Mother. You are no more now. David Berger hugs himself, touching the tear in his shirt. When mourning for close relatives, one does not mend the torn garment after Shiva. He will get rid of the shirt, or put it in a corner of a closet where sunlight never comes. The tear in the shirt is like a scar left from an old operation that had healed long ago, and its edges touch his skin with perfect peace. David Berger brushes away a lock of hair that had dropped to his eyes. "I'm an orphan," he says aloud and replaces the sheet on the mirror. The cloth drops, making a rustling sound, and David Berger shivers. As if there is still someone in the house.
He walks through the empty rooms. The sun has already set, enveloping him in a soft, quilted blanket. Well, that's the way of the world. Better to mourn our parents than for them to mourn us. He had uttered the words of the Kaddish as if he had rehearsed them many times in secret. Yitgadal - "may your glory grow" - but I am grown now. I can't grow any more. What will you be when you grow up, David Berger? I have grown up. Whatever I haven't accomplished by now I never will. I won't get up in the morning to go to school, I will only wake up my children, and when they plead to stay in bed a little while longer, I'll shake them and shout, "Get up now!"
David Berger opens the window of his childhood room, dispelling the darkness. Two beds used to stand here, one high, one low. On restless nights, when he woke up from sleep, he would find his mother sleeping in the bed next to him, a body wrapped in nightmares.
He opens the closet door and realizes that nothing has changed. Behind the door, in a corner, he finds a sticker. He remembers how he collected chewing gum wrappers in order to win that sticker. It edges were frayed. Somebody had tried to remove it. Probably Mother.
He opens the bottom drawer, which used to house his toys, and his heart begins to race. The years seem to vanish. In a frenzy, he yanks open the drawer, pouring its contents on the floor. Mommy, Mommy. David, clean up your room. David, where are you? Mommy, where are you? Mommy, I didn't know, it just got torn. You said that books don't tear easily. Only people. You recited poems by Rilke. You said that in the camps you knew when it was Yom Kippur, and no one missed the fast. Not even the sick or the dying. The secret was whispered throughout the camp. That day they brought a pot of thick soup into the barracks. You said you remembered the potatoes floating in it, and the rings of fat from the meat, real meat, too. The bastards, they knew it was the holy fast day. David Berger does not feel the large tears that gush from his eyes. Like the day the two neighborhood kids beat him up. They wanted his new bike, and he fought back. He came home, his body sore from the blows. His mother was horrified. She began to cry, and he said, "It's nothing, Mom, it'll pass." It was so strange to console her, he soon erased the episode from his mind.
Drops fall down, like the last showers at the beginning of summer. David Berger picks up a geography textbook from the pile. A piece of brown paper still clings to it, a remnant of its wrapping. He opens the book and inside is a map of Israel. Huddled in itself, hugging the blue sea, still content within its narrow borders.
He has no idea how long he has been sitting on the floor. All sorts of things he thought he had managed to erase gush out, flowing like a flash flood in the wadis of the Negev. He opens all the closet drawers, takes out their contents, throws them down, then puts them back.
David, two eggs a day are good for your health. David, finish your milk, please! Pleading.
Mom, I'm not hungry. Just a little bit more. One more. The last one, and that's it! No more. When was the last time? When did I kiss Adina for the first time? When she asked me for a divorce, didn't she also try to erase the memory of the first times? How we fumbled with each other. How I touched her blouse and reverently undid the hooks on her bra. Her white body sparkled in the night and terrified me, then set me on fire. I have not forgotten.
Now he comes to pick up the girls twice a week, as stipulated by the dry agreement, filed among the lawyer's cases. His ex-wife went and filed what was left of their love among a strange man's papers, and here he has found the evidence.
Mommy, where are you going? When are you coming home? What have you done to me? I'm still a child. First Adina, now you; you're both turning your backs on me.
It wasn't on purpose, Adina said. It just happened; that's what his wife said. But Mother told me that things don't just happen. She said, "You either forge ahead forcefully, or someone you don't even see will push you from behind."
In the middle of the room that was once the nursery, David Berger opens his eyes, as if waking from a long dream. Light hits his eyelids, then drops on the old articles that his mother left in the drawers.
