Some people peel apples in thick layers, heedlessly and negligently cutting away half the apple. Others squint and observe closely the fruit, stripping its skin paper-thin in an unbroken circular thread, lovingly and frugally, as if it were the last apple in existence. As a boy I came to belong to the latter in imitation of my Cherokee friend and tutor, John Rainwater, whose peelings were almost transparent.

At the age of 14 “Rainy” already respected the nature that I ignored; he carried a multi-purpose jackknife in the back pocket of his jeans to participate in it. On summer nights after we had hijacked another fruit-laden truck chugging up the hill in front of the elementary school, he would hunch exasperatingly long over each apple, skinning it just right. Just to show me. Though he disapproved of the waste of even fruit peelings, he was a hygiene maniac and would not allow me to eat unwashed apples, skin and all, as I in my ignorance did before he arrived in my life.

Before turning to the rest of the booty on one of those moon-soaked southern nights – peaches or apricots, watermelons or cantaloupes – he would ceremoniously scalp an apple and deliver to my hand a beautifully carved succulent and naked Delicious – we called them Starch Delicious – with such fierce warning in his Indian eyes that I didn’t dare taste it until his was ready.

Then as we partook of the sacred fruit Rainy would tell me eerie tales about the world of his ancestors – of Mother Earth and Father Sun, immortal butterflies and hummingbirds, the annual sun dance, the great sacred spirits, and vanished Indian forests. Early on he captured me with his natural way of calling trees “standing people.” And dead trees, “skeletons.” Though they were immobile and remained where they were, he said, they were the link between earth and heaven.

Rainy was never the image of happiness and joy. At times it seemed his life was only magic, unreal, and he was destined to live on a razor’s edge. But, I came to learn, he was not unhappy at all. He was – how should I put it? – he was quietly serene. I imagined his was an Indian approach to life.

He didn’t see the mountains as a prison as I did. And he flowed with things beyond his control. But I was angry. I was the rebel he should have been. Unconsciously I was angry at authority. Rather awed by power – when I recognized it – I refused to submit to it. In my refusal there was I think a suppressed destructive instinct; but not because power was cruel or in my opinion illegal, it was power’s encroachments.

But Rainy just laughed at my antics and to calm me would say in his mysterious way, “Life is a dance.” At that time he liked to identify himself as a Chiluki-ki. Pumping his arms and stamping his feet in a short dance he would boast that he belonged to the great Iroquois peoples. Usually he was more voluble than explicit and though his tales sometimes exasperated my Anglo-Saxon mind with no tales to tell, his sense of belonging fascinated me since I had little idea of what it meant to be Scotch-Irish. Before I was 15 he had made me feel both an affinity for the standing people and an awareness of belonging to the human race.

In our later boyhood years Rainy became mainstream – earnestly integrated. Most people in town even forgot he was Cherokee. He was just John Rainwater. Yet I still felt like his pupil and was dismayed when he sneered about his ancestors. When he once wore head feathers and a loincloth to a party and drank liquor in order to show it was just a masquerade, I was ashamed of him. It was sacrilege. Especially his treatment of the feathers his grandfather said were sacred. Before I left the town he had apparently totally rejected the “old beliefs” of his Grandfather John and stopped visiting him at the old man’s house on the Swannanoa.

Yet every once in a while a haunted look would fill Rainy’s eyes and he would spread his arms and look toward the heavens, I thought in prayer to Father Sun. And though in those late high school years he professed he was first of all a football player I remained convinced he was destined to become a medicine man.

This is what Rainy did for me: He kept me company in my loneliness and he kept alive in me the it I have since attempted to pinpoint, the same it that with my limited expressive capacity I have never succeeded in defining with words, the it that not even my thoughts have been able to achieve. And he taught me a secret language that only we spoke, so that speaking everyday language with him seemed forced and stilted. For five years in all, maybe five and a half, we hung together – the mystical pagan Cherokee and the American Baptist son of the Scotch-Irish-German conquerors of the lands of Rainy’s ancestors.

I later believed we gravitated one to the other because we were of the few aware of the standing people and of the it hanging just out of our reach. And because of our mystical language.

We were loners, Rainy and me. Out of focus. He was different. For that reason he at first didn’t seem to understand that I felt different, too. For a long time he ignored my sense of alienation. I thought he was unaware of the demons crashing against the thin walls of my brain; he didn’t realize it was because of my remoteness that I submerged myself first in sports and then in the fantasy of books and in his ancient mysticism. Because of Rainy my teenage world progressed in an air of magic, which probably saved me. I found my first hints of freedom in those fantasies that made my dreams the anteroom to the real world.

Rainy teased me because I had never learned to dance. Dance? I still don’t know why. But I thought he was pretty phony about it, too. He danced only Indian fashion ¬- his pious stamping on a nocturnal lawn to celebrate another victorious raid on a fruit truck – but he expected me to jitterbug and waltz and rumba like all Anglos. Once at a high school dance in the chic George Vanderbilt Hotel after he – dressed in a dark jacket and tie and looking like a Latin Lover – maliciously signed me up for ten dances with ten different girls on the cards they used to hand out, I was so embarrassed I had to skip.
I loved the waltzes and the sambas and dreamed of performing them, too, but I claimed not dancing was my declaration of freedom.

Pompously he commented that I was ridiculous.

It wasn’t just that Rainy made me wonder where we came from and where we were going – it was also that – but sometimes, back then, peeling and eating the Delicious apples on the luxuriant grass of the darkened schoolyard and examining the high skies filled with unnamed worlds, I felt the propinquity of the little ungraspable it – it seemed to be becoming comprehensible all-encompassing palpable attainable.

“I know things,” Rainy might say just to bewitch me as we observed the shooting stars and I wondered where the universe ended. Or if it ended. Like an astronomer he pointed out and explained Aldebaran or Rigel or Sirius and we spied on them, watching closely to see them move and I would wonder how he knew which was which.

“Where did you learn that?” I would ask.

“My father knows things,” he would reply matter-of-factly. “My grandfather and my great-grandfather, they all know things.

We’ve always known.”

“What things?” I asked. Concealment was his second name. “What things, Rainy? What things?”

“You know!” he insisted and grinned his shadowy Indian grin – his eyes prompting, alluding, insinuating that he knew that I knew. And I was flattered that he thought I knew.

“I know what?” I would continue to protest, though in retrospect I realize I came to believe that I did know something.

“You know that which you think is unknowable….You know the Great Spirit is there,” he said, quoting his grandfather. And he would jump to his feet and dance in a circle, singing gutturally his few words of Iroquois, his torso sinking and rising rhythmically, his feet pounding the grass in an uncertain rhythm.

“In imitation of real Indians,” he said, and slapped at his legs, just to irritate and confound me. He knew I wanted him to be a real Indian.

Then and there he made me imagine I saw some of those magical things, too. But after the rite of the apple and the feast of the melons and a Chiluki-ki dance, after a whispered narration of a shivery tale of the Great Mystery and the beginning of all things, and after we separated at the top of my street, I always stopped and wondered what we were doing.

His strange tales without apparent beginning or end, the secret knowledge he concealed, his eternal intangibility, and the it linked to the moon and stars in a high sky and to the peeling of the apples, have remained in my memory like images in a mirror reflecting another mirror reflecting other images from other mirrors, on and on into eternity.

If I turned my head away from the magic mirror I might forget it, sometimes even for years at a time, but the image always returned. Rainy would have said it was my piece of the Great Spirit fighting for supremacy.

And again I would become aware of the hollowness gnawing away.

It, I decided, was the shadow of an uncertain past when America was not America. Yet I felt lucky that I knew I too had my own mysteries to resolve.

Now, forty years later, I have returned to the town, my hometown. I had to return. The old it had to be here after all. And I have found Rainy again. A new start. Return can be a blessing. The wandering and wondering is over. I’ve left the other life behind.

He lives down along the river in his grandfather’s old house – a shabby, lonesome, white, four-room wood-frame rectangle facing the river, much like many houses in the hill country. Yesterday when I stopped my car in the empty space in front of the house, the dark man with silver hair sitting on the front porch was staring toward the river and, I was certain, waiting for me.

There near a bend the Swannanoa is narrower but swift and tricky and marked by magnetic eddies and counter-currents. It is alternately murky green or muddy brown like its mother, the French Broad River. Early mornings it is veiled with ashen white and late afternoons it is dull and misty. In the instant he rose from the rocker and I turned off the motor I saw him again peering into an eddy in a Pisgah Mountain creek: the blurred shadow of his image repeats to me that running water is magic and one should worship it.

His house stands alone facing the river. Lush green fields peopled with poplars and oaks and pines and fruit orchards slope gradually toward the backyard. Beyond the fields, steep green wooded hills rise up sharply, concealing the eternally secluded Kenilworth Lake to the north. To the right stretches a valley marked by groves and glades and hillocks in the direction of the dark chain surrounding Mt. Mitchell.

“There you are again,” he said enigmatically, as if I had left yesterday, and jumped down agilely from the porch. He walked toward me in his noiseless and springy step of a hunter and the gliding gait that had made him an elusive broken-field runner on our championship football team. Now darker than back then, still lean and muscular, his white smile emerging from behind the cloud of his face, he looked like an older Indian. I was glad.

“My adept, Govar,” he said, an inflection of his former irony in his soft voice. He held out his hand stiffly. His blue veins pulsated under the shadowy skin of his hand, his lips were moist and dark, his facial skin taut, his black eyes wells of crystal-clear water.

Rainy now lived alone. His wife had died, his children vanished into the prairies of America. He had no telephone, no computer, no car. Today more deliberate and more ceremonious in his every movement, I thought he could have been his grandfather.

Before Rainy my life had contained no secrets. But under his influence and tutelage back then I came to believe that the town itself concealed great secrets. And someplace, secret rites. No one else thought such thoughts. No one else saw the town as my eyes did. A walk through the downtown, a mere promenade in the sunshine, became for me a confrontation with unspecified spirits. I slinked along back streets. I was a man on the run. I dodged shadows and hid in doorways from secret agents pursuing me. Phantom armies were closing in. Old buildings on Wall Street and down Lexington Avenue that once were just old buildings came to host spirits and ghosts. In imitation of Rainy I lifted my head toward the skies when it rained. During those five summers of celestial magic, of sun, moon and stars, water and fruits, and tales of charms and spells and sorcery, life itself unfolded limitlessly and confusedly as when you stand in chaos and realize everything is possible.

Rainy said it was normal. It was my destiny at play.

It was in that atmosphere of fear and wonder that I began to sense the it dangling over my shoulder. I remember the first time I dared formulate such an idea. Rainy and I were lying on the grassy schoolyard under the stars. Only a membrane of moonlight illuminated the hills to the west. No fruit trucks had passed. We had been talking football and girls. He was lying on his stomach, rubbing his thumb across the blade of his jackknife, when I told him.

He looked at me in his most sinister manner – and nodded. “It’s normal,” he said.

