The Ept, The Ane and the Fantile

 

“Every war on Earth is, in the end, a battle of the sexes.”-Azzedine El-Hadi

In the three months between the time I signed the lease on my new flat and the day I returned to Berlin with two suitcases of meager possessions, the building next door was knocked to the ground, and construction started on an above-ground parking garage. I’d been charmed by the old fashioned quality of this corner of the neighborhood and now they were modernizing it.

The day I’d first looked at this flat, flipping light switches and opening and closing cabinets in an amateurish pantomime of my father, the caretaker assured me it was a quiet neighborhood. It’s standard in Berlin that you’re allowed to deduct a portion of your rent for inconveniences such as malfunctioning heat in the winter or quality-of-life-damaging construction on or near your dwelling, but there is so much development happening in this suddenly fashionable neighborhood that there’s a special clause in my rental contract that negates the reduced rent option ‘in the event’ of construction, which, obviously, though unknown to me, was a certainty when I signed the contract. I signed it, flew back to California a week later, then returned to Berlin on the last day of summer.

The taxi driver who drove me from Tegel to August Strasse was not German; he was a London-born Pakistani named Shadz (a contraction, he informed me, of a name that sounded, as he pronounced it, like Sa-Heedz). Shadz lifted my two large suitcases of meagre possessions into the trunk of his BMW-built taxi and guessed that I wasn’t a tourist. “Are you a scientist?” he asked, after I’d given him the address in halting German. I can’t say why, exactly, this offended me. Perhaps I’d rather have been mistaken for a rock star.

“A scientist? No.”

“You absolutely wouldn’t believe how many scientists I end up driving.”

“Really.”

“Oh, yeah. Something like, I dunno. Half a dozen a week, maybe more?” He didn’t in any way resemble the voice that was coming out of his mouth. He stared into the car that we were passing on the left as though its driver was insane. I looked too and saw that it was an extremely attractive woman at the wheel, brushing her teeth.

We drove through leafy green lanes that gave way to narrow, treeless, cobblestone streets. There was a fenced-in muddy lot of old touring coaches emblazoned with Cyrillic lettering, across the street from a row of run-down stucco cottages with boarded-up windows. Then a quaint shopping district populated almost entirely, it seemed to me, with women in Turkish headscarves. Then a mile of much-graffiti’d brown brick buildings. The scenery changed quickly and in unexpected ways and felt like an edited montage of several cities from different eras. Which, in a way, is what Berlin is.

“Are they working on some kind of big project, do you think?”

“Who, mate?”

“The scientists.”

He eyed me in the mirror. “That’s the question I was going to put to you sir, actually.” We both laughed. Shadz said, “A machine for influencing your dreams, maybe?”

“Exactly. Top Secret stuff.”

“Imagine the possibilities if you could beam adverts directly into people’s skulls while they were sleeping,” he said wistfully. I smiled but couldn’t think of a clever comeback and soon found myself dozing… nodding off… my chin touched my collar bone twice. Each time I awoke with a sudden start and a snort. Embarrassed, to prove I was awake I said to Shadz:

“But how do you know they’re scientists?”

“How else would they get the job?”

When we pulled up in front of my building it was shortly after noon, and so the construction workers were on a break, but I noticed the skyscraping crane anchored in the building-sized crater next door with a sinking heart. I was too tired to much care at that point, however. Shadz quoted the amount I owed him, I handed him two bills fresh from the money-changing kiosk at Tegel, and he popped the trunk and hopped out. He was yanking my bags with virile grunts and lowering them onto the pavement before I could manage to get my door open. That’s how wobbly the flight had left me.

Before he climbed in, he handed back one of the bills I’d given him. “Keep your eye on the ball, mate.” He winked. “This time the lesson was kostenlos,” he said, using the German word for ‘free,’ and he drove off, leaving me jet-lagged and constipated and with two large suitcases in the middle of the road, facing a construction site.

The only thing I like more than packing a suitcase is unpacking a suitcase; the former indicates an adventure to come and the latter an ordeal survived. My pleasure would be magnified in this case by unpacking my suitcases in an absolutely empty flat… just walls, floor, windows, doors and ceiling… a ritual I was, however, too exhausted to enjoy before getting a little sleep. In the top layer of suitcase number one was a cloth-covered air mattress I’d purchased from a bankrupt Army Surplus store as a much younger man always on the look out for bargains, novelties and items that nobody else had or wanted. I’d finally unpacked the thing, to air it out, the day before my flight, and it gave off a sad, dry rot odor of Korean War memorabilia when I first unboxed it. The odor managed to taint the entire contents of the suitcase, which I had wisely refrained from packing with clothes; suit case number two had all the clothes in it, along with a five hundred page manuscript (single-spaced, narrow margins, tiny font) I was nowhere near being finished with.

When I yanked the rip-cord dangling from the panel with the stenciled warning on it (WARNING: DO NOT PULL: JERK!), I expected the cord to snap off in my hand, or for nothing to happen, but, to my surprise, the mattress inflated rapidly with a loud hiss that changed in pitch as the mattress plumped out. The compressed air cannister continued until the mattress bulged asymmetrically and I backed out of the room with my fingers in my ears and it exploded in a cloud of dust. Of course. I unpacked half the clothing from suitcase number two, arranged it in a thick rectangle in the middle of the room and laid the blown mattress on top. I kicked off my shoes and curled up on the makeshift bed.

I dreamed I was climbing a steep, grassy hill on a sunny day with The Beatles. They were long-haired and bearded and young-looking, younger than I had been in years, and I was slightly embarrassed, in this dream, to be an over-thirty… someone they might not trust, or, even worse, someone they might mock with their rapid, cutting, inside jokes. John was the one I had to be especially careful with, I remember thinking in this dream, and I put an effort into watching his face very carefully for reactions to my cautious remarks: a lifted eyebrow or a curling lip or a conspiratorial glance at George. It was difficult as he was the furthest from me. To my immediate left was Ringo in a bright red caftan and then to my right the order went George, Paul and then John. Climbing the hill in the heat had winded me but they, The Beatles, didn’t seem visibly affected. Their long hair was shiny, fragrant and beautiful in the golden light; in fact they were pretty as girls, even with their beards, and I couldn’t stop thinking how it was really them, The Beatles, and here I was climbing this hill in the sunlight with them.

At what point as the dream unfolded did it become clear to me that these four young men weren’t The Beatles at all? They had merely resembled The Beatles. But as I stared at the profile of the one I had taken to be John Lennon, the one who was furthest from me, with most of his face eclipsed by his hair, I could no longer locate even the faintest resemblance between his face and Lennon’s, and it seemed to me (or does so now) that his facial features were changing, subtly, even as I watched, into something very strange.

The brilliant sunlight had dulled and darkened, too. The wind was picking up, whipping the tall grass, and, back down the hill the five of us were trudging up… down the hill into a vast valley that reached for miles to a poisonous black seam of clouds on the horizon… I watched white bits and large gray chunks of some kind of debris blowing; bouncing; rolling down the hill. The four young men I was climbing with were menacing… unambiguously hostile towards me and united in some kind of mission or scheme… and their grim faces and dark clothing in combination with the cold wind and violent storm overtaking us made me shake with despair.

The noise that woke me was so loud that it seemed to push me to the floor, but I was already on the floor, or close to floor level, gasping as my heart raced. I didn’t know where I was, but it felt like I was in an earthquake, back in California, having a heart attack. What was I doing on the floor of an empty, high-ceilinged room with strange windows and two narrow doors and a power socket in the wall shaped like nothing I was familiar with, rattled in my bones by a deafening rumble? A cheap ceiling lamp on the end of a white chord was swinging left and right. I stumbled in a panic to the door jamb and wedged myself there with my arms covering my head until I suddenly remembered where I was exactly and under what circumstances and laughed at my stupidity, right there where I squatted in the vibrating doorway. I slipped my shoes on, confronted a sleep-smashed face in the bathroom mirror (soft; middle-aged), splashed some water on it, and left the building to go for a walk, since sleep was impossible.

The day… a late spring/early summer day… was streaked with low, fast moving clouds like dark fish in a cold creek and the chill in the air made me consider going back to unpack a light jacket. But going back would have felt like the first small failure of my new life so I went forward instead, my hands jammed in my pockets and my collar turned up. It was early afternoon and there was only one other person on the street, a tall, pretty girl with brilliant orange hair. She wore a pale green diaphanous scarf over her hair and she didn’t once look up as she hurried past me on loud boots in the direction from which I’d come, the noise of her loud boots disappearing into the roar of construction. Turning to watch, I saw her cross towards my building and let herself into it while dust clouds and diesel fumes from the frenzy of construction next door blew over her.

I had followed her half-way back and waited to see if she’d appear in a window in the upper floors, pulling a curtain or lifting a blind to catch me spying from the corner. I lingered awhile, saw nothing and continued my walk. I started thinking of her as ‘the little red headed girl.’ I’d never had a neighbor that pretty in any apartment building I’d ever lived in in America, but I had observed women like that in some of the houses I’d worked in, chatting amiably with harmless me over a mug of coffee from the other side of the invisible barrier of comfort.

Most of the work we did was at one or another of the gated communities that had mushroomed beyond the suburbs in response to opportunities in new technology at office parks that were an hour’s drive from the city. The rows upon row of brand new houses were identically over-large, poorly designed, thrown up far too quickly and in need of paint. The owners were invariably young, college-educated and friendly to a fault with the workers, all the way down to the Mexican maids and gardeners. I always made it a point to have at least one conversation with the lady of the house to assert myself, I suppose, as a reader of books and an appreciator of culture. Which Richard, my partner (my boss, actually; they were his bids, and he had me on an hourly wage), considered embarrassing not only for me, he said, but for the client and himself and the tradition of house painting.

“No matter how smart you may think you are, to them you’re just a beat up old house painter, just like me, John.”

“I’m only doing this to finance the writing of my book, Richard. You know that.”

“All I’m saying is how you see it ain’t how they see it so the point is what? Plus it’s fucking unprofessional. Okay?”

I was careful not to let him catch me talking with the homeowners after that exchange. Once, I walked into a living room carrying a step ladder and found the client’s blonde wife curled up on the Cadillac-sized leather couch in a bright red jogging outfit, chewing a finger and reading a brand new paperback of Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov. She just happened to look up from the book as I entered the room in my cover-alls and cap, ladder over one shoulder, paint on my face. As she made eye contact I pointed and said, because I knew Richard was out in the van, mixing paint, “There’s textual evidence in there that Quilty is Lo’s biological father,” and her eyes went wide and her mouth fell open as though a talking dog had walked in on its hind legs and asked for a date.

Rosenthaler Strasse is the nearest main road and a trolley runs up and down both sides of it. There were more pedestrians there than on the sidestreets that led me to it and there was eerily quiet, clogged traffic packed with makes of cars and trucks I’d never seen before and for the first time since I’d arrived I had the thrilling sense of being in a foreign capital… the implication of infinite possibility and vague threat that middle-aged Bohemians travel for. The wind whipped flimsy spring coats against the short-skirted legs of business women or secretaries hurrying back to the office from lunch breaks and I wondered if the eros of foreign travel was more in the anonymity of it… as though anonymity in and of itself is an invitation to transgress… or in my subconscious superstition that European women find American men sexy. I turned left on Rosenthaler Strasse, under a whole city of clouds in places so black they looked rotten and I was chilled to the bone by the same wind that was flirting so rudely with the secretaries.

I hadn’t gone twenty paces when I came upon a pale older man, his thin hair wind-blown, painting a picture on the wall of a block-long building. The building housed a bakery and a barber shop and a travel agent among other ground level businesses. The building was made of huge black blocks of stone and he was very carefully taping a stencil to the wall and spray-painting it with slashing strokes. He then taped a second stencil on top of the first… lining up the edges of the two stencils with deft-but-nervous fingers… and sprayed again with a different color. He was blowing on the fresh paint, his lips just inches from the black wall, as I came up on him, and he didn’t look my way but cocked his head at my footfalls. He carefully peeled the stencils off and slipped them into a backpack, then produced, from where I don’t know, a telescoping, red-tipped stick and hurried off, tapping the base of the black wall with the stick.

