The Ept, The Ane and the Fantile

And then there’s Frederick, who discovers that The Sheltering Sky  is premiering at the English-language cinema right up the street, a ten minute walk from his rented room on Hauptstrasse. Not another Odeon! Cinemas called Odeon and restaurants called Tivoli: failures of the entrepreneurial imagination. Having reclined in the dirty velour seats of various Odeons in seven American states he thinks how if he ever runs his own little arthouse cinema  -a dream on par with living in a lighthouse- he’ll call it by its proper name, which would be Odeum.

He turned thirty a month prior, in London, weepy-drunk in his sublet with two slags he snagged in the off-license. The even-drunker, if that’s possible, blonde had three feet of thick braid sashing her bare back and asked him if he’d like to have it and Frederick slurred his assent in the form of the eternal question. So he found a chopped gold snake in the bathtub the next day and spent a tense noon struggling to reconstruct the events. He eventually found the courage to check the freezer for a head or a blonde tit in a baggie. He packed it in his luggage with the tailored shirts laughing.

The little bald refugee from an Otto Dix painting asks Veer ah yoo go-ink and Frederick shrugs so slowly the gesture becomes strange to him before he completes it.

-Oh, you know. Look around. See what’s what.

The last thing he came to Berlin to do is sit beside a panting homosexualist as the cinema lights go down. He doesn’t know for what he came to Berlin but he knows it wasn’t that. He knows so little so well. He can feel Herr Ludwig watching from the kitchen window as he saunters up the street with his hands in his pockets under fizzy warm twilight. Banshee brakes, infant muezzin, dogs in the gene joy of fight. Frederick recalls a news item concerning an opera lover who’d baked feces (authorities never specified if it was his own) in a tray of fudge brownies and had given one each to every of the dozen unrequited loves in his apartment building and Frederick makes a mental note to politely decline any food or drink Herr Ludwig offers. The word feces seems blacker, Greeker,  with an “a” in it. A church bell older than the country of his birth is chiming the hour.

It must be some sort of omen that The Sheltering Sky is playing the very day he lands in Berlin,  though the idea of Debra Winger playing Kit Moresby (playing Jane Bowles) elicits a sneer as he waits in line to buy a ticket, thinking of apter actresses and astonished to see people drinking beer from plastic cups in the cinema foyer and one of the patrons Frederick espies holding just such a cup at chest-height is not much more than ten years old, upperlip frothed as he chats, open-faced, with his parents. Frederick is finally granted the sensation of being adrift in a foreign country.

Dressed in a light gray three-piece summer suit and Italian shoes that Bowles himself would approve of, he eases into his dirty velour seat (Germans to the left, Germans to the right; Germans in front and behind him) and nods off under the influence of the after-tasty narcotic of jetlag, dreaming Herr Ludwig is Paul Bowles in disguise, a ruse to test Frederick’s sincerity.

“But how could I have known?” pleads Frederick.

“To be is to know,” chides Mr. Bowles, stripping out of his bathrobe. He has beautiful breasts.

Later that evening, wakened by an usher and reluctant to go ‘home’, Frederick wanders downtown, following the bus route, a forty minute walk the first half of which takes him through a Turkish neighborhood with operetta-like touches of the bazaar, showing fruit vendors crying out and burka’d matrons at waddle like sinister nuns and veiled glances from sloe-eyed houris with infidel-bashing tits. The Germans are a spectral presence and remind him of UN inspectors in their own country. On Marburger Strasse he finds a nightclub called Limbo and the angled black doorman nods at Frederick’s suit.

He is staring at an exquisite little blackhaired girl in a party of six at the VIP table under the window of the DJ’s booth. Her lipstick is as black as everything else in the bitter bang and webby fog of the long room until someone lights her cigarette, turning her lips for an instant the color of poppies, a bloodred field Frederick saw from a bus in the Sierra Gourda in Andalusia while writing in a now-lost notebook, stories about Levantine girls who make love like damp Joans of Arc in smoke-vomitting flames and either attempt murder or commit suicide after the party and in doing so reveal themselves to be the protagonist’s long-lost twin. Or something.

Winter comes to Berlin with the unspectacular viciousness of a jilted lover.  At the height of the  summer one blindly intuits that life will never be cold again and it is exactly then the cold comes falling back as the enemy’s pulped face on the window or heirloomed breaths of the mythical ancestor’s tubercular sleep, a misery so general it’s an insult.  Six months of drinking and smoking and fucking in darkness. The notorious German dream of bunker life.

