Berlin was a post-everything city. It deluded Puma into thinking she could invent what she wanted when and how she wanted it. She loved the city, albeit dispassionately—the public transport that no one seemed to pay for past 11 p.m., the cheap beer and rising rent, the way the city wore its history of devastation on its streets—Berlin was one giant Etch-a-Sketch to be flipped and shaken every decade or so and remade in another image. And there they all were, making their lives into something with no past, as the past collapsed into new construction sites around them.
Once, she found a dirty red gummy bear on its back on the sidewalk of Ku’damm; it seemed to contain a history of absurdity within it, the absurd history of the city in which she lived. She was overreaching; she knew that. But of course—part of the force of the gesture was the knowledge built into the gesture itself, as she leaned in to kiss the man she called her dear biologist.
Once, she found a dirty red gummy bear on its back on the sidewalk of Ku’damm; it seemed to contain a history of absurdity within it, the absurd history of the city in which she lived. She was overreaching; she knew that. But of course—part of the force of the gesture was the knowledge built into the gesture itself, as she leaned in to kiss the man she called her dear biologist.
*
She was sitting in a park near Winterfeldtplatz with her best friend Tuğçe, alternating forkfuls of an oversized tiramisu purchased at the Saturday market. German couples watched their children play around them and everyone pretended it was several degrees warmer than it actually was, positioning themselves strategically in the small window of sunlight available outside in wintertime Berlin. She gave Tuğçe an update on the biologist: as far as the situation went, she was trying to find a way toward a solution, going about it the way she did all things: haphazardly. She was relieved to see there was no judgement from Tuğçe—she had her own complicated past, her own struggles. There was a quality to Tuğçe that made her implicitly admirable, a candor in her way of being that lacked indulgence, without being self-effacing in that way Puma sometimes found herself adopting in order to seem nonthreatening. So what if they both carried small flasks of self-delusion to get through the day; doesn’t, doesn’t everybody. The problem was that she always attempted to resolve things the same way she cleaned her glasses—passing the blue cloth across the lens, leaving a surface sheen of greasy smudges, everything a little blurrier than before she’d attempted to correct it.
*
It was his gaze that drew her in. She had gone to Clärchens Balhaus with Tuğçe and a few other friends, it was their favorite place to go out in Berlin, she would lose herself in movement, it was a way of getting access to a part of herself that otherwise remained hidden for reasons she didn’t quite understand. Clärchens was very kitsch: the waiters gruffly tuxedoed, the interior as Ossi as it once was during the DDR times, and the disco ball and streamers hanging from the ceiling looked like they hadn’t been changed since the mid-Seventies, the place was a rejoinder to everything cool and cold about Berlin—it was warm, almost damp with unhip-ness. She would go into an almost trance-like state, her cowboy boots and skinny jeans, letting herself completely fall into the dictates of the music’s loopy beats. She and her friends would dance toward the front, near the band, and that night she noticed a man staring at her intently as she danced, she was certain he had been watching her for something like twenty minutes, and though normally she was shy and passive in her dealings with men, after the wine and the dancing and his gaze she felt confident enough to approach him. She told him in broken German over the loud band that she was going to the back terrace to have a cigarette with her friends, and if he wanted to join, he was welcome. He looked at her, dumbfounded, and said something she couldn’t quite hear or understand as she walked to the back of the club past the bathrooms and went outside for a cigarette, but he didn’t follow after her. Perhaps I misread the situation, she said to Tuğçe, maybe he’s not interested, but he seemed so interested. They went back inside, the band rattling through some Eighties pop hits, and she danced off her disappointment and was back in her tiny, private bliss, when all of a sudden the man appeared at her side and grabbed her hand and they began to dance. She was thrilled and slightly annoyed because he was inhibiting her ability to dance, he was an awkward dancer, and she pushed him around as she tended to do, trying to guide him, when a group of young British men approached her and he swatted them away, he was very possessive, and she was pleased by his possessiveness though didn’t yet know the hypocrisy of this, that he wanted her all to himself was charming but she also wasn’t yet convinced, though attracted to this man and his arrogance she was curious about the Brits, who did he think he was, claiming her as his. The music stopped and she—the American—asked him—the German—an American question in mangled German and he replied, I’m a researcher for a pharmaceutical company in Berlin. Although they alternated that night between English and German, later they always spoke to each other in her tongue, their little story compartmentalized by their refusal to speak the language of the country they found themselves in, it was the disavowal in which they lived.
He had a closed off, careful quality that projected a cautious intelligence. She found him handsome and he knew he was handsome—he was arrogant and anxious about it, knowing he looked young for his age, anxious about getting older, she appraised him as such to avoid the rest of her feelings, to avoid feeling how thrilled she was to have met him. The night they met, they went back to her flat, and he said he would be happy to see her on occasion, but that their meetings would be limited by his two children, so she asked him, Oh, where are they now, at your ex-wife’s residence—it was, after all, five in the morning—They’re with my wife, he said sheepishly, What do they say on Facebook, it’s complicated, Where’s your ring, she asked, if I’d seen a ring, I wouldn’t have danced with you, don’t you think this is information I would have liked to have and you could have mentioned sooner, I’m not bothered by the fact that you have children, you’re forty-nine years old, but a wife, you neglect to mention your wife, where’s your ring, what is this. He told her that, apart from their wedding day, a simple civil ceremony, they hadn’t worn rings. Oh, she said, trying to hide her anger and disappointment, how modern, I suppose you find rings bourgeois, but don’t you know they’re helpful, it would have been helpful. She asked him to leave and he asked several times for her number and she said no, she felt so pleased with herself, so self-righteous, he was a man who was used to getting what he wanted, his privilege and good looks and intellect and willing and willful dishonesty had left him accustomed to getting what he wanted and she wasn’t going to give him anything, she was so smug, so pleased. Impulse control, she said, chiding him like a naughty boy, and he looked up at her, curled as he was in the corner of her bed, and said, like a naughty boy, Impulse control isn’t something I’m very good at. And then he got up to put on his shoes as he was still fully dressed—for they had done little more than embrace, she’d been determined before his disclosure to get to know him, as a woman to get to know him meant she was supposed to withhold her own desire lest he think she was desperate, and she did, she was so smug, so pleased. He laced his shoes and stood up and asked, a sly grin drawn across his face—and if I hadn’t mentioned the kids? Kids? You think the kids are the problem? she said, almost laughing, and then, glad to have done the right thing she closed the door on him, fell into bed, and slept rather soundly.
