Bastian is silent. The sconces behind him light every kink in his hair.
The bill comes, and Hans pays with a department credit card, and Less cannot be persuaded a tip is unnecessary, and then they are out on the street, where street lamps shine on black lacquered trees. He has never been this cold in his life. Ulrich stands with his hands in his pockets, swaying back and forth to a private symphony, Katarina clutching him, and Hans looks at the rooftops and says he will bring Less back to the apartment. But Bastian says no, it is the American’s first night, and he should be taken for a drink. The conversation takes place as if Less were not there. It feels like they are arguing about something else. At last, it is decided Bastian will bring Less to his favorite bar, close by. Hans says, “Mr. Less, you can find your way home?” and Bastian says a taxi will be simple. It is all happening very quickly. The others vanish into the Twingo; Less turns and sees Bastian looking at him with an indecipherable frown. “Come with me,” the young man says. But he does not lead him to a bar. He leads him to his own apartment, in Neuk?lln, where Less—to his surprise—spends the night.
The problem comes the next morning. Less, sleepless from his evening with Bastian, sweating out all the alcohol he’s been served over the past twelve hours, still dressed in the black shirt and jeans grease-spotted from dinner, is able to climb the stairs to his building’s exterior walkway but unable to work the lock to his apartment. Over and over he presses the button on the fob, over and over he listens for the chirp of the door. But it is mute. It will not mate. Frantically looking around the courtyard, he sees birds gathering on the balcony of an upstairs maisonette. Here, of course, is the bill for last night. Here is the shame built into living. How did he imagine he would escape it? Less pictures himself sleeping in his doorway when Hans arrives to take him to the university. He imagines teaching his first class stinking of vodka and cigarette smoke. And then his eye falls upon an open window.
At ten, we climb the tree higher even than our mothers’ fears. At twenty, we scale the dormitory to surprise a lover asleep in bed. At thirty, we jump into the mermaid-green ocean. At forty, we look on and smile. At four and nine?
Over the walkway railing, he rests one scuffed wingtip on the decorative concrete ledge. It is only five feet away, the narrow window. A matter of flinging out his arm to catch the shutter. The smallest of leaps to the adjoining ledge. Pressed against the wall, and already yellow paint is flaking onto his shirt, and already he can hear his audience of birds cooing appreciatively. A Berlin sunrise glows over the rooftops, bringing with it a smell of bread and car exhaust. Arthur Less, minor American author known mostly for his connection to the Russian River School of artists, especially the poet Robert Brownburn, took his own life this morning in Berlin, Pegasus’s press release will read. He was fifty years old.
What witness is there to see your Mr. Professor dangling from the fourth floor of his apartment building? Throwing out a foot, then a hand, to edge himself toward the kitchen window? Using all his upper-body strength to pull himself over the protective railing and to fall, in a cloud of dust, into the darkness beyond? Just a new mother, walking her baby around her apartment in the early morning. Seeing a scene perhaps out of a foreign comedy. She knows he is not a thief; he is clearly just an American.
Less is not known as a teacher, in the same way Melville was not known as a customs inspector. And yet both held the respective positions. Though he was once an endowed chair at Robert’s university, he has no formal training except the drunken, cigarette-filled evenings of his youth, when Robert’s friends gathered and yelled, taunted, and played games with words. As a result, Less feels uncomfortable lecturing. Instead, he re-creates those lost days with his students. Remembering those middle-aged men sitting with a bottle of whiskey, a Norton book of poetry, and scissors, he cuts up a paragraph of Lolita and has the young doctoral students reassemble the text as they desire. In these collages, Humbert Humbert becomes an addled old man rather than a diabolical one, mixing up cocktail ingredients and, instead of confronting the betrayed Charlotte Haze, going back for more ice. He gives them a page of Joyce and a bottle of Wite-Out—and Molly Bloom merely says “Yes.” A game to write a persuasive opening sentence for a book they have never read (this is difficult, as these diligent students have read everything) leads to a chilling start to Woolf’s The Waves: I was too far out in the ocean to hear the lifeguard shouting, “Shark! Shark!”
Though the course features, curiously, neither vampires nor Frankenstein monsters, the students adore it. No one has given them scissors and glue sticks since they were in kindergarten. No one has ever asked them to translate a sentence from Carson McCullers (In the town there were two mutes, and they were always together) into German (In der Stadt gab es zwei Stumme, und sie waren immer zusammen) and pass it around the room, retranslating as they go, until it comes out as playground gibberish: In the bar there were two potatoes together, and they were trouble. What a relief for their hardworking lives. Do they learn anything about literature? Doubtful. But they learn to love language again, something that has faded like sex in a long marriage. Because of this, they learn to love their teacher.
It is in Berlin that Less begins to grow a beard. You could blame the approach of a certain wedding date. You could also blame his new German lover, Bastian.