Our lives then were torn between the potential sorcery of the other world in darkness and the football we lived for. At practice races we flew on the winds, he an inch ahead one day, I the next. Sports writers labeled us the “twins of speed” – he, the shadow and I, the ghost. I liked our nicknames; he shrugged: “What do they know?”

During my last year in town football seemed to get the upper hand over Rainy. The closer I edged toward it, the further he seemed to move away and the more he mocked his eccentric grandfather of the ingenious fancies – a poor crank, Rainy said – until he finally stopped going there – to this same house where he now sat facing the Swannanoa.

I stared at Rainy and imagined him during the four decades of my wandering. He was forever here on the river, among his hills, stationary, immobile – no Tuscany for him, no Amsterdam, no Moscow, no Teheran – while I raced back and forth among my distant worlds, trying to remember that I had to grasp the old it. I feared I had come to believe real life was concealed in faraway places. The secret! A déjà vu! Of a déjà vu.

On an August evening pleasant breezes blow across the tops of the 2000-meter hill of Upper Teheran, that morning it was 120 degrees in the Lower Town when the troops fired on the mobs, in the phony luxuriant oriental garden of the Shah’s cousin, we journalists feast on caviar and champagne and the most beautiful half-naked women of the kingdom, and I look around me and wonder and feel the void of hollowness and in a flash of a reflection from a polished brass samovar I see John

Rainwater squat and dip his hands into the silver water of a Blue Ridge Mountain stream, and say, “This must be paradise.”
For a moment now we listened in silence to the music of the waters of the Swannanoa – the “Suwali Nunna” – the word means the trail of the Suwali tribe. Rainy had always been capable of interminable silences as if his own story was written in silence. He used to say we understood things and each other best in those silences. I had accepted his silences but I always preferred the legends.

He went into the house and brought out tall glasses of iced tea. He asked about my life abroad. Surprised he knew where I had been I told him that I hoped to return home for good – even if not physically, I added.

When I said “home” he looked up and smiled.

“Of course,” he said, and asked if I had found contentment in my travels. I was glad he didn’t ask if I still considered this home, for I didn’t know either. Or why my commitment to it. Was this home?

“Remember the apples?” I said instead.

I couldn’t tell him that out there I was sicker and more alone than ever. How could I tell him that things in the real world were different? My inclination was to say something banal like that ‘in life you after all have to do something’ but that I too often had had the sensation it was not myself but someone else who was performing. When I spoke, someone else seemed to be speaking. When I acted, an unknown force seemed to be prompting me. I wanted to say that my thoughts had always seemed to be different from the thoughts of others. At those times when I felt my strangeness I remembered John Rainwater: and again I felt as if I knew things others did not and also at times as if I knew no one else on earth. I shared the same space and time with others but each person seemed ultimately isolated and alone. In a way return seemed to offer redemption for lost things.

“Oh yes.”

“Remember when we visited my secret places?” I said.

He looked at me gravely and again nodded. “You came to believe in my grandfather’s other dimension and that you could just step into it through a secret door – the way a shadow glides along a wall and suddenly vanishes.”

I was about 16 when I pinpointed what I believed were the physical containers of the town’s secrets – Grove Park Inn, the Catholic Church, the Masonic Temple and the Synagogue. I believed in multiple secrets, then. I was convinced that once revealed they would resolve also the matter of the it.

In general those years were for us a strange period – while the whole world was changing. Hopefully, expectantly, I kept returning to those mysterious places. Though Rainy’s sacred mountains around us were soon to become the walls of my prison, my 16th year in the Land of the Sky was a rich period of mystery and legend, occultism and myth, body and spirit.
“Yes, I remember,” he said, and sipped his tea and vaguely waved a hand in the direction of the trees along the highway. “You were convinced the secret was at Grove Park Inn.”

Majestic Grove Park Inn, its pink granite and the red folds of its tiled roofs visible from most of Asheville at its feet, seemed to leap out of the mountainsides, an invitation to the world beyond the mountains. For us at 16 the great hotel was never its famous tennis and golf courses or its elegant bars and restaurants or even the famous writers and statesmen who frequented it; Grove Park for us was its forbidden nocturnal swimming pool, attainable only for the brave who dared climb its high fences and defy its guards and vicious dogs and spotlights. Still, in my heart, I believed that its red roofs and deep cellars concealed unimaginable wonders and secrets and revelations of the real world.

“It contained no secrets,” I said.

“Secrets are somewhere else.”

“But not in the Basilica either.”

Rainy chuckled. “They changed the name to basilica but it’s as dry and alien as it ever was when it was just a church.”
The most awe-inspiring and magnetic church in the church-filled town was its Catholic Church whose magnificent dome cast its shadow over downtown. Fear and reverence in our hearts, we Protestants and pagans went to mass there each Christmas Eve. The carillons and thunderous chords from the German pipe organ echoed down from the great cupola and Neapolitan manger scenes and the priests’ elaborate costumes and the white eyes of standing singing and murmuring worshippers shimmered in the candlelight and reflected off the heavenly stained-glass windows. At mass on Christmas Eve we nudged each other, bewildered at the presence of Christian bibles in the pews – they told us the Pope would burn them – and at the absence of threats of perdition and of time running out, and we were bewitched by the foreignness of the Latin liturgy. It hardly seemed like church. It was a façade. It was enough to convert. Within the sumptuous taboo, deep in the unfathomable mystery of its great sin of humility, I knew most certainly must lay one of the town’s secrets.

“I looked in yesterday,” I said. “The doors were wide open and you could see dust everywhere. I picked up some chewing gum wrappers that had blown in…. You were always right.”

“Then you should take a look at the Masonic Temple!”

“I did that too. It looks like miniature architecture. A copy of a poor copy of a poor copy.”

The Masonic Temple was another landmark symbol of my arcane city, in my fantasy linked by invisible threads to the other containers. Isolated at the top of a hill on Broadway, its doors forever closed, its two oriel windows dark, it was surrounded by silence. Once on finding the great entrance door cracked I stuck my head inside and saw just under my eyes a copper plaque with the surprising inscription: “Brethren of the Temple of Solomon – 1118 a.d.” I rushed home and wrote it down.

On my newspaper route in the early morning darkness I always made a wide circle around the synagogue. Or, days, I waited in anticipation for the moment when my childhood playmate, Sidney, broke off play to go to his Hebrew lesson. Hebrew! I didn’t know what he meant. The lesson was in the synagogue just around the corner from my house and it should have been familiar. But skinny little Sidney was close-mouthed; he never explained what Hebrew was; he would never speak of the synagogue which for me was perennially dark and I never saw anyone go in or out. The synagogue and its Hebrew was a secret within the mystery contained in magic. When I later learned words like occultism and alchemy, I associated them with the synagogue and with Sidney’s Hebrew lesson.

“Yesterday, I made the rounds. I went to the synagogue, too,” I said. It turned out to be a surprisingly small, unassuming house. Nothing outstanding about it except that it’s made of smooth stones instead of the wood of most houses in that part of town. “Sidney’s name is not in the phone directory and information had no listing. I wanted to ask him about Hebrew. There was a handwritten notice hanging on the door – Closed for repairs.”

“That’s normal,” Rainy said, a dreamy look in his merciless eyes. “They could write that on anyplace here….You never did find the secret here, eh?”

“No,” I said.

“Did you learn then what the secret is, at last?”

I peered at him. His serious but serene look told me he was not teasing me as he did when we were kids.

“You mean…”

“…that the secret is that there is no great secret to be found in this town. This is our place, yes. But there’s nothing individual about it. That’s just the way we think when we’re very young. At that age we’re egocentric … completely anthropomorphic. No one tells us that the secret is our being and the miraculous certainty of our eventual return to the cosmic dust of the universe…. despite that little corner in our selves that believes in our physical immortality.”

I listened to the squeaking of the rocker. He rocked and laughed quietly. Somewhere he had acquired an unrecognizable eloquence, using different turns of speech and occasional bookish words as if he had a second sense for how words are best combined. His new manner of speaking was at odds both with his former speech and with that of other local people – as if he had just returned from a lifetime of study in faraway places. Even his former southern accent was now sharp, crisp and refined. He had been in the Orient, I decided.

“When did you return?” I asked.

“Return? From where?”

“From wherever you spent these years.”

“Oh I’ve always been here, Govar. Didn’t you know? I belong here.”

“I often thought I must belong here too. You know?”

“No! I don’t know. What it’s like out there?”

“It’s … it is surprising. I once met a guy when I was a newspaper reporter in Moscow – a Georgian – who always reminded me of you. Vachtang was his name. He was always in love. But he loved nature too, especially the grape. He was a wine grower from Tblisi but spent half his time in Moscow selling it.”

“Tblisi?” Rainy’s eyes opened wider at the musical sound.

“It means warm waters,” I said.

“Nice Cherokee name!” Rainy smiled.

“Vachtang only caused trouble. One night we went to a soccer match – USSR versus Chile. I imagined you and me out there on the field. Anyway Vachtang brought along wine and some powerful Georgian chacha against the cold and we got pretty drunk sitting there on the benches. After a long walk from the stadium to the subway up an avenue lined with soldiers and armored cars, the police grabbed us right at the metro entrance. But they let me go in the morning … with no explanation.”

“And the lover!”

“I never saw him again.”

It was a brilliant June afternoon. The longest day of the year. The mountain evening cool floated across the waters of the Suwali Nunna and crept onto the porch. Rainy leaned forward and turned his head toward the huge sun that was just starting its descent toward the horizon beyond the hills, beyond the football stadium, I knew, beyond the town and the French Broad River. Then, looking at me speculatively, he stood up.

I felt the familiar old uncertainty come over me as when back then on a mountain trail he would hesitate and study me as if he had been saving something special for me and was undecided whether I merited it.

“It’s time,” he finally said, and jumped lightly to the ground. “Come along.”

“Time?” I said.

“Time for time.”

Rainy walked ahead of me up a narrow well-grooved trail that led unswervingly straight up the steep hill hovering over the house. As we passed through an orchard he turned his head left and right, greeting the apple trees. I watched his straight back a few paces in front, erect and agile, his shoulders swinging slightly from left to right in rhythm with his hips. It was the movement that had once made him the elusive running back so baffling to would-be tacklers. He had a way of moving directly toward the goal line without seeming to; Rainy could always be counted on for that extra yard. Sports writers noted that I did the opposite – I would run in wide circumlocutions, engage in complicated maneuvers and feints and dodges, and often not gain an inch.

When he trailed his hand lightly along the luxuriant leaves of the poplars crowding the path, I knew he was whispering incantations to the standing people as he used to on our mountain hikes. I was breathing hard when the poplars turned into shrubs and bushes and we emerged onto a wide grassy plateau.

Rainy stopped and spun around in a full turn with his arms extended wide. To the north, the basilica’s tile dome and the red roofs of Grove Park Inn were barely visible on distant hills, behind which rose the majestic Blue Ridge now shimmering red and orange in the sinking sun. To the east were the commercial areas and crisscrossing highways and more mountains, and to the west the spires and turrets and dark roofs of Vanderbilt’s chateau. To the south, the Swannanoa meandered and seemed to lie still under protective coats of green and black reaching out over its still waters.