I looked at the image he had so carefully double-stencilled and saw that it was a formless mess of red and green paint running together into brown drips down the wall. I looked up again in time to see him hurrying across the street, his cane like a taut lead on an invisible dog. Almost without realizing it I decided to follow.

2.

The title of the book I’m struggling to finish is ‘The Bomb Collector’. Set towards the end of the 1960’s, it concerns the personal life of Azzedine El-Hadi, an Algerian émigré living in upstate New York. El-Hadi is a writer and bon-vivant, a silver-haired, worldly man of fifty with three American girlfriends. He teaches a creative writing class at a community arts center in his small town in the Wisselvallig Valley, and the youngest of his girlfriends, thirty years his junior, is a star of the writing class. The second girlfriend is married to a teacher of an evening class for working adults called ‘Generational Dissonance in Post-War Jewish Literature: from Singer and Malamud to Bellow and Roth,’ at the same arts center. His third occasional girlfriend, Ruth, his ex-wife, is the woman he married for his green card. Ruth is an amateur landscape painter and the mother of two grown children from a previous marriage.

El-Hadi has published one French novel, years ago, which he is busy translating for the English market; his second mistress has promised to show the manuscript to a publisher with whom she may or may not be having a parallel affair. The title of the French version of the book, Le Collecteur de Bombe, is from an Algerian saying that Azzedine’s father, a devout Muslim, often admonished his son with during the boy’s sex-mad adolescence: a man with too many women is like a bomb collector.

The Bomb Collector is comprised of thirteen linked short stories or vignettes on the theme of adultery; there are Moroccan, French, British and Nigerian adulterers featured in interwoven tales all set in Algiers, the great North African city. Cora (the second mistress, married to his colleague) has suggested that beyond translating the book, Azzedine should also include a new chapter, featuring an American, in order to increase the chances of getting the English version published. He initially resists her idea because to add a chapter would violate the numerology of the book… ‘thirteen’ is one of its ordering motifs.

“Well,” suggests Cora, “simply replace one of the existing chapters.”

“Which chapter would you suggest I replace?”

Without hesitating in order to think about it, Cora answers, “Love is Blind. I think it’s the least-charming chapter in the book, to be honest. It denigrates women… also men, when I think of it. The book will be better without it.”

How can Azzedine admit, then, after Cora’s judgment, that the Love is Blind chapter is his favorite… the very heart of the book? A handsome man, an epic womanizer with philosophical inclinations, goes to his Moroccan apothecary one day and requests a philtre that will render him blind, but only temporarily. The apothecary, a man as versed in modern pharmacology as he is in Moroccan folk medicine, mixes a concoction that will blind his client for thirteen days exactly. Take this with a glass of wine on the morning of the first day and your vision will return to you on the evening of the thirteenth. The apothecary, who knows the womanizer well (having provided the man with condoms as well as penicillin and various other salves and ointments in the past), adds, But if you don’t mind my curiosity: why?

The womanizer explains: As you know, I rarely go without extremely desirable female companionship. However, it’s often occurred to me that for every impossibly beautiful woman I allow (or cajole) to climb into bed with me, there are at least a hundred of her sisters, all too willing but, unfortunately, too ugly to meet my silly standards. I curse my good taste but, as you know, there’s nothing to do about it… the male organ can’t be reasoned with in terms of what it finds attractive or not. However, I realized, one need only sneak a lover past the sentry box of the eyes in order to…

Ah yes, says the apothecary.

Following the apothecary’s instructions, the womanizer stirs the bitter substance into a glass of wine early the next morning. It’s a brilliant day, and he doesn’t even realize, at first, that what seems to be the encroaching gloom of cloud cover in an unseasonable display of weather before lunchtime is, in fact, the drug taking effect. By dinner time he is utterly blind. After spending a few days getting used to the situation (with the help of his servant), the womanizer tests his theory that by being free of the tyranny of the aesthetic prejudices of his eyes, his lovemaking will enjoy new freedoms and varieties… new intensities. Guided to the marketplace on the arm of his servant, he says: point me in the direction of a real sow. The servant does so; the womanizer makes contact with a lady of that description and finds himself escorting her home (just as he is escorted by his servant) in no time at all. The resulting sexual encounter is the best he’s ever had.

By the time his vision fades gradually back in on the evening of the thirteenth day, the womanizer has bedded dozens of women… fat, tall, short, skinny, old, young, poorly-dressed, exquisitely-dressed, European, African and everything else… and all with the same high level of energy and pleasure. The experiment has been a success. So much so that he hurries back to the apothecary the morning after the regrettable return of his vision and asks that the prescription be refilled. As you wish, cautions the apothecary, but I must tell you that the third time you use this drug, the effects are permanent.

Another thirteen days of carnal amazements follow. At the end of this journey into the ravishingly sensual night, the womanizer opts for a third, permanent dose, reasoning that he is no longer a young man; he’s seen enough of the world’s picture; to trade just one of his grossly limited senses for limitless pleasure would be more than worth it. With logical eloquence he persuades the apothecary to sell him the third dose.

A year goes by. The apothecary has nearly forgotten the strange case of the self-blinding womanizer when the man appears one morning at the counter on the arm of his harried-looking servant, looking pale and skinny and with his formerly distinguished head of gray hair gone white. The apothecary is filled with guilt and pity: it strikes him that the poor fellow has returned to plead for his sight back.Which is, as he was warned, impossible. As the apothecary approaches the counter with a heavy heart he is surprised to see the blind womanizer detect his presence with a cocked head and give off a sly and boyish grin.

How can I help you today, my friend? asks the non-plussed apothecary. Are all things right with your chosen life?

Righter than ever, answers the blind womanizer. I’ve broken my own previous record for number of conquests in a week several times over and show no signs of slowing down. There’s only one thing I need from you now to make my bliss complete, says the blind womanizer, lowering his voice so that the apothecary draws near.

And what would that one thing be? inquires the very curious apothecary.

A drug to render me deaf, responds the womanizer.

The parallels between the blind womanizer from the book within my book, able to ’see’ all women as equally desirable in his darkness, and the blind graffiti artist, able to falsely ’see’ his art as beautiful (or well-executed), were amusing to me. As I followed the blind man on his route, along which he stopped to stencil his runny brown blobs on various buildings, I began to feel that I knew him because I had created the character he was an offshoot from. I began to predict the buildings he would chose to mark (or to ‘piss’ on; wasn’t it territorial behaviour? Wasn’t it canine?) with impressive accuracy. He went right for the newest, cleanest buildings, despite his blindness. He’d walk right by the buildings with too much graffiti on them. The unstylish buildings, too… he didn’t seem to find those very attractive. I assumed by this behaviour that up until relatively recently he’d been able to see.

I was miles from home already but unpanicked because we’d followed a straight line through a commercial district with a tram running up and down it and I could always hop on to ride one home. Figuring out how to buy a ticket (I speak less German than the average pre-schooler here) was another matter, but I’d face that hurdle when the time came. The street I followed the blind man along is called Kastanien Allee.

It’s a neighborhood of young people, good-looking young people sitting inside and in front of the packed cafes (despite the threat of rain) and smoking languorously, or with emphasis, like movie stars. Young people strolling in and out of funky record shops and quirky boutiques. The girls are all stylish and tall like the ‘the little red head girl’ living in my building and I marvelled at their uniform beauty. Not a fat body or failed outfit or wrinkled face among them. I began to feel quite self-conscious as a voyeuristic emissary from the awful fraternity of the aged and unhip and almost wished I’d picked a dowdier neighborhood to live in. I didn’t need to have my unfuckable mortality rubbed in my face every time I stepped outside to buy butter. But the blind man was above all that; those beautiful girls were as invisible to him as I was to the beautiful girls and so they had lost their power to tantalize and diminish him. He was flying through outer space with his spray paint. He would have been impossible in California and I realized that it was up to me not to become impossible in Berlin. Enough with the bitterness; expect nothing and you can’t be disappointed, I told myself. Finish your novel.

The writer character in my book, Azzedine El-Hadi, creator of the character of the blind womanizer, is based on a real person (of the same name) I’d met as a house painter. I suppose I never bothered to change the name of the fictional version of Azzedine because I either never really expected to publish the book, or assumed that he’d be dead by the time the miracle happened.

While the fictional Azzedine El-Hadi is a writer, the real-life El-Hadi runs an antique shop, with a sideline in contraband antiquities. Richard and I had been hired to paint the little apartment that Azzedine keeps over the shop which is situated in a row of genteel businesses in the Mission Hills neighborhood of San Diego. Richard had said, You’re going to get a kick out of this guy on the way over in the van that first morning and he was right. El-Hadi looked like something out of an Agatha Christie novel when he answered the door, a silver-haired gentleman with a fastidious mustache wearing red satin pyjamas and velvet slippers.

The walls of his bedroom were covered from floor to ceiling with framed photographs of beautiful women; photographs it was our task to remove and eventually replace in exactly the same order. There was more preparation than actual painting involved in this particular job and I had the pleasure of chatting with Azzedine, or listening to him chat, while I worked. Richard had learned by this point in the history of our partnership to behave like a real boss, leaving me to do the great majority of the work. He’d be gone a few hours every day (at the race track for all I knew), therefore I was free to chat with the witty, literate El-Hadi while I stripped the wall paper in his bedroom or sanded the moldings.

It gradually dawned on me that El-Hadi’s wit wasn’t the main reason I enjoyed his company. Unlike every other citizen of the state of California, he was able to distinguish easily between my soul and my occupation. In short, he treated me as an equal, a fellow human being, and not a middle-aged house painter. If he hadn’t hired me to paint his flat, he never would have known, not being impolite enough to ask, how I earned my money… it was of no concern to him, the details of my material wealth or my social standing. What he needed to know about me he gathered with his eyes and ears; it was the quality of my conversation he noticed, my ideas and opinions.

Richard’s return from his four hour lunch break was always jarring: I became a house painter again the moment he climbed the back staircase with his thermos of coffee and the paint-layered cuticles of his fingernails. Richard’s idea of egalitarianism was to display contempt for us both (Richard and me). At which El-Hadi would shrug and wink, preserving the secret of my humanity until our conversation could resume.

As my admiration for El-Hadi increased during the three weeks we worked to refinish his apartment in an oriental theme of greens and golds, my stubborn tolerance of Richard shaded gradually into resentment. I saw that an ugly aura radiated from the man and that my first assumption… that being a house painter had turned him sour over the years… was wrong. His job, posture, manner of speech, living arrangement and outlook on life were all just accessories, after the fact, to the original core of his negativity. We’ve all known gloomy or even vicious children from our childhoods; maybe it starts in the womb, or in the miserable upbringing of the mother. It was finally clear to me in any case that time in Richard’s company was more toxic than exposure to any of the noxious chemicals we handled and for the sake of my own health I should get out, despite the money he paid to keep me near and under his control.

I brought up the taboo topic of novel-writing with El-Hadi one day about five minutes after Richard drove off to whatever he did on his own for half of every working day…  but he came back. He came back for the wallet he’d left in the jacket on top of the toolbox. He caught me standing on the top of my step ladder, scrubbing the ceiling with trisodium phosphate and discussing the problem of particularizing character in the context of a first-person narrative; how to separate the narrator’s voice from both the writer’s and the reader’s? Azzedine stood at the foot of the ladder with his chin in his hand, looking up. Even Azzedine jumped a little when Richard shouted at me.

“Hey! Don’t we have an agreement that you keep your mouth shut and paint shit? Nobody wants to listen to your wannabe crap!”

“Calm down.”

“Calm down shit!”

I climbed down off the ladder. “Forget it, Richard” I said. “It’s over. I quit.”

“Fine. Get the fuck out of here.”

“Fine,” I said, wiping my hands.

“Excuse me for interrupting, my friends,” said Azzedine, with his mellifluous voice and his unreadable smile. He nodded at me. “John and I were having a conversation that I would very much like to finish.”

“But you heard him, Mr. El-Hadi: the damn fool just quit!”

“Perhaps you can send me a bill for work completed, yes?” Azzedine turned to me. “Can you finish it on your own, John?”