Frederick’s affair with the blackhaired girl thrives in this desolation. They meet on a blustery corner and exchange those double-cheek kisses and shiver indecisively in front of one cafe after another until finally abandoning the pretense and hurrying back to his room on Hauptstrasse where Herr Ludwig gives voice lessons at his baby grand to the greatgrandniece of Gustave Mahler. Cackling under a duvet at the caterwauling Mahler. Sariah is always all over again so sweetly tentative, so eager and afraid, as though her virginity stubbornly heals between fuckings. He thinks she fucks like dogs swim. They always seem surprised they can do it.

How it started. He took her to the third day of a Hitchcock festival in a cinema so small that the ceiling was someone’s living room floor.

They are watching The Birds in German and can hear a pavane of footsteps crisscrossing the parquet overhead. Out the Ausgang and on the street into the night in which everything appears to be pretending to be busy they walk for a block of ruminative silence until Sariah, who emigrated from Iran with her dissident mother as Khomeini came to power in ‘79, says  I believe that is the most religious film I have ever seen.

“Religious?” guffaws Frederick. “Au contraire. The most misogynist rant in film history! Fellini’s City of Women is nothing compared to The Birds, as far as that goes, my dear. ‘Bird’ is working class British slang for ‘girl,’ as you know. Don’t forget Hitchcock was British.”

“I mean, what, you have this hen-pecked bachelor, no pun intended, played by Rod Taylor. Rod. Right? And all the other important characters of the film -his girlfriend, his ex-girlfriend, his little sister, and his mother-  they’re all women. Okay.”

He ticks the points off on his fingers. “The girlfriend’s a frigid tease, the ex is a slut -that’s why her hair is dark -his mother is a clinging, emasculating shrew, and his little sister is a brat, also dark-haired, implying that she’s going to grow up to be a slut too. Meanwhile, the mother and the girlfriend are almost mirror images of each other. Their hairdos are identical, which means a lot in Hitchcock, who was the most hairdo-obsessed director in film history. Our hero, Mitch -rhymes with bitch, if you please -wants to, ahem nest- with a girl who looks like a young version of his own mother, invoking the Oedipus complex. Which ends up putting out the eyes not of Mitch himself but of his exgirlfriend, in a perfect example of substitution, since the resemblance between Rod Taylor and Suzanne Pleshette, who plays the ex, is uncanny. The birds, like Freudian harpies, pluck out her eyes.”

“The female romantic lead, his girl friend, Tippy Hedron, she goes from being a perfectly coifed snob and a tease in the beginning of the film to a -a disheveled, catatonic loony by the end.”

“Remember that the first blood drawn in the film, in fact, is from Tippy, who’s trying to strike a silly, an absurdly elegant, pose in the prow of a beat up old motor boat. She’s wearing a jadegreen Dior dress or what have you. As a matter of fact, as I now recall, she’s even got the nerve to be freshening up her makeup with a compact as she’s sitting there in this filthy boat, proving how vain, how shameless, how typical, or Tippy-cal she really is. Her nose is in the air, her bosom is high and hard, her spungold hair is immaculately coifed.”

“Between the tease, the shrew, the slut and the brat, this guy, Rod Taylor -Rod, for Chrissakes- he doesn’t have a chance! The illogical savagery, the unpredictable pattern of violence, of the birds, is just a metaphor for the daily reality of life for a guy among these women. All women.”

He finally looks over to see a silver eleven of tears runneling the Persian girl’s cheeks and down her neck to salt the never-sucked breasts in her schoolgirlish jumper and jacket.

Frederick is trembly climbing over her, sliding into her, the yellowtiled stove a stone headache of heat behind them as he relishes the strenuous work of mining her innocence for pleasure. Sariah with the Salome hair. Hair like a garment and pussy her little black lamb with its fiercely trusting grip. He jigs her across the room, gasping in her mouth, her legs around his waist, her brown back slamming the door. Fraulein Mahler wails across Herr Ludwig’s basic chords. There is homework all over the warped parquet and he steps in it. He slips on world history and comes.

Sariah has her seventeenth birthday. Frederick extends his visa. Herr Ludwig discusses opera in German with Sariah at the kitchen table while Frederick washes the dishes in his silk pyjamas. She looks so worldly with that cigarette in her mouth.