During my years away I had sometimes remembered the lessons of his grandfather, also named John Rainwater. Grandfather John often spoke of the “much” around us. It was the abundance that derived from their name. Grandfather John’s grandfather had chosen their family name as a symbol of rain. Rain water was sacred. Our “much” depends on our sacred rain, he said. Man is implicated in the vegetable growth process. The alchemy – of the Rainwater’s only Rainy learned that word – the alchemy of sun, earth, seeds and water yielded the vegetable abundance and human progress.

Only once Rainy went with me to the Christmas mass in the Catholic Church. We were 19, and I would leave the town the next summer. While I stood transfixed at the symbol of the candlelit transmutation of bread and wine into flesh and blood, he was cold and unimpressed. Afterwards we walked in critical silence down a deserted Patton Avenue. Lights were dimming and extinguishing. A few cars passed and then we were alone. He stopped in front of Kress’s and took me by the arm. “You palefaces – occasionally he used the word in irony, but sometimes including also himself in the category when he was feeling distant from his true self – you palefaces believe man is at the center of it all but that he returns to dust while his spirit is eternal. (Here, I’m rephrasing the words of the 19-year old Cherokee a bit in the light of our new vocabularies acquired in the time passed.) My ancestors instead know that man’s flesh is part of the vegetable cycle and his flesh and blood are transmuted into sacred corn and sacred water. Man’s spirit survives only a short time after his death. For us humankind’s existence is the point, not that of one individual.”

I didn’t understand what that meant but I knew then that beneath his veneer resided a spirit I hoped to find in myself.

In the center of the plateau, rock piles and rows of flat gray rocks spread in all directions. After the initial confusion I realized that the cairns and smaller rocks formed a circle. Rainy looked at me and waited as he had always done when he showed me something unexpected, bewildering, mysterious.

He stepped over a perimeter of rather casual stones and followed a spoke-like row pointed toward a waist-high cairn standing at the center of a circle of stone.

“A medicine wheel,” I gasped. Though I had read a lot about the rites of the first inhabitants of the continent and each time thought of him, it was somehow astonishing to see a real medicine wheel here on the hill above the Swannanoa River.
Rainy leaned forward with one hand on the central cairn and pointed punctiliously one by one down the spokes of rocks. There were twelve.

“Where did they come from?… How did you get them up here?”

“Patience,” he replied dismissively, as if to say my paleface “how” was insignificant in comparison with the symbol.
“The same way they did,” he said, pointing vaguely toward distant hills. “Medicine wheels are fashionable again. They’re everywhere. The Rainwaters and the Barefoots have built them on Curved Mountain and Snake Mountain,” he said, pointing to the east. “And on Grasshopper Hill and above the Seven Caves there to the west. But the first one was here, in the Place of the Apples.” Rainy laughed ironically and shuffled his feet in imitation of his old dance.

He instructed me as to what I should see: his wheel was 100 feet across, twelve spokes reached from the central cairn to the perimeter, four indicating north and south, east and west; each quarter was further divided by four spokes pointed north-east, south-east, south-west and north-west; four more pinpointed the Spring and Autumn equinoxes when day and night are of equal length and the Summer and Winter solstices marking the longest day and longest night; the twelve parts indicated the twelve segments of time, the twelve moons of the solar year – the time for the earth’s orbit of the sun – and the ancient mystical number twelve to identify the moon of one’s birth.

“Do you do the sun dance?” I asked, continuing my series of irrelevant questions and still stunned that nothing in the town was as I thought it would be. I hadn’t returned with a new understanding of things. The “it” was as elusive as ever.
Rainy gazed at me as if I were a hopeless case, then grinned, and said, “Certainly! Who doesn’t? I dance on the morning the sun rises precisely there,” he said, taking several long steps and pointing to a cairn arranged like rifle sights at the end of the south-east spoke of the summer solstice.

“I dance also on other mornings … and nights, too. Sun is life, yes, but you mustn’t forget the moon that reflects the sun’s light. It’s the mirror of our spiritual sun. A reflection of our essence. Grandfather John’s grandfather identified himself with the moon of his birth. He clung to his home. His attachment to his lands here saved him and brought him back from our Oklahoma exile. It was his power. Grandfather John said weakness in a person was a new chance and a challenge to become strong…. Oh, my poor Cherokees!”

Rainy said he was no astrologist. He didn’t engage in obscure predictions. Celestial energies were reflected on earth, he said. His interests lay in the influence earth forces triggered inside us at the time of one’s birth. “Where does the little acorn get its power to become the mighty oak standing behind my house? From within its self. It’s the force of life.

“Grandfather John said his grandfather, Swannanoa – he was named for his tribe – believed that also the explanations for events around us were to be found within us. John said the medicine wheel was a map of the mind, helping us understand ourselves and our place within the order of things. It unites the parts of ourselves that people think of as separate – body, mind, soul and spirit – so they can work together and move toward the Absolute. The Universal.”

“And destiny?” I said.

“Nature and the medicine wheel are not about destiny. They are about the opportunities within us. Here. Now.

“The answers are up there,” Rainy said, raising his arms toward the sky, his fingers spread wide. “And down here.”

He closed his eyes and spun around slowly. A shadowy silhouette against the west, he lifted one foot, pivoted, and braced himself on the other as if he had just received the hand-off and was about to cut back off tackle. He was smiling.

“What a consolation that you know,” I murmured. “Did you know it all the time?” I watched him dance near me, and felt suddenly sad.

“It would be horrible if the essence were out there and you could never find it,” he said, his feet shuffling to a silent rhythm.
“As above, so below,” he added.

After some seconds of silent dancing he said, “You are the Brown Bear. You dream things are different from what they are. I am the Deer and the persistent man of nature. We are what we are. And we both follow the Great Spirit within us.”

While he danced I closed one eye and aimed down the spoke pointed east. I zeroed in on a dead tree out beyond the perimeter of the hoop at the point the plateau ended – shrivelled, crooked, twisted, long vertical gashes turned brown. I knew it had to be the skeleton of a blind apple tree.

“Now, one last spectacle!” He took me by the arm and led me around the wheel, stopped and stooped, pulling me down beside him. “There it goes! Again!”

In an instant the sun dropped behind the hills beyond the French Broad River. Day was becoming night. Voices rose faintly from the shrouded river below us. A blanket of black and orange seemed to envelop me. He had timed it perfectly.

“If there is a secret, it is in us … and in the it you can’t define.” He clamped his sinewy hand on my shoulder and pushed himself upright, touching with his fingertips the cairn in the east.

“The standing people help us understand.”

Just like when we were kids, I thought. We looked at the same things but he saw them with different eyes. Yet I knew that today he was inviting me back into his world.

Again he began to dance. It was a beautiful movement. His pace gradually accelerated. A thin cloud of gray dust rose from under his feet. I watched his face and listened for the cadence.

I began shuffling my feet, too. At first awkwardly, embarrassedly, then with more confidence. I felt the pebbles and sand under my feet. I began to hear a faint rhythm. The dance seemed to come naturally.

****

Also published at The Literary Yard.

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Dispatches from
G a i t h e r
Stewart
European Correspondent • Rome

Welcome to another short story by our resident storyteller. Enjoy.

A sign hanging over the steps at the U – Bahn station at Schönhauser Allee carried the theatrical announcement, Endstation Sehnsucht. What did it mean, Sidney wondered? Nostalgia for the past? For pre – war Berlin? Or did it mean nostalgia for this neighborhood’s recent Communist times? Not everyone in former East Berlin, Sidney knew, was enamoured of globalized capitalism.

Following the sign’s arrows he entered the shopping arcades—a fruit stand at the entrance, inside, baker, fish shop, ethnic grocers, wine store, gift boutiques, clothing stores, galleries. At the rear of the third level he found the small shop he was looking for—Oggetti d’Arte e Cose Arcane, Inhaber: Conte Giuseppe Montereali.

Sidney’s heart sank when he read a handwritten sign on the window—geschlossen.  The store was dark, mail stuck in the door, newspapers on the floor. His face pressed against the dusty glass he noted a faint light inside, far back in the rear. A light push and the door opened.

“Do come in … Come, come, my boy, don’t be shy!” called a voice from the shadows.

Sidney recognized the accent. Exactly like that of his paternal grandfather in New York. Italian. Again he wondered about his impulsive trip. A mysterious handwritten letter in Italian addressed to him at NYU had sufficed to bring him here just at semester’s end when he should be consulting his graduate students. Yet, his book in preparation counted more. Across the top of the one – page letter had appeared the words, LA VERITA SULLA MORTE DI MASACCIO. The dangling allusions in the brief text were enough to carry the art historian Professor Sidney Sonnino to Berlin that very same weekend.

“I am Montereali,” the man said, stepping in front of the light that illuminated his ashen face and grasping Sidney’s extended hand in both his skeletal hands.. “I assure you that you will not regret your trip!” the shrivelled man said, tilting his head backwards to look up at Sidney’s tall figure.

“Here to the crossroads of new Europe!” he added.

“How could I not come?” Sidney murmured, looking around skeptically. Was this all in vain? What secrets could be hidden here? “After all I am the Masaccio specialist.”

“Ah yes!” The tiny man smiled condescendingly, continuing to pump Sidney’s hand. His eyes mere slits under thick eyebrows, his head bald except for wisps of long hairs over huge ears, his lips turned inwards over his gums.

“Ah yes, a specialist,” he said. “O, you academics, dedicating your lives so selflessly to old truths. Ah yes! Yes, yes … but wait, let us put some light on the subject.” For a moment the old man’s Italian accent had taken on Germanic cadences as if his persona were uncertain.

“But why here? Why in Berlin?”

“The capital Europe of the future! Is that not reason enough? Everything has always been here … and will be again.”

Conte Montereali turned to the wall and flipped a switch. Light filled the room, revealing in the rear shelves of books and a desk covered in papers and folders and opened tomes piled one atop the other.

He must be a hundred years old, Sidney thought, as the old man shuffled toward the desk. He was more voice than body. Voice and eyes … and the familiar odor of private collections of ancient tomes following in his wake. That smell alone seemed a guarantee of the authenticity of his hinted revelations.

“I’m also a detective,” Sidney murmured, “an investigator of the past.”

“Yes, yes, I understand. Precisely why I approached you … I knew you would come. Did I write you that I once knew your grandfather in Rome—no, it must have been your great – grandfather, Mosé. And I have read your book, The Secret Life of Masaccio. Now, young man, you can forget Berlin for the moment, for you must learn the secrets of his death.”

“But does anyone really care?”

“Care? Anyone? I think you are now pulling my nose! If not, then you are dedicating your life to nothing … to a bagatelle. Life dedicated to nothing is nothing! But no, or rather yes, true art lovers care what happened to the artist who nearly six centuries ago liberated man from the fear of God. Who established man’s right to know and to act. It’s a question of who we are … and of why we are here. He should have been a Berliner.”

“Who should have been a Berliner?”

“Your idol! Our idol was in fact murdered by the man of the fashions of the day. The man of the Court. The man of the big commissions. He was murdered by society. Breve, I have proof that his so – called master and employer, Masolino, assassinated our hero. And I will give you that proof. You must use it wisely.”