Perhaps she could not find anyone to give it to, or perhaps they refused to take it. You can't just chuck out children's school books, everything we've ever learned and what we never will. The geological structure of the universe has not been fully investigated yet. In any event, layers lie one underneath the other, and inside them are all the ancient dead, and mother lies on top of them, the most recent one. From the corner of his eye, David Berger notices a bundle bound by a thin rubber band. He recognizes his mother's rounded handwriting. His fingers fumble with the bundle and find letters that she wrote to his father during his long voyages, then ferreted away when he came back. The envelopes bear stamps from countries he cannot recognize without his glasses, the foreign letters are so tiny.
Then he finds a letter written in 1964, when his father was on a mission to Germany.
"Look for him," his mother wrote, "tell him I'm grateful to him. I don't want it to be too late." And the unfamiliar name in bold letters. "Find Heinz Klein for me."
David Berger turns the pages. Only a few words, as if she measured them while writing. A wind blows freely through all the open doors and windows; perhaps one of the neighbors forgot to bolt the door at night. When he used to come home from the boy scouts and, later, from the army, he would hear her toss and turn in her bed. She tried to restrain her movements, so he wouldn't notice, wouldn't get angry at her. She taught herself to breathe deeply and rhythmically, as part of her deception. She only wanted what's best for her children, a roof over their heads, bread on their plate. No more. Thus we will be protected: the mother, father, and their children. No strangers allowed. There is no room here for the neighbors' kids.
David Berger has heard that name before: Heinz Klein. Heard it and forgotten it.
Once, when greatly incensed, his mother hurled herself against the wall, shouting at his father, "I wish Heinz Klein had never saved my life!" He remembers her now, scrunching her body, writhing in rage, hoisting herself up, then dropping. He recalls pulling the hem of her skirt. Mommy, why are you crying? He was so afraid she might hurt herself. On the morning of October 6, 1973, when the bunker was crumbling around him, he suddenly remembered, like a picture from the wrong movie, that other scene. David Berger - this has no end; mothers never cease crying. They do their best to hide it from their children, but when they are caught, it is a disgrace worse than being a beggar at the door or a leper at the city's gate.
His father did not find Heinz Klein. Perhaps he did not bother to look for him. In what she said, more was hidden than revealed. But it is not too late now.
The phone rings, bursting in on his agitated thoughts.
"David, are you there?"
Adina's voice is tinged with anxiety. He has not heard such anxiety in her voice since he handed her the divorce papers.
In front of the entrance to the Rabbinical court, she touched his hand gingerly. They were standing by the divorced people's entrance, and a heavy stone weighed on his heart.
"Will you be all right?" she asked him, still his wife, but not for long.
"What do you think, I'll do something desperate? I'll slash my wrists, or jump from a tall building?" No, Adina, not even for your sake. There was a bitter taste in his mouth when he realized how eager she was to distance herself from him. Even her hand was cold. Adina had been a worrying wife, but a worrying wife does not imply a passionate wife, just a worrying one.
Now she asks, "Want to come over and have dinner with us?" and after a slight hesitation, "Would you like to spend the night here?"
"You obviously feel so much pity for the new orphan that you're willing to put me up?" he says, and she lashes back at him, "It's obvious that your new situation has not blunted your ability to be nasty. This is no time to settle accounts...."
No time is the right time, except the divorce proceedings. Between her tennis practice and one of her faithful clients. Since his divorce, his passion has become like the sand dunes in Sinai, rising swift and turbulent in an instant, sweeping over everything while he buries himself in it. He pours his seed into other women and, at the last moment, stops himself from groaning into their shoulders the name of she who used to be his wife. What a jerk you are, David Berger, all those years you were married to her, you didn't love her very much. And she has not gotten prettier in the meantime. When he comes to pick up his daughters, he watches with concealed pleasure how heavy her breasts have become. Since he divorced her, he has seen nicer, fresher ones. But when he touches those new white skins, he feels as if he is touching one of his daughters' dolls - smooth flesh with a dim spirit that turns on and off alternately.
Something is warped in your head, David Berger. It's disgraceful what
happens to you. This love, this sick, stubborn love.
David Berger slides his hands over his crumpled clothes. He is all sweaty from this day and from the last seven days when people kept pressing his hand and saying, "May you grieve no more." But he still cannot tear himself away from the house. Someone once told him that the dead person's spirit leaves the house only when the mourner himself does.