The next morning she woke up feeling joyful and giddy for no reason, so she wasn’t going to see the biologist again, so what, she’d had fun. The night before, back at Clärchens, he asked her if she was on Facebook and she said No, but I have a website with jpegs of my paintings and such, and she shouted her first and last name over the music and said, only half-joking, Google it.
He had a closed off, careful quality that projected a cautious intelligence. She found him handsome and he knew he was handsome—he was arrogant and anxious about it, knowing he looked young for his age, anxious about getting older, she appraised him as such to avoid the rest of her feelings, to avoid feeling how thrilled she was to have met him. The night they met, they went back to her flat, and he said he would be happy to see her on occasion, but that their meetings would be limited by his two children, so she asked him, Oh, where are they now, at your ex-wife’s residence—it was, after all, five in the morning—They’re with my wife, he said sheepishly, What do they say on Facebook, it’s complicated, Where’s your ring, she asked, if I’d seen a ring, I wouldn’t have danced with you, don’t you think this is information I would have liked to have and you could have mentioned sooner, I’m not bothered by the fact that you have children, you’re forty-nine years old, but a wife, you neglect to mention your wife, where’s your ring, what is this. He told her that, apart from their wedding day, a simple civil ceremony, they hadn’t worn rings. Oh, she said, trying to hide her anger and disappointment, how modern, I suppose you find rings bourgeois, but don’t you know they’re helpful, it would have been helpful. She asked him to leave and he asked several times for her number and she said no, she felt so pleased with herself, so self-righteous, he was a man who was used to getting what he wanted, his privilege and good looks and intellect and willing and willful dishonesty had left him accustomed to getting what he wanted and she wasn’t going to give him anything, she was so smug, so pleased. Impulse control, she said, chiding him like a naughty boy, and he looked up at her, curled as he was in the corner of her bed, and said, like a naughty boy, Impulse control isn’t something I’m very good at. And then he got up to put on his shoes as he was still fully dressed—for they had done little more than embrace, she’d been determined before his disclosure to get to know him, as a woman to get to know him meant she was supposed to withhold her own desire lest he think she was desperate, and she did, she was so smug, so pleased. He laced his shoes and stood up and asked, a sly grin drawn across his face—and if I hadn’t mentioned the kids? Kids? You think the kids are the problem? she said, almost laughing, and then, glad to have done the right thing she closed the door on him, fell into bed, and slept rather soundly.
The next morning she woke up feeling joyful and giddy for no reason, so she wasn’t going to see the biologist again, so what, she’d had fun. The night before, back at Clärchens, he asked her if she was on Facebook and she said No, but I have a website with jpegs of my paintings and such, and she shouted her first and last name over the music and said, only half-joking, Google it.
*
Well, he must have remembered her name, despite the noise of the club and the alcohol and the late hour. Five days after they had met, on an anything Thursday evening in July, warm and sunny, she was supposed to meet Tuğçe for dinner and was still in what she called her dirty painter clothes, slightly sweaty sweats she hadn’t changed out of since that morning’s half-hearted attempt to create something, obviously she wasn’t going to go meet Tuğçe for dinner in the dirty painter clothes she’d spent the afternoon not painting in, so she texted to say she’d be ten minutes late and took five to throw on a pair of jeans and a bit of mascara. Since she now had five minutes to spare, she decided to walk south toward the U-Bahn at Turmstrasse since she was headed to Kreuzkölln and it was nice out; a little change of routine, she always took the U-Bahn from Birkenstrasse because it was much closer, a four-minute walk north and east from her flat, but she wanted a small stroll, and so exited her flat and headed, as she almost never did, south.
She was wearing headphones and her usual distracted look when she felt someone staring at her in the distance, looking through her as though he saw a latent energy burning within her that she otherwise kept hidden, and she recognized the quality of this gaze before registering his face, before she could take in the miraculous, improbable scene before them. There, standing some ten or fifteen meters down the street from her flat, was a man with a bike in orange running shorts and t-shirt and wire glasses: the dear biologist. Her disbelief registered in the way disbelief does: it took her some seconds to recover, and by the time she did and realized that what she was seeing was in the realm of the real she was standing before him. His own surprise registered in a way that would have been indelicate of her to acknowledge though she enjoyed it, there was something tender and delicate about the fact that he was, well, happy to see her, his running shorts rendering this fact rather indelicately obvious. They stared at each other. She couldn’t believe she had walked right into him. Was machst du denn hier? she asked him, and he answered her in German, but she didn’t understand, and her face must have registered her feigned ability to understand, because he then said to her in English, I was looking for your mailbox, I wanted to leave you a little note, but I couldn’t find it, I was just getting ready to leave and bike home. He couldn’t remember which street she lived on, but had gone looking for her last name on the buzzers outside, in hopes of leaving her a note. I biked around the other block, I thought it was around here but couldn’t find you, he said. Stalker, she said, mostly joking, mostly delighted—dumbfounded actually, and thrilled—I live in a sublet, so you can’t, my last name isn’t anywhere on the building, I’m in an illegal sublet, she repeated, as if reiterating her anxiety over her ability to exist in the realm of the real Berlin. He was tall and tanned and she was as attracted to him as she’d remembered from that night the just days before, and she longed to embrace him, the drama of the moment seemed to call for them to embrace, running into him on the street, when she should have walked north and east, was so unlikely, so miraculous, but she was careful to hide her feelings behind a veneer of generic friendliness, she wanted to make him suffer, and maintained a decorous distance. I’m running late to meet a friend, would you like to walk with me toward the U-Bahn Turmstrasse, she asked. Yes, he said, I just finished work, I’ll bike home after. You’ll give me the note, she said, and he did, which she tucked away to read later, enjoying the warmth of his proximity as they walked through the canopy of trees in her Kiez, chatting. Since moving to Berlin she had become so estranged from her own feelings, so afraid of being disappointed by her own desires, and also aware, of course, that standing next to her was a married father of two children, that she maintained her act of cool bemusement, and tried to make herself seem hurried and important—she was in a hurry, she was late to meet her friend, it was, it wasn’t important, she wanted to walk with the biologist and sit with him and talk and drink something. She wanted to embrace him. She told him about her day, and he tried to tell her about a song by a German band that their encounter reminded him of, but she didn’t know the band, but she wrote down their name in her phone, forgetting the umlaut, not getting the name of the song. He said, I’ll send it to you, Yes, but you don’t have my number, she said, enjoying his frustration, her sense of power, Well, I wrote my number in the note, if you write me I’ll send you a link to the song, Okay, she said, we’ll see if I write you, and by then they had arrived to her U-Bahn stop. I’ve got to go, she said, I’m running late to meet my friend, it was great to see you, she said, and then gave him, not her embrace, but a cursory, friendly hug. She thought about how happy she was to see him, how happy he seemed in his ridiculous orange running shorts, and she didn’t look back while descending the U-Bahn’s stairs, she was still trying to understand why Fate had intervened, if one could call it that, and why—it seemed so improbable to her that she had turned left to head south and ran into him on the street, mere seconds before he was to mount his bike to leave. Nervously she took out the note he had given her to read from the quiet of her U-Bahn seat.