They sat face to face in front of the desk. The powerful overhead lights blinded Sidney to the old man’s face as he recounted the story of how a jealous Masolino lured the young genius, Masaccio, to Rome, and kidnapped and poisoned him rather than face again the ridicule of popes and mecenates because his pupil outshone him.

“You should always keep in mind,” Montereali said, “that facts are not always facts.”

“But why here?” Sidney insisted. “Why are you here? Why Masaccio here?”

“Why? Berlin too is an idea. An idea and a place many have died for … even if on faraway fields.”

 

Uncertain of what he was to do the next two days before his return flight to New York, Sidney hung around the rail stations … his method of learning a new city. And from time to time he wondered what the old man had meant—‘facts are not always facts.’

Walking through the busy Alexander Platz Station on the late afternoon in May the proximity of Poland and East Europe was palpable. He could smell the East. The old man was right, this was a crossroads. Everyone seemed to be passing through Alexander Platz. It was a strange sensation—you couldn’t tell who was travelling just the next station or to Frankfurt an der Oder and Poland. Still, he was surprised that the platform of the Friedrichstrasse Bahnhof was less crowded than Manhattan subways stations—the S – Bahn and regional trains arrived so frequently and departed so quickly that crowds had no time to form.

Signs and placards proclaiming that ‘a better world is possible’ confirmed his ideas that Berlin was an ardent Socialist city. A city of alternative life styles. It always had been, even in the Nazi era. It didn’t seem at all German as he had expected. He didn’t feel his Jewishness here as he had feared. When people in New York had asked how he felt about going to Germany, he always answered that he tried to confront his hang – ups. Berlin, distinct from Germany, was a bridge. The city did seem like an idea. He thought the maverick Masaccio too would have felt at home here.

 

As time passed the encounter in the dark little shop in Prenzlauer Berg came to seem like a dream. But the contents of cardboard file case Montereali had given him were real. A researcher’s dream. A detective’s dream. He had held it on his lap on the flight back to New York and stored it in the safe in his study at the university—photocopies of documents, letters from Masaccio’s parents, bits of testimonies and police protocol written in Latin and Rome dialect, drawings allegedly by Masaccio himself, one of which autographed. The dossier was meticulously indexed and cross referenced, and arranged according to the month and year the document was obtained. It read like a detective story.

In his downtown Manhattan study Sidney came to feel like a fugitive. Berlin was strangely on his mind. It was more than Masaccio. More than Monetreali. It was Germany, the history of the twentieth century, and his place in it. He paced the room. Measured again the Turkish carpet. Looked for pertinent 15th century quotes. Examined the Tula samovar and consider wiring it electrically. Listened to the Ute Lemper recording of Berlin songs. Read at random from the Pentateuch. Moses! Moses? Anything rather than read again and again the Montereali dossier, now condensed to fit his own needs. Yet, Masaccio was his ticket. To where, he didn’t know. Too bad he didn’t know Italian better. Straight into the computer with it anyway! Do it himself. No students involved. Top secret. After the Berlin discovery, he had reduced class work to a minimum. Late evenings spent sorting and recording the data.

In July Sidney made an urgent trip to Rome to interview sources indicated by the old man. On the flight he read and re – read the end of the fictional story the old man had sent him in a supplementary file of Masaccio materials labelled “Appunti dagli Archivi di Stato, Gennaio, 1922.”

 

He stumbled out into the darkness. He had to get to San Clemente. Masolino was waiting. His Rome paintings were there. Everyone knew his tryptich in Santa Maria Maggiore. That knowledge helped him to stay sober and upright. It was his. He teetered and zigzagged ahead. He was drunk and sick. He headed up the hill that would take him to the security of San Clemente.

Soon he heard the shadows closing in behind him. Strong arms encircled him from behind. He felt a searing pain in his side. ‘Masolino sends this to you, upstart!’ he heard before darkness descended into his brain.

Hours, days or weeks later he awakened, dried blood in his opened clothes, rags binding his hands and feet. The room was bathed in chiaroscuro. Shadowy figures were looking down at him. Sanguinely he stared up at them and felt only the absence of his money belt. He remembered exactly how it had felt around his waist, hanging erotically toward his groin.

No matter, he thought. He didn’t feel so bad, except for that wound in his right side. But when he peered into the silence and listened to the shadows, he knew.

‘Am I a hostage?’ he asked. ‘I suppose someone will pay my ransom.’      

‘We’ve been paid,’ a voice said.

‘Paid?’ Tommaso ‘Masaccio’ Guidi asked. ‘Paid? Who paid?’

‘Friends … and enemies. Both. You never know when you’re dealing with Tuscans.’

A frisson of mystery ran down his body. Mysterious like the smeared paint you find in the early morning on the canvas you worked on the night before and you recall the nocturnal nightmare of its destruction. Why that dream now? Or was it reality too?  He looked at the two lonely figures over him and knew that Satan was near.

 

Eight months later Sidney was again in Berlin, a fellow at the American Cultural – Historical Society. That was unusual too, an Italian art scholar here, but the Society strove for variety. And he was a celebrity, good for Society public relations. The joy of it was that he was relatively free of obligations or Society geared projects. And Montereali was here where now in Sidney’s mind Masaccio seemed to survive.

His book – exposé had taken shape in a manner he could never have dreamed. Before Montereali. Before Berlin. Crazy subject for a Jewish scholar, he knew. Masaccio and all his Christ’s! But they were after all so man – like … their human dimension. And their message was freedom. Free of inhibitions! And on another level, and despite the skepticism of the academic community, he congratulated himself that he was resolving a mystery that had resisted over a half millennium of investigations.

 

“How is it possible that a computer can just disappear?” Sidney said to his wife Isabel before he’d even closed the door of their apartment on the second floor of the villa. He had just returned from another fruitless trip to Rome.

“Such things happen,” Isabel said and clapped him on the shoulder fraternally.

“ But I can hardly believe that anyone in the Society, the cream of the American intelligentsia, would steal my old laptop. Everything was in it … all my research of the last year … the discovery of a lifetime.”

“Nonetheless it’s gone, lover boy. I waited a day before calling you while police and the admin people checked. An inside job! Police say it wasn’t the employees. Sidney, it wasn’t the computer the thief wanted … but what was in it. And we know very well who would most like to get his hands on it, eh, sweetheart.”

Isabel reached up to him, caressed his long blond hair, smiled her most optimistic smile and put her head against his narrow chest.

Sidney instead threw up his hands in desperation. He felt like crying. “And my talk for tomorrow evening is in that computer too! I don’t know how much I can reconstruct from my notes and my excited brain.”

“The talk is one thing, you can fake it a bit. But the book is something else!”

Sidney freed himself from her protective embrace, walked out onto the terrace and stared down toward the Wannsee where he walked each evening. ‘The same old story,’ he thought. ‘Mornings so full of ardour and confidence, withering away as evening approaches.’ In this moment dependent on a computer! He, Sidney Sonnino, a leader fearful of his own authority! Therefore his walks in the darkness provoked such obsessive and interminable interior monologues.

A thin layer of snow lay on the terrace and on the gardens reaching to lakeside. Low walls rising mysteriously out of the snow marked the outline of a former swimming pool. Giant oaks on the east side of the gardens loomed like nocturnal mushrooms. Abandoned boats in the ice filled basin bobbed and rocked frenetically against the docks as if trying to escape the clutches of the winter storm blowing across the lake. The ducks had vanished. The tops of the seven maple trees along the lakefront were silhouetted against the dark waters like seven lopped heads. The ferryboat headed toward Kladow on the north shore darted in and out among the green and white breakers rolling across the lake. Closer to the shore seagulls flapped and squawked as if in anger.

Mesmerized by the human silence that hung like defeat before the crashing violence of nature, he forgot momentarily the gravity of his situation … until he turned back toward the living room and met Isabel’s woebegone eyes.

“Mark Schweer!” he said, returning into the living room. He pronounced that name for her sake and in an attempt to erase the Weltschmerz he felt in his face.

“Of course,” she said. “That Nazi swine! Despicable Prussian! No wonder he’s stiff as a poker when he sees us. But I don’t know who’s worse, he or his conniving wife. She would kill her grandmother to further his career.”

“Certainly he’s gifted in his way but I’ve never trusted him,” Sidney said.

“Yes, but you’re a Jew and he’s still a fucking Nazi.”

“Now, Isabel, we don’t know that for sure.” Sidney, but nature introvert and timid, felt uncomfortable with his wife’s intransigence. Once right was established she never had doubts. But how do you really know what’s in another’s mind?

“Come off that fair – mindedness stuff, Sidney! You know very well what he is.”

“In a way you’re right. Alex says he’s full of complexes because of his father. He really was a Nazi, you know. I don’t think Mark knows who he is. Maybe that’s why he’s here … not unlike me.”

“Oh, God! And we had to come to Berlin for that.”

 

That evening the fellows were gathered informally with wives and children in the dining room. Tensions were rife. Sidney and Isabel carried on conversations with the others at their table, trying not to look at art history Professor Mark Schweer and his wife, Hannah, with their two children at a table in the rear. But the Sonnino’s accusing eyes were continually drawn to them. From time to time the outrageously handsome Schweer or his arrogant Teutonic wife gazed vaguely in their direction too, fleeting glances that as a rule wandered slowly past them and out the terrace windows facing the Wannsee.

“Listen, Sidney, how is possible that you just left your computer in your study unprotected?” whispered the philosophy professor from Cornell, sitting next to them.

“Alex, I don’t know how I could I be so foolish! But who would imagine a robbery here!”

“You know the maids go in to clean everyday. Why practically anyone could get in.”

“That blond she – devil Hannah too,” Isabel said. “She only looks like an angel … I wonder how they stand each other.”

“But why?” Alex insisted. “How would your computer help Schweer?”

“Help him!” Sidney exclaimed, staring across the several tables of diners to the group of whispering heads turned toward Mark Schweer. The Professor, as people called him, was leaning back in his chair, his mustache thick and flamboyant, his rich hair combed backwards. “I should say! I can show that his idol, that falsifier and exploiter, Masolino da Panicale, murdered Masaccio! It ruins Mark’s life work, that’s all. It would destroy his classic Masolino A Life. It’s a little like killing Mark Schweer too.”

“The double – dealing son of a bitch!” Isabel insisted. “He looks so pleased with himself … with his perpetual … his perpetual ecstacy. He thinks it purifies him, the creep!”

“Look at this place,” Sidney said, an almost amused expression in his eyes at his wife’s rage; she saw Mark with such different eyes. “Looks like the United Nations voting on another war.”

A palpable atmosphere of intrigue had spread across the dining room. An iron curtain seemed to separate the four long parallel tables. “Schweer – Masolino war supporters back there,” he added. “Sonnino – Masaccio peace champions here.”

“Life!” Isabel said.

“You always get to the point before anyone else,” Sidney said, turning a look of admiration on his wife. One thing about her, he thought, she was above all loyal.

