I hesitate at the door. Then I see the shaft of light on my shirt, a small yellow beam. I wave my hand out of the shadows and the beam fixes on my wrist. It’s coming through the keyhole. I put the key in the metal fitting and turn it, feeling the bolt swing smoothly. Not any more, I think, or any less.
I walk in.
23 June 1924
23 June 1924
Schöneberg, Berlin
She watches the shadow of the streetcar glide past on the sidewalk, steel clattering upon iron as the wheels roll over a junction in the grooved tracks. The streetcar halts. The woman studies the white placard displaying the number 8.
She breaks into a jog, pushing down the crown of her hat. A leather portfolio is tucked under her arm; the camera slung over her shoulder bobs against the small of her back. The conductor watches the woman climb onto the streetcar and lean her portfolio against the wooden paneling. She draws out her purse, offering a coin inquiringly.
— Fährt dieser Straβenbahn nach der Auguste-Viktoria-Platz?
The conductor takes the woman as French on account of her accent and her strange clothing. He does not care for the French, but he tells the woman the streetcar does stop at Auguste-Viktoria-Platz. He tells her the fare. The conductor is used to telling passengers the fare, for only a year ago under the old Papiermark the fare had climbed to 150,000 marks.
The woman pays the conductor and moves down the aisle, grasping a handrail above her head. An old man stands and doffs his homburg, offering his seat.
— Bitte nehmen Sie Platz.
She smiles, explaining she would prefer to stand. The old man does not believe her, but he taps his hat low over his forehead and sits back down. The woman turns and shifts her weight onto the handrail, staring at a young girl on the seat across from her. The girl wears a white frock, its rounded collar tied by a long blue ribbon; she holds a porcelain doll in her arms, the paint rubbed off entirely from its face. The woman guesses at the age of the child, but in the end she realizes she has no facility for this judgment.
She frowns and looks out the window, studying the faces of the pedestrians on the sidewalk. Her mind returns to the old question of the Teutonic features. Is it only their expressions that make them severe? The Germans remained an enigma to her, and in years past she had considered them a species apart, a people with some anatomical divergence of nerve or gland that accounted for their facility with the problems of this world, the way they systematically solved every obstacle that came along, even the impossibility of their present hardship. She had long admired them for this, differing as they did from her. But was it true? Perhaps there was hardly any difference, perhaps she only imagined how these faces differ from those she might see in Copenhagen or Rotterdam. Her eyes follow the back of a man walking briskly on the sidewalk. Was he a German, and could she tell from the back? There is something familiar in the roundness of his shoulders; the angle of his gray trilby, ever misshapen; the curious rigidity of his gait. Could it be Anton? Of course it could not, for the last she had heard Anton was in Brazil.
She lowers her gaze in distress, studying the cuff of a young man’s trousers, the greased crow-black boots of the conductor. She imagines the tram passing the figure on the sidewalk; she pictures the familiar body growing closer, the closest it had been in years and now passed, the distance only gaining between them. Now she is regretful, almost shameful. There was nothing so hateful to her as the fragility of human relations, and love most of all. She had always felt so. As a girl she had never understood the affairs of others, those who had lain with lovers for months and years only to part bitterly, only to pass each other on the street as mere strangers. That was not love, she had felt. That was caprice; that was whimsy. It was not love.
But later it had happened to her too. She had lain with them; they had held each other and promised all they could promise, the past and future alike. And now they were nothing to each other, or as little as two people were who would never speak again. How little remained from such episodes, dimming memories vouchsafed only by scraps of evidence unearthed years later: a visiting card dropped behind a chest of drawers; a pair of earrings in their silken gift box, never worn. She was still fairly young, and yet the affairs of her youth were things hardly remembered, unfocused images she had blurred by trying to picture the same scenes too often. Anton had never been her lover, but she felt the same discomfiture at his mirage, the inevitable embarrassment of the meeting of two people who had once been close but no longer were.
The memories were all that remained. Her life now was an apartment of rented furniture, where even the pictures on the wall were unfamiliar, rented pictures, portraits of dead Junker families and landscapes of the Sächsische Schweiz, a place she had never visited. She had not even a suitcase of mementos to carry with her through the world. But all this was as she had wanted it. It was the life she had chosen.
She had always told herself it would be worse to stay in touch, to trivialize love into trifling acquaintance, where years passed and the letters became fewer and more superficial. Still there were moments of terrible doubt. She woke sometimes from dreams of perfect clarity, trysts with spectral lovers who promised that all histories had been smoothed away, all obstacles removed so that at last they might meet again for all time. These were dreams so perfect in the dreaming that they became nightmares upon waking, for in the morning, in her bedroom, she recognized at once the stark feebleness of her present life. She would be seized by the need to find this specter, to dash to the post office and send a telegram, to board any train or ship or airplane to meet him. She must find him.
Yet in the end she could never do this. There were reasons why they lived apart and the reasons had not dissolved with the years. Besides this, there was always the caprice of human affection: the other people who would come between them, or those who would come in the future if their attachment waned. She could write, at least, a few lines to say she had thought of him. But the only fitting reply to love was equal love; once that was gone, all that remained was the trivial and the tragic. It was better not to write at all, better to remember him only in their finest moment — that interlude where the gilded spotlight had lingered upon them. And so she labored to shake off the dream, passing the day in a haze of murky sadness, waiting for the small but certain pleasures that would reconcile her to this life. Until the dream would come again.
The conductor taps the woman on the shoulder. She looks up and sees the tall spire of the Gedächtniskirche; they have reached Auguste-Viktoria-Platz. The woman snatches up her portfolio, pushing her way off the streetcar onto the square.
She crosses toward the café on the eastern side, weaving among the traffic of motorcars and pedestrians and bicycles. A grimed youth selling bootlaces arrests her on the sidewalk, hoisting his selection before her eyes. The laces are waxed and shiny, in flat or round varieties and varied shades of black or brown.
— Nur zehn Pfennig, he pleads.
The woman shakes her head, but the boy persists until she chooses a pair of laces. She has only a fifty-pfennig coin. The boy claims he has no change and in the end she buys five pairs of laces, asking if she can take a photograph of the boy in return. She unslings the camera from her shoulder and the boy asks how he should pose. The woman smiles and tells him not to pose at all.