCullers (In the town there were two mutes, and they were always together) into German (In der Stadt gab es zwei Stumme, und sie waren immer zusammen) and pass it around the room, retranslating as they go, until it comes out as playground gibberish: In the bar there were two potatoes together, and they were trouble. What a relief for their hardworking lives. Do they learn anything about literature? Doubtful. But they learn to love language again, something that has faded like sex in a long marriage. Because of this, they learn to love their teacher.
It is in Berlin that Less begins to grow a beard. You could blame the approach of a certain wedding date. You could also blame his new German lover, Bastian.
One would not expect them to become lovers. Less certainly did not. After all, they are not well suited. Bastian is young, vain, arrogant, and incurious, even contemptuous, of literature and art; instead, he follows sports avidly, and Germany’s losses leave him in a depression not seen since Weimar days. This, despite the fact that he does not consider himself German; he is Bavarian. This means nothing to Less, who associates this nation more with München’s beer fests and lederhosen than with the graffiti heaven of Berlin. But it means a great deal to Bastian. He frequently wears T-shirts proclaiming his heritage, and these, along with light-colored jeans and a puffy cotton jacket, are his typical costume. He is not intellectual about, interested in, or kind with words. But he is, Less is to discover, surprisingly softhearted.
It so happens that Bastian visits Less every few nights. Waiting outside Less’s apartment building in his jeans, neon T-shirt, puffy jacket. What on earth does he want with your Mr. Professor? He does not say. He merely pins Less against the wall the moment they are inside, paraphrasing in a whisper from the Checkpoint Charlie sign: Entering American Sector.…Sometimes they don’t even leave the apartment, and Less is forced to make dinner from his meager fridge: bacon, eggs, and walnuts. One night two weeks into the Wintersitzung, they watch Bastian’s favorite TV show, something called Schwiegertochter gesucht, about country people looking to play matchmaker for their children, until the young man falls asleep with his body wrapped tight around Less’s, his nose docked in Less’s ear.
Around midnight, the fever begins.
It is a puzzling experience, dealing with a stranger in his illness. Bastian, so confident as a young man, becomes a sickly child, calling for Less to pull his covers down, then up, as his temperature soars and plummets (the apartment comes with a thermometer, but, alas, it’s in alien Centigrade), asking for foods Less has never heard of and ancient (possibly fever invented) Bavarian remedies of plasters and hot Rosenkohl-Saft (Brussels-sprout juice). And Less, not known for his bedside manner (Robert accused him of abandoning the weak), finds himself heartsick for the poor Bavarian. No Mami, no Papi. Less tries to banish the memory of another man, sick in another European bed. How long ago was it? He gets on his bicycle and rides the streets of Wilmersdorf in search of anything to help. He returns with what one usually returns with in Europe: powder in a folded packet. This he puts in water; it smells atrocious, and Bastian will not drink it. So Less puts on Schwiegertochter gesucht and tells Bastian he has to drink every time the lovebirds remove their glasses to kiss. And when Bastian drinks, he stares into Less’s eyes with his own: each as light brown as an acorn. The next day, Bastian has recovered.
“You know what my friends call you?” Bastian asks in the morning light, tangled in Less’s ivy-patterned bedsheets. He is his old self, red cheeked, alert with a little smile. His wild hair seems the only part of him still asleep, like a cat on the pillow.
“Mr. Professor,” Less says, toweling himself from a shower.
“That’s what I call you. No, they call you Peter Pan.”
Less laughs in his backward way: AH ah ah.
Bastian reaches for the coffee beside him. The windows are open and blowing the cheap white curtains around; the sky is foxed and gray above the linden trees. “‘How is Peter Pan?’ they ask me.”
Less frowns and makes his way to the closet, catching a glimpse of himself in the mirror: his flushed face, his white body. Like a statue pieced together with the wrong head. “Tell me why I am this called.”
“You know, your German is pretty terrible,” Bastian tells him.
“Not true. It is not perfect, perhaps,” Less tells him, “but it is excited.”
The young man laughs freely, sitting up in bed. Brown skin, reddened on his shoulders and his cheeks from his time in the solarium. “See, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Excited?”
“Excited,” Less explains, pulling on his underwear. “Enthusiastic.”
“Yes, you talk like a child. You look and act very young.” He reaches one hand out to catch Less’s arm and pulls him to the bed. “Maybe you never grew up.”
Maybe he never did. Less knows so well the pleasures of youth—danger, excitement, losing oneself in a dark club with a pill, a shot, a stranger’s mouth—and, with Robert and his friends, the pleasures of age—comfort and ease, beauty and taste, old friends and old stories and wine, whiskey, sunsets over the water. His entire life, he has alternated between the two. There is his own distant youth, that daily humiliation of rinsing out your one good shirt and putting on your one good smile, along with the daily rush of newness: new pleasures, new people, new reflections of yourself. There is Robert’s late middle age of selecting his vices as carefully as ties in a Paris shop, napping in the sunlight on an afternoon and getting up from a chair and hearing the creak of death. The city of youth, the country of age. But in between, where Less is living—that exurban existence? How has he never learned to live it?
“I think you should grow a beard,” the young man murmurs later. “I think you would be very handsome.”