Summer is the relief that everyone has promised. The city gushes green and the Tiergarten park is clothed in flesh, the women blasé about unpacking their marshmallows, the men strutting their bellies and cocks, the gregarious Turks organize epic barbecues in their nudity-free corner of the park with music and card games and dancing. The Germans keep apart and sun themselves with mute efficiency. Sariah studies the earth at her feet as she and Frederick traverse a field of what looks like an obscenely neat aircrash.

Their relationship is topsecret and they become as crafty as addicts at the protocol of deception. Sariah’s mother isn’t even aware of Frederick’s existence for that first half year. Sariah calls him from pay phones, or leaves scribbled notes about when and where it is safe to meet. As their second half year commences, Frederick is introduced as an English tutor. The matriarch unwittingly pays for them to see R-rated English language movies at the Odeon. The day before Sariah tells him she’s pregnant, Frederick dreams it: he’s following a long trail of tiny footprints in warm snow to a tree. He looks up the tree and his mother is in it, hung by a leafy umbilical.

At Chez Jacques, their favorite cafe, Sariah says her period is late. Frederick finishes his spaghetti, staring at her in the tender light, the dingy Moorish pale gold walls of Chez Jacques. He looks at Sariah and sees it in her, a mistake the size of a thumbnail and lodged in her core. Why does he feel such peace at that moment? She, too, is unaccountably serene in the face of this disaster. Why does genuine peace briefly fill them with its fearless heaviness? They are bound by an Old Testament pact that hinges on a sacrifice. On a real death.

Her belly doesn’t grow very much in six weeks, but fat lines, the consecration of a ghostpriest’s ashed thumb, bisect her navel and her nipples and the breasts balloon and her scent changes from musk to cinnamon to saltwater. Her mother tells her she looks like the moon.

You look like the moon, Azizam.

A foggy morning. The slender birches along Mahlerstrasse hooded in ectoplasm. Cross Mahlerstrasse and then Alymerstrasse and hurry between two buildings and over a carless blacktop to U-Bahnhof Hirschfeldtplatz, descend to an empty platform. Wait in silence. Stare down the tracks.

The waiting room is ringed with occupied chairs. Sariah stands with her arms at her sides at the receptionist’s desk while Frederick sits stealing glances at the other patients. One in particular, all alone, is sniffing and gulping and rubbing her raw wet cheeks with the sleeve of an old sweater. She appeals to Frederick’s mercy with crushed pink eyes and he cowers behind an obsolete Vogue and  it occurs to him right there in the abortion clinic, months after the fact, that Sariah’s religion-based reading of The Birds may well have turned out to be the freshest interpretation in years, an interpretation he himself could have appropriated, but he stepped on her argument with his glib presentation, showing off, and now it’s too late.

He has just gotten to his incomprehensible horoscope when a nurse calls out a broken version of his name. She is walking as fast as a dreamfigure down a long white hall but he catches up with her and she points at the door he is to enter and says hinter rechts (rear right) without stopping.

The room is divided into six cubicles, each cubicle made of three rolling walls and a curtained entrance and in each cubicle is a high bed, on wheels, affording minimal privacy on a sort of honor system. Flustered, Frederick turns left, or links, rather than right and enters the wrong cubicle, parting the curtains. He comes upon a girl, shirtless in a bra but no panties, knocked out and skinny on her bed, the inverted italic v of her legs bent open, her eyes just fluttering slits. Her bruised white arm, the i.v. needle still taped to it, is at a wild corpse angle, reaching, but not reaching, for the leather backpack, square with textbooks, that sits on a chair beside the bed.

She is young, tall, with wild blond hair like slashed violin bows piled on the pillow. She is blond in all the places where Sariah is black. Around the mound of her sparse pubes is a saucer-sized winestain or how he sees it as a shockingly well-placed comment which purples the skin around the furled lips and stains the lips themselves nearly glossy black as burnt sugar against which the wisps of her bush are pale as devilglows of static under a duvet on the longlost night of a boy’s first masturbate winter.

Frederick, angry, can imagine the creep who has gotten her pregnant making jokes about it. About the birthmark. Jokes about Negroes or blowtorches. He can imagine how this unexampled angel is probably ashamed to fuck and how the birthmark’s kicky ugliness has undercut her ability to select an apt lover because our souls turn so sadly on trivial pivots and Frederick can well imagine this lucky creep exploiting the wound and pumping long-stroked into her with an exaggerated sense of his right to.