On the folded slip of paper there was a sketch of her delineated in the top-right corner, her angled nose and wavy hair, his name and phone number below. And this: Images, words, and moments from that night echo and echo in meinem Kopf. Es war besonders. Echt. I can’t stop thinking about you--
She didn’t know what she wanted out of the note, somehow she was expecting something more grandiose, but already the gesture was both silly and grandiose; what more could she want. She knew she wanted to see him again, and felt the truth of this as shock that made her feel how very hollow her sense of order around her life had been, it was not unlike the shock she’d felt after a car accident years ago, her brain dutifully fixated on the banality of the details of the day, but the heart and body so overcome they become sublimated by the intensity of the moment before them. Her body, in fact, was performing every cliché of romantic excitement: the fast-beating heart, the euphoria. She swooned in her U-Bahn seat and couldn’t wait to tell Tuğçe about the improbability of this moment, her dear biologist. She longed for him and and was overcome by the transparency of his own desire, his insistence on pursuing her after she’d rejected him, which she unconsciously took to be an indicator of not only the intensity of his desire, but also its depth and seriousness, she felt then the possibility that what had passed between them might occupy the realm of the real, even if their meeting on this street corner had all the trappings of an unlikely fable, and one that would end with her facing the tracks of the U-Bahn, the train pulling out and moving on.
Tuğçe said, You’re glowing, and she explained, I saw the biologist; I never thought I’d see him again, and there he was. They laughed together over the note he’d written, the drawing, they jokingly called him her stalker. She knew she wanted to write him but also wanted to torture him, punish him for his indiscretion and make him wait forty-eight hours, it was the least she could do, after they spent an evening together in which he only told her only at the end of the evening, and then, only because she’d asked, that he was married and lived with his wife, his wife and his two adolescent children.
She wrote him two evenings later, a coy, casual message: Dear biologist, seeing you on the street the other day was so unexpected. And your note was sweet. Here’s an after-work post-punk Eighties tune for you--
She sent a link to Fun Boy Three’s version of “Our Lips Are Sealed,” figuring, at the biologist’s age, that he would have been in his early teens when the song came out; she, on the other hand, had not even been born when the song was released, but what did it matter now, she throughly in her thirties, when difference in age spreads out into diffidence—now, they were officially grownups, gleefully acting like children. She sent the message at dinnertime, just before an art talk she had to give, “Rendering the Male as Muse,” she’d called it, and sending it made her nervous, for she wanted him to respond right away, even though she’d made him wait forty-eight hours, she wanted him to make his presence known instantly, not considering—since he seemed to live his life independent of his family—that probably they were sitting down to dinner at that same moment, all four of them. She gave her talk, distracted, anxious to receive word from the biologist.
He responded that evening, at midnight. In the days following, they made arrangements to see each other again.
