Every woman adores a Fascist.
--Sylvia Plath
I.
When Friedrich and Frieda were children, they told each other bedtime stories about the noble lords and ladies from whom they were descended. They described how their ancestors would climb a ladder up to a canopied featherbed, and how as they nodded off they counted silver instead of sheep, or amused themselves by looking at the gold-embroidered tapestries on their walls. There was Saint George vanquishing the dragon, its spouting blood a burst of red thread; there was the chained unicorn in its garden. And eventually Friedrich and Frieda would both drift off to sleep in their bunk cots, curled up under the thin, scratchy sheets.
It came as a great shock to the children when they were told their ancestors had been not chivalrous knights but common laborers, and their mother not a tragic princess deprived of her inheritance but a woman of loose morals and bad blood.
"I don't believe it!" cried Friedrich.
"If the Mother Superior says so, it must be true," said Frieda.
"What does she know, that old witch! Bad blood--I'll show her blood!"
Nothing came of the little boy's attempt to protect his family's honor, because it was suppertime and then lights out. But for a long while afterward he would occasionally stare, brow furrowed, at the bluish veins on his wrists.
II.
I met Friedrich many years after the war. I had seen him before in monochrome and Technicolor, looking out from the screen as if daring me to return his gaze, but it all really began when my first play was being produced in New York. Never mind what it was about--it all seems rather naïve to me now. It was set in an old-country shtetl because I thought this made a good backdrop for a tall tale. I was very young at the time, so naturally all I cared about were tall tales--the taller the better. That way it was easier to hide the truth somewhere inside.
Friedrich had the starring role. When he tried on the costume--a woman's headscarf and apron for the first act, a man's fur hat and black suit for the second--I nearly died of laughter. He didn't crack a smile.
"Miss Freud," he said one evening during the first week of rehearsals, "you realize you've just rewritten Twelfth Night and taken all the comedy out of it?"
"Oh. Have I?" A quizzical pause. "By the way, call me Leo."
We were backstage. Everyone else had already gone home. I was sitting on a wooden crate, rereading the notes balanced on my knee. He pulled up a chair and straddled it, facing me. A bare lightbulb flickered above the space between us; the harsh light deepened the shadows under his eyes and angular cheekbones. Some instinct from my upbringing urged me to edge away from him. I defied it.
"And do you also realize you aren't fooling anybody with that masculine pseudonym?"
He had a strong German accent, pronouncing the "p" in the final word. I smiled despite myself, reminded, oddly enough, of my parents' English.
"Is it really a pseudonym if it's the only name you know me by?"
He narrowed his eyes, but then smiled back, his lips curving elegantly.
"As for the play, I consider what you said to be a compliment. Not many people get their first play compared to Shakespeare."
He chuckled--that dark, mocking sound I would later come to associate with life's more absurd twists of fate.
"All right, you win," he said. "I came looking for a fight and I lost."
"Why?"
He shrugged. "It's in my blood."
"Fighting or losing?"
"Both, I guess."
I smirked. "Well, thank God it's both, or I'd be putting on puppet shows in a concentration camp."
He jolted as if hit by an electric shock, standing up so abruptly that the chair wobbled.
"That is not funny."
"I was just joking. I wasn't implying--I mean, good Lord, of course I know you aren't a--"
"You don't know anything about me."
I looked down at my hands, feeling my face grow hot.
"You're just like the rest of your idiotic generation," he sneered, crossing his arms. "You've seen everything on television so you think you understand it, you think you can joke about anything."
"It's your trip if you don't find it funny, you know. My father says Germans ought to shine our shoes for what they did."
His eyes flashed.
"Abba Kovner was right, he says," I went on, standing up and regarding him with a vicious smile. "I'd say you're pretty lucky I'm too young and stupid to care about the past. Anyway, we're in America and I have a play to put on, so I think I can joke about whatever I please!"
