“Yes, she’s here?”
“Still in Leipzig. She likes to make these little trips. I said, send a letter. But, well, Ruth. So, you’re here. All the little birds returning to the nest. And Feuchtwanger was sorry to see you go, yes? Always sorry, but he stays. How is it there now?”
“Still warm and sunny.”
Brecht shrugged. “So, sun. But now everyone’s here. Speaking German again.” He waved his hand to the room, and, as if in response, the sound rose, lapping at them, the comfortable babble of one’s own language. “There’s a spirit, you can feel it.”
“I hear they’re giving you a theater.” Making conversation, sleepwalking. Had the British soldiers seen anything?
Another shrug. “People come up to you in the street. They know who you are. In California, who do they know? So it’s flattering. But the work we can do now. Not Quatsch for some studio. Wait till you seen Helene. Magnificent. You’re at the Adlon too, Ruth said? It’s comfortable. Better than a house, while this is going on.” A finger to the ceiling, the unseen stream of planes. “They won’t sell us coal, so it’s a problem.” Martin’s explanation, what everybody knew.
Alex looked over Brecht’s shoulder. The room was filling up, men in old suits and women without makeup in wool skirts and thin shapeless cardigans.
“You know who’s also here? Zweig. Soon everybody. Except Saint Thomas maybe. The bourgeois comforts, very important to him. A Biedermeier soul, Herr Mann. Biedermeier prose too,” he said, a small twinkle, having fun. “A stuffed sofa, with tassels. In his case maybe Switzerland would be better.”
“Why should he go anywhere?”
“He can’t stay there. It’s starting again. He thinks the Nobel will protect him? Not if they—well, you know this. Who better? I congratulate you, by the way. I didn’t know—forgive me—you had such strong—” He paused, peering at Alex. “A dark horse. All the time—I didn’t know you were even in the Party.”
“I’m not. Other people were. But that was their business. Most of them left anyway. After ’39.”
Brecht looked around, hesitant. “Well, that time. It’s not so well understood here. How people felt. To them, you know, it was a kind of disloyalty. Not to follow the Party.”
“And be nice to Hitler. But of course Stalin knew what he was doing all along.”
A flicker of caution, then a small smile, unable to resist. “He usually did,” Brecht said, a boy being naughty. He looked at Alex. “They’ll ask you to join now. Just tell them you’re not a joiner. No organizations. A writer works alone.”
“Is that what you said?”
“It’s enough discipline with Helene,” he said, waving the cigar, then lowered his voice. “Then you’re not obliged—to do what they say. A little independence. They have to work with you. Push-pull. And they will. It’s a new start here.” He cocked his head west. “Over there, business as usual. It doesn’t change. Nazis. The Americans don’t care, as long as they’re not Communists. Like the committee. But here there’s a chance.” Believing it, like Martin. “But first, bread. They’re reissuing your books?”
Alex nodded. “All of them. Even Notes in Exile. Pieces.”
“Make sure they pay. They can afford it. They get a subsidy. It’s a priority with the Russians, culture. Coal not so much,” he said, another wry shrug. “You’ve met Dymshits?”
“Not yet.”
“A lover of German literature—Goethe, by heart. There he is. Sasha,” he said, approaching a slight man with dark hair and glasses, eyes slightly watery. “Meet our guest of honor. Major Dymshits.”
“I’m so pleased,” he said, taking Alex’s hand. Another face from the faculty lounge, bookish, an eager smile. “Welcome.”
“I gather you’re responsible for bringing me here.”
“Your talent brings you here,” he said with a quiet flourish, his German precise but accented.
Alex nodded, a court gesture. “My thanks in any case. And for this reception. So much—”
“My advice is have some ham now. It always goes first.” A polite joke, the smile in place again. “Artists are always hungry, it seems. There is so much I want to ask you. The scene in The Last Fence when the shirt catches on the barbed wire— Perhaps a lunch one day, if you would like that?”
“Of course,” Alex said. That easy. Just as Willy had hoped. When that was all they’d wanted.
People were still coming in, more men than women, none with her blond hair. She wouldn’t stay in a corner, she’d come up to him. Almost family. How would she look? Fifteen years.
“This is your publisher,” Dymshits was saying. “Aaron Stein. Aaron will be taking care of you at Aufbau.”
“An honor,” Stein said, bowing, a younger version of Dymshits, the same glasses and gentle Semitic face. “We’re so pleased. I hope you will come to the offices, meet everyone. We’re just down the street. Notes in Exile—”
“Of course it’s a favorite with him,” Dymshits said. “Both of you exiles. Aaron was in Mexico City with Janka and Anna Seghers.”
“Mexico. What was that like?”
“All right,” Aaron said tentatively. “Of course, foreign. Walter had a little Spanish, from his time in Spain, you know, but most of us—so we had each other. Los Angeles was better, I think. Anyway we used to think so. Everyone wanted to go to America.”
“Even those of us who were already there,” Brecht said, a growl in his voice. “Where was it, this America we’d heard about? In Burbank? Culver City? No, not possible. So maybe nowhere. No such place.”
“Like Mahagonny,” Dymshits said.
Brecht ignored this, taking a drink instead.
“Here’s Colonel Tulpanov,” Dymshits said, standing straighter. “He very rarely comes, so you see how popular you are.”
“His boss,” Brecht said.