She was wearing headphones and her usual distracted look when she felt someone staring at her in the distance, looking through her as though he saw a latent energy burning within her that she otherwise kept hidden, and she recognized the quality of this gaze before registering his face, before she could take in the miraculous, improbable scene before them. There, standing some ten or fifteen meters down the street from her flat, was a man with a bike in orange running shorts and t-shirt and wire glasses: the dear biologist. Her disbelief registered in the way disbelief does: it took her some seconds to recover, and by the time she did and realized that what she was seeing was in the realm of the real she was standing before him. His own surprise registered in a way that would have been indelicate of her to acknowledge though she enjoyed it, there was something tender and delicate about the fact that he was, well, happy to see her, his running shorts rendering this fact rather indelicately obvious. They stared at each other. She couldn’t believe she had walked right into him. Was machst du denn hier? she asked him, and he answered her in German, but she didn’t understand, and her face must have registered her feigned ability to understand, because he then said to her in English, I was looking for your mailbox, I wanted to leave you a little note, but I couldn’t find it, I was just getting ready to leave and bike home. He couldn’t remember which street she lived on, but had gone looking for her last name on the buzzers outside, in hopes of leaving her a note. I biked around the other block, I thought it was around here but couldn’t find you, he said. Stalker, she said, mostly joking, mostly delighted—dumbfounded actually, and thrilled—I live in a sublet, so you can’t, my last name isn’t anywhere on the building, I’m in an illegal sublet, she repeated, as if reiterating her anxiety over her ability to exist in the realm of the real Berlin. He was tall and tanned and she was as attracted to him as she’d remembered from that night the just days before, and she longed to embrace him, the drama of the moment seemed to call for them to embrace, running into him on the street, when she should have walked north and east, was so unlikely, so miraculous, but she was careful to hide her feelings behind a veneer of generic friendliness, she wanted to make him suffer, and maintained a decorous distance. I’m running late to meet a friend, would you like to walk with me toward the U-Bahn Turmstrasse, she asked. Yes, he said, I just finished work, I’ll bike home after. You’ll give me the note, she said, and he did, which she tucked away to read later, enjoying the warmth of his proximity as they walked through the canopy of trees in her Kiez, chatting. Since moving to Berlin she had become so estranged from her own feelings, so afraid of being disappointed by her own desires, and also aware, of course, that standing next to her was a married father of two children, that she maintained her act of cool bemusement, and tried to make herself seem hurried and important—she was in a hurry, she was late to meet her friend, it was, it wasn’t important, she wanted to walk with the biologist and sit with him and talk and drink something. She wanted to embrace him. She told him about her day, and he tried to tell her about a song by a German band that their encounter reminded him of, but she didn’t know the band, but she wrote down their name in her phone, forgetting the umlaut, not getting the name of the song. He said, I’ll send it to you, Yes, but you don’t have my number, she said, enjoying his frustration, her sense of power, Well, I wrote my number in the note, if you write me I’ll send you a link to the song, Okay, she said, we’ll see if I write you, and by then they had arrived to her U-Bahn stop. I’ve got to go, she said, I’m running late to meet my friend, it was great to see you, she said, and then gave him, not her embrace, but a cursory, friendly hug. She thought about how happy she was to see him, how happy he seemed in his ridiculous orange running shorts, and she didn’t look back while descending the U-Bahn’s stairs, she was still trying to understand why Fate had intervened, if one could call it that, and why—it seemed so improbable to her that she had turned left to head south and ran into him on the street, mere seconds before he was to mount his bike to leave. Nervously she took out the note he had given her to read from the quiet of her U-Bahn seat.
On the folded slip of paper there was a sketch of her delineated in the top-right corner, her angled nose and wavy hair, his name and phone number below. And this: Images, words, and moments from that night echo and echo in meinem Kopf. Es war besonders. Echt. I can’t stop thinking about you--
She didn’t know what she wanted out of the note, somehow she was expecting something more grandiose, but already the gesture was both silly and grandiose; what more could she want. She knew she wanted to see him again, and felt the truth of this as shock that made her feel how very hollow her sense of order around her life had been, it was not unlike the shock she’d felt after a car accident years ago, her brain dutifully fixated on the banality of the details of the day, but the heart and body so overcome they become sublimated by the intensity of the moment before them. Her body, in fact, was performing every cliché of romantic excitement: the fast-beating heart, the euphoria. She swooned in her U-Bahn seat and couldn’t wait to tell Tuğçe about the improbability of this moment, her dear biologist. She longed for him and and was overcome by the transparency of his own desire, his insistence on pursuing her after she’d rejected him, which she unconsciously took to be an indicator of not only the intensity of his desire, but also its depth and seriousness, she felt then the possibility that what had passed between them might occupy the realm of the real, even if their meeting on this street corner had all the trappings of an unlikely fable, and one that would end with her facing the tracks of the U-Bahn, the train pulling out and moving on.
Tuğçe said, You’re glowing, and she explained, I saw the biologist; I never thought I’d see him again, and there he was. They laughed together over the note he’d written, the drawing, they jokingly called him her stalker. She knew she wanted to write him but also wanted to torture him, punish him for his indiscretion and make him wait forty-eight hours, it was the least she could do, after they spent an evening together in which he only told her only at the end of the evening, and then, only because she’d asked, that he was married and lived with his wife, his wife and his two adolescent children.
She wrote him two evenings later, a coy, casual message: Dear biologist, seeing you on the street the other day was so unexpected. And your note was sweet. Here’s an after-work post-punk Eighties tune for you--
She sent a link to Fun Boy Three’s version of “Our Lips Are Sealed,” figuring, at the biologist’s age, that he would have been in his early teens when the song came out; she, on the other hand, had not even been born when the song was released, but what did it matter now, she throughly in her thirties, when difference in age spreads out into diffidence—now, they were officially grownups, gleefully acting like children. She sent the message at dinnertime, just before an art talk she had to give, “Rendering the Male as Muse,” she’d called it, and sending it made her nervous, for she wanted him to respond right away, even though she’d made him wait forty-eight hours, she wanted him to make his presence known instantly, not considering—since he seemed to live his life independent of his family—that probably they were sitting down to dinner at that same moment, all four of them. She gave her talk, distracted, anxious to receive word from the biologist.
He responded that evening, at midnight. In the days following, they made arrangements to see each other again.
*
Two weeks after they had met, a few days following their miraculous encounter on the street, Puma asked the biologist to show her something of ‘his Berlin,’ hopeful that he would make an effort to impress her. He said, if she wanted, that they could go for a bike ride along the Havel river, and then rent a boat and explore the Wannsee. He often went for long runs there in the early hours, and said it was one of his favorite places in Berlin. (He was a man of a certain age who ran marathons because he could—he knew how, as they say, to ‘take care of himself.’) Puma wasn’t sure what she expected, but chose to forget the fact that whatever he would propose would be clandestine. Regardless, she said yes, and they met one Wednesday morning in July, a day that they had already decided would be the last to spend together before breaking off contact; their situation was impossible, and he was about to go on holiday for three weeks with his wife and two children; it was, as they say, for the best.
They were sitting in the rented rowboat on the Wannsee beneath a wavering sky, the lake empty but for a skitter of boats, little boys with black bands tied ceremoniously around their necks, children taking part in a sailing camp. The biologist sat across from her primly as the undercurrents of their intentions—taking this excursion, alone, in search of a secluded beach—circled around them. He had brought a light red wine from his family winery, which his sister now ran; it had been in the biologist’s family for nine generations. She opened the bottle while he rowed placidly despite the dark gathering of clouds moving in, explaining to her that the family winery was situated down the road from one of the Third Reich’s earliest concentration camps—or rather, one of the Third Reich’s earliest concentration camps was situated down the road from the family winery. As he told her this, she poured him a glass of the family wine, and he looked at her with one of those looks that people give when they are both trying to tell you something and trying to tell you that they aren’t trying to tell you something, a long gaze that he then tucked away into a squint at the storm in the distance. He had never spoken of his family or the past, and before she could ask him the question one was not supposed to ask, he told her that his parents had both been active and ardent National Socialists. Everyone was, but my parents and grandparents truly believed, he said, going on to explain that his mother had been a member of the Bund Deutscher Mädel, the League of German Girls, and later the BDM-Werk Glaube und Schönheit, the Faith and Beauty Society.