"Fine," he snarled. His mouth had lost its soft curves, distorting into a thin white line. "I'll laugh along if that's what you want. I'll shine your shoes, too. And since you're so witty, you can take a trip to Poland, where you can put on a nice little comedy--it will be so funny, what's the word--a real gas!" A loud crack echoed through the theater as I slapped him in the face.
He recoiled from the blow, rubbing his face gingerly. His cheek was red. I covered my mouth with my hand, suddenly feeling as if I'd broken a vase or been caught smoking at school.
Perhaps in response to my childish gesture, he began to laugh: at first a mirthless bark, but then he couldn't stop. Suddenly I was laughing too. Soon we were helplessly doubled over, eyes streaming, our voices booming absurdly like in a madhouse, the center of a little circle of light amid impenetrable shadows. When I finally caught my breath I realized I was leaning against him. He looked into my eyes, and I held his gaze.
III.
Friedrich was in his shirtsleeves, bending low over the billiards table. Cigar smoke filled the overheated room and a jazz record warbled away on the gramophone.
Oh the shark has pretty teeth, dear...
He squinted, aimed, and made an expert shot, knocking over a glass of brandy someone had left on the corner of the table. The balls clacked in perfect unison; the glass shattered on the floor. Languid applause sounded around the room.
"Damn it, Weiss, can't you be more careful?" said a bald middle-aged officer, dabbing his sweaty neck with a handkerchief.
Scarlet billows start to spread...
"You've already had enough to drink as it is," Friedrich said breezily, leaning against the billiards table. He pointed at the gramophone with the cue. "Hey, Bauer, shut that off, will you? Someone will hear."
"It's jazz, it's good, who gives a fuck!" came the response from a bespectacled man sprawled on the sofa with a cigarette dangling from his mouth.
"It's degenerate, is what it is."
Guffaws bubbled up around him.
"Degenerate, he says," scoffed Bauer. "The Führer isn't gonna fuck you, Weiss."
"I could have you shot for talking like that," said Friedrich, color rising in his cheeks.
"Ooh, I'm so scared! Sounds like Weiss is saving himself for his wedding night."
Now Macheath spends like a sailor...
"You aren't married?" another officer piped up, a pug-nosed man who'd been absorbed in a book about Paleolithic fertility sculptures.
"No."
"Why not?"
"Yeah, why don't you get married?" echoed the bald man.
Friedrich shrugged, bored by the question. "Haven't met anyone worth the trouble."
More laughter.
"But aren't you lonely?" drawled Bauer.
"Who keeps house for you?" said the pug-nosed man. "My Greta, she cooks me dinner, irons all my shirts. She's a nag but I couldn't live without her. Handsome young fellow like you--good blood, healthy stock--you could get any girl you want."
"I live with my sister," said Friedrich. "She keeps house. And we aren't lonely."
"You know, in France you can marry your sister," said the bald man placidly.
"That's fucking disgusting, Schumann," said Bauer.
"I know, I was just saying."
"Fucking frogs. Ought to mow them all down."
"Stop swearing so much," said the pug-nosed man, looking over the top of his book disdainfully.
Lotte Lenya, sweet Lucy Brown...
Friedrich thought of his sister. At parties, while the other officers' wives gossiped around cocktails, Frieda always sat in the corner in a simple dress, hands folded in her lap. Whenever Friedrich's face began to redden and his laugh grew more boisterous, she would cover his glass with her hand and look him in the eye. Her meaning was clear, but there was no reproach in her gaze, no judgment. Silent and endlessly forgiving, she reminded him of the statue of the Virgin Mary that had stood in an alcove opposite their beds at the orphanage. Every night it had kept watch over them as they slept, a white shadow in the darkness.
He turned away and again took aim at the billiard balls.
IV.