I shrugged, then nodded. Richard turned red. He put his hands on his hips. “We agreed on a price.”

Azzedine’s smile took on extra depths as he made a very compact little voila gesture, saying, “Ah, but we have signed no contract, sir, correct?”

Richard laughed as though he enjoyed being out-maneuvered.

3.

It was sometime after I’d watched the blind artist spray, with meticulous care, the fourth brown blob on an otherwise immaculate building that he lost me… he must have slipped into a doorway or up a sidestreet while I was watching an unreachably pretty girl walk by. Ahead of me stood the massive overhead girderwork of the overground link of the U-Bahn system at Eberswalderstrasse, an old green hooded train bridge straddling a complicated five-way intersection thronged with cars and walkers. To get to the other side of the U-Bahn station I had to cross under it and against three traffic lights in a crowd of people. It felt like a group activity: a sight-seer’s hike or school kids on a class outing… five minutes of camaraderie with people I’d never seen before and would, for the most part, never see again. I imagined the crowd holding hands, two by two. A big girl to my immediate right, dark-haired and sweet-faced and over-dressed in a puffy orange jacket, must have thought the same thing: she seemed so amused by it all when we made eye contact. Under normal circumstances I wouldn’t have considered her even remotely attractive, but loneliness in a foreign city can be a powerful aphrodisiac.

“Welcome to the International Society of Pedestrians Crossing Schönhauser Allee,” she said, with a pronouncedly Philadelphian accent. She walked as though weighed down by an invisible, book-laden backpack. I guessed her age at 29-ish.

“Membership is free, I take it.”

“All you need to join are your feet.”

“And you’re the president.”

“No, sir, I’m the ombudsman.”

“I always loved that word.”

“Me too. Ombudsman, stipend, satyr, druse… “

“Druse?”

“An incrustation of small crystals on the surface of a rock or mineral.”

“Aha.”

She pressed her hands together in a mockery of prayer. “I’ve been waiting for years for someone to ask me the definition of that word.”

We all completed the complicated task of crossing under and to the other side of the vast green riveted structure. The group was dispersing. “Now what?”

“Ask me the definition of drupaceous.”

“Okay.”

“Resembling or related to a drupe.”

There was a cafe in the shadow of the U-Bahn station and we sat there with cake and coffee while the weather, miraculously, cleared up. Her name was Amanda Nye and she’d been in Berlin for five years.

“Came as a German language student but defected when I figured out I don’t like speaking German.”

“If you don’t like speaking German, why stay in Germany at all?”

“Because Germans don’t like speaking German either. It’s easy to get by with your English and a native vocab of about twenty six words. Besides, Berlin is the least German city in Germany. I just pretend it’s South East London in an alternative universe where the Nazis won the war. How old are you?”

“Forty two.”

“Okay. That’s not so old.”

“Thanks.”

“Wanna come watch porno at my place? It’s not far from here. No big dogs or roommates.”

Funny girl. I paid for our coffees and half-eaten cakes and followed Amanda out the door of the cafe in time for a lurid sunset. All of the clouds had been pushed to the westernmost corner of the sky like damp kindling. She produced a wafer-thin camera and aimed it over my head and clicked without looking, paying attention to me instead. She said,

“Personal anecdote. I thought I was Dianne Arbus when I was nine years old. I had an old Kodak Instamatic and I photographed the ugliest people in my neighborhood. Fat kids, acne cases, crones with dowager’s hump, shrinking violets with faint mustaches… you name it. I kept developing these rolls of film and getting them back and they looked nothing like Dianne Arbus. You know: haunted, shunned and auguring extinction? Nothing at all like that. Nothing like I had hoped to capture.”

“Did you try using black and white film?”

“That was my next step. My uncle Dan drove to a flea market and got me a banged up old Pentax for twenty bucks. So back I went to re-photograph every freak and outcast in my neighborhood, and then I did my church and my grammar school too. The custodial staff at school was a god-send. They were Existential super-models. Wet eyes and stubble. I shot rolls and rolls of black and white 35 millimeter film and spent all my savings… every single Kennedy Half in my piggy bank… getting those damn rolls developed. And guess what?”

“You still weren’t Dianne Arbus.”

She pantomimed tearing her hair out. “I still wasn’t Dianne Arbus. It was very frustrating to a nine year old girl who’d come that close to knowing what she was going to spend the rest of her life doing.”

“You tacked every print to the bedroom wall and stared for hours trying to grasp the difference. While all the other kids were playing you were staring intensely with the curtains drawn. You took a magnifying glass and studied gray, blurry, low-contrast images down to the finest molecular grain to locate whatever it was that wasn’t quite there. You studied between the grains. You ran your fingers over the photos in the dark… “

“I sure did. And guess what?”

“Eureka?”

“I came to a profound conclusion. See, all my freaks were… smiling… smiling. In every single photo I’d taken. Listen, it’s hard to look like a freak and an outcast when you’re smiling. Arbus was a fraud. Those famously eerie and depressing pictures of hers would have looked exactly the same no matter who she was photographing… as long as she put ‘em in a bad enough mood first!”

I laughed, but it was also some kind of genuine insight. Funny girl; smart girl. But still not any version of pretty.

“See, artists, first and foremost… if they’re any ‘good’… ” She simulated quotation marks with her fingers, seeming to quote her own head. “… they’re con men. Con Artists. It’s all a scam. Because of that precocious little revelation, I lost the desire to be an artist very very young… but I couldn’t find anything else to replace it. Some epiphanies suck.” She sighed. Or ’sighed’.

I thought: I should study her face the way she studied those photographs and get to the bottom of this ‘attractiveness’ thing. Was there no hope for her? We walked in silence for half a block until she perked up and skipped ahead and turned, walking backwards to face me and ask, “So, I guess being forty two and all means you already know what you became when you grew up, huh.”

“Well, yeah. ‘What’ and ‘how’ are pretty young questions. ‘Why’ is the one I’m dealing with now.”

Still walking backwards she held the camera out at me like it was I.D.. “Ask an oblique question and get an oblique answer, I guess. Smile?”

“Best I can do is leer.”

She stopped abruptly and I bumped into her, making us both laugh while also confirming my suspicion that she was flat-chested. Her bones were like a heavy old iron bedframe.

“So here’s my building and so forth.”

“Am I coming in?”

“Suit yourself.”

She shouldered a massive door and we passed through a dark hallway, one wall of which was a bank of letterboxes, and across a barren courtyard the most interesting feature of which was the wire-fenced enclosure for two wheeled dumpsters and three barrels for various colors of recyclable glass. Meaning beer bottles. She lived in the rearmost wing of the building, what the Germans call the hinterhof, and up five flights of stairs. Her voice and our footsteps echoed in the otherwise deathly quiet stairwell.

“I arrived in Berlin about two weeks after the attack on the Twin Towers, right? First thing I noticed was the airport… I flew out of Newark… the airport was empty. No lines, no waiting. I got upgraded to First Class and I got all kinds of free drinks. It was like everyone was feeling sorry for me. Then I land in Berlin and the Germans… you never saw Germans acting so compassionate. It freaked me out. I saw an ad in the paper and came to look at this flat… I was staying in a youth hostel up the road a ways… and the lady practically begged me to take it. Didn’t ask about my financial status or anything. All she needed was to hear that I was American. I was like a celebrity… I was living, breathing history and she wanted to be a part of it, and to show her solidarity with the American way of life.”

We were huffing and puffing as we trudged ever upwards.

“She told me she was leaving for Jamaica… a friend wanted her to run a bed and breakfast there… she proposed I sublet until she returned in March and then we’d talk about it. Fully furnished, washing machine, the works. Reasonable rent… all the utilities bills are deducted automatically from her bank account. All I have to do is deposit money in her account before the fifth of every month, right? She says I’ll call in a week in case you have any questions. She doesn’t leave a number or an address she can be reached at but I figure nothing that bad can happen in a week… if the toilet backs up I’ll bang on a neighbor’s door or something.”

We stood on the landing in front of the door while she dug in her puffy orange jacket for the keys. We were both winded and panted heavily while smiling at each other like idiots. She said,

“But she didn’t call in a week. Or in three weeks. Or, like, ever. It’s been five years and I haven’t heard a word.” She unlocked the door and pushed it open and gestured that I should enter first.

It was an airless flat with hardwood floors and overstuffed, maiden-aunt furniture. The distant odor of rotten cherries. Every flat horizontal surface… windowsill, counter-top, book shelf, banquette and faux mantelpiece… was covered with obsessive-compulsive kitsch. Porcelain figurines, miniature spoons, plasticine cartoon characters, antique thimbles, keys, ink pens, buttons and egg cups and so on. The living room opened, theoretically, onto a balcony but the double doors were blocked by a small table supporting a very large vintage radio and had a sealed look about them. There was a large box or trunk on the balcony, exposed to the elements. To the right of the table supporting the radio, on the floor, was a television on top of a VCR angled to face the overstuffed couch that Amanda gestured with mock grandiosity that I should sit on.

“Do you know what a vollmacht is?”

“A what?”

“Okay, it’s like this signed declaration authorizing you to pick up a parcel at the post office on the signatory’s behalf, for example. Okay. She left one for me on the kitchen table figuring there’d be packages for her from time to time.”

To the right of the television were two old steamer trunks which, unlike all the old steamer trunks I’d ever seen, had obviously once belonged to the profoundly wealthy, with ornately bracketed corners and complex locking mechanisms. The larger of the two stood on end, on metal wheels, and the one nearest the television lay on its bottom face, handle facing us. She opened this one and removed a video cassette and shoved it into the mouth of the VCR.

“Just about every two months I get a little green notification in the mail that the mailman has supposedly attempted to deliver a parcel… which is a lie, he’s just too lazy to come up the stairs and he assumes people will be at work during the day… and so here’s me in a taxi to fetch a package that isn’t even mine because it’s way too heavy to use my bike.”

She aimed a remote control at the television.

“About a year ago I figured, what the hell? So I started opening the parcels.”

A sinister-looking copyright warning in Cyrillic lettering appeared on the screen.

“It’s all porno. Hundreds of videocassettes of porno porno and more porno. Every kind of porno known to man, no pun intended. This trunk here is full of them but these are only the ones I’ve gotten to… the bedroom is stacked to the ceiling with ‘em. Hey, what can I say, I’m on a tight budget… I can’t afford to go to the movies, pay for cable, or rent something from the videothek, so… you know. This is my entertainment. I can see you’re surprised. Some of them are actually pretty good and even clever in a theory of film kind of way but, well, duh, most of them are amateurish and evil but they’re all fascinating. I’m becoming kind of an expert. The neighbors must be pretty acclimatized to the moaning by now… moanin’ noon and night… moanin’ and groanin’ and horrible horrible music and so forth. I tried watching with the sound off a few times but a soundless porno is like a silent martial arts film and it was definitely missing a dimension.”

“So, you weren’t kidding about the porno.”

She shook her head just once and tossed her jacket on a chair near the kitchen door. “I wasn’t kidding about the porno.”

She plopped down beside me on the couch. “I’m not an expert on the terminology, okay, because I never studied it in school, so give me a break, but I’ve managed to break the films down into three basic categories: mind control, rape, and torture. The mind control ones are the easiest to watch. It goes like this. Some guy exchanges a chatty kind of dialogue with some chick with boobs out to here… I mean, I assume it’s chatty from the general sound of it… and within a few minutes she’s got his thingy-do in her mouth and they’re off an running. Some of the guys look fit enough and sometimes even slightly, weirdly cute… in a sideburned way… but most of them are bushy, freckled pot-bellied beasts so that’s the mind control aspect. It’s a certain kind of male fantasy for a certain kind of male… usually the gentler ones… that they can have sex with a mind-bogglingly attractive woman by merely coming up with the correct combination of words, all things being equal. I love it. But this one we’re about to see is from a rape batch, I’m pretty sure. Yeah, it’s definitely going to be rape. So, like, fasten your seat belt… “

A tiny, black-haired, Middle Eastern type with dirigible breasts climbs out of a limousine as it comes to rest on a circular driveway. She’s done up in a way we’re meant to accept as wealthy: a low-cut black micro-dress and gaudy jewelry. Her hair hangs down as far as her thighs and she is pretty in a hard bronze way, with khol-rimmed eyes and cheekbones of almost Mongol severity. She lets herself into a pillared house we accept as a mansion. Cut: to two gangly gentlemen (resembling nothing so much as retired second-string basketball players) dressed in black leather and berets, ransacking the master bedroom. Cut: to the ‘wealthy’ beauty ascending her spiral staircase, a half-finished bottle of champagne in one hand and her stiletto heels dangling by their straps from the other.

