Joseph Kanon: Leaving Berlin

They were still A few miles out when he heard the planes, a low steady droning, coming closer, the way the bombers must have sounded. Now loaded with food and sacks of coal. After Köpenick he could make out their lights in the sky, dropping toward the dark city, one plane after another, every thirty seconds they said, if that were possible, unloading then taking off again, the lights now a line of vanishing dots, like tracer bullets.

“How does anyone sleep?”

“You don’t hear them after a while,” Martin said. “You get used to it.”

Maybe Martin had, new to Berlin. But what about the others, who remembered huddling in shelters every night, waiting to die, listening to the engine sounds-how near? — the whining thrust as the nose was pulled up, free of the weight of its bombs, now floating somewhere overhead.

“So many planes,” Alex said, almost to himself. “How long can they keep it going?” Die Luftbrücke , Berlin’s lifeline now, with little parachutes of candy for the children, for the photographers.

“Not much longer,” Martin said, certain. “Think of the expense. And for what? They’re trying to make two cities. Two mayors, two police. But there’s only one city. Berlin is still where it is, in the Soviet zone. They can’t move it. They should leave now. Let things get back to normal.”

“Well, normal,” Alex said. The planes were getting louder, almost overhead, Tempelhof only one district west. “And will the Russians leave too?”

“I think so, yes,” Martin said, something he’d considered. “They stay for each other. The Americans don’t leave because the Russians-” He stopped. “But of course they’ll have to. It’s not reasonable,” he said, a French use of the word. “Why would the Russians stay? If Germany were neutral. Not a threat anymore.”

“Neutral but Socialist?”

“How else now? After the Fascists. It’s what everyone wants, I think, don’t you?” He caught himself. “Forgive me. Of course you do. You’ve come back for this, a Socialist Germany. To make the future with us. It was the dream of your book. I’ve told you, I think, I’m a great admirer-”

“Yes, thank you,” Alex said, weary.

Martin had joined him when he changed cars at the Czech border, straw-colored hair slicked back, face scrubbed and eager, the bright-eyed conviction of a Hitler Youth. He was the first young man Alex had met since he arrived, all the others buried or missing, irretrievable. Then a few dragging steps and Alex saw why: a Goebbels clubfoot had kept him out of the war. With the leg and the slick hair he even looked a little like Goebbels, without the hollow cheeks, the predator eyes. Now he was brimming with high spirits, his initial formal reticence soon a flood of talk. How much Der letzte Zaun had meant to him. How pleasing it was that Alex had decided to make his home in the East, “voting with your feet.” How difficult the first years had been, the cold, the starvation rations, and how much better it was now, you could see it every day. Brecht had come-had Alex known him in America? Thomas Mann? Martin was a great admirer of Brecht too. Perhaps he could dramatize Alex’s Der letzte Zaun , an important antifascist work, something that might appeal to him.

“He’d have to talk to Jack Warner first,” Alex said, smiling to himself. “He controls the rights.”

“There was a film? I didn’t realize. Of course we never saw American films.”

“No, there was going to be, but he never made it.”

The Last Fence , a Book-of-the-Month-Club Selection, the lucky break that supported his exile. Warners bought it for Cagney, then Raft, then George Brent, then the war came and they wanted battle pictures, not prison-camp escapes, so the project was shelved, another might-have-been on a shelf full of them. But the sale paid for the house in Santa Monica, not far from Brecht’s, in fact.

“But you were able to read it?” Alex said. “There were copies in Germany?” Really asking, who are you? A representative from the Kulturbund, yes, the artists’ association, but what else? Everyone here had a history now, had to be accounted for.

“In Switzerland you could get the Querido edition.” The émigré press in Amsterdam, which explained the book, but not Martin. “Of course, there were still many copies of Der Untergang in Germany, even after it was banned.”

Downfall , the book that had made his reputation, presumably the reason Germany wanted him back-Brecht and Anna Seghers and Arnold Zweig had all come home and now Alex Meier, Germany’s exiles returning. To the East, even culture part of the new war. He thought of Brecht ignored in California, Seghers invisible in Mexico City, now celebrated again, pictures in the paper, speeches of welcome by Party officials.

There had been a lunch for him earlier at the first town over the border. They had left Prague at dawn to be in time for it, the streets still dark, slick with rain, the way they always seemed to be in Kafka. Then miles of stubby fields, farmhouses needing paint, ducks splashing in mud. At the border town-what was it called? — Martin had been there with welcoming flowers, the mayor and town council turned out in Sunday suits, worn and boxy, a formal lunch at the Rathaus. Photographs were taken for Neues Deutschland , Alex shaking hands with the mayor, the prodigal son come home. He was asked to say a few words. Sing for his supper. What he was here for, why they offered the resident visa in the first place, to make the future with us.

He had expected somehow to find all of Germany in ruins, the country you saw in Life , digging out, but the landscape after lunch was really a continuation of the morning’s drive, shabby farms and poor roads, their shoulders chewed up by years of tanks and heavy trucks. Not the Germany he’d known, the big house in Lützowplatz. Still, Germany. He felt his stomach tighten, the same familiar apprehension, waiting for the knock on the door. Now lunch with the mayor, the bad old days something in the past.

They avoided Dresden. “It would break your heart,” Martin had said. “The swine. They bombed everything. For no reason.” But what reason could there have been? Or for Warsaw, Rotterdam, any of them, maybe Martin too young to remember the cheering in the streets then. Alex said nothing, looking out at the gray winter fields. Where was everybody? But it was late in the year for farmwork and anyway the men were gone.

Martin insisted on sitting with him in the back, an implied higher status than the driver, which meant they talked all the way to Berlin.

“Excuse me, you don’t mind? It’s such an opportunity for me. I’ve always wondered. The family in Downfall ? These were actual people you knew? It’s like Buddenbrooks ?”

“Actual people? No,” Alex said.

Were they still alive? Irene and Elsbeth and Erich, old Fritz, the people of his life, swallowed up in the war, maybe just names now on a refugee list, untraceable, their only existence in Alex’s pages, something Fritz would have hated.

“It’s not us, these people,” he’d yelled at Alex. “My father never gambled, not like that.”

“It’s not you,” Alex had said calmly.

“Everybody says it’s us. They say it at the club. You should hear Stolberg. ‘Only a Jew would write such things.’ ”

“Well, a Jew did,” Alex said.

“Half a Jew,” Fritz snapped, then more quietly, “Anyway, your father’s a good man. Stolberg’s just like the rest of them.” He looked up. “So it’s not us?”

“It’s any Junker family. You know how writers use things-a look, a mannerism, you use everything you know.”