I fell in love with him, of course. I don't think there was anything else I could have done. He was tall and blond, with a straight nose and a strong jaw and blue eyes like sea glass. The scars on his face--one across the bridge of his nose, one in an X on his cheek, one straight down through the corner of his mouth--were pale against his athletic tan. I thought they made him look even more handsome. I liked how small and dark I looked next to him. Even when he was drunk, which was often, he never seemed rumpled or grubby. He had strong hands that never shook. He took me by the waist and held me tightly, almost too tightly--and I liked that, too.
Friedrich was exactly what my parents had told me to stay away from, but I was, as I said, very young then. My parents--the son of a rabbi and the gentile daughter of a trade unionist--had fled the war, I knew. But they didn't talk about it and so I didn't think about it. All it meant for me was that in Europe there had been some relatives whom I'd never met, and would now never get to meet. Aunts and uncles and grandparents with names like Gittel and Mendel and Goldie, people I'd never seen even in photographs and of whom my mental image, as a result, was closer to tree branches or dolls made of corn husks. In my mind they were always on fire, the branches burning slowly from the inside, the corn husks consumed in a moment.
But Friedrich was real, and he fascinated me. He rarely spoke about himself--all I knew of his life was that he had a twin sister he hadn't seen in a very long time. He didn't say her name or whether she was alive or dead; I assumed she was dead, because it seemed most people of his generation had died young. I tried to imagine what she had been like when alive: did she too walk with long strides, did her lips also turn up scornfully at the corners, did she have his habit of looking up sullenly from a furrowed brow?
I asked him about her once when we were in bed together. He was smoking a cigarette held between the knuckles of his long, thin fingers, and I lay with my hand and cheek on his chest.
"Fritz, what was your sister like?"
He was silent for a moment. "She was a good cook. There wasn't a lot to eat growing up, but she always found something and made it taste good."
"Did you ever eat the soles of your shoes?" That was, I knew, something people did in lean times.
He laughed darkly. "I don't remember. I've done all kinds of things."
"Like what? Tell me and maybe I'll write something about it."
"You would hate me."
"I'd love you if you were the Devil himself."
A languid, indulgent smile. He pulled my head up by my short hair--a gentle tug, but one I felt in my scalp--and kissed me on the mouth. "And I you."
I traced circles on his warm, sturdy chest and felt his heartbeat. "Would you still love me if I wrote you into a novel?"
"Only if you give me a cut of the royalties."
"What about if I got a sex change?"
"Of course," he said, sleepily stroking my arm. "But if you become a man, how will we get married?"
"You want to marry me?"
He took a long drag of his cigarette and said nothing.
V.
Their house was small and cozy. The previous occupants, a married couple, had disappeared after receiving a slip of paper in the mail summoning them to the nearest train station. Frieda swept the floor and the front steps, dusted the photographs on the bookshelf: Friedrich in uniform, Frieda herself at a picnic table, the two of them on a sailboat, the Führer giving a speech. She bustled around the kitchen, hair pinned back save for a few unruly tendrils at her ears, sunlight glinting off her knife as she chopped potatoes. She ironed Friedrich's uniform and brushed his coat for him. Friedrich stood still--back straight, shoulders square, hands behind his back--idly regarding their reflections in the mirror. They could have been man and wife. And they finally had enough to eat.
The garden was Frieda's paradise. She knelt in the soil, wearing a straw hat and wielding a large pair of shears, weeding, pruning, severing, uprooting. Black dirt stained her bare hands, gathered under her fingernails.
"Those roses are growing beautifully," came Friedrich's voice from behind her.
She turned around and accidentally cut into her thumb with the shears. She gasped, more in surprise than pain, dropping the instrument. Blood dripped thickly on the green grass. Friedrich saw; kneeling at her side, he unfolded a clean white handkerchief from his pocket and briskly wrapped it around her thumb.
"Clumsy girl," he murmured. "Does it hurt?"
"A bit."
"Let me get you a bandage and some ice. If it doesn't stop bleeding--"
"Can you stay here a little while?"
"Fritzi..."
"Please?"