“It’s peculiar that Schweer seems to have so many supporters here,” Alex said. “Why? After all it’s so easy to read him. He’s such a fake.”

“Why?” Sidney said, a faraway look in his eyes. “Alex, you should know that’s just the way people are. Most people need and like the Court.”

 

On the S – Bahn to Potsdam the next morning Sidney told Isabel a little about the painting they were going to visit at Sans Souci Castle. “Remember that Rubens modelled his Hercules and the Lion of Nemea  on many paintings of the same theme, on Raffaello’s Sansone che spezza la mascella al leone, and on a bas relief in Villa Medici in Rome, and especially on the Giulio Romano frescoes in Palazzo del Te in Mantua. That’s why they called Rubens the Italian back then. And those models of course mean also the influence of his beloved Leonardo da Vinci … and so back to you know who!”

“To Masaccio!”

“Naturally.”

“And that will be your point in your talk tonight?”

“Yes. And on models.”

“Models?”

“I will make the point that we all model ourselves on someone. Most people need heroes. But some are heroes. That was the basic discrepancy between Masaccio and his master, Masolino. The master knew he was an imitator.”

Their faces were pressed against the train windows as they passed through booming Babelsberg, the movie town. They hoped for a glimpse of a film studio or just the street name, Marlene – Dietrich – Allee. They saw nothing but colorless residential areas and row houses and bars and restaurants.

“But also,” Sidney said, “I will stress the red line running from Masaccio via Paolo Veronese and Michelangelo to Rubens. And thus straight to north European art.”

“Everything seems to lead back to him! Is it a boon or a detriment to live life with such a passion as yours?”

The train came to stop at the Potsdamer Bahnhof. “Do you think I chose it?” Sidney said sadly as he stood up and took her arm.

 

The lecture room was packed. The fellows and their wives, Society sponsors from various European countries, Berlin dignitaries and several German art historians Sidney had personally invited.

A ripple of restrained applause greeted Sidney when he stepped behind the speaker’s lectern— from the back rows too the applause was ambivalent, as if uncertain as to whether he was aggressor or victim. Schweer’s friends occupying the front rows like Maginot Line trenches held scraps of paper ostentatiously ready for drawing pictures and playing word games. Chairs scraped, throats cleared, coughs were barely suppressed.

Sidney stared down at Mark Schweer and beautiful smirking Hannah in the middle of the first row. He read taunts and sneers in their handsome faces. Old ‘facts are facts’ Schweer! he thought. Pedant! Pedestrian! His famous pronouncements preceded by “in my humble opinion” or his theatrical German “meiner Ansicht nach” qualified here by a “virtually,” there by an “en effet.” It must work well on his students.

Sidney straightened his crooked tie and grinned at Isabel in the second row behind the Schweer’s. He shuffled the pages of his hastily prepared lecture, cleared his throat … and on the spur of the moment decided to extemporize:

“This morning my wife and I saw a famous Rubens painting. Rubens again provoked in me the question of the choice of freedom that each of us makes, either consciously or more often than not subconsciously. I mean the difference between being and seeming. It is the age – old question of life or theatre. Of truth and authenticity or imitation and fakery.

“My research into the life and work of Masaccio has convinced me of his dedication to truth and the liberation of man from religious superstition and social encroachment. Rubens on the other hand, for me, though technically impeccable and one of our greatest artists, when all is said and done, remains the imitator. He is the man of the Court, masterfully reproducing beauty, reproducing fashion and the theatrical of life. Yet each of his greatest paintings inevitably evoke in me merely the past—another artist, another period.”

Mark Schweer had begun squirming in his chair and looking around the room as if ready to stand up and leave. Hannah was pulling at his arm.

“Instead of looking at a work of art and really seeing it,” Sidney continued, “most people tend to accept the explanations of specialists as to what a work of art is. Great paintings of course have more than one view. Interpretations are open to interpretation … naturally including my own. Truth is forever elusive. However, one thing is certain—true truth does not live in imitation.

“Both Rubens and Masaccio count among the greatest artists.

“Yet, in my opinion, Rubens is theater, imitation, counterfeit.

“Masaccio, on the other hand, is life, truth, authenticity.”

A single chair scraped. Sidney paused. Schweer had twisted in his seat, his head turned to one side, and thrown up a hand in front of his face as if to shield himself from the assault of such blasphemy.

Pleased he had achieved his objective, Sidney grinned and continued:

“The question today is still the same as when Masaccio was upsetting accepted truths established once and for all by Church dogma—what will the imitators not do in order to arrive? They will lie, cheat and steal as man has done since Cain and Abel. They …”

At those last words a current of mutterings and shuffling of feet and scraping of chairs passed through the hall. All the fellows understood the charge. Hannah Schweer squealed. Mark had half risen from his seat when from the back of the room a Society secretary cleared her throat and, jumping up and down, shouted in a whisper ‘Herr Sonnino! Herr Sonnino!’ She held up Sidney’s laptop like a trophy, as if to say he could now begin his real lecture.

“It was in the bath house!” she said.

“Hurrah! Hurrah!” Isabel shouted from behind Schweer’s shoulder.

“Thank you,” Sidney said with a slight bow to the audience. “Thank you all.” While many of the fellows applauded, he walked briskly to the rear and took his computer from the young lady’s hands still quivering from excitement.

 

“Where were you really going with that life or theater analogy?” Isabel asked later that evening as they half watched a familiar old American movie dubbed in German and tried to understand some of the lines. Sidney maintained it was their difficult language, almost a secret language, that made Germans so different. Their language seemed like a mask! You listen to them speak and they seem to be masking their real selves. What was it they were hiding, he wondered?

“Oh, I had in mind the juxtapositions of life. For what kind of accord could have linked Masaccio and Masolino? Masolino who relied on divine inspiration while Masaccio had already turned his back on the angles as a youth. Masaccio’s rejection of the irrational, his jettisoning of description in favor of narration—oh yes, Isabel, that is his art! His rejection of Masolino’s theatricality echoing an invisible god. His subjects leading a heroic existence, aware of their right to know. His rejection of the inauthenticity of the Court in favor of the potential authenticity in the real life of the workers’ district of Florence. I had in mind also a burgeoning Berlin in comparison to Catholic theatrical Court – like Munich. Or market – oriented Milan as compared to political Rome. New York rather than Washington … that kind of thing.”

Toward the end of another CNN pro – war economic – military analysis, Isabel yawned loudly, her skirt up to her hips, and said provocatively, “Well, lover, aren’t you going to take your usual walk to the lake tonight?”

“I don’t think so,” he said leering at her legs. “I feel like I’m coming down with a cold.”

“Hypochondriac!”

“My throat was raw even during my talk.”

“Liar lover! You were only up there seven minutes!”

“Too long for the Schweers! You should’ve seen the look on their faces when Frau Schmiedinger announced her find … you’ve got great legs, you know!”

“I was right behind Hannah and heard what she said into his ear—‘I’ll kill that bastard,’ she said. “You, that is. And I really believe she would do it.”

“But why did the thief just hide it down there in the bathhouse instead of destroying it or scrambling it. I can hardly believe everything’s intact.”

“Maybe he—or she—planned on copying the good stuff!” Isabel sat down at the Bösendorfer and ran her hands passionately across the keyboard. “What a satisfying feeling,” she said.

“Maybe they did already,” Sidney said, caressing her hair. “You’ve got great hands, you know.”

“What’s this euphemistic ‘the thief’ or ‘he or she’ stuff mean?” Isabel said. “We both know we’re talking about none other than that Nazi anti – Semite, Professor Mark Schweer and Frau Doctor Professor Hannah!”

“Well, Sweetheart, the computer is intact, Masaccio is safe, and we’re cozy cozy in our nest looking over the lake. What do you say we retire to our boudoir and consider more interesting endeavors.”

“I’m with you, Lover. A much more engaging idea than nocturnal walks along the Havel.”

 

While the Sonnino’s frolicked festively in the king sized bed, on the opposite side of the sprawling villa Mark Schweer stared out the windows of his apartment. The Wannsee night was cold and clear. The stars seemed more distant than in the skies over America. It was a strange feeling being back in the Berlin of his parents and grandparents. He liked to stroll along the Kurfürstendamm but it somehow wasn’t the same as when he was a student here and they all called it the Ku – damm. Today he continued to avoid former East Berlin, he wasn’t sure why. He disliked Unter den Linden; for him it still smacked of the East. He had no use for Mitte. Again and again he would stand on the corner of Fasanenstrasse or sit in the terrace café of the Kempinski, but former West Berlin also seemed pointless. He didn’t feel the spirit of before, when the Wall was there. Nor were the people the same. Where was everyone, he wondered? It wasn’t like that in the Berlin of his own early years when he was still painting. He smiled at the image of himself standing before his easel in the apartment in Dahlem. Yet, though he had felt some underlying affinity in those years—the certainties of the firm ideology of the bastion Berlin—even then he was a stranger to that time and that place. He thought it must be atavistic. After all, his father hadn’t been able to swallow all that liberal shit American intellectuals spouted in post – war Berlin. Yet Mark had never digested all the Nazi shit his father preached either—right up to his death his father had regretted that Americans had not joined up with Germans to squash the USSR, right then, in 1944. He felt no less detached from his father than from the liberal set of Sonnino. ‘We’re a detached generation,’ he thought. ‘We just don’t belong.’

Speculatively he touched the roll of fat around his waist, frowned, and again wondered where Hannah was and what she was up to. Despite his usual matinal vow to the contrary he had again eaten and drunk too much at the dinner offered by the Society in honor of the evening’s speaker—his enemy, Sidney Sonnino. Still, broken promises had become a way of life. But no, he wasn’t drunk. In fact, that was the problem—he found it increasingly hard to get drunk. But he felt sluggish and dull – witted. It had come on him while he tried to concentrate on what that pompous asshole Sonnino was saying in that truncated speech. He’d been delighted at the interruption … ‘but the nerve of Sonnino, just to bow and walk away like that. But he did it with style and aplomb,’ he admitted. ‘Almost in triumph. Not that I’m in the least anti – Semitic—no, no, despite my Dad, I’m not—but that’s just the way these Jewish intellectuals are! And why isn’t Sonnino in Italy anyway if he’s so enamored of that Che Guevara Masaccio? What’s he doing up here?’

Yet, yet, Hannah had been stupid to stash the laptop in the bathhouse before he even had a chance to look it over … look it over, and maybe copy out extracts.

The lake down below was silent, a dark invitation. After the brilliant sunsets, the night, the stars, the north, the lamps along the waterfront, stirred something in his Germanic soul. It was a mystery, the things that once were and are no more!

In his wife’s continuing absence Mark Schweer decided to take a walk. It might do some good. Yes, he would begin a nightly walk after dinner. A constitutional! Thickening waistlines were the dangers of his sedentary profession. That, and not publishing. That was another thing, all this obligatory publishing. The problem was ideas! That had always been the problem. Better if he’d stuck to his painting. But the problem there was always the same—what to paint … at least something people would buy. Now where did Sonnino get all his ideas? Down there, right down there at the lake maybe. In the dark? In the cold and the wind? And he also had this thing of staring out windows! What’s he looking for? Always worrying about the social in everything! Social here, social there. What could he want anyway, a classless society? Fucking Communist! Jews all seem to be Communists. His father always said most Communists were Jews. As if a painter had to project social ideas into art! And all that ugly chiaroscuro he loved! What is it Sonnino wrote about Masaccio? ‘He painted the new man!’