He descends the stairs slowly, holding a briefcase in his hand. With vague trepidation, he listens to the thud of his own steps, then lays his foot on the stair gently, careful not to cause any disturbance. He cocks his ears and listens for silent steps behind him.
An autumnal sun shines outside. It's October again. The clods of earth on the grave must be dry by now. At that moment, when he stood in the hallway, one of his mother's neighbors approached him. His face was only vaguely familiar. The man offers him his hand clumsily and says, "Accept my condolences, Mr. Berger. May you know no more sorrow. Was she sick?" David Berger nods silently, then peels a funeral notice from the pole, folds it, and puts it in his pocket.
He gets into his car, parked by the house since the funeral. The neighbor stands motionless on the sidewalk, confused, then shrugs and turns to go. David Berger adjusts the rear view mirror. The empty street stretches behind him, and sunflecks tumble onto the mirror and dance there. He stares at the flecks, but his eyes do not become accustomed to the light. The light is temporary. All the safe and sure things break down to their primary elements. This glare in the back is devoid of color, devoid of warmth, a cold fire, a strange fire.
He has not been to the office since his mother's death. He requested a leave of absence until the thirty days of mourning were over. He is in deep mourning, his friends observe. All the while, his mother's letter is tucked in his pocket. He changes clothes, and the letter changes places. Every so often, he takes it out and reads the few words, even though he already knows them by heart.
At night he dreams about Heinz Klein. He is a figure dressed in an SS uniform, with no face. In one dream, Heinz Klein calls to him, "Come! Come to Germany, you dirty Jew. Come and we'll show you what we did to your mother."
He wants to forget the dream but cannot. One morning he says to himself, "I'll go there, then I'll find peace."
In the meantime, winter rains have begun to pour, reaching all the way to the cemetery.
A suitcase and a bag. When going on a voyage, one takes only one's essential belongings. David Berger stuffs a razor in his bag; it is, after all, a friend that strokes his face every morning. Like a blind person feeling unknown objects.
Adina sticks a bundle of socks in the corner of his suitcase. "It's going to be cold there this time of year," she says. "Call the airport to find out if the flight is leaving on time." David Berger sits in a rocking chair, but he does not rock. It feels funny to be here. The girls always come down to him, bursting out of the hallway, their tiny heads bobbing happily. He waits for them in his car; he never goes upstairs. After the divorce, Adina made changes in the apartment. Only the rocking chair was left in its place, receiving the impression of his body now like a pleasant memory.
His daughters are excited. They saunter back and forth in the room. The younger one hugs him as if he were already back from his trip. "Daddy, do you have to go away?" she snuggles at his knees and he draws her closer and embraces her. This girl is such a woolly kitten.
The phone rings. A persistent, annoying ring. Adina whispers into the phone, but David Berger listens attentively. "No, not tonight, I'm busy. I have to take a friend to the airport..." - He has become a friend... perhaps a friend of the family - and she adds, "Maybe tomorrow."
David Berger cannot help feeling a pang of jealousy. He has to restrain himself from inundating her with questions and complaints.
She has been fussing around him the whole evening, as if it were his birthday. This is how she had acted in the months before she asked him to leave the house, when her conscience was already bothering her. She does not make a bed for him in the girls' room, and a knot of excitement burgeons at the bottom of his belly. She sits in front of the mirror, brushing her curly mane. Some women lose their hair, but Adina has an abundance, as if she were in the prime of her youth. Even its sheen has not faded. He embraces her from behind.
"Do you really want to?" he asks, like a bashful youth. She hushes him, a finger on her lips. He pulls her to bed. How many others have shared her bed? What does this woman have that she has struck such thick roots in him? She grabs hold of him, and with a sure hand undoes her buttons. David Berger touches the ample flesh and thinks, I'm not left alone, after all. Even though the home is empty, it doesn't mean it has ceased to be a home. However flaccid her flesh is, it is also sweet and its aroma intoxicating.
He has stopped talking to her, but his hands act frantically with inexplicable stubbornness. He thrashes inside her and sees that she is lying beneath him with her eyes wide open but he cannot read their message. For a moment, her lips part, she seems to want to say something, then they clamp shut again, and she averts her eyes.