He sighed, like he used to do when they were children, but obeyed. Red warmth seeped through the handkerchief as a ladybug crawled over the blade of the shears.
"Are you afraid of blood, Friedrich?"
"Of course not, I'm a soldier."
"I'm not afraid, either. It reminds me of these roses--they're my favorite, you know."
"Why?"
She blushed. "Because they mean true love."
VI.
Gray fog engulfed the brownstones like a mink coat. Rain pattered comfortingly on the windows and roof. The TV was on: Joan Baez singing at a peace rally.
"Leo, darling, we'll be late."
"Hold on a minute--Fritz, does this tie match my vest?"
"Yes, yes, it's very nice."
"You didn't even look at it."
He looked. "Well, it looks fine, but you've tied it wrong."
He kneeled in front of me and carefully retied the knot. We regarded our reflections in the mirror, standing next to each other in our best suits. I barely came up to his shoulder.
"You look so handsome, mein Schatz."
I grinned, too giddy to say anything.
"Shall we go, then?" he said.
"You got it, baby. Oh--almost forgot!"
I took two flowers from the vase on the windowsill--red roses that had seen better days but were still vibrant--and pinned one to each of our jackets.
We walked to City Hall under one umbrella, which dripped on the polished floor as we signed the papers. Friedrich dipped me backwards and kissed me, just like in the movies. In that moment it was as if every previous element of my life had simply been a link in the chain leading me to him: the unbearably lonely tomboy childhood, the long Saturday morning services to which my father dragged me in defiance of my mother's refusal to convert, the college writing workshops and community theater productions. (Even the week of nightmares I'd had as a small child when my father was being investigated at his job and the Rosenbergs were in the news--though I'd understood nothing at the time, my parents' tense, drawn faces had seeped into my dreams and turned everything black.) And now a life of wandering had finally led me here, to a man with strong hands and scars on his face and sea-glass eyes, a man who had starred in my first play, who loved me as much as I loved him and didn't mind that I wore a suit to our wedding.
Only when the clerk pointedly cleared his throat did I remember that today was a rainy day in New York, that there were protests in the streets and a war going on, that Friedrich and I were not the only two people in the world. But for all we cared, we might as well have been.
We ran laughing down the marble front steps. Friedrich had stashed our marriage license inside his trenchcoat to keep it dry. A taxi cab splashed dirty water onto the sidewalk. People hurried past us, looking at their wristwatches or the ground; they had no idea we'd just been married. The clouds parted above us, revealing a rainbow only we could see.
"I guess I ought to tell my parents."
"You mean they don't know?" When I shrugged carelessly, Friedrich threw his head back and laughed. "My God, you really are something, kid!"
"Well, they know we've been living together."
"But still, eloping with a foreigner twice your age! You know, if I were your father I'd have you chained up in a closet with one meal a day."
I ran to find a payphone. My mother picked up after the first few rings.
"Ma, hi, it's me! Guess what, I gotta tell you something."
"Where are you? Sweetie, is everything all right?"
"Of course, everything's groovy--listen, I just got married!"
"Married? To who?"
"To Friedrich--you know Fritz! Oh, Ma, I'm so happy, you wouldn't believe it. We just signed the papers downtown. I wore a suit and Fritz was just so romantic and now we're standing outside in the rain but I just had to call and tell you!"
"Downtown? A suit?" I could picture her frowning and rubbing her forehead as she stood at the telephone in the kitchen, the curlers still in her hair.
"Yeah, listen, can you get Pop on the line?"
"Oh... sweetie, are you sure that's a good idea?"
"Look, I know he's not crazy about Fritz and all," I said, an apologetic tone creeping into my voice against my will, "but I think I can get through to him. Really, Fritz is a great guy, I don't know what Pop's whole trip even is and anyway we've already signed the damn thing so if you could please get him on the phone just for a second, please, Ma?"
"Well... all right."