Du bist schön, the biologist once told her, and schön was one of the words in Puma’s meager German Wortschatz she was always using to express nice, fun, cool, lovely: amazing.
Puma couldn’t believe the biologist was only one generation removed from the horrors of the Second World War, in her suburban American existence growing up in the Eighties and Nineties her only understanding of the War came from bad movies with bad actors with worse accents and below-grade textbooks, but then she remembered that the biologist was the youngest of four children and that his mother had given birth to him in the late Sixties, at the late age—especially for the time—of forty-five. The biologist and his siblings were raised by parents who had grown up and grown into the horrors of the War. Did they talk about it, Puma asked him, and he said, Yes, quite openly, in fact. And the concentration camp, she said, did people in the town know it existed, Yes, he said, it was obvious, but in operation for only a year, and no one was executed there; it was a labor camp for political prisoners established after the Reichstag burned, he said, not a place of death.
Months later, she remembered this camp and went to Google Maps to look it up, together with the family winery. The camp, which was now a museum, was less than a kilometer from the family winery, a ten-minute walk on a single road on the north side of town separating the vineyard from the former paper factory owned, in the nineteenth century, by a Jewish family, and that, in the year 1933, had the word KONZENTRATIONSLAGER emblazoned across it.
As he rowed, she asked the biologist if he felt some sort of residual shame or guilt—for that is what she’d been told of, what her German friends his age said they couldn’t help but feel, and couldn’t help but resent feeling—but he said no, he found the idea absurd, for he was guilty of nothing, his parents spoke of what had happened quite openly, they were a product of their time, he said, they weren’t evil the way you Americans always think, it was something that happened and they got caught up in it, but they were good people, and I don’t feel guilty for them. She both did and didn’t believe him; reserved as he was, it seemed such a particular moment to disclose this very particular fact from his past—just before they were to reach a secluded beach for their highly secluded purposes.
The wine was taking its effect on their empty stomachs and the biologist proudly removed his shirt, revealing his tanned skin, which was handsome and ever so slightly middle-aged, or rather, academic—or both, perhaps—but even that was appealing, his vanity and its inherent vulnerability were charming to Puma, as was his slightly neurotic quality, she took pleasure in it, as she was more than a little neurotic herself (at least at times when she felt she had something to worry about, which, ever since moving to Berlin, seemed to be all the time). But here they were, the biologist showing himself off to her as he rowed, clearly proud that, at forty-nine years of age, he was still in good shape—and she was reminded of the day when he modestly bragged to her about the physical he’d had at the doctor where, after biking through a stress test with the other employees of the pharmaceutical company where he worked, he was rated the healthiest among them—modest bragging, she called it, because after all this was a group of aging men, academics and researchers, and she teased him about it, his pride among the nerds, and he smiled the same smile he always seemed to carry across his face, which was crooked in the literal, not the figurative sense; for though his smile did try to hide as much as it revealed, it was without malice. It was a smile she couldn’t recall ever seeing elsewhere, but somehow recognized, clear in tone; tinged as it was with an almost comic sense of shame, it drew her in: it was a crooked, forlorn grin.
The biologist was still rowing, he had a beach in mind and it wasn’t close and the lake was big. She asked to take a turn and was glad to see that despite her awkwardness she could more or less manage as well as him—it was her own modest brag, her spindly arms taking them across the incremental expanse as the waves from the gathering low pressure system slowly pushed them back. She set the oars down for a moment and her bare feet, which had been grazing the boat’s hull near his in invitation, found themselves, to her delight and relief, in his hands, the biologist leaning forward and pulling her toward him. The gesture was almost innocent in its need, erotic but adolescent in its transparency, their sternums pressing against each other as the clouds crawled in, the wooden boat reluctantly adjusting to their movements; and then, a string of sailboats went by in the distance, the children from before, and they both became self-conscious even though there was nothing overtly untoward about the moment they were caught in, except their age, although their age wasn’t visible at a distance, they could have been two teenagers caught in the passionate blush of first love, and one of the little boys from across the water lifted his hands in the shape of a heart, both mocking and cheering them on, and she was pleased, as the biologist also seemed, that what passed between them was so palpably legible, even at a distance. They looked at each other and smiled, although it wasn’t until much later that she found herself contemplating what darker motives lay behind the biologist’s intentions—in that way, too, she was more than a bit teenage: naive.
There on the lake, however, all she could feel was foolish and giddy; as if, although she knew better, this was the beginning of something monumental. There on the open water, beneath the loose yellow top she had deliberately worn hoping to find herself being held the way she was now, the biologist wrapped his hands around the bare skin of her torso, pressing his thumbs very gently against the hope held in her chest.
Their boat finally reached a tiny beach in front of a chain-link fence on the Schwanenwerder island. They waded through the ebullient marsh grasses, pulled the boat onto the makeshift beach, drank what little was left of the wine, and sat down to eat. Up to that point, Puma and the biologist had done little more than embrace, they had not yet even kissed. Their interactions were always circumscribed and compartmentalized, mimicking the situation they found themselves in.
The biologist seemed surprised and touched by the elaborateness of the picnic lunch she’d prepared, which really wasn’t elaborate at all, and this increased her tenderness toward him, making her wonder how little he was nurtured in his life (though here Puma was probably, most definitely projecting), how heavily he carried the burden of being the husband who provided—he was a senior researcher in drug development for a multi-national pharmaceutical company, after all, so he must have done well in providing. Puma enjoyed teasing him about his haute-bourgeois lifestyle: the badminton games, ski trips to the Alps in winter and summers on the Mediterranean, the excellent coke and pure MDMA she imagined he took with friends in small doses on special occasions, little measured rebukes to the passing of time, which he clearly feared as much as she did; and even as Puma teased him about his haute-bourgeois lifestyle, she envied and misunderstood him for it, in the same way she thought he might have envied and misunderstood her seemingly ‘carefree’ lifestyle as an artist.