I cleared my throat and scratched my forehead and said, “Is this some sort of test, Amanda?”

“Um, you could think of it as a lie detector test in a way, yeah.” She giggled. Or ‘giggled’. I didn’t giggle back. What if I suffered a terribly obvious erection while these two black gentlemen beat and raped the Persian? What would that say about me and how could I deny the verdict? Amanda had mercy and flicked the remote and the picture froze with the blacks crouched on the obscure side of the bedroom door. It was a striking image. Figures on an urn. “Want some tea?”

“I’m not sure.”

“You think I’m weird now.”

I shrugged.

“I’m not weird. I’m just acclimatized to Germans. You’re the first American I’ve ever had up here. I’ve forgotten certain standards of normal.You’re new in Berlin, okay, so you don’t know it yet but the cultural distance between, like, Germany and America isn’t that much smaller than the one between, say, Iceland and Iran. You’ll see what I mean.”

4.

El-Hadi is in a quandry about his book. If he leaves the thirteenth chapter, Love is Blind, untouched, there’s a good chance that Cora (with her hairy privates; such a contrast to her polished nails) will renege on her promise to get the manuscript to Mr. X, the powerful, mysterious publisher she might also be screwing on the side. Azzedine doesn’t care who else she’s screwing beyond her husband; it’s good for his book if she sleeps with this man. He will encourage her to if she hasn’t already. He will even give her pointers. He wants to be a published American writer.

He realizes that he’s suffering the kind of cultural problem… the problem of truth… he’d expected on first arriving in his adopted country but until now naively believed he’d escaped. An illusion, of course. Has a man who hasn’t died young or even in middle-age escaped death? He’d expected the Americans to seem like Martians to him, and to treat him as though he himself were from the Moon, but his first weeks in New York had been a perfect dream of endless, seamless welcome. It was only now, all these years later, that he saw that the wall he’d expected to walk into had all this time been behind him. He was free to move forward in America but not to turn back. Not even to look back. Love is Blind, the tale of the blind womanizer… this looked too far back to Algeria. Cora was offended by the animal truth in his beautiful story and rightly saw in the center of the soul of the blind womanizer, as Azzedine had crafted him, Azzedine’s own eye winking back at her. The cold eye of a proper deity. That is art; that is truth. That is the heart of his book.

The evening of the day of Cora’s infuriating suggestion that he mutilate this creation of his; that he castrate it; Azzedine found himself alone with his young mistress, Noa, in the classroom he occupied on weekends at the community arts center. It was not a serious class and Azzedine was not paid a ’serious’ fee for teaching it but he felt there was a serious dialogue about literature being held under all the small talk, hot air, topical blather, chit chat, empty banter and other forms of static the class was good for generating. The serious dialogue about literature was going on surreptitiously between his mistress and himself and their lovemaking was the distilled conversation in its arcane form. El-Hadi could just as well have quit the futile attempt to open these money-mad materialists up to the spirituality of a pure sentence and held the discussion in bed alone with Noa. There was something valuable in the mundane presence of the others, though. He couldn’t decide if it was as contrast or padding, or, even, protection, that the others served to magnify his pleasure in having Noa. Of seeing her amongst them like the high priestess to El-Hadi their minor god. He chuckled at this thought. But he felt it had truth.

The last lingering student… a housewife whose weekly ration of creativity was wasted in the selection of the garish hats she affected every Saturday in class… finally left them alone together. He sat for a good long time on the edge of his desk, trouser leg dangling from the desk’s corner and shining black Brogan swinging to the buzz of the overhead fluorescents with a boy’s indolence, and he luxuriated in their ability to stretch a purposeless moment. She sat at her student desk with skinny arms folded over that exquisite sparrow’s chest of hers (the violet welts of her breasts) and rolled her blue eyes around the room, smirking. Her sandy-blonde hair was short and boyishly cut and added to the aura of middle class mischief he associated with her dungarees and sandals and untucked shirt. Like that luminous gamine from Peyton Place. A woman like that… to get the full benefit of her… one makes love as one did as a boy, with a boy… that pungency under the tented bedsheet.

“Why were you so late today?”

“The truth would be indelicate, honey.”

She gave Azzedine a certain look and he turned away with embarrassment and said, “Aha. I see. Your strawberry days… “

With a perverse glee she said, “I’m unclean.”

It was a clear, mild twilight in the shallow bowl of the Wisselwallig Valley… the sky resembled an inverted parfait with its dulcet bands of orange and pink at the bottom and deep dark grape at top. The breezes were warm breath and Azzedine went without his suit jacket, draping it over one shoulder on the hook of his forefinger a la Sinatra, and Noa’s white shirt provocatively unbuttoned to the level of her heart. The community arts center was all glass and dark metal (though brilliantly lit), a modern structure set down upon the northernmost hill of Wisselwallig Park. They strolled down the grassy slope towards the parking lot holding hands. Holding her hand in public produced in him the kind of prideful frisson you’d expect in a man who’d overcome a phobia. They could hear a basketball smacking the concrete on the court on the other side of the lot in which El-Hadi’s car stood alone. Floodlights blazed to reveal the disconcerting delay between the dribbled ball and the sound of it while gangling Negroes and a solitary paleface chased it around the court. Azzedine brought up the topic of Cora.

Noa was shaking her head. “What do you see in that wrinkled old bag, anyway?”

“Without the other women in my life I would rely too much on you, I think, Noa,” El-Hadi joked. But it was also true: keeping several women was insurance against any one woman taking over. Especially a young woman. With her untapped dowry of as-yet-unleashed cruelties. “Otherwise one upsets the balance, wouldn’t you agree?”

“I agree in principle but why her?”

He touched two fingers to his lips and frowned, one of the gestures she found most attractive in him. He spoke as though repeating sentences that were being whispered to him. “She’s convenient. I always know where her husband is. She’s grateful for the attention. And I must also admit that I like the fact that her husband is an academic Jew. You know… it’s the sibling rivalry of the Middle East, still sleeping in my Westernized bones. It wakes up in me when I see his wife naked, you see.” He laughed. “The aura of scholarly refinement I glimpse reflected in his wife’s neglected body inflames me.”

She said, “Jews are funny. They call themselves ‘Jews’. Isn’t that funny?”

He put a hand on her shoulder, certain that no one was watching. “I find the word ‘Caucasian’ rather more amusing, to be honest.”

“I’d tell that Cora Simon creature to screw off with her suggestions, if you ask me. Since when did she become Maxwell Perkins?”

“But I very much want this book to find a home in America, Noa. Until I’m published in this country, what am I? What’s my purpose? I’m living as a man of the past and I find that intolerable. Sometimes one must hang a man to keep him from harming himself, so to speak. Is Cora ignorant of art? We could say so. But there are politics… strategies… “

“These are all rather arch ways of saying ’sell out’ if you want my opinion.”

“I do.”

“You like Cora because she’s had three kids and her box is capacious enough to accomodate that massive bronze thingy-do of yours. And you like me because I’m smart like a boy.”

“As I’ve already told you.”

“And I let you screw me like a boy, too.”

El-Hadi offered a courtly gesture of assent.

“Promise you’re not a queer?”

“A queer is a man pretending to be a woman. Or longing to be a woman. I am a man inside and out. I was a man already at seven.” He pretended to pretend to make a muscle of his right arm like Charles Atlas. “You could ask my father. There are two of everything on this planet and a time for everything… a tool for every job, so to speak. When I take pleasure from a male’s body it’s a matter of power and utility. Do you understand what I mean? The exchange is between master and servant. Not between two bearded dreamers in pink.”

“Is it this way between us, too? Master and servant?”

“Teacher and pupil, I should say.”

“With the twist being that I’m the teacher,” she said, skipping ahead of him and walking backwards to face him as they walked.

“Exactly,” nodded El-Hadi.

“Exactly!” shrieked Noa, and she turned and ran ahead to his car. Just watching her tired him out, and he wondered if he himself had ever in this life run. She was swift and awkward like a child; her limbs seemed to fly from her torso in an ecstasy of flight and reassemble at her destination. But when she reached his car in her game of tag she seemed to recoil from it. She cupped her hands to her mouth and called back to him, “Hey, Rudolph Valentino!”

“Hey Jean Seberg!” he responded, impulsively, feeling very foolish… feeling light-headed. Feeling for half-a-second drugged. If this was his attempt to participate in the exuberance of the era it had taught him, instantaneously, that he couldn’t. Which was a relief. He was confused, however, to see Noa examining his dear old second-hand convertible, sneaking around it in the twilight. Her head appeared above the pale ragtop and she waved.

“You’re not going to like this!”

“What?” he shouted. Shouting gave him a headache. His normal tone was a whisper.

“You’ll see when you get here!” she shouted back.

After my confusing encounter with Amanda Nye earlier in the day I realized that the character of Noa needed re-writing, so I went back to the passage in which I had first attacked the problem of her with any depth and made her less grimly enigmatic and more sexual… less of a sphinx and more Puckish. Unpredictably young. After Amanda Nye it struck me that I couldn’t allow ‘god’ to write his characters with more verve than I did and that any novelist half-worth the term is better than ‘god’ (or god) at just about everything that matters. The novelist learns from god’s mistakes. Literature is the imposition of order and meaning on god’s untidy experiment. The passage I was re-wiring was only about half-way through the 500 or so pages (single-spaced, narrow margins, tiny font) I already had. Meaning massive revisions for the remainder.

My method is to write it out by hand in a notebook and type out the ‘completed’ chapters. Every time I change any passage anywhere (other than at the very end of the text ) it means a lot of work. But it seems to me that getting it right is a question of life and death. Getting it wrong would leave me with nothing to show for my time on the planet. A credo, if you will.

If Amanda Nye can bring a strange man, a rootless traveler (I might easily be a killer who has fled America to elude prosecution) home to watch hardcore porno with her, what is Noa Reese, twenty years old and beautiful in that magical year of 1968, capable of? I had to explore that within the themes of the book I had already developed. I had to let Noa flower without running amok. But I realized that Noa was a much more important character than I first assumed, and that Azzedine’s ex-wife Ruth was less so. Much of the writer’s block that marooned me on the 500th page was due to the strategic mistake of relying on Ruth’s character to catalyze plot developments. Ruth was too passive, content, even-tempered and willing to give. The dangerous energy of the re-configured Noa (capable, even, of violence) was my solution.

Noa wagged her finger. “Don’t touch.”

She grabbed Azzedine’s shirt sleeve as he reached for the driver-side door handle. He looked at her as though she were being bothersome and shoved her and reached for the door again. She shoved him back and said, “Christ, are you blind? Can’t you see? Somebody crapped on it.”

She pointed at swirls of what at first appeared to be ruddy rich mud on the driver-side door and on the handle and across the windshield in greasy figure eights. A thick-limbed stickman sketched in shit on the ragtop like a Roualt or a Klee. Where the tarry mud had smeared on thin it was dried and cracking but in the thicker, slopped-on gouts it oozed and glistened and fallen clumps piled under the chassis. It was not dog shit; there were mosaics of undigested food exposed in the smear. The dulled colors of a cheap cafeteria lunch. El-Hadi stood back from his car with a disgust so intense it looked to Noa, who couldn’t help laughing, like terror.

“The Jew did this… “ he said, surprised to hear his father’s quaking voice. Surprised most of all that the voice had survived the purifying crossing to America. Something chilling occurred to him as he hugged himself and headed for the floodlights of the basketball court, Noa running after him, seeking the possibility of a witnesses among those colored boys with their ball. Something very odd.

