Less is told that at midnight, the music will go silent and a spotlight will turn on over the stage where he and his “Soviet counterpart” (really a Russian émigré, beard and ochki, gleefully wearing a Stalin T-shirt under his tight suit) will be waiting, and they will then present their work to the Spy Club crowd. They will read for four fifteen-minute segments, alternating nationalities. It seems an impossibility to Less that club-goers will stand still for literature. It seems an impossibility that they will listen for an hour. It seems an impossibility that he is here, in Berlin, at this moment, waiting in the darkness as the sweat begins to darken his chest like a bullet wound. They are setting him up for one of those humiliations. One of those writerly humiliations planned by the universe to suck at the bones of minor artists like him. Another Evening with Arthur Less.
It is tonight, after all, on the other side of the world, that his old Freund is getting married. Freddy Pelu is marrying Tom Dennis at an afternoon ceremony somewhere north of San Francisco. Less does not know where; the invitation only said 11402 Shoreline Highway, which could mean anything from a cliffside mansion to a roadside honky-tonk. But guests are to gather for a 2:30 ceremony, and, considering the time difference, he imagines that would be about, well, now.
Here, on the coldest night yet in old Berlin, with the wind howling down from Poland and kiosks set up in plazas to sell fur hats, and fur gloves, and wool inserts for boots, and a snow mountain built on Potsdamer Platz where children can sled past midnight while parents drink Glühwein by the bonfire, on this dark frozen night, around now, he imagines Freddy is walking down the aisle. While snow glistens on Charlottenburg Palace, Freddy is standing beside Tom Dennis in the California sun, for surely it is one of those white-linen-suit weddings, with a bower of white roses and pelicans flying by and somebody’s understanding college ex-girlfriend playing Joni Mitchell on guitar. Freddy is listening and smiling faintly as he stares into Tom’s eyes. While Turkish men shiver and pace in the bus stop, moving like figures on the town hall clock, ready to strike midnight. For it is almost midnight. While the ex-girlfriend finishes her song and some famous friend reads a famous poem, the snow is thickening. While Freddy takes the young man’s hand and reads from an index card the vows he has written, the icicles are lengthening. And it must be, while Freddy stands back and lets the minister speak, while the front row breaks into smiles and he leans forward to kiss his groom, while the moon glows in its icebow over Berlin—it must be now.
The music stops. The spotlight comes on; Less blinks (painful scattering of retinal moths). Someone in the audience coughs.
“Kalipso,” Less begins. “I have no right to tell his tale…”
And the crowd listens. He cannot see them, but for almost the entire hour the darkness is all silence. Now and then lit cigarettes appear: nightclub glowworms ready for love. They do not make a sound. He reads from the German translation of his novel, and the Russian reads from his own. It seems to be about a trip to Afghanistan, but Less finds it hard to listen. He is too confused by the alien world in which he is residing: one where writers matter. He is too distracted by the thought of Freddy at the altar. It is halfway through his second reading when he hears a gasp and a flurry in the crowd. He stops reading when he realizes that someone has fainted.
And then another.
Three go down before the club raises its lights. Less sees the crowd, in their Cold War Nostalgie, their Bond-girl and Strangelove chic, caught in bright lights as in an old Stasi raid. Men come running over with flashlights. Suddenly the air is full of restless chatter, and the room seems barren with its white tile—a municipal bathhouse or substation, which, in fact, is what it is. “What do we do?” Less hears behind him in a Cyrillic accent. The Russian novelist pulls his lush eyebrows together like the parts of a modular sofa. Less looks down to where Frieda is approaching in a clatter of mincing steps.
“It’s all right,” she says, resting her hand on Less’s sleeve while looking at the Russian. “It must be dehydration; we get that a lot, but usually much later in the evening. But you started reading, and suddenly…” Frieda is still talking, but he is not listening. The “you” is Less. The crowd has lost its shape, clotting into politically impossible groups by the bar. The lights on the tile create the awkward feeling of a night’s end, though it is not even one in the morning. Less feels a tingling realization. Then you started reading…
He is boring people to death.
First Bastian, then Hans, Dr. Balk, his students, the crowd at the reading. Listening to his tedious conversation, his lectures, his writing. Listening to his terrible German. His confusions of dann with denn, of für with vor, of wollen with werden. How kind they have all been to smile and nod through his sentences, wide eyed, as if listening to a detective announce the killer before he lands, at last, on the wrong verb. How patient and giving these people are. And yet he is the killer. One by one, with his mistaken blau sein for traurig sein, (“I’m drunk” for “I’m blue”), das Gift for das Geschenk (“poison” for “gift”), he is committing little murders. His words, his banalities, his backward laugh. He feels drunk and blue. Yes, his gift to them is a Gift. Like Claudius with Hamlet’s father, he is ear poisoning the people of Berlin.
Only when he hears it echoing from the tiled ceiling, and sees the faces turning toward him, does Less realize he has sighed audibly into the microphone. He takes a step back.
And there, in the back of the club, standing alone with his rare smile: Could it be Freddy? Fled from his wedding?
No no no. Just Bastian.