The Ghosts of Wannsee
23 min read
In Berlin, the winter sky is screwed on so tight that all the world beneath becomes dark and gray and grim. On my runs around Wannsee, from the corner of my eye, I could glimpse the furious ghosts of the place seething in the middle of the lake, transforming into whitecaps if I looked at them directly. Around some bends, I’d come across naked old men, bright red with the cold of their swim, vigorously toweling off their withered loins. When I’d come to the ferry launch to Pfaueninsel, the peacocks across the spit of water would cry out so loudly in their winter rutting, I could easily imagine that the island was entirely made of peacocks, in layers four thick upon the ground, that the castle there was wrapped in a hissing sheet of iridescent blue, the million eyes of Argos on their tail feathers staring up, affronted by the low gray clouds.
Then, in mid-April, just as despair crept in and I began to think that we would be stuck in chill darkness for good, the lid of the sky blew off, and the sun poured down, and the earth leaped up in joy to meet it. A green fur grew on all the bereft trees and dirt, and the tulips stood up and unfurled themselves, the brave avant-garde of more color to come. Even the German people who’d so dourly walked their dogs along the lake paths all winter began to smile and nod in greeting. But the ghosts still wrestled mutely in the middle of the lake; even the sun couldn’t burn those off.
It was a week or so into this astonishing reversal of winter that my first love, my first friend, Leslie, called me for the last time. My heart seized; nowadays, he only ever called to relate tragedy—our high-school heartthrob who had died in a motorboat accident, my roommate from college who’d overdosed. Leslie wasn’t an oracle; he was just still on social media. There had been a time, long ago, when we didn’t need to call, when we could talk without talking in our separate beds across the little town where we were raised, chatting away in our minds until one of us fell asleep or was interrupted, and then we’d pick up the conversation mid-sentence at school the next day.
I’d discovered him in first grade. He’d been there all along, since nursery school, but we’d somehow never connected until I turned around fast in the lunch line with a fork in my hand and accidentally stabbed him in the stomach. The injury wasn’t serious, he was fine, no blood even, but it hurt. He was always brave, though, and when he cried, he cried silently so as not to get me in trouble. I was impressed. I asked him what his name was, and he said, Leslie, but in a whisper, holding his gap teeth behind his hand, because already he’d been relentlessly teased for the gap and for having a girl’s name. From that lunch on, he was mine, and nobody ever dared tease him again, because back then I was a biter.
Leslie wasn’t calling with tragedy this time; he was coming to Berlin for a couple of nights. He had to fly over to set up the house on his husband’s Greek island for the summer and could get away early to come see me. Why wouldn’t I want to see my oldest friend? he said. And I mean that literally. God, honey, I’ve been looking at your husband’s pictures of you on the ’gram, when did you decide to let yourself go? We both laughed, I a little sourly. It was true, the Berlin winter had seeped into my soul, and I had let myself go gray, let myself have my fill of beer and pommes rot-weiss. The way I looked must have been shocking to him, married as he was to an haute couture designer and now living in a world without fat or blemish, only expensive fabric on expensive bone.
I had yet to meet Leslie’s husband, had not even been invited to the wedding, which rankled some. When I’d asked him about it, he had let out a puff of exasperated air and said, We only had four people there, they are all Damien’s friends, they’re so famous they’re not even real human beings. Bringing a normie into that mess would have been cruel to you, believe you me. When I’d said, But still, I’m me, you’re you, he’d said, Oh, honey, if it’s any consolation, not even my parents were invited. This was no consolation at all; I knew the parental history.
Later, after my stung ego had eased up a bit, I felt sad for my friend, not allowed his own friends at his wedding; he had fought for so long, transforming himself from a street kid into a wildly successful interior designer without even a college degree, and as soon as he’d married Damien, he’d been forced to give up his career to become something like his husband’s majordomo. It wasn’t right; none of it was right. But Leslie’s allegiances had shifted, and he was happy, deliriously happy, and I found I couldn’t say this to him anymore. In revenge, I wore while bleaching the bathroom floor the one piece of Damien’s I owned. True, it was a skirt from his collaboration with a big-box store, but I’d felt sexy in it.