Chapter Four in The Bomb Collector… the chapter called A Precaution Against the Attentions of Jealous Gods… didn’t something similar to this happen in chapter four of his book? Someone smears shit with his bare hands on a Nigerian art dealer’s front door and the Nigerian can’t bear the idea of ever setting foot in the defiled house again. And all the precious art in the house… the paintings, drawings, illuminated manuscripts and fetish figures he’s collected from Africa and Mediterranean Europe for twenty five years… he decides to destroy it all along with the house. He packs the perimeter of the building with dry brush and sets fire to it and watches the flames twist and rise and roar in an ecstasy of devils without realizing that the girl of his dreams is upstairs in bed waiting for him, a gift from his incorrigible brother.

5.

I tried to sleep but I couldn’t, in no small part because I still didn’t have a bed. Buying one was the top of my list for the next day’s activities, but the resolution to do so didn’t much help at 2 in the morning as I lay on the rubberized canvas hide of the burst inflateable and a few layers of towels and sweaters under that for padding. I couldn’t sleep but I was exhausted. Not from the day’s walk but the night’s writing. Was it really an art or a compulsion? The more I wrote the less I cared about the answer to that question… which case being, in and of itself, of course, the answer.

My flat… the building… was quiet except for the sputters and hum of the student-sized refrigerator in the little kitchen. I began to imagine the most ancient former tenants of the place, which is the oldest building in the neighborhood: built at the end of the nineteenth century. Grim German ghosts. Because the games the mind plays with itself are usually uncontrollable, I had a vivid fantasy of a young peasant (shapeless hat; rope belt) hanging himself from a beam (now gone) in the living room where I was trying to sleep… kicking and swinging in front of the high window with its view of the park. When someone tapped on the window I nearly jumped out of my skin.

I opened the window and looked down and saw that it was Amanda Nye, standing on her tiptoes in a faint drizzle on the sidewalk. I put on my pants and shoes and let her into the building. “It’s 4 in the morning,” I whispered.

“It’s the human timepiece!” she said in a middle-of-the-day voice. There was a bike in the hallway, chained to the ballustrade at the bottom of the staircase. “Is this your bike? We should ride to Wannsee before the weather gets too cold.”

“It’s not my bike.” I ushered her into the flat. I had to admit to myself that I was grateful for the company after the vivid suicide reverie of a few minutes prior. She peered into the kitchen, then turned left and I followed her into my living room, switching on the light as I entered. She was wearing her orange jacket and a dark beret and beadlets of rain were sparkling on her face. She was taller than me in very high heels.

She said, “I figured you could use some company,” and from the look on her face I couldn’t tell if she was making a guilty joke or congratulating herself on her amazing generosity. She looked around the room and her face fell. “No bed.”

“No nothing,” I added. I nearly mentioned the fact that I had to sit on the toilet just to write in my notebook but I didn’t want her to know I was writing.

“You’re a real little Abelard, aren’t you?”

“A what?”

“You don’t know the story of Abelard and what’s-her-name? Heloise?”

“No, and at the risk of sounding like a bad host, I don’t really care to, either.”

“Suit yourself.”

She patted my cheek and handed me her jacket. I hung it on the door handle. She fossicked around in her backpack and said, “Look, I brought some candles. And some absolutely exquisite hot cocoa. Ohhh, and some embarrassingly old digestive biscuits from the UK.” She handed me each item after announcing it.

“I don’t have a pot to make the cocoa in.”

“This is where my sheer genius comes in handy.” She handed me a small electric tea kettle and two tin cups.

She removed her heels and we sat on the floor in the candle-lit kitchen using mounds of my clothing, wrapped up in sweatshirts, as pillows. I took note of the fact that either the candles flattered her or she was wearing a cleverly subtle layer of makeup or that a combination of the hour, the circumstance and general loneliness was eroding my faculties of discrimination: her lips seemed plumper, her eyes rounder and the bridge of her nose not quite so broad. Also, the soft white sweater she had on seemed to me to be an order of magnitude bustier than I remembered her being. I wondered what kind of inventory she was performing on me, meanwhile. I could only hope I wasn’t being judged solely by the lights of the content of my character, because that would mean I was a shit.

“You must be the only person in Berlin who speaks less German than I do.” She gave me a thumbs-up. “What nobody can seem to get through their thick skulls is that I like not being able to speak the language… my isolation is a luxury, man, it’s precious to me. Most writers, like, pay for solitude like this.” She peered at me from under the rim of her beret as she sipped her cocoa.

“You’re a writer?”

“Didn’t I tell you? Oh my. That’s why I came to Berlin, to write my second book.”

“I thought you came to take language lessons.”

“That too.” She smiled and carefully placed her cup beside the electric kettle. “I’ve had two novels published and one twee little book of short stories. It’s practically an oeuvre, dah-ling. Surprised?”

“You said you were disillusioned with art at a young age, though, yes?”

“Writing isn’t an art, it’s an addiction, silly boy.”

I was glad that I hadn’t mentioned The Bomb Collector; how foolish would that have made me look? Strutting dilettante with his chest puffed out. The ghost of Richard, pointing and laughing. When and if she does ask what I ‘do’, I decided, my answer will be simple: housepainter.

“It’s cozy in here,” she said, “even without the furniture. You’re lucky… my flat gives me the creeps. Too many ghosts.”

“Doesn’t anyone ever come there looking for the former tenant?”

“No… I don’t think she knew very many people, poor girl. She was here illegally, you know… even the government didn’t know. Iranian. Persian if you want to get poetic and towel-head if you want to exercise your freedom of speech. Two heads worth of hair on her head… best thing about Iran has got to be all that hair in that country. The women have hairy arms and faint mustaches and the boys are capable of beards at seven. She was a pretty little thing, though. I suppose she’s packed in a box in an abandoned building in Haiti by now,” she giggled. “Not to be morbid. Jamaica, I mean,” she corrected herself. “How long do you think you’ll stay in Berlin?”

She sat with her back against the kitchen wall, hugging her knees. She seemed less larger-than-life than before… nicely so. It occurred to me in any case that I had fucked less likeable women and even fallen in love with ones who were not nearly as bright. It also struck me that ‘personality’ is almost always a defense mechanism; a diversion. Wit, charm, gregarious vitality: they’re all a performance. The core being is a mysterious bundle of thoughts and sensations much closer to animal than we care to admit… it may well be that the ‘human’ aspect exists solely in the performance… the human bit is an avatar we project to interact with other avatars. The more her performance faded (out of sheer exhaustion), the more I liked her.

“I mean,” she yawned, resting her chin on her knees and closing her eyes, “do you even like Berlin so far, or are you already kicking yourself for coming here?”

I yawned back and didn’t bother answering. I just stared, determined to make her do all the work.

She stood and crossed the kitchen towards the countertop, dragging her fingers through my hair along the way, and cradled her hand around each candle flame before blowing it out. Because it was dawn, however, the room was no darker after than it had been before, and I watched her undress.

“Voyeur,” said Amanda.

6.

It rained all day, the next day (or, that is, later the same day), and I found myself under a cheap umbrella on Schönhauser Allee, looking for a mattress store. I hadn’t told Amanda about my plan to go mattress shopping simply because I hadn’t wanted the activity to take on symbolic signifigance; a tacky conjugal milestone; I just wanted to make a basic purchase. After an adventurous few hours on the makeshift campsite of my livingroom floor, we’d separated drowsily at the front door of my building with a plan to meet later for dinner. I ended up wandering for quite a while in a light drizzle after it became obvious that most shops weren’t open before ten or eleven a.m.. I window-shopped a sex boutique with a row of huge black topologically accurate dildoes on display like biblical serpents. Next door was a travel agent advertizing discount flights to Johannesburg.

There’s a wretched majesty to the city in the rain that fulfills its romantic image. I’ve seen Berlin on a bright hot summer day and there’s something sad about it under those conditions… ugly and vulnerable like an old queen kicked out at closing time and caught staggering home in a blast of work-a-day sunshine. Berlin is properly a city of mists and fogs and water-stained stone. Buildings rarely burn here, but they go black with time. To stand near one of these black edifices is to feel the cold serenity of the utterly hopeless.

When it started raining so hard that drops were bursting through the fabric of the umbrella in a fine spray, I stepped off the street into a cafe packed with refugees from the sudden downpour. Most of the refugees were standing with styrofoam cups of coffee at the glass wall of the cafe, watching the rain, waiting for a break in it, so there were several free tables. I picked one near the back, propped my drenched umbrella against the wall and dug a little notepad out of the capacious side-pocket of my raincoat. I always carry a notepad and pencil, never knowing when I’ll have the opportunity to write.

I flipped open the notebook, stared at the blank page on the table, licked my pencil and wrote: She is lying. Then I looked at what I’d written and wondered what I meant by it.

Azzedine El-Hadi once made a remark to me that was so powerful that I seriously considered either framing it or making a tattoo of it. We were using a chart to replace the hundreds of framed photos (of every size and style of framing) of beautiful women on the walls of his bedroom. The walls were freshly painted a lovely, subtle green called Statue Patina. I don’t remember what specific conversational thread led to this but he said:

“Women are liars and men are their lies.”

I went home after work that day and put the same line in the mouth of Azzedine’s dopplegänger in the untitled novel I’d just started (having scrapped the first attempt: a novel concerning the adventures of two house painters), inspired by our conversations. I was yet to have the book’s title as Azzedine was yet to pass it on to me (unawares) as the memory of his father’s favorite aphorism. The manuscript was thirty or forty pages of first draft at that stage and the few characters that populated it were stick figures who spoke like comic book characters and moved in a jerky, mechanical fashion.

Cora was standing in El-Hadi’s bathtub, one foot up on the bathtub’s rim, while El-Hadi sponged her reddening flesh. Rosewater. There was evidence of his attitude towards the female sex, she was thinking, in the vociferousness with which he soaps and scrubs my cunt. She sighed and said, “You can’t really agree with that, Azzedine. Tell me you can’t. Having a cunt doesn’t automatically make me a liar.” She usually pinned up her shoulder-length hair when he bathed her but she felt particularly exposed this time; shy about her old neck. My mother’s neck. Red as a raddish. As a lobster. El-Hadi said,

“Whether I agree with it or not is immaterial, Mrs. Simon. The saying was already old before America itself was only a dream! Who are we to quibble with its wisdom? Perhaps you take it too literally.” A hand-rolled cigarette batted up and down between his lips as he spoke and his right eye squinted against the smoke that rose into it. “Okay,” he said. He clapped. “Out.” He fetched a towel and patted her dry.

I looked up from the declarative sentence in my notebook. I saw that it had stopped raining, so I left the cafe without having ordered a thing, feeling as though I’d gotten away with something. The scrubbed air tingled on my face and the clouds had lifted to the level of the tree tops like a blur of ghostly kites. The ground was a dark mirror of stone and asphalt; cars drove on their reflections.

“Are you always so mind-bogglingly observant?”

I jumped. It was Amanda, laughing in my ear. I was walking at a good clip but she was right beside me, clopping along in her heels. “I was sitting right there in the Supreme Bean!”

“The what?”

She took my arm in hers. “Possibly the name of the cafe you just came out of, Captain Kirk?”

“When I was a kid we had a cat that was forced to wear a bell around its neck… “

“Droll. You walked right by me when you came in the cafe. You sat at a table in the back and wrote something in your notebook and just sat there staring at it in a trance for, like, fifteen minutes. Then you got up and left. What were you writing?”

“Nothing. List of things I need to buy today.”

“Do you mind if I look at it?” She reached in the pocket of my raincoat and fished out the notebook. It was a brand new notebook, so there was nothing else to find in it but what I’d just written. “She is lying. Who’s lying?”

“Not you, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“I wasn’t thinking that.”

“I disagree.”

“Okay. But only for as long as it took me to read, reflect on and be hurt by it.”

“Hey, aren’t we meeting for dinner tonight?”

“Hint taken. Well, here’s my bike, you silver-tongued devil.”

It was chained to what looked like a German No Parking sign. It was too beat up to require security measures more stringent than sticking a Free Bike sign to it. She unchained it, wiped the cracked vinyl rain-beaded seat with the arm of her orange jacket and swung a leg over. “Anyway, that’s what we do.”