They lie silently. His pain and longing leak out of him in a flow he can't, or won't, stem. In the dark, he puts his hand on her stomach, and he wants to say to himself, Hush, Hush, enough.
When the plane lifts its nose in the air, his thoughts revert to his ex-wife. Why did she pull him into her bed? Or did he go to her of his own volition? For three years, the memory of her flesh kept sailing away from him, like a rudderless ship, at times carried by the tides all the way to the shore, at others drifting a sea to places where the land is no more than a dream.
What is the point of looking backward, when time goes forward where the prow points? When, in past reveries, he pictured himself sleeping with her again, he saw himself shaking her body, shouting at her to come back. But last night he saw none of that. Like the plane, David Berger fumbles his way ahead, but he already knows that the revolutions of time lead one in unpredictable ways.
David Berger opens the telephone directory of West Berlin. Hands trembling, he leafs through the pages until he reaches K. His finger runs down the column, Wolfgang Klein, Ulrike Klein, Thaddeus Klein, Margarita Klein, Martha Klein, Josef Klein, Heinz Klein - doctor. Was the man a physician? He picks up the phone and asks the operator in English to dial the number for him. The persistent ringing irritates him, but finally the phone is picked up and a woman's voice says, "Ja?"
As if someone flicked open a light inside him, he immediately switches to the language of his childhood, German. When his mother had harsh things to say to his father, she used that forbidden language, so the children wouldn't understand.
"Is this the home of Herr Heinz Klein?"
A moment of silence.
"Who is speaking?" the woman asks, her voice young and soft.
He says, "I am a tourist in Berlin. I wish to speak to him in regard to my mother. I think he was acquainted with her during the war."
Again, the woman is silent. For a moment he thinks that she has left the phone.
"Fraulein?" he asks gingerly.
"Sir," the woman finally says, "Doctor Klein died tragically three years ago. He was only thirty five."
"I'm sorry, Frau Klein," David Berger says, "Please accept my sympathy."
He puts down the receiver very carefully, as if it is fragile. His hands are cold. He walks to the window and looks out on the swarming city. The Kurfirstendam is a black ditch where people float, some peacefully, others with vigorously arms. The neon lights of a beer sign flickers in front of him. How many of the people walking here still remember the war? Did the woman think I was crazy? A person wants to talk to her husband who's been dead these three years. Maybe he just collapsed in the middle of this busy street and his heart stopped beating. Maybe he was hit by a foreign car, or tumbled onto the subway tracks.
David Berger opens the window. The noise that the glass pane had kept at bay now assails his ears. "A Berliner remains a Berliner," his mother used to say, and John Fitzgerald Kennedy, too, said, "Ich bin eine Berliner". They say it was an historical error, a temporary distortion of the psyche. But we Germans are an industrious nation. Our stores are brimming with goods. There is no room for improvement really. Our life is perfect. Where are you, Heinz Klein? Lost among all these practical people who speak the forbidden language of my childhood. Hallo, hallo, greetings to all the surviving murderers; the victims' children wish to pay you a visit. Will you open the door for us? The Deutschmark is a hard currency, and lately there hasn't been a war here. Berlin is a youthful, lively town, only thirty five, thirty six years old. It is the pride of the Reich. Hi-Lili Hi-lo, his mother used to sing to him softly when he could not fall asleep. It was the only lullaby she knew; perhaps she forgot all the others. Standing by the window, David Berger begins to hum the melody of his childhood, the cold air trapped between his teeth.
"You should visit the Kaiser Wilhelm Church," the reception clerk at the hotel tells him. "How long will you stay in Berlin, sir?" To the third generation, everything will look like a faded movie.
David Berger feels dizzy. The "Ku-dam" whirls around him, like an American plane in an airlift operation, bringing food to the besieged Berliners. Heinz Klein died tragically when he was only thirty five. I, too, am thirty five, an abandoned man, father of two girls. Mother asked me not to be late. Before his wedding ceremony, too, she pleaded, "This time, please be on time." I was late approaching Adina. I did not confront her with questions. Mother's silence was enough for me. So was her death.