In any event, the prospect of soon seeing my oldest friend was a light radiating out into the rest of my life. I ran faster; I ate fewer potatoes; I yelled at my kids less. Then, the next week, he texted to tell me that the few days in Berlin had to be curtailed to only one night, alas. And the day of, when I was already waiting at the restaurant where his assistant had booked lunch, he texted to say that, oops, Damien needed the plane, he could spare only the afternoon. Could I come to Mitte in, like, four hours? He needed to take pictures of something in the Altes Museum, and we’d have time to do dinner before he had to go back to the airport. I was upset, of course, but there was nothing I could do. I had to see him. Despite recent changes, Leslie would always share the private throne room inside me with my husband and my sons.
For a long time, he’d been a separate piece of me, preferring to spend most of his time in my loud and messy house, full of pets and the friends of my brother and sister, chaotic with music and life and games, which Leslie, with his long-limbed, goofy sweetness, had joined with almost fervent zeal, his high-pitched laughter making everyone else laugh.
Leslie was an only child, and the rare times I’d spent the night at his house, I’d felt tentative in the cathedral hush. His was a large and supermodern home, on a hill above the lake, two miles outside town. There, you could stand on the flagstone veranda and look down on Main Street with binoculars to track the ant-size people who were so huge in our daily lives. The floors were dark, shining slate; the ceilings were 25 feet tall; the furniture was precious and uncomfortable and looked to my child’s eye like the carapaces of huge insects frozen in place. His mother was extraordinarily beautiful—Leslie got his glow from her—but almost entirely silent, floating pale-haired through the house with a chuckling glass of ice water that she replaced at exactly five in the afternoon with vodka from the freezer. His father was a froggish man, red-faced, also with long limbs, whose torso seemed somehow inflated, like a rubber hot-water bottle. Poor Leslie had inherited his face, with its huge, thin-lipped mouth and bulging eyes. My friend has never been beautiful, even during his years as a twink, though, of course, he overbrims with charm. His father was also the kind of man who sucked the oxygen out of every room and left you gasping. He loved gossip, jokes, pointed observations. Only at night did he go silent, though even the night hours in Leslie’s house were startling, marked by a clock that cuckooed the hour, then sang what in adulthood I would understand to be a Wagner lied.
I hated being in that house. They kept it too cold, and Leslie was not allowed to hang the undeniably excellent drawings he did on the wall of his own room. I once woke to see the shadowy shape of his father in the doorway, his silken robe parted. Whenever Leslie’s father saw me, he had a savage impulse to needle me with dumb-blonde jokes over and over until I broke down and cried. That this adult man absolutely needed to make sure I knew how small and powerless and stupid I, a little girl, was compared with him has, I’m afraid, been the subject of hours and hours of therapy.
The last day I’d see Leslie, I came, very slowly, on the S-Bahn to Museum Island. The weather was gray again, drizzling and cold, but the purple peonies at the flower shops in the station gave me courage. I wandered around the Neues Museum and had a coffee there, then sat on the steps of the Altes Museum, watching the tourists huddle and dart off, mesmerized by how they behaved like fish near coral, their colors the same brightness, their noise the same noise as the chewing one heard under the water. At last, when I had begun to shiver with cold, I smelled Leslie before I saw him, an expensive custom perfume of bergamot and orange and musk, and his hands were over my eyes, and I took them down and kissed his palms. He was laughing his high, delighted Leslie laugh.
You looked so forlorn sitting there, he said. A lost little puppy.
Oh, I thought, how strange to see people whom you’ve loved for so long. You don’t really see their current face; instead, you see the faces of your greatest intensity of love. I could see my 7-year-old friend, my 11-year-old friend, my 18-year-old friend, not really the middle-aged one. Still, I sensed something different about him now. Let’s go get you warmed up, he said, and he linked my arm in his, and we went inside the old columned building. At the desk, though, he stood aside for me to buy the tickets, behavior that felt a little strange for a man with a Greek island and a private jet. We walked slowly through the ancient torsos—You must change your life, I intoned gravely, which he blinked at, puzzled—the Etruscan jewelry, the Roman busts. He seemed to know where he was going, and we arrived at a little room on the second floor called the Garden of Delights.