“What?’

“Writers. That’s what we do. We lie. Fair warning. So bring a decent bottle of wine and your toothbrush tonight. Or feel free to use mine. You haven’t even bothered to ask me who I was sitting in the cafe with. Tootles.” She pedalled off, leaving me in a quandary as to whether or not I liked her.

It wasn’t even 11 a.m. yet but I was too tired to continue this quest for a mattress. I made my way home and collapsed on the pile I called a bed and dozed off until the construction workers’ lunchbreak was over. The building shook and I let loose with a primal scream of rage and frustration that no one could even hear. Or so I thought.

Five minutes later my doorbell was ringing. I heard it during a two-second gap in the roar of construction. I assumed it was Amanda and snatched the door open wearing nothing but my pants and was non-plussed by the apparition of ‘the little red-headed girl,’ standing with a tentative smile in my doorway. I find that clichés work best in the description of beauty: she was cat-eyed and breathtaking. With perfect posture and pearly-white teeth. She spoke with the faintest of German accents.

“Are you okay? You screamed. It sounded like you hurt yourself.” As wild and irrational as I felt I must look to her at that moment, she didn’t seem afraid. She extended her perfectly sculpted hand in greeting. “I’m your upstairs neighbor, Nico. I heard an American was moving in.”

I shook hands with her. “John.”

“John! John… what?”

“John just-John.”

“Hi John just-John. So I guess you’re okay, then?”

“Great. Except, you know… the noise… “

“Speaking of which.” She winked and lowered her voice and leaned near; the smell of her hair was tantalizing. “I heard you this morning. I thought you were watching a porno until I saw your girlfriend staggering out of the building… “

“Who? Oh! That’s not my girlfriend.”

“Well, I hope she’s not your daughter!”

“No, neither. You know. I don’t know. It’s Berlin, right?”

“Is it?”

“It’s not?”

“I’m a Christian, ” she beamed. Oh god. Well, the Christianity explained her boldness. Proselytizers are bold of a necessity, but I felt it was unfair for her to harbor an agenda like this and be so physically attractive. “Christians don’t do that. In Berlin or anywhere else.”

“Christians look like this?”

“You should see my little sister.”

“What do I get if I convert?”

“Unsurpassed peace and blessings everlasting.”

“Is that a euphemism?”

She wiggled her fingers in a bye-bye wave and turned towards the staircase. “You’re asking a virgin?”

“Have a nice day, Nico.”

“Same to you, John.”

And she ascended the staircase. What stuck with me was how she’d pronounced ‘unsurpassed,’ emphasizing the third and fourth syllables of the word. Like an Elizabethan. Her pale skin and orange hair and striking blue eyes supported this impression.

7.

At Amanda’s that evening I experimented with pretending that Amanda was Nico. Nico lighting a dozen candles around her living room, bustling back and forth from the kitchen in an apron. A kitsch apron embroidered with a German aphorism girdling Nico’s hips. The touchingly harried look of a woman trying to get the first meal just right… but not on Amanda’s face… on Nico’s. It was impossible, though, to imagine Nico demonstrating one of Amanda’s feats of strength: the trunk. She was using the steamer trunks for dinner tables and the one edge-up on its wheels had to be laid on its side with the other. She was grunting and groaning as she maneuvered it, so I jumped from the sofa to help. I was stunned to discover that the thing must have weighed as much as I do.

“It’s okay, I’ve got it.”

“Honey, the thing weighs a ton, let me… “

“Don’t be a male chauvinist pig, John-John… I said I’ve got it. Sit down, okay? You’re my guest. Sit fucking down and relax.” She lowered it carefully onto its side and let it fall the last inch or so with a flat-shaking thud. Her sleeves were rolled up and I saw the veins bulging in her forearms. I thought: I better never make this girl really mad.

She spread a white lace table cloth over each trunk and brought in two plates but no utensils. I was forbidden entry to the kitchen so when she went off to stir something or turn a flame down or whatever she was up to we communicated by shouting between the two rooms, which were separated by a short hallway. Both to make small talk, and to indulge in the surreptitious erotic delight of discussing Nico with Amanda, I said, “Turns out there’s a Christian living in my building. Right upstairs.”

“A Christian?” Amanda yelled, over the sound of chopping. “Is he a German?”

“She’s a German, yeah.”

“Germans can never really be Christians. They’re too pagan in the blood. They revert to their roots in times of great need or stress. I’d watch out for her. She’s probably horny as a stampede of cattle. Where do you stand on salt in your food?”

“No particular stance.”

She poked her head around the corner. “No issues with hypertension?”

“Not particularly.”

“Well, you know. Forty two and so forth.”

“I’m a healthy specimen.”

“So I’ve noticed.” She disappeared. When she came out of the kitchen again she was carrying a paperback. She said, “Dinner’ll be ready in twenty minutes, sir. By the way, in case you’re curious.” She handed me the book.

“The Passenger. By Amanda Nye, Harridan Press. Nice cover.”

“Thanks.”

The cover was a black and white period-type photo of a station platform. Couple of ‘colored’ porters in the background and a pale-skinned, black-haired female traveler in the foreground, looking a bit camp in a pinstriped, shoulder-padded, wide-lapelled business suit of the ’40s. The dame was glancing at her chunky, modern, steel-banded wristwatch, the anachronism (no pun intended) which falsified the image. Glancing at the watch with a look of concern. Was someone late for a rendezvouz? A suspect? A lover? I handed the book back.

“Oh no, please. Keep it.”

“Thanks. I’ll have a look later. Is it post modern?”

“Genre. Sub-genre. Lipstick-lesbian murder mystery.”

“There’s a market?”

“Large enough to keep me in Ramen Noodles.”

“I thought I recognized the smell of monosodium glutamate wafting from the kitchen.”

“Give that man a cigar! It’s the beef flavor packet, so your Riesling should go well with it.”

I tapped the female on the book cover. “Victim or sleuth?”

“Neither. The publisher’s girlfriend. Actually, this is true, I made the publisher a minor character in the book.”

“So it is post modern.”

“Isn’t everything?”

“Though nobody yet has managed to define the term to my satisfaction.”

“Well, it’s like the definition of pornography, isn’t it.”

“You know it when you see it?”

“You know it when you do it. Ooops! Gotta go check on Ramen.”

The mention of the word pornography reminded me of the fact that the table-cloth-covered steamer trunk I would be eating on was full of it. This gave me a funny little thrill. I’d be dining atop all those pumping, heaving, spasming body-parts. All those pink and brown gurgling holes. It was very nearly disgusting, like some new Japanese restaurant fad.

I agreed with Amanda’s assessment of her flat: it gave me the creeps. There was an aura of the taxidermied and shellacked about it that the candle light, with its twitching shadows and orangey wood-tones, exacerbated. But did this creepiness emanate from Amanda or the previous tenant or something inherit in the apartment? Could the previous tenant really be blamed for the Victorian attic ambience if Amanda had been living here for five years already?

I yelled, “Hey, I have an idea for a book you can write.” But she didn’t answer. I waited a good long time and called out, “Amanda?” and there was silence, though I heard the creaking of floorboards in other rooms in the apartment.

Just as I was deciding to go check on her she entered the room carrying a large silver serving tray, dressed in the style of an orthodox Muslim: from head to toe in a dark Burka, only her hands and eyes exposed. Her eyes were kohl-rimmed and the grim fabric of the Burka billowed and despite her attempt at being exotic or even seductive she was frightening. There was no trace… no remnant… nothing to indicate that within that macabre shroud there existed a human in any way known to me. She kneeled with the tray and set it on the edges between the two trunks and spooned dollops of hummus, tabouli, tahini, etc., on my plate. Her plate remained empty.

I said, “Amanda…”  But she cocked her Burka’d head with a perfectly alien movement and stared me down, a finger over the shroud where her lips would be.

I realized that in this role-playing fantasy, she couldn’t eat until after I was finished. I was very hungry and the food was delicious; she knelt beside me as I ate. The apartment was quiet as a crypt, which magnified the sound of my chewing and swallowing. She remained in character throughout, and I tried not to look at her, but it was impossible. There were no utensils; I just scooped and mopped with hunks of pita bread; and I’d stuff some in my mouth and glance over and there she’d be, eyes downcast, swaying almost imperceptibly as I ate. The horror of the Burka is the sinister magic of it… how the woman shrouded in it becomes all women and no woman, with less personality than a dog.

I ate quickly, finishing about half of the food, then leaned back from the plate and gestured that she should continue where I’d left off. She was reluctant until I moved entirely away from the ‘table’ and sat on the couch. She then crawled to the plate and balanced on her haunches, lifting the front flap of her cowl with one hand and stuffing the food in with the other, careful not to expose any of her own flesh in the process. There was a hypnotic rhythm to the mechanics of it and a dream-like blankness in her kohl-rimmed eyes which she fixed on me without acknowledging my presence. The eyes looked decorative, flat, painted-on… but it also struck me that they could be gazing on some bearded Imam of the 19th century for the absolute absence of recognition I saw in them.

Abruptly, she stopped shovelling it in and angled away from the plate for a still moment, eyes closed, and then she stood, with a rustle of fabric, and crossed to where I sat on the couch. Kneeling before me, pushing my legs apart, she fussed with my zipper. She reached in with thumb and forefinger and plucked it out deftly while lifting the front flap of her cowl. I only caught a glimpse of my swelling dick before it disappeared into her mouth under the shroud. Her head bobbed and I gripped at the couch, holding my breath while she nodded and gulped in prayer.

I closed my eyes and arched my back and pushed into the dark warmth. I made sounds… I said things… I’m not sure. If I hadn’t opened my eyes again before coming I wouldn’t have seen Amanda, in a bathrobe, walk into the room with that smirk of hers.

8.

I shoved the Burka away and jumped up and snatched at the door and stumbled down five flights two steps at a time in the dark, barely able to breathe. I ran across the black courtyard to the front of the building and shouldered through the heavy door afraid that they might follow me and I ran when I hit the sidewalk and the laughter I had heard or imagined I heard as I escaped from Amanda’s flat… the dirty laughter that followed me down the stairs as though the witch it came out of was flying down the stairs behind me… her laughter was smokey, Middle Eastern; the dusty throat of the Levant. Amanda wasn’t laughing but her friend in the Burka was. This is like a movie, I kept thinking. This is like a horror movie. I even considered, for a wild second, flagging down a cop car. Had I just been raped? If not, I’d been severely fucked with. I couldn’t tell if the chest pains were from the trauma or from running down five flights of stairs.

I vowed to myself that I’d never cross paths with Amanda Nye again, although, the further I got from her flat, the less frightened, the less angry, I became. I could see the creepy Zen of it… the decadent, artistic Choderlos de Laclos wit of it, even. Still, I had never been less than ambivalent about a relationship with Amanda, as interesting as she had proven herself to be, and this was the perfect excuse for a righteous exit. She couldn’t drench me in guilt or seek revenge over my breaking things off with her because by almost any system of reckoning, what she had done was ‘wrong’. I could well remember her saying, I’m not weird, I’m just acclimatized to Germans. I’ve forgotten certain standards of normal. Damn right. But it wasn’t as though she’d killed anyone. Knowing Ms. Nye, I realized, meant never knowing when the floor was about to drop out from under you. Some people might enjoy that.

Six blocks away from the scene of the crime I began to laugh. I laughed hard. More had already happened to me in my first few days in Berlin than in ten years of living in San Diego. I felt free, the sky was bruise-blue and moonlit and beaded with stellar ova; the air was a cool drink and Kastanien Allee was jumping. A Babel of music pumped out of every cafe, club, restaurant and idling car on both sides of the long long street and young people were everywhere, endearingly willing to dress up in loud fashions and prance across my path. I was glad I hadn’t come in the Burka’s mouth. I was glad I hadn’t wasted the day’s orgasm.