And now what? His mother used to say, a Berliner remains a Berliner. Dead or alive. The beer glass is filled to the brim, its foam bubbling. It is possible that the man changed his name. But what would impel a man to change his name? David Berger reasons in his mind. Is the man so weighed down by the burden of his memories?
His mother's words echo in his head like a defective metronome.
But the town is divided, David Berger tells himself. He drinks from his glass and the bitter taste dulls his tongue. Two German girls lean on the counter. He can see one's legs -- shapely, tapering to delicate ankles. A gold ankle bracelet twinkles in the dim light. A pretty girl, he thinks, and the taste of her flesh is almost on his lips. Her golden head moves to the rhythm of the music. She is so absorbed in it that, if he touched her, she wouldn't feel a thing. Germans, how dare you forget? You brought children into the world, you formed parties of "greens". But even your clothes reek of your shame.
The girl stops dancing and motions to him to join her on the floor. He pretends not to notice. I am a member of an inferior race. Restrain yourself, beautiful Aryan.
Now, there is only one thing left for him to do. Go to the other side of the wall, and if he cannot find him there, it means that the Berliner has transferred himself to either Cologne, Munich, or Mainz. The beer in his glass is flat. He stares at the limpid liquid and imagines that the girl's legs are reflected in it. Such beauty parading itself so freely by the counter. Just get up and take it; pull those legs to you, bury your head between them and ask her if she remembers...
"Taxi!"
The doorman waves his hand and a cab pulls up. The driver, a young man, pops his head out the window.
"Where to?" he asks.
David Berger does not answer right away. He tosses his handbag in the back seat, then gets inside the cab and says, "Checkpoint Charlie."
For a moment, it looks as if the driver is about to refuse, but then he starts the car, and the cab meshes into the traffic. After only a few minutes, he pulls up at the side of the road and turns to the passenger behind him.
"I'm letting you off here," he says, "go straight ahead, turn right, and you'll see the crossing point."
"But why don't you drive a little closer?" David Berger asks.
"Look," the driver says, "I come from there."
"When?" David Berger asks.
"Ten years ago," the driver replies. "Back then, we could still find ways to get out. Today it is no longer possible." Then he adds, "Those guys there remember every face..." A flicker of terror creeps into his eyes.
David Berger walks down the street, his bag heavy in his hand. The road block appears in the distance and, next to it, the station building. "You are now leaving the American zone" says a sign in English. His eyes glide further down and he reads the writing in Russian and, underneath, in French and German.
Policemen patrol both sides of the road. One of them opens his coat collar, trying to sneak a little sunshine down his neck. David Berger lifts his eyes and sees the stars and stripes. There is no wind, and the flag flaps idly over Checkpoint Charlie.
A perfectly ordinary day. Swedish tourists tumble out of a bus. Like a flock of chicks, they turn and march toward the building. David Berger approaches the policeman standing guard at the entrance.
"I wish to cross to the other side," he says.
The policeman scans his passport and sends him to a large hall.
A woman in police uniform makes her way towards him with lively steps. Surreptitiously, David Berger peeks at her body. He fails to find even a single curve under the stiff uniform. Her face is pretty, but it is like a mask donned as soon as she woke up in the morning. He cannot imagine her shouting out loud at the peak of passion, scratching the shoulders of the man on top of her, wrapping her legs and arms around him. David Berger tries to catch her eye, but it is as if she is wearing thick glass over her face. She gives his passport photo a brief look. But she is not done with him yet. Her face bends intently over the gray square, then to his face, as if trying to etch it in her memory. For a moment, it occurs to him that she might be sending him some amorous signals, but her scrutiny of his portrait is nothing but routine work for her. She utters three measured words, "Please wait here," and disappears with his passport.