‘New man, my ass!’ As if Masolino exploited him, when it was that brat Masaccio who hung onto his master’s coattails to arrive.

‘Not that anyone really cares. But Sonnino seems dedicated to destroying me. He talks about the social but it’s really just pure envy … and ambition too—he wants to make a name for himself by undermining me. All his talk about disenchantment with the world and about the artist’s social role. His is a mad design! That’s it. First his social essays. Now a book. Still his ambition is understandable. And it’s not the end of the world. I have a good job, I’m respected, I get the recognition and the rewards. The crazy thing is how Hannah takes it on herself to stop him. Well, she’s right too … somebody ought to teach that self – righteous bastard a lesson. But Hannah! Woman of violent solutions! You’d think she’d been out there in the mock war maneuvers in the woods with me! A lady of action, she is! Now how did I ever get mixed up in all that military crap? My Dad’s influence again. But stealing a Society fellow’s computer! She has to be crazy.’

 

In the cellar, petite Hannah Schweer had rummaged around in the storage rooms until she found what she was looking for. Not a soul was in sight. No one ever came here at night. She lifted the short axe in one hand and swung it in a cross motion, a kind of arc diagonally from right to left. She grinned in satisfaction. Yes, she could handle it easily. A good sock on the head with this and that upstart Sonnino would spend the next semester in the hospital. Might get some sense into his head. She had seen just enough on the laptop to know what he was up to—if he revealed that Mark’s favorite artist was a murderer, then her husband’s book on Masolino would be meaningless. His work of the last five years would go up in smoke.

‘Mark talks a good game,’ she told herself, ‘but when it comes down to the act he’s a coward.’ It was infuriating that he didn’t raise an arm to defend himself. There was a time to fight … the Bible said so.

Again Hannah looked at her watch. It was nearly time for Sonnino’s evening walk in the back gardens. Night after night, while Mark watched some TV show in that mysterious language that she couldn’t understand, she had observed Sidney from her window upstairs. Each night at 11 o’clock he repeated the same routine. From the rear terrace his tall figure dressed in black topcoat and black scarf and cap meandered down the walkway to the former swimming pool that seemed to fascinate him each time again. Then on to the boat basin where he stood motionless as if checking that all the boats were there. And no matter how cold it was he would sit a few minutes on the same bench facing the lake.

She always shivered observing his silhouette, under the lamp only a ghostly outline against the dark water. When he then turned back up the pathway on the opposite side of the park, he invariably stopped near the bathhouse as if reading the signs and instructions for use.

Tonight the trees lining the high wall cast nocturnal shadows over the bathhouse so that the dark was total. She would wait for him there.

 

Professor Schweer lifted his glass and drank off the weinbrand he had been resisting. He looked toward the window, shrugged, poured himself another, and drank it off without a second thought. So much for that! He put on his topcoat and black cap and yellow scarf, walked down the hall, and took the elevator to the cellar.

From the rear terrace his eyes swept over the park and stopped on the statue about half way down the slope toward the lake. He knew it well—Georg Kolbe’s Verkündigung of 1937. The beautiful nude Aryan woman was fitting. But, he wondered, an Annunciation? In those years? He noted the bunker next to the kitchen and again recalled that the villa once belonged to a prominent Nazi. Lucky bastard! Not like his worker father who’d had to scrape and bow just to survive. No wonder he became a Nazi! But this bigwig just stashed away the whole family when the air raids came.

‘But didn’t they ever accept that it was all about to end? What could they’ve been thinking about when bombs were falling all over the place? Carpet bombing Hamburg and Köln and Düsseldorf and Essen and Frankfurt and München and Nürnberg and they thought Berlin would be spared. That some magic weapon would save them. Well, if they’d developed the bomb first, everything would’ve changed. Those times are over … but sometimes I wonder what would’ve happened otherwise.’

The bare limbs of the oaks were astir when he stopped at the bathhouse and read the words on the two doors—Damen and Herren. Why the separation while it was raining bombs? Was there a rush on the bathhouse? In these months he’d never seen anyone even near it. Bathhouse had a bad ring.

He placed both hands on the sill of the only window, lifted himself on his toes, and peered in.

Blackness.

 

As silent as an Apache, Hannah in the same moment slipped from around the corner of the bathhouse, her weapon poised. Despite her internal agitation and adrenalin – fired strength, the axe now weighed heavy in her hand. She glanced at it again. Was it the same axe?

But then there was the enemy, Sidney Sonnino. His face was pressed against the panes. What did he expect to see inside? she thought as her mind wandered into distant regions. His future? Paradise?

She lifted the axe from her shoulder and paused briefly, glancing at it again, surprised that Sonnino didn’t sense her behind him.

‘I’ll show you … Masaccio … that’s a laugh!’

As she swung her arm, the axe weighed like leaden dreams. Her hand twisted. In a flash she realized she was missing her mark. Instinct? Sixth sense? The axe seemed to take its own irresistible course. Not the blunt side, but the blade came down. And not on his head, but toward his shoulder.

The enemy twisted toward her, and yelled in a familiar tone “Hey!” before he fell against the bathhouse door and slipped slowly to the ground.

Hannah shrank backwards and threw the axe away from her. As she turned to run to the house, she saw in a reflection from a distant lamp along the lakefront a shimmering of color at her feet. She leaned over the black form and saw in horror his yellow scarf. She knew it was yellow. It had to be yellow.

She stooped and ran her hand over the head and neck. Something gooey was spreading.

 

The next morning Sidney hummed to himself as he went downstairs for the newspapers, and coffee for Isabel. After his strenuous evening he had slept like a log. The elevator was so unusually busy, up and down between the admin offices upstairs and the cellar, that he gave up and walked down to the Erdgeschoss.

On the ground floor a uniformed cop and a tall thin man in a black topcoat stepped out of the elevator. Curious, Sidney opened the front door and stepped onto the porch. Two green police cars and several official – looking black Mercedes were parked in front. Yes, the American Society villa was a natural terrorist target but he’d never seen more than the two men in the mysterious green van near the gate with its motor constantly running for heat. Policemen were now nosing around the grounds and disappearing down the side toward the rear gardens.

A gelid gust of wind forced him back inside.

He knocked on the closed door of the receptionist’s office in the hall to ask what was happening. No answer. Strange, he thought, picking up from a table the Tagesspiegel and the TAZ , she was always there.

In the dining room three fellows huddled at the rear table fell silent when he walked in. Sidney shrugged. Still trying to get right the theme he loved from Bohème, he filled a mug with espresso for Isabel. That woman would sleep forever without it.

“What’s going on out there?” he then asked the others over his shoulder and pressed the espresso button again.

“What’s going on?” a voice echoed his words.

“They took Mark to the hospital late last night.”

“Hospital?” Sidney spun around, spilling coffee on his hand, and yelled in pain. He sat down uneasily at the far end of the table.

“Hannah found him at midnight in the back gardens,” one said. “Someone clubbed him … nearly chopped his arm off.”

“He could have frozen to death!” said another.

“Why would anyone club a fellow here? Do they suspect terrorists?”

“No, no terrorism … an inside job, police believe. Crazy, but Hannah claimed it was Masaccio.”

Sidney sat there at the end of table, stunned and puzzled. A fellow attacked and nearly dead! And Mark of all people. But what could Hannah mean, Masaccio did it? An apocryphal kind of statement, he thought, except she had confused the characters. But Masaccio? She must mean me, he thought, bewildered by his conclusion.

What was it that old Montereali said about Berlin? A crossroads! The future! Something to the effect that it was a place many have died for!

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=A Short Story By= Gaither Stewart

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he flow of Andrey’s life recalled that of the uncontrollable race on a roller-coaster. From the time he boarded, his unstable little car had carried him at terrifying speeds around curves and over bumps, up, up, then hurtling straight earthwards, while he submitted, hardly holding on and showing no desire or will to get off. It seemed he was always ready to take any dare he encountered for, as he once told me, you might not ever get a second chance. Still, I never thought his search of reward was necessarily related to pleasure. Instead, he acted—I came to think over the year or so that I followed his case—in the manner he thought life dictated and in which it was supposed to be lived. In fact, if he did seek pleasure, I feel certain he didn’t recognize it when he encountered it because of his haste to live. Most certainly his life was never guided by any dominant thought whatsoever. Nonetheless, at times during the loneliness of night he must have sensed the doom of where his path was taking him for he seemed to believe that the only doom to worry about was the one he himself desired, so why try to escape it?

For that reason, I have never thought he was surprised during the few seconds of his fatal fall from the rotting drain pipe at the fifth floor to the pavement below. For him, had he known how to express his thoughts clearly he would have said it was just another of the absurdities life offers. Nor do I believe cynical Andrey would have regretted his burial in the pauper’s plot of the obscure Rome cemetery. I doubt he ever even posed to himself the question of a change of the direction of his life; in fact he seemed to accept his destiny without resistance, even with humility. He obeyed the rules of the “game”, as he often referred to his own life. I still remember how his Oriental eyes would sparkle when he blithely denied one accusation or the other or when he created another outrageous alibi or unexpectedly promised to reform his ways in exchange for some momentary gain.

That fatal night while his women and I crouched over his crushed body lying awkwardly on the pavement an enigmatic smile played at the corners of his mouth as he tried to form a Russian word which sounded like “za” or “zab” … before he closed his eyes in peaceful death. I have always believed he wanted to say the Russian word for ‘I forgot’, zabyl.

I had just graduated from Rome University in Russian studies and was doing volunteer work at a refugee agency established to deal with the flood of immigrants and refugees arriving back then from Africa and the Near East and above all from Russia. My first assignment was the difficult case of Andrey, a dirty blond, tall and lanky Russian Jew about my age, whose ardent desire was to immigrate to any European country that would have him. He justified his rejection of immigration to  the United States or Israel quite simply: “I am a European and want to live my life in Europe.”

You couldn’t say that Andrey had not already begun to live his life. He lived life to the full and only infrequently did he complain about the traps and entanglements his life had reserved for him. Occasionally he expressed mild disappointment about what were relatively inconsequential problems, or he might complain to have been wronged in one way or another, but as a rule he was a man at peace with what the downward trajectory of his life meted out to him.

He told me that the only troublesome situation to be avoided at all costs was boredom. “The source of all my problems,” he admitted.

I remember being struck by two of his most positive characteristics during his first days in Rome: his unjustified optimism and his sly but friendly smile for one and all. His optimism was in reality inexplicable and his smile, I now know, a mask to cover his submissive nature.

“My father was a Korean who came to Russia after the war in the East. He and my Jewish mother were quite a colorful couple in Odessa. The school kids teased me as the Chink … and you know how Russians looked down on the Chinese. Still, it wasn’t so bad … and after I finished school there were other friends.”

