Berlin Cantata by Jeffrey Lewis Page B

with her, but I was at a loss as to what else to say. Really, I was only trying to make conversation.
    â€œWould you stop being such an asshole,” she replied, also good-naturedly, a response clever enough that I translated for my boys, who were suitably impressed with the ability of Western girls to curse.
    â€œSo what’s next? A little tour de Pologne , perhaps, for spice?” I asked.
    â€œWhat are you talking about?” she asked.
    â€œAuschwitz,” I replied. “No tourist of shame would want to miss that. Psychodrama guaranteed, the past rising up like a puff of smoke.”
    â€œI can’t believe you think you’re being witty. Have you even been to Auschwitz?”
    â€œYes I have. When I was two.”
    So I scored my cheap points. Nils returned and the conversation moved on, to the fate of his story on Franz Rosen, or the very survival of our old paper in the new penurious, post-unification era, or things of that nature. The West’s realization that it no longer had to support us like little kings. Holly stayed grumpy with me then, offering no more than a pout and a bout of silence – and not without justification, I would add. But later I came to believe that I had put the idea of Auschwitz in her head.

OKSANA KOSLOVA
    Father
    WHAT WAS MY FATHER DOING on his trade missions to Switzerland? The official Soviet version was that he had been granted the privilege to travel abroad in order to negotiate gas contracts. Unofficial versions inevitably had it that these gas contracts were only a cover – no more than a piddling few were said to have ever been completed – and that the real reason for the trips was, variously, to make hard currency deposits on behalf of the Party in Swiss accounts, to make such deposits on behalf of individual high-ranking members of the Party in such accounts, or to invest the Party officials’ money in American securities. All these versions allowed for a juicy conclusion: my father had the opportunity to steal. And so gossip, or as it may have presented itself, character analysis, came as accompanying baggage. I learned that my father, who had always brought me very nice gifts from the West, was a swindler, a confidence man, a charmer, a womanizer, and for the icing on the cake, a Jew. It was then inevitable for the character analysts to conclude that he had been caught absconding and paid for his crimes with his life. But if so, where was the body? The Swiss were said to be orderly people. Was the body at the bottom of Lake Geneva?
    You can therefore imagine how I held out hope. I dreamed of my father in various exotic settings, in Monte Carlo or Las Vegas, gambling the Party’s money away, having a high time of life, and thinking every once in a while of me, and of the present he would send me home.
    No present ever came. Years passed; my mother’s flight to Finland with a man; my esteemed grandfather’s guardianship over me. A girl grows up. I slept with Mischa Lander once, the hardly publicity-shy German spy, in the understanding that if there was anything in the Stasi records about my father, he would tell me. He told me there was nothing, and he must surely have been telling the truth, because he knew that if there had been anything there, I would have slept with him again.
    There are still days when I imagine that some present might arrive, or that I might run into my father, unslept and unshaved, in a park or on the U-Bahn of any Western city you can name.

MISCHA LANDER
    Exile
    KINDLY CONSIDER THE UNFAIRNESS of the situation. I have conducted my life in a way that was both lawful and helpful. Lawful according to the laws of the society in which I lived and helpful to the world as a whole. Oh yes, you would deny this? Someone on this earth has to stick up for the poor. That is of course what it was all about. No one can finally deny this, even as they peck at all the rest of our entrails. If you help the poor, you