Inside was a circus of priapism. Ancient penises with wings, Leda being reamed by the swan, lamps in the shape of little satyrs, their members so huge and painfully engorged that they touched the ground. I said, I suppose that one set fire to the little hole in the urethra, what is it called? Leslie said, The glans? No, I said, I got it, the meatus. Leslie giggled, then set to work with his cellphone, taking picture after picture, in close-up. I thought about when we were 12, in the little Methodist graveyard where we’d liked to gossip and talk about death. One day, we’d decided out of curiosity to French-kiss. Leslie’s mouth had been cold and wet, and tasted like corn chips, which he’d just been eating. I’d fled immediately. All night, I’d turned in bed, unable to even try to talk to Leslie in my mind, growing ever more certain that now I was going to die of AIDS, that I was probably pregnant now, that I was doomed to have to marry Leslie and have his baby at 12 years old and spend the rest of my life kissing cold, wet corn-chip kisses. But in the morning, when I saw him at school, he’d looked at me, startled, and then his mouth had spread and spread in his froggy smile, and then I’d started laughing too, and we’d set the kiss event aside and never attempted another one again.
I stared so long at one hyper-endowed lamp that it turned its head, stuck out its cracked terra-cotta tongue, and licked all the way around its mouth, lascivious, shimmying. Leslie said, suddenly, He’s thinking of a collection inspired by this room, and put his phone away. Who, Damien? I said, stupidly. Yes, Leslie said. Damien remembered this place from, like, a decade ago, and he wanted me to take photos of every single thing in the room. How’s he doing, I asked, this husband of yours whom I’ve never met, if he’s actually real. Leslie said, He’s real. He’s amazing. Just absolutely amazing. You have no idea what it’s like living with a genius. Oh? What is it like, I said, and he shrugged and smiled and said, Amazing. I was stung; he was protecting someone with his vagueness, but I wasn’t clear who.
We came back down through the dim antiquities, the nine carved Muses on a sarcophagus gesturing above our shoulders. Now that his task was done, he could focus on me, and he asked me rapid-fire questions that I answered as honestly as I could: Yes, the boys were furious with us for dragging them to Berlin, no, they don’t like their school at all, yes, they were the most gorgeous humans ever to set foot on the planet, funny and loving and smart and good, yes, I do in fact wonder how they came out of me, haha, it’s true, yes, my husband wanted to see Leslie too, he says he’s sorry he had work to do today, no, I’m not getting any work done myself, this place is too exciting, I can’t focus. Ugh, Leslie said, nobody wants to work anymore, it’s a cultural disease. Then we went out into the darkening afternoon.
Hey, Leslie said, I’m working on my bikini body—let’s say we skip dinner and just go have a drink? You already have a bikini body, I said, everybody has a bikini body, besides, I am starving, you had me skip lunch, if you remember. But he either didn’t hear me or affected not to, and said he knew an amazing bar, they always went there when they were in Berlin, I’d love it, and if I was really hungry, he thought they had food there, and swept me along.
He led me by the hand down the damp and windy street, where idling for him was a gleaming black car of such absurd luxury that I laughed. Oh, he said, it’s the airport’s, not ours, we don’t keep a car in Berlin. I slid onto leather that both looked and felt like actual butter. For all my socialism, I luxuriated in the reflected heat upon my face, this dazzle, this excess, the champagne chilling in an ice bucket, which Leslie fell upon with relief, popping the bottle, pouring out coupes of perfect honeyed chill. We slid through Berlin surreally in this purring car, bubbles striking our tongues. Until then, I had mostly seen the center of the city as excitingly gritty—piss in stairwells, graffiti atop graffiti.
Seeing my friend so comfortable in comfort, my old guttersnipe buddy who’d once lived for years in actual squalor, felt odd. Of course, he had started off in smoothness and sleekness up in that sad house of his on the hill, but the Thanksgiving of his freshman year in college, all hyped up by his campus LGBTQ alliance and against my counsel, he’d decided to come out to his parents. That same night, as my own family was passing around appetizers, he showed up at my house, unable to speak for weeping, his skin reddening into what would later be a hideous black eye. We had lost some of our ability to speak without speaking by then; enough life had streamed through us without the other person there to witness it. But while everyone else was eating stuffing and pumpkin pie downstairs, he lay on the foldout bed next to mine, and I held him, big spoon to his little, and I came to understand what had happened as vividly as if I had been in the room.