She called out to him. A long silence, then I heard them bickering. Suddenly my father spoke into the receiver. He said my name--my real name, the one he and my mother had given me and with which I'd just signed my marriage license.
"Hi, Pop," I said, trying to sound confident. "Listen, I can explain. The fact is--"
"If I had known," he cut me off, voice shaking with anger, "if I had known my daughter would run off with a German, I would have stayed in Europe and let the tanks roll over me."
He hung up with a loud click.
I stood holding the receiver, my wet hair sticking to my forehead, the rose on my lapel drooping limply.
"Leo?" said Friedrich, appearing beside me. "Something wrong?"
I blinked and shook my head.
"You're crying."
I hadn't noticed. Silently I wiped my eyes with my sleeve. I felt Friedrich's hand on my shoulder, protective and warm.
"Come on," he said, "let's get something to eat."
I nodded and let go of the phone, letting it dangle forlornly on its cord.
VII.
The garden was overgrown. Friedrich was surprised it was still there. The damp, weed-choked earth yielded beneath his boots. At the end of the path stood the house. From the outside it looked unchanged, as if the tall grass had hidden it from time, but as Friedrich approached he could see a broken window, a few tiles missing from the roof, the crooked door.
He knocked. After a few moments the door creaked open, and there stood Frieda. Her face was blank save for a dull wariness, her dress drab and worn-looking, her posture hunched. The sight of her was like a blow to the chest. There, inches away from him, was the face he had seen obliquely through his own reflection in puddles of water and shards of glass: the same straight nose, haughty mouth, severe chin. Looking into her blue eyes felt like falling into a frozen lake after having misjudged the thickness of the ice.
"I'm sorry," he said, "I didn't have time to write."
The next moment Frieda's arms were around him, her face buried in the crook of his shoulder. "You're alive."
She made him tea without needing to ask and poured the last of the milk into his cup. They ate bread and butter. For a few minutes it was as if no time had passed at all since their last breakfast together. The kitchen clock ticked noncommittally.
"What happened to you?" she said.
He realized she'd stopped eating and had been watching him intently for some time. He took a long gulp of tea--it was warm and rich.
"I was captured. Spent a year in a camp."
Frieda blanched. "Soviet or American?"
"American. They treated me well."
Better than I deserved.
She reached across the table to touch his arm. "Oh, Friedrich..."
"Don't be upset, Fritzi, everything's all right." He kissed her hand and rested his cheek on it, but his voice sounded hollow.
You don't know.
"And then?"
"Well, when I was released I knew I had to see you, but what with my papers and the roads... It all took much longer than I thought. I didn't even know if you were alive or dead, but I tried not to think about that."
"I thought you were dead," said Frieda, looking down at her plate on the old checkered tablecloth. "The news reports were in chaos. I didn't know what to believe. But I was sure you must've been killed. I felt a dull ache in my side all the time--as if we'd been sundered with a knife." She looked up at him and smiled. "I don't feel it anymore now."
She began to cry. Friedrich stood up and embraced her.
"Hush, now, it's all right."
You don't know what I've done. You don't know what we did.
Her hair was disheveled. He kissed the top of her head, holding her tightly, his heart thudding in his chest. She was warm in his arms. Warm and alive.
We're standing on a pile of corpses.
Frieda ran him a hot bath and watched as he took off his dirty traveling clothes. Friedrich didn't mind. He entered the bath slowly, feeling the warmth wash over his stiff limbs.
"I'm sorry, Fritzi," he said suddenly.
"For what?"
"I don't know. I missed you--I thought about you every day."
"I missed you, too."
She was perched on the windowsill, swinging her legs like a child. Her stockings had been darned many times. Friedrich wanted to touch her slight calves, her small ankles. Heat pooled in him at the thought. He washed his body, scrubbing his back and chest, lathering his greasy hair. Frieda brought him a razor and he shaved. His reflection grew more familiar to him, yet somehow he couldn't stand to look at it. He touched the water: his face fragmented into ripples, then reappeared.