Puma was touched that he was touched by this simple lunch: chicken and pesto with lettuce on a baguette, another with basil, tomato, and mozzarella. They ate quietly, nervously—she couldn’t tell if he was nervous, but surely he was, he had planned for them to be on a deserted beach, he wanted her, she wanted him to possess her, they were both possessed by the startling intensity of their feelings. The clouds had darkened and were no longer in the distance but the sun was still out, and, as the weather shifted, Puma quickly tried to calculate just what she wanted her own limits to be. She’d never slept with a married man before, and didn’t really want to know herself as a woman who slept with married men. Maybe it was better to keep the intensity of their feelings in the realm of the abstract, a happy fantasy, she thought to herself as he undressed to enter the lake for a quick swim. Though in Germany it’s not uncommon to bathe in the nude among friends and strangers, this was an invitation, clearly—he was showing off his body with a simian pride, and his invitation possessed the delicate plainness of a boy’s. Puma was folding all of these thoughts over, wondering if she should deny her desire in an effort to assert control as she so often, too often did. She was worried that if she followed her desire the biologist would presume that it was also laced with something else, with some other burden or need, and then the biologist would feel that Puma was meant, at least in part, to be pitied, and she didn’t want to be pitied, and as she watched him traipse through the water from the security of her picnic blanket, admiring his body, she was pleased to notice that he was already slightly aroused, and Puma debated removing her clothes and joining him in the water as she wanted to go to him, or for him to come to her, but she didn’t have to debate anything, because in that moment the sky over Berlin opened, and hail fell down in pearl-sized pellets, hard.
The shift in the weather was nearly biblical in its suddenness. The nimbleness of the change from light to dark, the improbability of frozen rain in July when it was warm enough for them to bike to the lake in t-shirts and shorts. They were washed up on this tiny beach, and suddenly it was freezing, and suddenly it seemed a question of survival, a matter of staying close in order to preserve their body heat. It came to Puma not as a decision, but rather, from biological instinct, her clothes were drenched so she removed the heavy denim shorts and no-longer-jaunty yellow top, worrying for a moment about the array of electronic devices in the backpack she had brought in case they resigned themselves to a chaste afternoon of swimming and reading—she’d imagined it might be a tame excursion, filled with the promise of longing but not its fulfillment, but now the only thing for them to do was to take shelter from the cold in each other, stranded on this island, utterly exposed. It felt inevitable to her in a certain sense, it almost didn’t seem like sex; although that is, of course, the biological explanation for what they did, as they struggled to keep warm and the hail fell all around and on them.
They hardly moved as Puma held his body, warm, inside her; it was too cold, the hail too painful as it came down, his body protecting hers though they were both shaking from the sudden drop in temperature; they had the picnic blanket wrapped around them for insulation, but it, too, was drenched, and she looked up at him and then he kissed the space beneath her clavicle, just above her breasts, and so suffused with tenderness was the gesture that she was aware of nothing other than their connection. Puma recognized that there was something both grand about the situation and grandly foolish, they were fools—what were they doing, coming out to the lake on a day when the forecast called for rain and the biologist had to work and she could at least try to direct her energies toward someone who might be even slightly more available than a married father of two. In that instant, lighting flashed over the lake, and the biologist told her he was concerned about getting back, but, given the lighting, he was also worried about rowing over the open waters, he was downright trembling from the cold by now and fair enough, for he was the one exposed and she was safely nestled beneath him, clinging to what little warmth was left. Let the storm pass, she kept saying, it will pass soon and then we can row back—though it had been an hour already, and showed no sign of letting up. In truth, even if she was freezing, she didn’t want to leave, she didn’t want to lose her dear biologist’s embrace. As he held her there he whispered, I could stay like this forever, and her heart did a small leap, although she later learned this is precisely what he’d say just as he was taking leave. He was shaking and scared and they were both freezing, their backpacks and clothes completely drenched and covered in sand, mud, and marsh grass. Instinctively, Puma understood then that she was the stronger and braver of the two, but this knowledge lent her only mild satisfaction, as this strength came partly from the fact that she was used to a life of discomfort, and even if that discomfort often made her sad or anxious, she didn’t question it, and that was part of the problem. She was so used to accepting discomfort, she practically leaned headlong into it.
Finally the hail stopped and the rain began to fall more slowly. They gathered their things and got dressed in a procedural fashion, their intense closeness vanishing with the same brusqueness as the storm overhead. They did what they could to empty the boat of the water it had gathered, and Puma worried over her electronics, furtively trying to dry them. They said nothing to each other as they prepared to leave, relating to each other as though work colleagues at a mandatory team-building picnic. They started back, the sun beginning to meekly show itself from between the clouds. It’s late, the biologist said, and indeed it was, nearly six p.m., the fleeting amplitude of the afternoon slipping away into evening. They returned the boat, and if the young Germans manning the kiosk had any idea about what transpired during their excursion, they were kind enough to feign ignorance. The biologist paid and was pleased when they gave him a large discount, unprompted, since they’d been caught in the storm, as it were, for over four hours, and Puma could see he was thoroughly careful with money as he was with everything—including her, including her—he was so careful, it was almost stingy.
They biked back to the S-Bahn and boarded the train. Not knowing where to put all that had passed between them, they waited in silence for their stations, alighting in the evening dark.
