To Poland

When she died, she wanted to look like the city: a sun-bathed mausoleum wrapped in furs, glorious, neck craned at the upside-down bowl of Berlin’s sky, mortal milky clouds and all. The train window framed Kreuzberg in a curator’s dream. Daylight left quickly. She saw some government buildings; someone had told her that, in a symbolic gesture of reassurance and transparency, all buildings related to any part of the government had glass walls. Nice enough for the administration to peer out of, she supposed, but the point was that the public felt like they could peer in and observe at any given moment. These were the things that made her love the Germans. The train cabin, on the other hand, was an American’s bad joke, a kitsch sitcom of some Eastern block train ride. The man across from her ate smelly greenish cheese from a lace handkerchief, staring lustily at the triangular tits of the girl beside her. His face was a leering unbaked pie. Two women jabbered in what she guessed was Polish, laughing often in a sharply hysterical fashion. One of the woman’s hair jutted from her head sharply, stiff tangerine strands.

Her lungs coughed, creating the sound of boots stomping on snail shells. She let herself cough, a voluntary cheese grater, bringing forth mucus she had demurely swallowed while with him. She spit gobs into her jacket sleeve. The blood hid in the crimson wool pattern of her coat; the sweet metallic stench began to mix with that of the goat cheese. Vomit rising to her throat, she slid open the door of the cabin and stepped across the hallway, struggling with and then opening a train window. She closed her eyes and plunged her head out, loose cheeks now peeling back from her skull and mining her closed esophagus. She screamed long. Snot clapped her throat shut and flew onto what she guessed was the cabin window beside hers, because a gaunt man came into the hallway and began to lecture her, irate and incomprehensible. She listened for a few moments and then stepped back, cocking her head coldly, and spit on the floor between them. The man paused, only unfreezing to laugh nasally. Ha. Ha. Ha. Pulling her own cabin door open, she stepped clumsily over the legs of pie-face and collapsed in her chair. Ha.

She slept. The train stopped every couple of hours, sometimes jarring her awake, but her body seemed merciful, seemed to understand that its survival was more insured by keeping her mind cradled in cotton. In Poznan, she considered turning back. Kutno. Warsaw. Especially in Warsaw, with three hours to pass until the connecting train. She had been asleep when they arrived at the station, just running off before the last whistle sounded, only making it because the girl with the triangular tits had poked her head with her stiff chest. A bullet bra? She fuzzily wondered, pulling her backpack from the overhead compartment and running through the hallways. Tripping down the stairs of the train, she landed on the cement platform, catching herself by the wrists. The suspended electronic sign read -5 C. She entered a nearby stairwell and walked down the short flight, entering the long cement tunnel that led to the other platforms. A newspaper stand lined half the cold passageway. The air was hard to breathe, frozen and hardly worth it. She saw pie-face buying a Polish smut magazine, a lollipop stick jutting from the left side of his mouth. Ducking her head, she skirted past him shakily and found the platform for the commuter train to Krakow, climbing the stairs and then tossing her backpack onto the ground. Her stillborn fingers were neglected pomegranates, blue with the cold, little streaks of blood from hangnails running excitedly over the knuckles. A purple palette of winter.

___

He said, “No purple prose.” Admonishing himself.

She looked up from her own writing.

“I do that. Purple prose. When I’m nervous or under deadline.”

He leaned back from the table and threw his pen down on the floor theatrically. She picked up the rusting tin where he kept his tobacco, covered in enthusiastic white advertisements from the 1950’s, and handed it to him. Arching his right eyebrow, he began to roll a seamlessly thin cigarette, looking at her mockingly. She lit it with a match, only slyly watching his movements as he strode to the stove and finished cooking their dinner. When he started pulling plates from the cupboards, she stood up and walked to the full bookshelf, a distraction from staring. Benjamin. Adorno. Some anthology about the Greek and Roman gods. Occult. Occult. A ukulele. A shelf of whiskeys and bourbon. Fleurs du Mal. He had Baudelaire.

He said, “Will you come and eat?” Gallant.

She ate with a leg pulled into her body, head leaning on her right knee, arm weaving around her thigh and gripping the fork. He could cook; he told her that he had worked in a restaurant for months to afford the ticket to Berlin, to live in this little studio, a squashed grandchild of the DDR.

She said, “Thank you for inviting me to dinner. I’m glad to see you again, after Sunday, before tomorrow.”

“What’s tomorrow?”

She said, “I fly back to Madrid. I’m not sure where I’ll be living, of course, but I’m expected nonetheless. And this weather isn’t helping my bronchitis.” Tightly.

“Why don’t you stay? Vagabond around town here, in Berlin?”

Pause. She said, “With you?”

“Well… yes, why not? There’s a certain devil-may-care tinge to it I like.”

“Fuck. I don’t know why I thought you meant I could stay with you. I’m sorry to impose. I’ve made things rather awkward now, haven’t I? I have a return ticket already anyway.”

“No. I have an air mattress. I charge by the towel, of course. I may try to seduce you again. These are the charges for staying in my hostel.”

“Alright. I’ll bring my things tomorrow.”

And they finished dinner and she shyly stood to go, slipping her fingers into creamy suede gloves, quiet and unsure, only looking up when he said,

“Stay. Give me your sickness.”

___

All the loose tobacco kept flying out of the thin white paper, the wind and her swollen fingers resisting dexterity. She left her backpack, quickly reentering the cement passageway and walking toward the newspaper stand. Five zloty for smokes. She resolved to pass the time like a queen in Krakow, an internal dry laugh accompanying this thought. As she dug into the fetid woolen coat pocket, her phone chimed, MoviStar reminding her to buy more saldo. This message reminded her how he hadn’t checked on her, hadn’t asked if she had made it alright. And it was like a slow cruel boot to the chest, realizing that he wouldn’t. She dropped the zloty on the magazines in front of the vendor, her face laced up tight, until she reached her backpack in the stairwell.