Andrey smiled his sly smile and only hinted that those “other friends” had contacts abroad. Another Russian immigrant who had known him in Odessa told me that Andrey’s gang had been an unsavory lot, constantly in trouble with the police. Although Andrey had never been arrested or even charged with anything, since he had never had a regular job but had money people suspected he was involved in smuggling drugs from Turkey and Iran, a common activity for the daring in Odessa. However, since he was reluctant to take on steady work in the factory he was exposed to the charge of parasitism.

In general I liked to hear his stories about Odessa, a city which though I had never visited fascinated me. Its dramatic history, the Eizenstein film, The Battleship Potemkin  that I had seen several times and those famous steps leading down to the sea created an aura of mystery and drama around the city at the north end of the Black Sea.

“As a boy we loved to play “smugglers and coastal” police in the underground tunnels and run races from top to bottom and back on the great staircase. Then as I got older I liked to meet the sailors and hear their foreign languages … and I yearned to see the rest of the world.”

“Who did you prefer to be in those games?” I asked.

“Most of the kids preferred to be cops, but I always wanted to be a smuggler. Strange, no. But I learned then how many people really want to be policemen. Everybody wants to command. But not me. I think it too difficult to be both policeman and a good man.”

“But you don’t believe someone has to control our anti-social instincts.”

Andrey chuckled. “My feeling is that we’re born free … we’re also responsible for our actions.”

Because of statements like that I always thought the best of Andrey and gave him the benefit of the many doubts he created about himself.

“But anyway the police were constantly knocking on my door for one thing or another,” he told me, intimating persecution for political reasons as a justification for his definition of himself as a political refugee. “After my father left, my mother was easily upset and afraid of everything … so it was simply time to leave the country.”

****

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]fter all the years since then, after all our talks  that seemed frank and sincere, I realize I never knew what was fact and what belonged to the realm of immigration rumors about Andrey’s real life in Odessa. Allegedly, late one night at the end of a long drinking session he had robbed and murdered a young sailor on a back street in the Old City. I never reported the story about the dead sailor to the immigration agency, which in truth was only hearsay, but I recall that when I asked Andrey for clarification he showed remarkably little interest about the “incident”—his favorite word for the ugly things of life, for the great mistakes that can determine the direction your life takes. For him such events always remained “unfortunate incidents” causing me sometimes to take my disappointment in him for the truth.

Only a few months after his arrival in Rome occurred an event that eventually accelerated the downward spiral in his game of life. Now I should underline that Andrey was not one to be easily frightened or stalemated, or even chagrined and cowed by those reoccurring gross and embarrassing situations. He made no compromises. Though that it is not to say that he was not concerned about events dangerous to his personal situation or that he neglected to undertake corrective measures. Nevertheless, his overall behavior belied his cynical, albeit sensitive nature. When I saw his somewhat distorted name in large print on page 5 of the daily IL MESSAGGERO one morning, I was really surprised that the “Russian immigrant” was in grave condition in the Fatebenefratelli Hospital, while his friend from Odessa, a certain Niederman, was dead from an overdose. The official position of the Italian authorities was so intransigent that it took my agency twenty-four hours to penetrate police omertà.

By the time I learned where Andrey was supposed to be, he had already been taken away by the Carabinieri. The upshot of the event was that his official image seemed to have been actually enhanced, chiefly as a result of his deadpan descriptions of what had occurred and the comradery of an understanding policeman.

The next day I found him miraculously recovered and sprawled comfortably on a leather chair in the Carabinieri Special Investigative Unit in Parioli where I was to interpret for his official deposition.

“I drank a lot of beer and vodka,” he explained in his most reductive manner, which the young Carabinieri officer seemed to like. “I was stinking drunk, passed out and woke up on that examination table in the hospital.”

“Doctors thought you were dying,” the policeman said nonchalantly.

“Dying?… Why should I die from too much beer? I was drunk. And in heaven’s name what is this story about drugs? They only told me today that Misha died. I had met him on the street that day and when I saw he was in bad shape I really wanted to take him home. But things got out of control. Anyway, by now that evening is pretty vague. I remember a car, and sleeping on the back seat.”

Andrey smiled his engaging laid back smile and looked so Italian I thought as he slouched lower in the chair, his long legs extending half way across the room. The young Brigadier smiled as he wrote up Andrey’s testimony, I was certain, in a positive way for Andrey, emphasizing, he told me in Italian, the absence of any trace of narcotics in his blood, and linking Andrey to the affair only as a witness. The whole thing reminded me of how Andrey’s “policemen and smuggler” games might have gone in the Odessa underground. Exonerated of all drugs charges or involvement in Niederman’s death, he was released on the spot and left with me.

The downside of the affair was that he was ruined with immigration authorities of nearly every country he had applied to, countries not about to accept such tainted characters.

So what now? I wondered. And what mischief would he be up to next? You just never know what a man on his way down is capable of … or one on his way up too fast, either.

Writing this story about Andrey years later makes me nervous. I’ve already forgotten his last name. I just wanted to show what really happened to Andrey back then, a man on his way down, maybe something about his being half Korean and teased by Russian schoolmates or maybe his fear of the Odessa police. But the reality is I am not leaving him in his time and place and am projecting him into a future which he never experienced. This kind of reconstruction is like living life backwards although Andrey always lived his existence surging forwards, apparently free of all hesitations and shilly-shallying

The fact is that Andrey seemed less affected by the simple burial of his friend Niederman than was I. And I still remember pertinent details and can reconstruct that physical sensation coherently as if it happened yesterday instead of decades ago. The day was hot. An August sun beat down on the dry and brown Roman countryside north of the city. It hadn’t rained for weeks. I recall the heat waves rising from the clay of the baked fields around us.

You would have thought the disgusting scene over the open grave would have at least touched Andrey. For he was superstitious as a result of his Asian and Jewish heritage with which the revolting big-city, West European treatment of the remains of a poor, hardly identified person, the humiliation of Niederman’s barely hidden body in a crude wooden box dumped unceremoniously into an open pit along with others like him by a quartet of nonchalant and loud-talking graveyard employees, a scene accompanied by the muted whispering of Misha Niederman’s pregnant wife and small child. The tragedy made a deep impression on me and I believe on  most of those few present. As Andrey and I walked away together even he seemed pensive and quieter than usual. However, as I soon realized, his mood was not shock or regret. It was his usual detachment. And his acceptance of unpredictable and capricious fate.

“I hardly knew him anyway,” Andrey muttered, glancing over his shoulder as we started out the main gate. Then, lying as was his way, he added: “I didn’t even know he used drugs.”

While we had stood around the grave pit, he had hardly looked at his friend’s sobbing wife, who had been estranged from her husband for six months or so, even if for economic and social reasons they had not been able to separate physically, and who had gotten pregnant again, possibly by her husband. She felt sorry for herself and was confused as to what she was to do now, alone in a world she didn’t understand with a small child and another on the way. Later, I heard that Andrey gave her 350.000 lire, probably more money than either of them had seen in a very long time. I refused to attribute that show of generosity to feelings of guilt, for deep in Andrey’s psyche hunkered down an ethical man.

In the immigrant community there was much speculation and rumors were rife about the drug incident. Not only Niederman, but apparently two other men in Ladispoli on the sea north of Rome were dead. Exaggerated reports of an international narcotics ring reached the ears of the police and of the immigration office at the French consulate, the only country that had not rejected Andrey earlier. Now he was persona non grata there too.

In true Andrey style, at the same time his chances for legal immigration almost anyplace dimmed he became attached to a shady group of housepainters who, as the immigrant community suspected, were the petty thieves and burglars plaguing their area at the beach area of Ostia. Andrey was perfectly at home with them and had found a girl friend among them and immediately moved in with her. This old-looking young lady, an Italian, rented two rooms of her Ostia apartment to immigrants so she had a certain experience with Russians. With a hard wrinkled face of the kind of person who rarely smiles and looking more like a mother to Andrey, she accompanied him and his painter friends to the refugee agency and to the French consulate to testify to Andrey’s sterling character and outstanding human qualities as part of a “rehabilitation plan” to appeal the rejections of the immigration authorities.

Unfortunately the coordinated intervention not only failed to ameliorate his situation, but because of the suspected burglars it had a boomerang effect and cast a cloud of doubt about him.

For that reason during the following period Andrey’s image remained nebulous to me since he went underground as if he were still in Odessa. I personally had the impression that since immigration anywhere seemed chimerical, he had begun thinking about assimilation in Italy, either by marrying his old-looking girl friend (an idea he quickly abandoned) or opting for a clandestine existence elsewhere in Italy.

So when I learned he had been arrested for shoplifting in the UPIM department store on the Viminal Hill behind the cathedral of Santa Maria Maggiore, I felt certain the Italian police would either jail him or expel him from the country. But expel him to where? At the time no western country would contemplate sending him back to the Soviet Union … even if that country would accept him which was doubtful. So they could have jailed him. But for what? For stealing a pair of socks, while the prisons are already overflowing with criminals and juvenile terrorists? Besides, nothing was found on Andrey the day he was stopped, while he denied so emphatically and innocently any relation whatsoever with the Italian couple picked up along with him, who actually said so little that it was never clear whether or not they were even together in the store.

“I was looking for some cheap underwear and suddenly the store manager, or somebody, grabbed us all, and the police arrived.” This time, however, Andrey was held overnight in the Trastevere jail but was released the following morning. A few weeks later I appeared with him before an investigating judge in the criminal court. The judge turned out to be a sympathetic Communist intellectual who believed Andrey’s story, and decided to simply hide away his files: “The case won’t come up for four years or more! He will have long left Italy. So why ruin his life for a pair of socks?”

Andrey, as usual, nonchalantly dismissed the entire affair, relegating it to one of those “incidents” and already putting it in the past. At the bus stop he held out his hand and said, “Well, thanks. I’ll head back to Ostia now. I’ve got a job in a small garage, and have to get back to work. They let me off for a few hours to take care of this matter,” he lied.

Since I was surprised that he was living in Ostia again, Andrey explained that he was better off there, “and besides the woman that came to the consulate with me that day had to return to her mother up in La Spezia. She gave up her apartment, and of course I can’t afford it alone,” he said laconically in Italian, thus putting also that period of his life behind him.

The winter rains had been falling on Rome for weeks when it seemed Andrey went berserk. Damp cold, a penetrating clamminess occupied the centuries old, thick walled, poorly heated stone buildings of the Rome Old City. That kind of dampness carries a kind of chill and trembling unknown in colder climates. It penetrated the Old City while also the summer resort apartment houses in Ostia were cold and miserable. A black cloud of pessimism and also surprise at the fabled Italian weather settled over the immigrant community. Later, I recalled thinking that this was precisely the time during which Andrey might have changed his life and ways. Instead, the grip of a no longer capricious fate and its forces sucking him downwards were too tenacious to resist. If you could believe the immigrants in Ostia who accused him of the most dastardly acts, he was as if possessed by some evil spirit.