A skinny blonde came skipping out of an Indian bistro sing-songing something in German. Taking note of my incomprehension, she said, “Do you please have the extra money you can give me, sir?” She was late-teens, early twenties and dressed like a pirate, with leggings and tall boots and a red bandana tied over her ratty blonde shoulder-length hair. She smelled like hard candy and cigarettes. There was a spot high in the middle of her forehead that it had obviously been the bandana’s job, before slipping, to hide. “An Euro, perhaps?”

“Sure,” I said, and handed her a five. This appeared to impress her.

“You must be American,” she said. “Brits are as cheap like the Germans. Are all Americans so rich?”

“No, but we’re all fools.”

“I like fools!”

“Lucky you. I’m a one man ship of fools.”

“Hey, you talk like a book by Jack Kerouac, man. You must be, so, a Schriftsteller. I am correct?”

“What’s a Schriftsteller?”

She mimed writing. “You must be a psychic,” I said.

“For another five I am reading your palm.”

“I’ll give you ten to listen to me talk for forty minutes.”

She made a praying gesture with her hands. “Fifteen?”

“Deal.”

We walked arm-in-arm up Kastanien Allee, a forty two year old American and a nineteen year old waif of Central Europe. Being a nameless, faceless traveler, I was immune to shame or the pressure of public opinion, like a long-time member of the Milwaulkie chapter of the Kiwanis Club with his arm around a fifteen year old hooker in Saigon. I was still half-hard from the unfinished blow-job and rattled, still, by the prank. But I refused to remain creeped-out for the rest of the evening. I refused to let Amanda have the last laugh or dominate my thoughts by becoming a phobia. Let’s speak of things Amanda knows not of, I thought. I told the girl,

“I had an unhappy childhood. My parents divorced before I could even walk, and my father was nothing but an authoritarian voice on the telephone who would only make the special trip to where my mother and I lived if I had done something bad enough to deserve a spanking.”

“I soon figured out the relationship between misbehaving and seeing my father, so I misbehaved constantly. Those spankings were the high point of my week. I usually made sure to misbehave on the weekend so the spankings wouldn’t interfere with homework.”

“Meanwhile, my mother, my gentle mother, whom I’d loved obsessively as an infant, seemed less perfect as I grew older and went to school. She was not a bright woman… my father had married her for her looks and her ability in the kitchen and her natural genius was in her optimism and kindness. But I was a so-called gifted child… too smart to be happy, or to fit in anywhere… and I soon lost patience with the idiotic aphorisms and catch-phrases she faced life with. I was a cruel little tyrant of eight or nine the first time I told my poor sweet mother to shut up. What’s worse, rather than spank the shit out of me for that filthy impertinence, she obeyed me. Which had the effect, to make a long story short, of ruining my life.”

“I was accepted into an expensive private college, on a full scholarship, at the age of 15. The student body was equal parts whizz-kids and trust-fund brats and quite a few members of the faculty were bonafide geniuses and or masters of their discipline and taught classes that in some cases featured three pale students with large, pulsing craniums. It should have been exactly the kind of place I’d find myself in, but, instead, I spent my two years on campus staging elaborate pranks and fucking beautiful coeds from all over the world. I’d always wanted to write a book, I could write extremely well but only in spurts, but it had never occurred to me that writing could be a profession… something that people paid you to do. It never occurred to me that this private college was anything other than a symbol for everything I hated about people who’d been born having more than I did.”

“I quit in the middle of my sophomore year to follow a girl to California. I was still just barely seventeen. This was the late ’70s. I jumped into her Volkswagen minibus with a duffel bag full of my meagre possessions and that was that.”

“The thing I noticed real quick was that whereas in prep school and college, smart people were paid or otherwise motivated to listen to you, outside of college, the density of smart people not only dropped to something close to the vacuum of interstellar space, but, also, the dumb fucks you suddenly found yourself surrounded by… whether on the job or in your run-down apartment building or even on the streets… could not give less than half a blind monkey’s bent-dicked fuck about your theories, dreams, quips or observations. In fact, it soon becomes painfully clear that many dumb people are too dumb to know they’re dumb or that you, in contrast, are smart… they even, some of them, misinterpreting the eccentric behaviour of the intellectually gifted for stupidity, might take to calling you retard.”

“The moistly voluptuous Jewish American Princess I had run away from school with wised-up fairly quick and opted out of the situation by playing her trump card: blaming me. Daddy sent a friend of the family… a crewcut jock attending the school I’d bailed out of… to get her the fuck out of our hovel with a minimum of incident and drive her back to the family compound in Rhode Island. When I got home from my job on the loading dock that day, I saw them driving off, and when I entered the open door of the apartment I noticed that all the good furniture, all the booze, most of the records and all of the silverware… was gone. The only thing she left me… and this hurt… was the hand-painted book of poetry I’d written for her birthday. That she left in the empty refrigerator, strangely, and I’m still working out the symbolism there. Her family had staged an intervention and pried her easily out of a poverty cult of two, no deprogramming necessary. Have I mentioned already that it was her idea to quit school and move to California? Life, as we now know, is unfair.”

The girl I was walking with (who called herself ‘Motte’… German for Moth) took all of this in and said,”You must be lucky to write. I dream of this, or to make music.” She reached up and adjusted her bandana, self-conscious about her Third Eye. “To eat from what you create!”

She assumed, of course, that I was a published writer; that I earned my living from words. I could have taken her back to Amanda Nye’s place and introduced her, saying Now, this is a real writer, Moth; she has a book out and everything… unlike me. Instead, I acted the part for my little fan. To lie about being a published writer is to be closer to being a published writer than if one is honest about not being one, after all. I went into great detail about my book. If there’s one thing anyone who’s committed a year or two of his or her life to the founding and maintenance of a text knows, people with whom one can discuss the effort are far and few between. Songwriters have it easy: they ask for between three and five minutes of your time, on average. Painters even easier: usually, a glance will do it. But a writer… someone working on a novel… is truly a wretch, waiting for that rare patient angel with hours, days, weeks of attention to dedicate towards the reading and discussing of one’s goddamned creation.

The real Azzedine El-Hadi had been the only such listener in my life (while Richard was the perfect embodiment of the anti-listener); there would have been no The Bomb Collector (whatever degree of a shambles the manuscript is in at this moment) without our conversations. Rigorous conversations about aesthetics, language, vision, purpose, life. Everything. It was refreshing, in America, to have what Americans might consider a self-indulgence or a hobby treated by this cultured Algerian as a sacred duty imposed upon me by my sincere willingness to undertake it. Not that he had ever read the result, or even knew that I was working on a fabulated version of his life. He respected my serious desire to write and proved this respect by listening.

And now there was this nineteen year old runaway (I assumed she was a runaway), who’d listen to anything I cared to ramble about in exchange for a pathetic €15. She seemed smart enough; her English wasn’t bad; and, most importantly, she was at an age during which interest in Art is at its peak, if it is present at all. Not to mention the fact that €15 would probably feed her for three days. I only escaped feeling guilt about this exploitative arrangement by floating the mitigating (and experimental?) thought that at least I wasn’t expecting a blow job.

The first time El-Hadi was bold enough to go on a ‘date’ with Noa in public, he drove the precautionary distance from his conservative bedroom community in the Wisselwallig valley to Manhattan. If he couldn’t get away with it in Manhattan, there was nowhere in America that he could reasonably expect to. Noa considered her lover’s caution quaint (fatherly) at best and paranoid (grandmotherly) at worst, and El-Hadi was torn between wanting to have a pleasantly uneventful experience and hoping that his young mistress might learn a lesson about the dangers inherent in crossing certain lines, not only in America but around the world. Her assumption that she could go anywhere and do anything (the driving force behind the Peace Corps, no?) was her middle-class, White Anglo-Saxon Protestant birthright and El-Hadi resented and admired this birthright in equal measure. Noa Reese wouldn’t know the caliphate from a Caliban but she had a Mullah’s pig-headed arrogance.

The first part of the journey, El-Hadi kept the top up on his convertible, but ten miles along the Henry Hudson Parkway he pulled over into a scenic rest stop (Howard Johnson’s) and put the top down and they enjoyed the rest of the drive with the wind and the sun as fellow passengers. There was an AM radio in the car and Noa was in charge of it, so El-Hadi was treated to the cacophony of musical so-called ‘youth culture,’ which was owned, promoted, often created and sometimes even performed by middle-aged men. They had a good-natured argument about Paul Anka.

“He’s Lebanese.”

“No he’s not!”

“Oh, I’m afraid he is, my dear. His biggest pop hit is ‘Diana’, yes? You remember this song?”

“Yes I rememember that dusty old thing.”

“It was about a Lebanese girl named Diana Ayoub!” El-Hadi laughed with great relish. “He’s now married to the daughter of an Egyptian count! You are unaware the extent to which the Arab world is taking over, my dear! But not to worry, I’ll put in a good word for you!”

“It’s just music for squares, anyway. Who cares? I suppose the Jefferson Airplane are Arabs, too?”

“I would not be shocked by this! Although I rather suspect they are Jews.”

“Same thing.”

“In point of fact it is, in many cases, but don’t tell anyone I uttered such blasphemy.” He dragged a finger across his neck. “It is an unpopular opinion among the boys with the sharp knives.”

“And so they have found Manhattan?” asked Moth.

“They have found Manhattan.”

“They found a good place to park?”

“They found the best of all possible parking places.”

“Did they park in the sun or under a tree?”

I began to seriously reconsider the blow job option. I said, “Moth, can you really read my palm?”

“I have done it like my nine-to-five job since I am twelve. Everybody knows that Motte is the girl who reads palms like they are U-Bahn maps.” We were standing in front of the crowded entrance to a club/cafe called Rash wherein a live band was banging away on their laptops. It didn’t strike me as the most congenial atmosphere for tuning into the ether but Moth grabbed my right hand and held it up in the brilliant red glare of the neon RASH sign.

9.

As Noa and El-Hadi waited at the bus stop for the number 6a (because his car, smeared with human feces, was now untouchable), he thought of the time they’d driven into Manhattan together, a little more than a year before. He’d had the same damp palms; the anxiety like sand in his lungs. What did he expect to happen on a city bus, a lynching? He’d never in his life ridden one. Noa was in charge on this mission and it was she who held the two adult fares of thirty five cents each (including the nickle charge for a transfer) as the bus rounded the corner onto the main street that ran along the southern edge of Wisselwallig Park. The bus was a gleaming cage, a mobile exhibit from the zoo. It wasn’t packed but it was far from empty and, after Noa dropped their money in the slot and the machine collated and digested the coins, making a sound like a tiny washing machine, El-Hadi followed her up the aisle, careful not to make eye contact with any of the piles of clothing that sat motionless on the filthy green seats. The experience was marginally less disgusting than driving home in his shit-besmeared car would have been.

Last year, summer, a near-lunch in Manhattan and the Diane Arbus show at MoMa. El-Hadi had parked his car in a lot owned by distant cousins who’d preceded him to America and the cousin on site at the lot, the short dark one who now called himself Sammy, had given Azzedine a sly and complicated look which Azzedine recognized from his youth. That’s nice what you’ve got there, cousin… how about sharing?

A subway ride later they were on Fifth Avenue, headed for West 53rd Street. The tension in Azzedine’s neck by then made him feel like a robot who could only turn his head left or right by moving his entire torso. Noa, in contrast, was energized by the Manhattan shopwindows and babbling giddily. Several times she reached spontaneously for his hand to drag him to see something… a purse or a shoe or a shockingly short skirt on a mannequin… and he dodged the gesture. Everywhere he looked he saw red-faced Irish cops, plainclothes detectives or bohunk sailors on shore leave, savagely drunk. The hipsters, freaks, fashion-plates, matrons and sniffy plutocrats who also thronged the street were invisible to him, or flat as cartoons and resolutely backgrounded as he picked out one after another of the vivid threats to his dignity and physical well-being as he and Noa walked by.

Who would intercede if there were to be trouble? The pathetic, black-skinned shoe-shine boy? The Puerto Rican queers cackling on the corner? Noa’s fine-featured, fair-skinned beauty made him feel blatantly dark and coarse in comparison, as though his charcoal touch had left smudges and pawprints on her. To make matters worse, Noa had dressed like a proper woman for a change. The knee-length skirt and frilly top and suede boots… the little purse and those big round sunglasses… he looked like her sweaty old chauffeur when he opened the car door for her and she poured out, long legs first, like a cool drink from the refrigerator.