The next moments were hideous. Breaths came hard, pulls on arsenic ice cream through a straw, but quiet as a waltz. A ribcage opened with dynamite. She chain-smoked in the stairwell until the train came, sometimes coughing blood into her hand and drawing little pictures with it on the wall next to the stairs. These moments, the bereavement of it all, struck her as eerie.

The commuter train was almost empty when she got on. She half-stood for many minutes, unconsciously deciding whether to run up and down between the chairs, imposing the rotten radish rage she felt upon unsuspecting Poles. A beautiful blonde girl sat down in the aisle across from her, thin and cruel and undeniably Slavic. The Pole stared at her, bemused and seemingly disgusted, until she finally sat down and arranged the dirty backpack next to her, hoping the pretty Polish girl would look away. I looked like that in the States. Clean, maybe even hawkish, she thought. Scrambling for distraction, she pulled out the first book the backpack yielded. Herzog.

That funny etching, an angular man hiding behind brambles, on the yellowing cover. She began to read, an eccentric respite, until she reached the ninth page, when the last paragraph slapped her eye. Tucking the book away in her bag, she curled into the fetal position in her chair and began to pray.

How the fuck does it go? Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name. Thy and she couldn’t finish, because she couldn’t remember, and because the skipping record player that was her worn down scratched mind wouldn’t let any moments of peace get through, and she started again, Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed by Thy name, Thy kingdom come, fuck, please come please come, please God help me please God help me please God please God please God please God please God please God please God where are you? Please please please please please until it all blended with the train wheels and her quieting coughs until her body let her sleep Thank you God.

­____

She picked her way through the pebbled paths of Dorotheenstädtischer, the crumpled map flapping in her hand, coffee-stained and typed in crude English. Hegel, Mann, Fichte. And she finally found it, Brecht. The headstone sat, almost lackadaisical, near one of the skinniest skeleton trees in the graveyard. She looked over the high brick wall into the wan sun, almost gone although it was 2:30 pm. The brothy light shone against the windows of his old study next door. She had gone there yesterday, taking an informal little tour of his dusty and regal final quarters. Although she had gone in loving the playwright, she emerged with an aching love for his torn dedicated wife. Particularly striking was the photograph of the actress beside her bed, standing in the couple’s garden. The guide said Helene was about 45 when the picture was taken— but she looked to be in her eighties, wrinkled and dark, with hardened black eyes of rotting glass. The woman had left her husband’s study untouched after he had died, referring to his rooms as “Brecht’s” until she passed away. Helene Weigel was now buried under the headstone next to her wayward lover, now and always to lie next to the man who told her, in later years, that she was losing her touch on the stage. Insult to a streaming procession of younger ingénue injury.

She left upon twilight, hesitating through the cemetery's heavy iron gates, then making her way to meet him in Kreuzberg. Taking her time getting to the thrift store, she stepped into an antique shop across from the metro exit, black nails fingering old minks and chipped Bohemian tea cups. The mirror across an aisle told her she looked beautiful that day, despite her dancing knotted hair and chapped face. The Turkish owner started to close in with hospitable but claustrophobic offers, so she hastily went back onto Bergmannstraße and turned left, walking toward Colours, where they sold clothes priced by the kilo. A meat market where vintage went into convalescence. He found her there, circling in front of a mirror wearing oversized wool trousers, embarrassed by his sudden appearance.

He said, “Let’s go to some bookstores. You’ll need reading for the train ride."

The first one was for expatriates, stacked to the ceiling and filling two rooms with English books. She found many worth buying, only to find a spidery script reading, “Not For Sale” where the price should have been on the inside cover. Frustrated, she made her way through a kitchen separating the two rooms and found him sitting in a floral armchair in the back room, smoking a cigarette.

He said, “I found a book on the history of Cornish smugglers. Can you believe it?”

Digging some coins out of his trousers, he made his way to the cashier, a burly man donning an unenthusiastic toupee who was watching what seemed to be the German version of American idol. She went outside and waited, clumsily rolling a cigarette and coughing into her sleeve, straightening as he busily left the bookshop.

He said, “You didn’t find anything? There’s another one, more worthwhile, close by.”

She debated touching him as they walked in the street, finally looping her left arm through his crooked elbow, his hand jammed into his coat pocket. It was a constant question she had, his affinity for her, why he chose to call her Meine Leibling. He had taken no other lovers in Berlin, so their friends told her, and his rough animal beauty made this romantic absence altogether baffling. She had outgrown, younger than most women, the over-valorization of being a unique presence in a man’s life. So this knowledge about his isolation meant nothing essential. She wondered how much she had forced herself upon this man, who had joked that he happily barricaded himself in Berlin, choosing to suffer internally the way a good Jewish expat ought to.

The next bookstore had an English section in the back. They grew competitive, informal intellectuals asking whether the other had read this book, knew the background of that author, sometimes detailing the story behind their first encounter with some novel. On the back wall, while looking for Durrell, she found a ratty copy of Herzog by Saul Bellows, a paperback she had seen the day before shoved in among the thousands of Brecht’s books. She scanned it and, showing him the delicate little copy, read:

“He went on taking stock, lying face down on the sofa. Was he a clever man or an idiot? Well, he could not at this time claim to be clever. He might once have had the makings of a clever character, but he had chosen to be dreamy instead, and the sharpies cleaned him out. What more? He was losing his hair.”

She smiled widely and hid her hands in his curly hair, fingers hidden in an unruly field waxed with pomade. He kissed the side of her neck and said,

“I’d like to read that when you’re done. You should get it.”

And she did.