His legs feel weak, and he looks for a place to sit down. He slumps by one of the low tables laden with piles of papers. David Berger picks up one page; it is in French. Another one is in German, a third in Cyrillic script, and a fourth in Chinese. His eyes glaze over. From the pile, he fishes out a paper in letters that he can piece together into recognizable syllables, and reads what seems like words of praise. Glorifying the regime. For a moment, he has an urge to fold the papers into airplanes and aim them at the far end of the room. The big hall is divided into cubicles, and he can see heads of clerks, bent down, silently toiling at their posts. There are no sounds of idle talk, let alone of laughter. He peers at his watch. A long time has elapsed. The Swedish tourists who came in at the same time as he, have already received their passports and left. Only he sits alone in this desolate place, with all those guards lurking around. But he cannot retreat now. He looks about, trying to catch someone's eye, to find a flicker of warmth. But like the policewoman's eyes, their looks, too, are cold and glazed. He scrunched in his chair, tightening his coat around him. Maybe they found something reprehensible about him. True, the photo in the passport is ancient and bears very little resemblance to this man, David Berger. They are trying to scare me. He puts his hands in the pockets of his coat, and the letter rustles inside it. He came here in good faith. He wishes to report to Heinz Klein that his memory surfaced in his mother's new existence, in her innermost thoughts.
His feet fall asleep and a wave of intense cold spreads from them upward. He tries to contain his anger and increase his patience. Finally, "his" policewoman comes out and motions to him with her hand. Her voice suppressed, she addresses him in heavy, halting English.
"How long you intend to stay in the Democratic German Republic, sir?"
"One day, maybe two," he says.
"And why do you travel, sir?" The look she darts at him is laden with suspicion.
"I'm a tourist," says David Berger.
"If you're a tourist, you must return tonight! No, you are not a tourist!" she suddenly accuses him.
"But I am ..." David Berger says apologetically, "I'm interested in seeing... the streets, the places... you see, my mother was born here, and now she's dead."
Not a muscle moves in her cheeks.
"Do you know anybody in town?"
"No, no," he hastens to say. "Just to see.... She told me about the house where she was born."
"You will not find it. The city was rebuilt after the bombardments."
"Maybe the school she went to..."
"Berlin is not the same Berlin," she says in a harsh voice. "The people here are quiet. They must not be disturbed."
David Berger keeps quiet, and the policewoman says, "Please show me your money, sir." David Berger spills bills and coins on the table, and the policewoman arranges them in piles, counts them, then notes them down meticulously. When she is done filling her forms, she hands him his passport and, with affected politeness, says, "I wish you a pleasant visit, sir, and remember, you must return to the West by midnight."
Just like Cinderella, he thinks. Without the magic.
David Berger crosses the empty hall, his steps echoing on the tiles. They can shoot me in the back. This is how they eliminate secret agents in faded suits. Checkpoint Charlie. Michael Caine scaling the wall, or maybe it was another actor. I will fall, and nobody will know. They'll say, "his mother was born in Berlin, and he dared to come back."
All of a sudden, he is outside.
For a moment, he stands on the tenuous fulcrum between the commotion of the other side and the silence on this side, then he starts walking in a long alley.
On either side stand the houses of no man's land. Window squares open with nobody looking out. No swaying laundry lines, no sound of children. Ghost houses. Like a gold prospectors' town when the river has dried. The alley refuses to come to an end, and David Berger does not turn back. He feels strange eyes looking at him from behind but, in fact, there is not soul in sight. He feels a strong urge to saunter but, as in a nightmare, just then the alley comes to an end and the blockaded city on the other side opens up before him.
David Berger's feet now stand in a wide street, and he reads the sign Unter den Linden. It is a broad boulevard. What kind of tree is "linden"? David Berger racks his brains. Perhaps it is a tender, lovely lime tree, of the genus tilia. Time passes here at a slow pace, like a light drizzle, and the bag in his hand, heavy as a barbell, slows down his steps. Thus Alice went across to the land of the looking glass, peeked in and declared that everything was, indeed, reflected, but differently.
David Berger stands at the curb, watching out for himself; he feels like a man who has been walking for hours by the bank of a river but is afraid to dip his foot in the water. He is scared he might hear the noise of the crowds. The citizens of Berlin crowd the streets to watch the parade. Multitudinous feet trample the roots of the linden trees. "Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!" Berlin is going berserk with excitement. He waits for a long time, but there is no taxicab in sight.
He grows tired. But he has no choice, so he drags his feet along the street, from time to time waving to the few cars that pass by. There are strange sights; he feels as if he were walking backward in time: ancient models of cars, women with thick eyebrows shod in heavy workers' boots. When he finally finds a cab, he tells the driver to take him to a hotel that he picked from a tourist guidebook. The driver's face is concealed. Perhaps he, t