Джоан Силбер - Improvement

“Okay, she’s with me,” Dieter said. “We’re taking her. Because of me. Okay?”

Bruno laughed. “Your loss,” he said.

The drive took a day and a night, and the two men took turns driving. Steffi was mostly silent. It was hard to tell how much threatening Bruno had done, but she was rattled and scared. We’re almost home , each of them said several times, and Dieter was saying it to solace Steffi. All her boldness seemed faded out of her. He watched the bend of her back, slumped against the door, in the T-shirt she’d been wearing for three days. At least they had the radio on—what a pleasure to hear German on the airwaves again. Bruno sang along to crappy East German stations; he’d done the vocals when he and Dieter had their band. Dieter tried not to sleep, even in the hours when he wasn’t driving. He was watching over Steffi. Someone had to watch.

There was a very odd moment at the end of it all—the hot summer morning, Berlin bustling with everything that had been going on without them—when Bruno drew the van near the curb and stopped to drop Steffi off at her apartment at the edge of Kreuzberg. Who was going to help her with her luggage? Was anyone kissing her goodbye? Not Bruno, who said, “See you,” and looked straight ahead. Dieter carried the rolled rug Steffi had bought and one of the duffels up the stairs of her building. He was startled when she flung herself at him in passionate farewell. What a romantic adventure she thought they’d had. Her body did have a sweet abundance, even in the sweaty shirt, and he patted her back with what he hoped felt like affection.

And it wasn’t even farewell—they were business partners, the three of them. That at least was a matter of honor. And each piece they’d brought back seemed to require its own negotiations. They went as a trio to dealers, collectors, middlemen. They told people they had bought these remarkable whatevers from a once-rich Turkish family in London and sometimes they said Geneva. No one wanted to know too much. Steffi had bouts of being perky, trying to charm gallery owners with tales of British pubs, but Bruno and Dieter kept her back when they could. She irritated both of them. Bruno would say, “That’s enough, Steffi.”

Outside the selling, Dieter still stopped by her apartment from time to time to check on her. He lived way over on the other side of Berlin, near Charlottenburg, and he thought it was very good of him to come so far. Her place was a mess; she herself was sort of a mess now. The friend whose chic little clothing store she’d worked in wasn’t hiring her back and she was still adjusting to losing Bruno. “Don’t you think he’s a turd? Don’t answer. He’s a turd.” Dieter would listen to her—she was manic between bouts of listlessness—until he had to say, “Okay, take a bath, I’m cleaning the kitchen, we’re going out.” In this way he grew attached to her.

One wouldn’t think any of this had much power in it. How could a mercy-fuck be anyone’s longed-for darling? Yet he and Steffi often slept together, at the end of those nights, and this fooling around had sparks. The old Steffi arose then, ready for anything. And grateful to Dieter. They’d fall asleep fondly entwined, and the fondness was real.

Some cash was starting to come in from the Turkish purchases. They’d guessed wrong about many things—the amphora wasn’t as much of a prize as they’d thought, but some of the Byzantine coins brought surprisingly high amounts. The big disappointment was the Hittite tablet. In a cool-white showroom off Kurfürstendamm, with nooks lit like shrines, an elderly woman dealer wound in a paisley scarf said, “So wonderful!” and offered them no more than what they’d paid. They went to two other dealers and Steffi finally got someone up to a thousand deutschmarks. In New York, where Steffi kept saying she wanted to go, that would be less than seven hundred dollars, she pointed out. Not so much, split three ways.

But that was the last of their antiquities, and, really, they had done very well. Bruno had them celebrating with a few bottles of very decent Riesling at a restaurant he liked. He was already seeing someone named Marie, that Steffi wasn’t supposed to know about yet. For some reason, Bruno had never said Dieter was a bad friend for sleeping with Steffi. It was true that Steffi was not the first girl they’d both had sex with, but the other had been when they were much younger and not serious. Were they serious now? Maybe Steffi was. In the restaurant, while Dieter toasted to adventures in crime, she gazed into his eyes over her glass. She was wearing a darker lipstick than usual and earrings like key chains. She looked pretty—she was pretty, in an ordinary way. And she had more to spend on herself now.

They all looked better. In this stage, the smuggling was making them very pleased with themselves. Dieter thought that in those self-help books people bought in America, the ones about how to gain total confidence and never worry, the secret advice should be to go break laws. Look at Bruno, handsome and groomed, a blond hero merrily chewing his expensive veal. Look at himself, Dieter, always the quiet, wary one, at ease in the restaurant’s imperial banquette, airing his views on the nature of the soul, a topic he never would’ve raised before. And even Steffi, recently so unraveled and depressed, was a calmer, more queenly version of her sometimes loud self.

Dieter was saying that the word soul was a fuzzy term, a bit of bad poetry that stood for an actual inward consciousness. This made Steffi laugh. “Are you in high school?” she said. “Who cares?”

Bruno was also chuckling, which was the nicest he’d been to Steffi in a while. “Dieter,” he said, “is very soulful.”

Steffi seemed to think this was hilarious. “Look at Dieter,” she said. The celebration was going to their heads.

I’m surrounded by assholes , Dieter thought. Their faces were bizarre to him then, the stretched mouths and narrow eyes. And the others could tell. They were coarse but they weren’t stupid.

“You won’t do a trip like this again,” Bruno said. “But I might.”

“No, you won’t,” Steffi said. “You don’t know enough.”

“Dieter dreams of repaying the noble Turks,” Bruno said, “but he likes the money just fine.”

Dieter hadn’t especially thought about paying anyone back—who would he send money to? The pots-and-pans salesman from Boğazkale? The government? But he was aware that he was holding on to his money, thus far, as if he might have to do that.

The others ran through their profits with all due speed. Bruno dispensed his to the dealers of much more expensive drugs than he’d used before and went to bars day and night like a job. Steffi never made it to New York, but she got herself to Paris, where the alleged glories of the city disappointed her but she came back with clothes she was very crazy about. Dieter didn’t have a fashion eye, but he could see she looked “smart” in them (as English people said), assured and alert and sleek. She was still interested in Dieter. She sent him postcards from Paris—“sunsets on the Seine not as good as in Turkey”—and when she was back in Berlin, Dieter began again to pay visits to her apartment, long talks followed by getting into bed. The bed part was better than ever, actually.

“Are you in love with her?” his friend Ulrich asked.

Dieter was stunned by the question. What kind of romantic comedy did his friend think he was in? Dieter couldn’t imagine falling for a person like Steffi, though he hoped someone would someday; he wished her well. “We have a particular friendship, with an erotic element,” he said. “We don’t even like each other that much. It’s definitely not love.”