Unclean.
He became aware that Frieda was standing beside the bathtub, and that she was naked. He held her gaze as she slid into the water and sat across from him, her knees drawn up to her chest. They were so close he could see the hairs on her arms prickling.
"We haven't bathed together since we were children," she said. "Do you remember that horrible old Mother Superior?"
He laughed softly. "Do I ever. She loathed us."
"Do you remember how she once beat me with a birch rod for saying I wanted to marry you?"
"Yes. Your back was so red afterwards--I could hardly stand the sight. I wanted to snap that rod in half over her head."
Frieda smiled. "You've always stood up for me."
You don't know.
"We're like mirrors, you and I," she said. "The same blood in our veins. Our hearts must beat in unison."
Or do you?
She placed a hand on his chest, guiding him to copy the gesture.
Did you know what was happening?
He felt her sternum and the faint outlines of her ribs.
Did you close your eyes?
"My sweet, strong brother, I'm so happy you're back."
VIII.
Friedrich and I soon grew sick of America, so we moved to Paris and lived in a garret until he landed a role that paid enough for a proper apartment. I continued to write--plays, novels, short stories, screenplays, and of course various hack jobs of the worst sort--and made decent money myself. No sense in being humble: I knew I was good, even when churning out potboilers to help keep the lights on. Bad reviews upset me, though not for long; good ones simply confirmed what I was already aware of.
After a particularly successful publication--another tall tale--I was interviewed by a literary magazine. They asked me about my message; I told them I didn't have one. They asked me about American politics; I replied I hadn't been following the papers back home for years. They asked me about Israel; I said I'd never been there. They asked me about my husband; I said I liked most of his films. Finally they asked me about women's liberation and why I never published under my real, married name; to that I just said, is it really your name if no one knows you by it? (I wasn't trying to be cryptic--I was just being honest. How could I have explained what I really meant?)
Our new apartment had high ceilings, big windows, and a balcony you could see the Eiffel Tower from. He never cooked and I rarely cleaned, so the place always smelled of booze and cigarettes. On warm nights we'd sit on the balcony listening to old jazz records, gazing at the stars and the Seine.
"It all seems so far away, doesn't it?" I said. I was thinking of the gray dawn that had greeted us as we dragged our luggage down the brownstone steps, past overflowing trash cans, and onto the bus to the airport.
"What does?" said Friedrich.
I gestured vaguely, my limbs heavy with contentment. "You know--it all."
"Isn't it a bit cliché, though? I swear I've played this scene before a hundred times. The worldly, dissipated heroes are in Paris, in love, talking about something meaningless. Even the soundtrack is familiar."
"I wouldn't mind living in a movie."
"That kind of film rarely ends well," he said, tipping his head back as he downed the last of his beer. "There's always a betrayal in the final act."
"Well, I like a good tragedy."
"You say that because you're young. You haven't lived your own tragedies yet."
"Sure I have."
"Oh, yes?" He raised an eyebrow, scrutinizing me through the evening gloom. "Like what?"
"Life's a tragedy, baby."
He laughed so loudly that it echoed. A dog began barking in the street below.
"I don't know why, but I'm reminded of a nice little word we have in German--Schadenfreude." The word was perfect in his voice: soft with a hint of harshness, like a knife on velvet.
"What's it mean?"
He smiled wolfishly. "Feeling happy when others are suffering."
IX.
Frieda did not return to the garden, but sometimes before leaving for work she picked a fistful of wildflowers to brighten up the schoolroom. One of her students had hidden in a cellar for two years during the war. Frieda couldn't look her in the eye. The girl thought the teacher didn't like her.
Friedrich worked ten hours a day at an auto parts factory. In he morning he thought about Frieda and how she hummed snatches of songs while making dinner, or doing laundry, or brushing her hair. As he hammered strips of metal he thought about the American soldiers he passed by on the way to work: they were usually playing cards or checkers, but the same one always lost--and he was a sore loser, by the look of him. And as he walked home at the end of his shift he thought about the husband and wife who had been deported to Poland and never returned, in whose garden Frieda had once grown red roses. It all seemed like a very long time ago.
