Berlin Cantata by Jeffrey Lewis Page A

forgiveness. I wanted someone to know.
    â€œAnd they were reconciled!” I cried. “They’re together again. Do you know what that means? Do you know how long I’ve waited? Since I was a child!”
    â€œThey came here …two nights ago,” she regurgitated with unhidden distress, which my intensity at once ran over.
    â€œListen to me. It all makes sense! After fifty years! Why I came back, why I was such a stupid Communist! My mother and father divorced, yes, in 1937? Equals Germans and Jews divorced! In a young child’s mind! What I never knew, never saw: that all I ever truly wanted from the GDR was a Germany that would reconcile Germans and Jews! Don’t you see? The wish of a child for her mommy and daddy to be reconciled.” I was exhausted by then. My voice dropped off to nothing. “Holly, they were in the room. My dead mother and my dead father…”
    I wept gladly and, as she held me, I repeated: “It all makes sense, it all makes perfect sense.” I knew then that I had made a convert, that my would-be landlord had begun to admit to herself that it made as much sense as anything else.
    I have memorialized the conversation above because it is the only time I ever spoke out loud the truth that had overcome me. I invited Electra Papaiannis to conduct more séances in the house. I was hoping to see my parents again, to strike up a more natural, informal conversation with them, to learn more, to fill in details, to swap stories. This was a foolish hope. Of course they would not come again. But what was truly foolish about it was that I already had perfection. My mind was relieved. I had what I needed. I called off the séances. I packed up the remaining bits and pieces of my life. I took down my lovely curtains. Next year in Jerusalem became my motto.

HOLLY ANHOLT
    Tenant
    IT ’ S SO THAT I HAD BEEN WARNED by Oksana about Simona Jastrow. I took care right from the start with her. It’s the case that, combined with suspicions I could scarcely avoid about myself for having made my deal with the Schiessls, Simona’s presence in my parents’ old house seemed to me a cruel omen. She was obviously obsessive, demanding, self-deluded, narcissistic, and mistrustful, the kind of person you could try to win over and be left with nothing but sand in your smile. So why did I come to pity her? I suppose for all those reasons. Or what I could finally see was her intelligence. Simona was right about something: that every person’s politics are so deeply mixed with the personal that terrible mix-ups between them can take place. That the divorce of individuals could be confused with the divorce of peoples seemed as plausible as it was terrible.
    As for the odd coincidence that she had once informed on my lawyer Anja to the Stasi, I knew it because Oksana had told me even when Anja had not. As between myself and Anja, and myself and Simona, it had to remain a secret. I didn’t wish Simona to have another reason to mistrust me.

DAVID FÜRST
    Tease
    I AM UNFORTUNATELY AWARE of my own worst traits. I am a bully and I am a tease. Ask the American girl, ask Nils’ friend. Of course her vulnerability, her naïveté, disturbed me. Jews aren’t supposed to be so naïve. That’s what comes from living in a country where you’re hardly oppressed.
    Yet what a delightful conversation I had with her in the back room of the Café Charlie. Johann and Heinrich were my witnesses, as I had brought them there to show them a bit more of all they had hitherto missed in life and might aspire to, techno girls and Gauloise smoke.
    Holly had come in with Nils, but he was off on the phone, once more in pursuit of Franz Rosen, his great whale.
    â€œAnd how are we doing on our psychotherapeutic ramble through the GDR countryside?” I asked good-naturedly. “Experiencing any epiphanies this week? Any crise?” I would not have been so facetious