They were sitting in the rented rowboat on the Wannsee beneath a wavering sky, the lake empty but for a skitter of boats, little boys with black bands tied ceremoniously around their necks, children taking part in a sailing camp. The biologist sat across from her primly as the undercurrents of their intentions—taking this excursion, alone, in search of a secluded beach—circled around them. He had brought a light red wine from his family winery, which his sister now ran; it had been in the biologist’s family for nine generations. She opened the bottle while he rowed placidly despite the dark gathering of clouds moving in, explaining to her that the family winery was situated down the road from one of the Third Reich’s earliest concentration camps—or rather, one of the Third Reich’s earliest concentration camps was situated down the road from the family winery. As he told her this, she poured him a glass of the family wine, and he looked at her with one of those looks that people give when they are both trying to tell you something and trying to tell you that they aren’t trying to tell you something, a long gaze that he then tucked away into a squint at the storm in the distance. He had never spoken of his family or the past, and before she could ask him the question one was not supposed to ask, he told her that his parents had both been active and ardent National Socialists. Everyone was, but my parents and grandparents truly believed, he said, going on to explain that his mother had been a member of the Bund Deutscher Mädel, the League of German Girls, and later the BDM-Werk Glaube und Schönheit, the Faith and Beauty Society.
Du bist schön, the biologist once told her, and schön was one of the words in Puma’s meager German Wortschatz she was always using to express nice, fun, cool, lovely: amazing.
Puma couldn’t believe the biologist was only one generation removed from the horrors of the Second World War, in her suburban American existence growing up in the Eighties and Nineties her only understanding of the War came from bad movies with bad actors with worse accents and below-grade textbooks, but then she remembered that the biologist was the youngest of four children and that his mother had given birth to him in the late Sixties, at the late age—especially for the time—of forty-five. The biologist and his siblings were raised by parents who had grown up and grown into the horrors of the War. Did they talk about it, Puma asked him, and he said, Yes, quite openly, in fact. And the concentration camp, she said, did people in the town know it existed, Yes, he said, it was obvious, but in operation for only a year, and no one was executed there; it was a labor camp for political prisoners established after the Reichstag burned, he said, not a place of death.
Months later, she remembered this camp and went to Google Maps to look it up, together with the family winery. The camp, which was now a museum, was less than a kilometer from the family winery, a ten-minute walk on a single road on the north side of town separating the vineyard from the former paper factory owned, in the nineteenth century, by a Jewish family, and that, in the year 1933, had the word KONZENTRATIONSLAGER emblazoned across it.
As he rowed, she asked the biologist if he felt some sort of residual shame or guilt—for that is what she’d been told of, what her German friends his age said they couldn’t help but feel, and couldn’t help but resent feeling—but he said no, he found the idea absurd, for he was guilty of nothing, his parents spoke of what had happened quite openly, they were a product of their time, he said, they weren’t evil the way you Americans always think, it was something that happened and they got caught up in it, but they were good people, and I don’t feel guilty for them. She both did and didn’t believe him; reserved as he was, it seemed such a particular moment to disclose this very particular fact from his past—just before they were to reach a secluded beach for their highly secluded purposes.
The wine was taking its effect on their empty stomachs and the biologist proudly removed his shirt, revealing his tanned skin, which was handsome and ever so slightly middle-aged, or rather, academic—or both, perhaps—but even that was appealing, his vanity and its inherent vulnerability were charming to Puma, as was his slightly neurotic quality, she took pleasure in it, as she was more than a little neurotic herself (at least at times when she felt she had something to worry about, which, ever since moving to Berlin, seemed to be all the time). But here they were, the biologist showing himself off to her as he rowed, clearly proud that, at forty-nine years of age, he was still in good shape—and she was reminded of the day when he modestly bragged to her about the physical he’d had at the doctor where, after biking through a stress test with the other employees of the pharmaceutical company where he worked, he was rated the healthiest among them—modest bragging, she called it, because after all this was a group of aging men, academics and researchers, and she teased him about it, his pride among the nerds, and he smiled the same smile he always seemed to carry across his face, which was crooked in the literal, not the figurative sense; for though his smile did try to hide as much as it revealed, it was without malice. It was a smile she couldn’t recall ever seeing elsewhere, but somehow recognized, clear in tone; tinged as it was with an almost comic sense of shame, it drew her in: it was a crooked, forlorn grin.
The biologist was still rowing, he had a beach in mind and it wasn’t close and the lake was big. She asked to take a turn and was glad to see that despite her awkwardness she could more or less manage as well as him—it was her own modest brag, her spindly arms taking them across the incremental expanse as the waves from the gathering low pressure system slowly pushed them back. She set the oars down for a moment and her bare feet, which had been grazing the boat’s hull near his in invitation, found themselves, to her delight and relief, in his hands, the biologist leaning forward and pulling her toward him. The gesture was almost innocent in its need, erotic but adolescent in its transparency, their sternums pressing against each other as the clouds crawled in, the wooden boat reluctantly adjusting to their movements; and then, a string of sailboats went by in the distance, the children from before, and they both became self-conscious even though there was nothing overtly untoward about the moment they were caught in, except their age, although their age wasn’t visible at a distance, they could have been two teenagers caught in the passionate blush of first love, and one of the little boys from across the water lifted his hands in the shape of a heart, both mocking and cheering them on, and she was pleased, as the biologist also seemed, that what passed between them was so palpably legible, even at a distance. They looked at each other and smiled, although it wasn’t until much later that she found herself contemplating what darker motives lay behind the biologist’s intentions—in that way, too, she was more than a bit teenage: naive.
There on the lake, however, all she could feel was foolish and giddy; as if, although she knew better, this was the beginning of something monumental. There on the open water, beneath the loose yellow top she had deliberately worn hoping to find herself being held the way she was now, the biologist wrapped his hands around the bare skin of her torso, pressing his thumbs very gently against the hope held in her chest.
Their boat finally reached a tiny beach in front of a chain-link fence on the Schwanenwerder island. They waded through the ebullient marsh grasses, pulled the boat onto the makeshift beach, drank what little was left of the wine, and sat down to eat. Up to that point, Puma and the biologist had done little more than embrace, they had not yet even kissed. Their interactions were always circumscribed and compartmentalized, mimicking the situation they found themselves in.