The bed they shared was the only warm place in the world. The winter after the war's end had been particularly lean, and Frieda had had to sell most of Friedrich's furniture.
"It's silly, but I felt like I was burying you by selling off your things, even though I was sure you'd never need them again. I cried so hard."
Often Friedrich dreamed of a play they'd put on in the POW camp (to boost morale, supposedly). He remembered swinging a wooden sword, sweat trickling down his face from under his paper crown. The battle was, of course, lost, the tyrant defeated. The men had clapped and hooted as Friedrich took a deep bow. The sky was huge and blue over the green fields beyond. The air shimmered with heat. The roar died down and everyone was sent back to work, but the applause still rang in Friedrich's ears as he scrubbed the latrines.
Later they had shown all the prisoners a reel from the liberated camps. Twisted bodies stacked high like firewood. Mountains of broken eyeglasses, leather boots and high-heeled shoes, silver wedding rings. A tractor pushing the bodies into a yawning pit. Men and women with protruding ribs and shaved heads. Empty gas chambers that seemed miles long. The man sitting next to Friedrich had covered his face with his hands. Friedrich watched expressionlessly, barely blinking. The grainy images flitted before his eyes like moths around a streetlamp. There was no sound save for the hum of the projector. The reel had concluded with a shot of two children behind a barbed wire fence--a boy and a girl. Once the lights had come back on and everyone filed out of the room, Friedrich had walked calmly to the latrines and vomited.
Now, in his dream, he saw himself onstage again. A sad clown in black lipstick, standing at attention as the projector beamed the reel onto his baggy white costume. A Roman centurion holding his own severed head, still in its helmet. Claudius with a flagon of poison, Don Juan dragged away into Hell, Mephistopheles drenched in red. Then the stage collapsed and Friedrich tumbled through the floorboards, plunging into an abyss hung with colorful masks and ribbons, drowning in a sea of wedding rings.
He sat upright in a cold sweat. Someone touched his shoulder and he jolted.
"It's just a dream, Friedrich--just a dream."
As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he saw Frieda sitting up next to him, a tangible shadow. He let her embrace him and whisper soothingly into his ear, wrapped his arms around her willowy frame, pressed his face into her nightgown. His heartbeat calmed and he breathed in deeply. Frieda always smelled of flowers.
"Do you want me to tell you a story to help you fall asleep?" she said. "Just like when we were children?"
Friedrich looked away, embarrassed. "All right."
"Once upon a time, there lived a knight who decided to go wandering. One day he came upon a lake that was home to a lonely mermaid. She took him into her underwater realm, and fed him and washed his clothes. The knight left his sword and shield at the bottom of the lake, where eventually they rusted and disappeared forever."
"And then?"
"Then the mermaid, in exchange for her hospitality, asked the knight to kiss her."
"Did he oblige?"
She was silent for a moment. "I don't know."
They were looking into each other's eyes. The same shade of blue, the same dark, sleepless shadows.
He cupped her face and kissed her on the mouth, slowly and deeply.
"I love you," he said.
"I love you too." She kissed his forehead, his temples, his eyelids. "I've never loved anyone but you."
The next morning she awoke to sunlight and a note.
Dearest Frieda
I love you too much. I want to play a different role in life, so I'm going wandering. Please forgive me. I promise we'll see each other again someday.
Yours always
Friedrich
X.
"Forgive me, Mme. Weiss," said my publisher, M. Levy, flipping through the manuscript I had typed up, "but what is this?"
"You don't like it?"
"To say that I dislike it would be--well, that is, of course..." He folded his hands on his desk diplomatically. "You know how deeply I respect your craft."