The Arbus show confirmed his mood. “My god,” whispered Noa, glancing at the museum guard over her shoulder as though what she was about to say might get them kicked out of the exhibition, “I didn’t realize there were so many ugly people… “

Azzedine pressed two fingers to his lips and lowered his chin and said, “Is it that they are so ugly, or that they have seen so much ugliness?”

“Well, I bet they never dreamed they’d be hung on the walls like this, for all the world to see.”

“All the world? Not even a millionth of it.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I know all too well what you mean.”

She tried to slip her arm around his waist but he sidestepped the gesture. “Not here, Noa,” he whispered. Now it was his turn to glance at the guard.

“If not here, then where? Christ, Azzy, it’s not… Nazi Germany!”

“For you it’s not,” he answered, too quickly, with too much passion, and he realized, immediately, how idiotic he sounded. Like a frightened old woman. To prove he was a man he reached and pulled Noa to his side and kissed her full on the mouth.

“That’s enough of that, Jack,” said the museum guard, tapping Azzedine on the shoulder. A thick-lipped Polack with sour-milk breath. “This is public property! Take it outside to the gutter!”

“We’ll probably just screw in the car, thanks,” said Noa, sweetly. It was exactly what the day needed… it broke the spell… Azzedine and Noa left the exhibition hand in hand, laughing, strolling down the famous spiral ramp of the museum like any other culture-loving couple. They didn’t notice the man who followed them out into the sunlit street.

Azzedine, who hadn’t been in Manhattan since his arrival in America more than a decade earlier, was on the lookout for a restaurant in which to treat his young mistress to a proper meal; El-Hadi was torn between wanting to keep a low-profile for fear of trouble and wanting to show off the glittering prize on his arm in a commensurate venue. Noa continued to lobby for something casual, by which she meant, without being blunt enough to put it that way, an establishment frequented by young people. Azzedine had brought a navy-blue blazer to wear with his white turtleneck and gray slacks and oxfords, despite the heat, and the thought of sitting in a diningroom full of similarly-attired people filled Noa with anticipatory boredom so powerful that she nearly yawned from it. Dining with her parents upstate every blue moon provided more than enough of the required yearly dosage of that particular character-building vitamin.

Her Algerian lover, so forcefully young in bed and so self-possessedly fascinating in the classroom, was half the man, however, under other circumstances. He aged and shrank in the context of the mindless chores and mundane confrontations of daily life; how else could she explain his vassalage to the snap judgments of absolute nobodies? It was Noa’s job, she felt, to support him… be his crutch, his shield or even his red-tipped cane… when he wasn’t fucking or lecturing. She’d read his story A Precaution Against the Attentions of Jealous Gods but hadn’t understood it in the context of their relationship.

Noa won the restaurant battle because El-Hadi couldn’t find anything satisfactory after forty minutes of walking. By then they’d wandered into an aromatically fecund corner of the East Village and Noa stamped her feet in a mock tantrum in front of a place called The Star’s Bangled Jammer. Laughing, wringing his hands and rolling his eyes to a putatively Christian heaven for strength, Azzedine gave in.

They pushed through the heavy curtains of the entrance and found a table near the window and Azzedine, seating Noa and then himself said, “This looks like a madman’s idea of a restaurant.” The walls were covered in primitively hand-painted faces. “Or a child’s,” he added.

Noa shrugged. “Everything is relative, Azzy.”

“Relativism is merely nihilism without the courage of its convictions, my dear. Is bright light merely on a continuum with utter darkness? Pleasure interchangeable with pain? Aesthetics may seem to many to be a wholly subjective affair, but, I assure you, it is no more subjective a matter than biological or physical properties. There are laws. Rules.” He picked up his menu with a patient smile; he’d said what he’d said without bitterness or emphasis. Noa enjoyed his comment, in fact, and he knew it. She was reassured to see him become fully himself again. The lecturer. The stern lover. The confidently big-dicked intellectual.

A waiter came and sat at their table, scooting in next to Noa. He was a pale, thin Brit with his incisors missing and copper wires twined here and there in his shaggy hair. He said, “Here at The Jammer we believe in removing the artificial barrier between customer and the waitstaff. I’m Jeremy… pleased to meet you.” He reached across the table to shake Azzedine’s hand. Winking at Noa, Azzedine seized Jeremy’s hand in a manly shake and said,

“Tell me, Jeremy, do you also believe in removing the artificial prices as well?”

Both Jeremy and Noa laughed at this. Noa said, “Jeremy, what’s the story behind your teeth? I’ve seen other people in the area sporting the same fashion today. Is it religious?”

El-Hadi was surprised and impressed by Noa’s powers of observation; he’d noticed no such thing on the street himself. He’d assumed the condition of the young man’s teeth was drug-related.

“The canines? Had them removed.We inherit them from carnivorous ancestors, but in our case… myself, and the others you’ve noticed… we find them no longer necessary. You’d be surprised at how having these teeth pulled will purify your thoughts?”

Jeremy settled back in his seat. His gappy smile made him resemble a backwoods character from the popular televsion show called Hee Haw. The exquisite little cross-reference being that the dipthonged and glottal speech patterns of much of the American South were handed down from 18th century Cockneys marooned there in British penal colonies. It pained El-Hadi to have to forego the pleasure of sharing this observation. He smiled at Jeremy and said,

“How do you handle the lunchtime crowds with such a… relaxed… attitude towards service, if I may ask, young man?”

“If things get too hectic, actually? We close?”

Noa said, “Hey, Jeremy. I think we might be ready to order.”

“You haven’t told me your names.”

“Heckle and Jeckle,” said Azzedine. He was pleased no end when Noa rested her chin on her interwoven fingers and, batting her eyelashes, cooed, “I’m Jeckle.”

“Awe-inspiring,” said Jeremy, looking bemused, and he took their orders. “We’ll call your names when the food is ready.” Noa twisted in her seat to wave as Jeremy shuffled off, but when she turned to face Azzedine again she had a puzzled look on her face.

“I must say,” said Azzedine, “I’m impressed. This incisor matter. I noticed no such thing. Your powers of observation are truly amazing, my dear. I’m extremely proud of you.”

“Oh, I can do better than that. Much better. Behind me? The nondescript gentleman in the hat, with a camera around his neck?”

Azzedine peered over her shoulder. The man she described was frowning at a menu. He looked like a G-man from a B movie and he was surrealistically out of place in The Star’s Bangled Jammer. Noa said, “I recognize him from the museum. He was in the room with us when the guard kicked us out.”

“Yes?”

“What’s even more interesting, Azzy, is the camera around his neck. It’s a real nice camera… a Hasselblad reflex, okay. He’s got a Zeiss telephoto lens on it. Viewfinder is on top. It’s really the only way to go if you want to take pictures of somebody without them noticing. Oh, and by the way? I see that the lens cap is off. Say cheese, baby.”

El-Hadi tried to adopt a light-hearted tone. “Paparazzi?”

“Are we so famous?”

“As you know,” joked Azzedine, “fame, like everything else, is relative.”

“I shouldn’t have told you.”

“Nonsense.” But he felt the tension return like a plague, spreading across his shoulders and up his neck and solidifying like lead in his jaw muscles. He looked at his watch. “Let’s go.”

“Without even eating?”

“Yes.”

“But I was looking forward… “

“I know. Heckle and Jeckle.” Azzedine stood, placed a five dollar bill on the table, and pulled an exasperated Noa out of the restaurant. The man with the camera put his menu down, scooped the five off the table they’d just vacated, and followed.

10.

My first snow in Berlin arrived on the evening of November 1st. By this time, nearly ten months after moving to Berlin, I had a second-hand sofa bed in the livingroom, a kitchen table with two chairs, a basic set of plates, cups, pots, pans and utensils, and a futon in the narrow, windowless room next door to the livingroom.

I had re-worked The Bomb Collector considerably, but it was still, basically, poised at the same spot in the arc of the tale where it had stalled as I fled The States: the end movement remained unresolved. But the first two thirds of the manuscript had changed so much that it energized me to read through it. I had learned, ‘on the job’, as it were, to throw things away. Even good things; if they didn’t add to the forward-momentum of the tale, I crossed out. Any narrative threads that led to dead-ends were either crossed out or the walls that the dead-ends led to were dynamited.

By the evening of my first snow in Berlin, I hadn’t heard from or about Amanda Nye in months, not a peep or a note since her grotesque prank (the night of the Burka). My upstairs neighbor, Nico Taubkind, the pretty, orange-haired Christian, had eased into a harmless, chatty friendship with me, though she sometimes (and increasingly so) gave me funny looks. These looks of hers (troubled, intrigued) undoubtedly related to the fact that my living situation had taken rather a curious turn that any woman over a certain age would frown on.

I was scrawling in a fresh notebook on my kitchen table by the parchment light of a brass-based lamp I’d gotten at an Estate Sale (cancer in Pankow) when I heard a key jut into the door lock. The door jangled open and jangled shut like the exaggerated sound effect from an old time radio show, and boots stomped a little war dance on the muddy rug in the short hall of the entrance.

Moth came in with a dozen fat snowflakes impaled and trembling intact on the spikes of her platinum hair. She pecked me once on each cheek and I noticed, again, how her nose looked bigger with her hair so short, and her eyes looked smaller and closer together with her nose so big. But her skin had cleared up since I’d taken on the responsibility of feeding her in a more-or-less healthy way. Her white-sugar consumption was drastically down and every day spent inside the flat, sleeping late, bathing long and listening to music in the windowless room I let her have, was a day without smoking or exposure to sexually transmitted diseases. I’d even bought two cell phones, the cheap kind you buy minutes for, and given her one as a safety measure.

Discussing books with Moth was pointless: in the system she’d worked out, books and paintings are there to make us better people; popular movies and songs to keep us up to date; and everything else is mindless entertainment. Any discussion about a book that went deeper than the question of plot was lost on her, and she had a knack for changing the subject (sometimes by seducing me: an effective method). We rarely ate out or went dancing or strolled through Berlin’s surplus of galleries and museums because both of us were frankly embarrassed about the age gap. Our only public appearances together were shopping trips… clothes for Moth, mostly (clothes she preferred looking for in the Men or Boys departments). We rarely ever even ate together at home; she preferred taking a jar or a tin or a box of something into her room and chowing with her headphones on. I tried to make sure she had warm soup or a sandwhich and a big salad for lunch and dinner a few times a week but I never pressured her to dine with me. My eating habits, after years of living alone, were as solitary and unceremonial as her own, and I can remember, more than once, in California, coming home from ten hours of housepainting and drinking a ‘gourmet’ vegetable soup from Whole Foods cold, straight out of the can. In an almost Swiftian way we were a perfectly suitable couple, though I never deluded myself that it was a stable union. I knew she’d be gone by the time she was twenty.

I folded my notebook closed, lay the pen across it and watched Moth think with her body in the middle of the kitchen. The tip of her nose was as cold as it was red and it was running. She sniffed and back-handed it and said, “It’s snowing cats and dogs out there!”

“I haven’t seen snow in fifteen years.”

“Wow! You haven’t seen snow since the year I learned the word for it. That’s what you call poetic creepiness.” She grabbed the electric tea kettle and stuck it under the spiggot. Her English had taken on an idiosyncratic suavity in the two months we’d been living together. She filled the kettle with hot water, a tic I’ll always remember her for, and said, “So, are you Mr. Busy right now?”

“Not really. Not anymore. I ran out of steam an hour ago. I’m just doodling now. Wanna see?”

“Wanna get fucked in the virgin snow?”

“Why not.”

“Lemme put some warm tea in the Moth-motor first.”

“Okay.”

“And then you get fucked.” She nodded with and that’s-that curtness.

I appreciated the offer. We hadn’t fucked in a week. I never pressured her; sometimes we fucked a lot and sometimes we fucked a little and it was my job to act as though I didn’t notice, it was all the same to me, etc. She, of course, was free to fuck whoever whenever as l