The biologist seemed surprised and touched by the elaborateness of the picnic lunch she’d prepared, which really wasn’t elaborate at all, and this increased her tenderness toward him, making her wonder how little he was nurtured in his life (though here Puma was probably, most definitely projecting), how heavily he carried the burden of being the husband who provided—he was a senior researcher in drug development for a multi-national pharmaceutical company, after all, so he must have done well in providing. Puma enjoyed teasing him about his haute-bourgeois lifestyle: the badminton games, ski trips to the Alps in winter and summers on the Mediterranean, the excellent coke and pure MDMA she imagined he took with friends in small doses on special occasions, little measured rebukes to the passing of time, which he clearly feared as much as she did; and even as Puma teased him about his haute-bourgeois lifestyle, she envied and misunderstood him for it, in the same way she thought he might have envied and misunderstood her seemingly ‘carefree’ lifestyle as an artist.
Puma was touched that he was touched by this simple lunch: chicken and pesto with lettuce on a baguette, another with basil, tomato, and mozzarella. They ate quietly, nervously—she couldn’t tell if he was nervous, but surely he was, he had planned for them to be on a deserted beach, he wanted her, she wanted him to possess her, they were both possessed by the startling intensity of their feelings. The clouds had darkened and were no longer in the distance but the sun was still out, and, as the weather shifted, Puma quickly tried to calculate just what she wanted her own limits to be. She’d never slept with a married man before, and didn’t really want to know herself as a woman who slept with married men. Maybe it was better to keep the intensity of their feelings in the realm of the abstract, a happy fantasy, she thought to herself as he undressed to enter the lake for a quick swim. Though in Germany it’s not uncommon to bathe in the nude among friends and strangers, this was an invitation, clearly—he was showing off his body with a simian pride, and his invitation possessed the delicate plainness of a boy’s. Puma was folding all of these thoughts over, wondering if she should deny her desire in an effort to assert control as she so often, too often did. She was worried that if she followed her desire the biologist would presume that it was also laced with something else, with some other burden or need, and then the biologist would feel that Puma was meant, at least in part, to be pitied, and she didn’t want to be pitied, and as she watched him traipse through the water from the security of her picnic blanket, admiring his body, she was pleased to notice that he was already slightly aroused, and Puma debated removing her clothes and joining him in the water as she wanted to go to him, or for him to come to her, but she didn’t have to debate anything, because in that moment the sky over Berlin opened, and hail fell down in pearl-sized pellets, hard.
The shift in the weather was nearly biblical in its suddenness. The nimbleness of the change from light to dark, the improbability of frozen rain in July when it was warm enough for them to bike to the lake in t-shirts and shorts. They were washed up on this tiny beach, and suddenly it was freezing, and suddenly it seemed a question of survival, a matter of staying close in order to preserve their body heat. It came to Puma not as a decision, but rather, from biological instinct, her clothes were drenched so she removed the heavy denim shorts and no-longer-jaunty yellow top, worrying for a moment about the array of electronic devices in the backpack she had brought in case they resigned themselves to a chaste afternoon of swimming and reading—she’d imagined it might be a tame excursion, filled with the promise of longing but not its fulfillment, but now the only thing for them to do was to take shelter from the cold in each other, stranded on this island, utterly exposed. It felt inevitable to her in a certain sense, it almost didn’t seem like sex; although that is, of course, the biological explanation for what they did, as they struggled to keep warm and the hail fell all around and on them.
They hardly moved as Puma held his body, warm, inside her; it was too cold, the hail too painful as it came down, his body protecting hers though they were both shaking from the sudden drop in temperature; they had the picnic blanket wrapped around them for insulation, but it, too, was drenched, and she looked up at him and then he kissed the space beneath her clavicle, just above her breasts, and so suffused with tenderness was the gesture that she was aware of nothing other than their connection. Puma recognized that there was something both grand about the situation and grandly foolish, they were fools—what were they doing, coming out to the lake on a day when the forecast called for rain and the biologist had to work and she could at least try to direct her energies toward someone who might be even slightly more available than a married father of two. In that instant, lighting flashed over the lake, and the biologist told her he was concerned about getting back, but, given the lighting, he was also worried about rowing over the open waters, he was downright trembling from the cold by now and fair enough, for he was the one exposed and she was safely nestled beneath him, clinging to what little warmth was left. Let the storm pass, she kept saying, it will pass soon and then we can row back—though it had been an hour already, and showed no sign of letting up. In truth, even if she was freezing, she didn’t want to leave, she didn’t want to lose her dear biologist’s embrace. As he held her there he whispered, I could stay like this forever, and her heart did a small leap, although she later learned this is precisely what he’d say just as he was taking leave. He was shaking and scared and they were both freezing, their backpacks and clothes completely drenched and covered in sand, mud, and marsh grass. Instinctively, Puma understood then that she was the stronger and braver of the two, but this knowledge lent her only mild satisfaction, as this strength came partly from the fact that she was used to a life of discomfort, and even if that discomfort often made her sad or anxious, she didn’t question it, and that was part of the problem. She was so used to accepting discomfort, she practically leaned headlong into it.
Finally the hail stopped and the rain began to fall more slowly. They gathered their things and got dressed in a procedural fashion, their intense closeness vanishing with the same brusqueness as the storm overhead. They did what they could to empty the boat of the water it had gathered, and Puma worried over her electronics, furtively trying to dry them. They said nothing to each other as they prepared to leave, relating to each other as though work colleagues at a mandatory team-building picnic. They started back, the sun beginning to meekly show itself from between the clouds. It’s late, the biologist said, and indeed it was, nearly six p.m., the fleeting amplitude of the afternoon slipping away into evening. They returned the boat, and if the young Germans manning the kiosk had any idea about what transpired during their excursion, they were kind enough to feign ignorance. The biologist paid and was pleased when they gave him a large discount, unprompted, since they’d been caught in the storm, as it were, for over four hours, and Puma could see he was thoroughly careful with money as he was with everything—including her, including her—he was so careful, it was almost stingy.
They biked back to the S-Bahn and boarded the train. Not knowing where to put all that had passed between them, they waited in silence for their stations, alighting in the evening dark.