"What's wrong with it? I know the ending's a bit abrupt, but I think it works. Or is it too predictable?"
"No, no, your style is impeccable as always... but there is a time and a place for everything."
"Well, why not here and now?"
"But l'inceste? Le fascisme? And in such a lighthearted tone? This is not the reputation I wish to cultivate for my press. Frankly I find it objectionable, and I'm surprised you don't seem to understand why." He sighed and wiped his horn-rimmed glasses. "But perhaps I shouldn't be."
"I beg your pardon?"
"After all, you're quite young, and the condition of Jews in America has always been vastly different from that of those in Europe. I suppose I'm simply disappointed in what this suggests about man's capacity to empathize with the suffering of others; the narrator seems to positively delight in it."
"There's no need to lecture me, M. Levy."
"I am not lecturing you, Madame, but rest assured that had you been my student in the old days, before academic philosophy disillusioned me and drove me into the arms of literature, you would not have passed Foundations of Ethics in Western Thought if your compositions were anything like your fiction."
"You haven't even considered what the book is trying to say."
"Please, I'd be obliged if you could explain!" His face had grown red against his white moustache.
"Well, I won't! Once you start explaining things it's all over. For God's sake, M. Levy, I'm not a philosopher, and you aren't a writer."
"One need not be an author of fiction to see this can hardly be called literature--anyone with sound morals would find your novel deeply offensive."
"I can write whatever I want." I stood up and shoved the manuscript in my messenger bag. "You'll be sorry when I publish this somewhere else and become the next Nabokov."
"I fear you'll sooner become the next Marquis de Sade."
Usually after meeting with M. Levy I loitered in the city for hours--people-watching, drinking coffee, writing--but that day I felt an inexplicable dread, as if the windows of the old houses lining the street were all watching me. I went straight home. The stairwell of the crowded Métro was covered in graffiti: a heart with two names scrawled in the middle, a lonely person's telephone number, protest slogans. Sous les pavès, la plage.
Friedrich wouldn't be expecting me home so early. Jazz was playing somewhere in the apartment; the windows were open, letting in fresh air and dissipating the familiar smell of alcohol and cigarettes. A cutting board and a knife were in the kitchen sink, and a pot of soup that smelled of pepper and thyme was cooling on the stove.
When the shark bites with his teeth, dear...
Suspicion struck me. Oh no, I thought, his contract must have fallen through--he'd had an argument with the director, gotten drunk on set, shouted at the camera crew--so now he was playing housewife to distract me from the fact that his salary had covered the rent. And this right after I'd dumped my publisher.
"Fritz?"
No answer.
"Friedrich?"
Lies a body oozing life...
Walking down the hallway, I could tell the music was coming from the bedroom. I knocked on the door.
"Fritz, baby, you all right?"
I thought I heard him say something, make some kind of noise, and I really began to worry. He'd definitely been fired. He'd lost his contract, taken pills, and in a second I'd find him half-dead on the floor.
Did our boy do something rash...
I opened the door.
Friedrich was on the bed. A woman was straddling him. They were both nude, her pale skin against his tan, the sunlight shining through the white curtains and illuminating their sweat-slicked bodies. He held her hips, the muscles in his arms taut; her breasts bounced as she moved on top of him. Her hair--the same shade of blond as his--cascaded in a disheveled tumble down her shoulders. They were both breathing hard and looking into each other's eyes with such intensity that it seemed to generate its own heat and light, engulfing them, blinding them to everything outside.
Now that Macky's back in town...
I stumbled back against the wall. Finally they realized they were no longer alone, and it was as if they'd been severed with a knife. Friedrich swore in German. The woman gasped and scrambled to cover herself with a blanket.
The sunlight turned Friedrich's hair to pure gold, his chest and hips and thighs to bronze, glimmered in his blue eyes, the eyes whose secrets were now breaking open to me like split jewels, the eyes that had always been my fate and my ruin.
"Leo, this is my sister Frieda."
❦