“He took 50,000 lire from each of us for the rent,” said the spokesman for a trio of three seedy characters with whom Andrey shared an apartment. “And then he disappeared for two days. He never paid the rent at all and now we have been evicted. But Andrey just shrugs it off and refuses to give us our money back.”

An elderly couple described Andrey as the chief of a band of wild Russians, “robbing and conning new immigrant arrivals of their possessions and cheating them on rents, forcing their wives to sleep with them or face beatings from the hooligans.” It all sounded so fantastic, of another place and time, like something out of a Dostoevsky novel. When confronted with such charges, Andrey was always shocked and so sweetly innocent. Could he be such a good actor? What was the truth here? I wondered. The immigrant community was so totally alienated from the real world that anything was possible … the good, evil, and the evil, good. They thrived to such an extent on hearsay and rumors, and on conditioned desires and old dreams that even if you could gather them all together in a great consultative assembly, the truth about Andrey, if one truth even existed, could never have been established.

Yet no one had ever charged him publicly … much less to his face. He didn’t seem at all awe-inspiring enough to still the wagging tongues of his neighbors.

During this ecstatic period, Andrey’s most violent period I came to believe, a mysterious event occurred, a cynical crime the guilt for which was never clearly established. He continued coming to the welfare organization for consultation and assistance and to receive his monthly dole, during which visits he had never been friendlier or franker. He was always convincingly astonished at the accusations against him, although he never displayed embarrassment when confronted with them and he appeared sincere when together we weighed measures to eliminate the mafia-like aura surrounding him and to rehabilitate himself in the eyes of the various consular officials.

On the eve of the crime he came to the refugee office with others to receive his monthly welfare dole. As everyone could see a lot of money was lying in neat stacks in the cash drawer. When his turn arrived that day I noted him staring fixedly into the full drawer as the paymaster counted out his lot. I noted the gleam in his eyes and imagined his thoughts. Here was the solution to all his problems: money. Law ceased to exist and for that instant his weakness and his temptation were fixed in his gaze into that box. Since payments were spaced over several days, at the end of that the first payday a goodly sum remained. As usual it was left that evening in the desk drawer overnight. During the night someone scaled the wall on the back side of the building, climbed to a second floor balcony, and swung dangerously up to a small bathroom window that had obviously been unlocked from the inside, and penetrated into the offices. The thief knew where the money was, forced open the drawer and took the three million lire without any disorderly searching. Playfully, he left a five thousand lire note on the desk of the director.

Andrey should have been the prime suspect, but that was not the case. There were two newly arrived Afghans in the office that day and for some inexplicable reason the immediate suspicion fell on them. An investigation ensued but police found no evidence against anyone, and none of the suspects was known to have been spending any large sums of money. The crime was never solved.

Only after Andrey’s tragic death did an investigator from the American Embassy reveal that “it had been established” that the agile burglar was indeed Andrey. Nevertheless, this post mortem charge never seemed conclusive since the Embassy allegation was based on hearsay and the immigrant rumor mill.

As so often happened in Andrey’s life of contrasts and contradictions, before and after the robbery he was busily and cheerfully discussing plans for reconstruction of his life. I noticed only little signs of a sudden improvement in his economic situation, such as sometimes paying the check when we had drinks in a café or the absence of any talk about rents and rising food prices.

Andrey scratched the back of his thin neck as was his habit and peering out the plate window said: “I learned in our games in the Odessa caverns I told you about that money is neither god nor devil but it helps make me a better person since I’m not really greedy for much more.”

“Yep,” I said, “that’s the danger. It’s never enough.”

“The secret is knowing when to stop desiring more … otherwise it’s a bottomless pit … greed for money, I mean.”

******

[dropcap]S[/dropcap]ometimes, it seemed, he displayed such positive thinking chiefly to alleviate the fears of others more concerned about the future than he. Shortly afterwards, he revealed his decision—ah, the devil that he was!—to marry a young Russian girl and to present himself to the Australian Consulate as a serious family man, young, strong, and willing to work, and desirous to start life anew in true pioneer spirit on a new continent. He introduced the attractive girl to me, bringing along to a pizzeria her mother and sister who appeared charmed by the prospect of this son-in-law. Andrey beamed as he outlined their marriage plans: “As soon as our birth certificates arrive, we’ll arrange the ceremony in the Campidoglio Chapel, and then celebrate the religious rite in the synagogue. Thank God,” he added poetically, holding the hand of his fiancée, “for us the winter is over … and things are looking brighter.” Again his beguiling optimism! He seemed truly in love and determined to change. For Andrey life was not a problem to be solved but a reality to be experienced before it became real reality.

Ostia somehow seemed warmer after that evening and was becoming gay and joyful again. On good days, people sprawled out on along the littered beaches and a few hardy Russians were already venturing into the suspiciously dark water. As the summer season progressed, beach activities intensified and rents for immigrants’ apartments rose drastically. Spring and the early summer passed and I heard little from or about Andrey. I did hear some petty complaints and then the usual rumors about some sordid activity in which he was allegedly engaged. On the other hand, the Procurator of the Republic gave him a clean bill of health which I presented to the Australian consulate to strengthen his slow-moving immigration processing.

Nearly everywhere work stopped when the stifling August heat settled in on Rome. Everyone waited breathlessly for the middle of the month and the Ferragosto holidays and the rains that bring relief to the peninsula at the peak of the summer. For reasons of economy Andrey had moved into the apartment with his fiancée and her mother and sister, and, I supposed, to stay out of trouble. As usual summer Ostia was noisy and more dream than reality as Rome’s shopkeeper’s and their families and workers from local factories that had closed down for the month of August crowded into the chaos of seashore apartments, magically transformed into devilish vacationers but bringing along with their unreal vacation selves also most of the habits of their normal Rome city life and making of Ostia just another part of old Rome.

I joined Andrey on one of those heavy, windless evenings when the streets and the bars and the cafés and restaurants and pizzerias are animated until late at night. He and his fiancée, mother and sister, decided to take a neighbor’s small son out for an ice-cream. We strolled languidly along the Lungomare to the gelateria at the main square, and eating ice-cream walked along water’s edge. We were all in good spirits when we arrived back at their apartment at around midnight.

When we arrived at the door of their fifth floor walk-up they looked at each other. No one had the key. A big, old-fashioned key of a blue-colored iron that hardly fit into a pocket. The door was double-locked.

Now what?

Andrey, as always true to his character was undaunted.

“Everybody wait here,” he told us. “I’ll run back downstairs and climb up the drain pipe to the balcony and open the door from the inside. See you all in a few minutes,” he called out as he jumped and hopped back down the stairs. The three women smiled and mother commented how good it was to have a man in the family at which sister smirked and remarked that Andrey had after all had a lot of practice in drain pipe climbing.

I had followed Andrey downstairs where I found him examining the drain with a professional eye. The heavy pipe ran up the front of the building, passing just next to their balcony. The iron hooks and the window ledges at each floor would make his ascent a piece of cake. Nothing compared to getting into the immigration office, I later imagined he might have thought. And sister was right: he was good at that kind of thing.

He climbed as fast and agilely as a monkey and was just short of the fifth floor when a rusted and rotted part of the pipe suddenly snapped, hung for a moment and gave way. After only a brief shout he fell right before the startled eyes of the others, who were observing his daring ascent from the stairwell landing on the fourth floor through a large picture window.

Almost a year had passed since I had stood with Andrey at this same Prima Porta Cemetery on Via Flaminia at the north edge of Rome for Niederman’s burial. Now the same scene was to be repeated in all its particulars: the same wooden boxes all alike, the same unconcerned cemetery employees lowering them into a long ditch, the crying women whom I observed closely because they seemed to be over-doing the required dramatics. I was surprised when I realized that they aroused no pity in me. Their demonstration was unreal, forced and, I thought, as if rehearsed which only complemented and intensified the vulgarity of the funeral scene. They were too noisy, ugly, out of keeping with the real tragedy that was both the life of Andrey and his tragicomic death. Then I realized that their wails and laments stemmed less from sadness than from their great frustration that I didn’t yet comprehend.

In that moment I couldn’t grasp the real reasons for their desperation because I knew little about their real relationship with Andrey—about their business activities nor the ramifications of their relationship with him. Only weeks later did I learn that Andrey had been pimping for the two sisters, and probably Mother too, chiefly among the many single immigrants who had difficulty finding female company in Rome. Using their flat as a base, it seems the little group had made a lot of money that spring and summer. Rumor had it that Andrey was the mastermind of it all, found the clients, made the appointments and collected the fees. Now he was dead, and his fiancée too was pregnant, the same situation after the death of his old friend, Niederman.

After the men covered the ditch I lingered a few minutes and watched the despondent but now quiet women walk with Andrey’s friends to the old Volkswagen bus parked near the entrance. Across the fields toward Prima Porta the shadows were lengthening on the hills. But darkness would still be long in coming. I stared at the fresh dirt at my feet and it occurred to me that Andrey was probably amused by the banality of his fall. And I still wondered what he had tried to say as he died on the sidewalk. Had he suddenly remembered that before they went out for ice-cream, one of the women had tied the blue key on a string and hung it around the little boy’s neck. Or if he, perhaps, in that last instant of life had been struck by the blue color hanging there as the boy stared down at him with his puerile eyes.

The End

Rome, March, 2016

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Notes: (1)

Since the eighth century BC when Greek settlers created in southern Italy Magna Graecia, or Great Greece, the “America” of many contemporary peoples of the East, the peninsula of Italy has attracted immigrants from the North, East and South. Even before Ancient Rome and the Roman Empire, adventurous Greeks had made of Siracusa and Agrigento in Sicily and Naples farther north major cities of the Mediterranean world. Today their Greek dialect is still spoken in places in south Italy. Still today, Italians and Greeks say of each other stessa faccia, stessa razza. Same face, same race. In the seventh century Muslims conquered Sicily and made of Palermo one of their greatest cities where they left behind them their architecture and vestiges of their cultures, language and life style. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries Normans occupied south Italy and built their magnificent cathedrals in Palermo, their capital city of the Kingdom of Sicily where they left much of their architecture. Spain made of Naples a modern European capital city. Austrian Habsburgs governed much of north Italy and Tuscany from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries as a result of which north Italy is contemporary Italy’s best territory. Rome and the central Papal States were less fortunate. Ruled over, exploited and plundered by a corrupt Roman Church, Rome today is one of the most backward and worst governed of modern European capitals. Immigrants flooding Italy today are not conquerors; most aim for Rome as an intermediate step on their way to other countries. In the late 1970s, because of certain language abilities, I worked for a brief time with one of the immigrant organizations in Rome, dealing chiefly with East Europeans, many of which were from Russia. Recently I found in my file cabinets notes, biographic details and rough sketches of some of the immigrants I met. This story emerged from one such record.

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Senior Editor Gaither Stewart, based in Rome, serves—inter alia—as our European correspondent. A veteran journalist and essayist on a broad palette of topics from culture to history and politics, he is also the author of the Europe Trilogy, celebrated spy thrillers whose latest volume, Time of Exile, was recently published by Punto Press.

 

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