His mother had bought a turkey dinner from a local caterer and put it on her own mother’s sleek porcelain platter. His father had been drinking bourbon, glass after glass, ever since the food had arrived hours earlier. Leslie had been quivering with anxiety, a big mistake, because when his father saw weakness, he leaped on it, he couldn’t help it, the man was a hunter, a predator, a kind of jungle cat. When at last my friend had broken the tension and announced that he was gay, his father had stood up and taken a fistful of turkey and thrown it in Leslie’s face, then leaned over and punched him in the eye. Before he’d left the room, he’d said, with his back turned, That’s it. You’re no child of mine.
Leslie’s mother had picked turkey off her son’s shirt, whispering, Hush now, hush now, stop crying, he’ll hear, and then she’d kissed him, and whispered, I always knew, of course I did. A mother knows. But you’d better go down to your friend’s house, just get out of his sight. After his devastated week with us, my parents drove him back to college, and he finished out the term and spent winter break at my house, but when he went back to school, he was barred from the dorm; his father had withdrawn his payment for the semester, they were sorry, he was no longer officially matriculated in that institution.
He’d hitchhiked to my school and spent a few weeks on my common-room couch, until my roommates had revolted. They loved Leslie, he was so funny and kind and smart, but he wasn’t a student there, and his feet at the time reeked like dead things, they were sorry, they sympathized with his plight, they were allies! But they’d have to tell the dean if he wasn’t gone by Friday. That day, I withdrew every penny from my savings account, all my earnings from lifeguarding during high-school summers, all my graduation and birthday money, and gave it to my friend. He sat for a long while with his face in his hands, saying, I should just kill myself, nobody would care. I said fiercely that if he killed himself, I would kill him again, and at last he smiled wanly and packed up. Whatever he needed, he just had to call, I said, I’d figure it out for him.
He’d hitchhiked to San Francisco and lived on my money for about two months, after which he’d declined rapidly. I took a dining-hall job washing dishes so that I could send him a check faithfully every week—my hands can still hold searing-hot plates without pain. But some months, I couldn’t send one, because he had no address to send things to. Other months, he managed to call but couldn’t speak, only sobbed into the receiver.
Along with the jobs he told me about—the go-go dancing, the house painting, the bartending, the dog walking—there were darker jobs he hinted at. I think he sold what he had, which was his youth. For a time, he was addicted to something, but he wouldn’t tell me why his speech was slurred. When he finally washed up in a steadier place, he was so proud that he bought a disposable camera and took pictures of his room and sent the camera to me to develop. But when I got the prints back, the room was so little and sparse—four walls with a giant poster of David Bowie on one, a bed scrupulously made with a cheap wool blanket—that I ached at the difference between my hopes for him and his reality.
When I saved up enough to go visit him over spring break during my junior year, he was house-sitting for a pair of kind elderly lesbians in the Marina. He’d met them when he’d shown up with a crew to paint their house, and they’d worried about him and semi-adopted him. He seemed sober but looked pale and haunted when he picked me up at the airport, and I felt a strangeness between us during that trip, which couldn’t end fast enough. He had no money for restaurants or tickets, of course, so I bought us groceries, and we cooked and went for long walks and talked and talked, awkwardly, with hours-long pauses between bursts of conversation. At the end, he promised he’d pay me back for all the money I’d sent, which by that point was something close to $10,000. Not that I’m a person who keeps accounts like this, but even with all his private jets and Greek islands, he has yet to repay me. I don’t think it is intentional; I think he was so ashamed to have taken from me that he cast the debt from his mind. If he were to write me a check today, I don’t know if I would take it, though perhaps he could pay for his own museum ticket.
We slid to a stop before a bar with a neon sign above a green door. It didn’t look like a haven for the cognoscenti, but one had to ring the bell to be let in, and the person who opened it was about 10 feet tall, with a shaved head and the sharp-boned face of an angel, and so many piercings, she looked like she’d been bedazzled by a bored child. Les! she cried out, wrapping him in her spidery arms. She looked behind him for Damien and seemed piqued when she saw me. God, Anya, you look incredible, let me take a picture for Damien, he might be able to use you, Leslie said, and once inside the dark bar, he took about 50 flash photos of Anya, her hand on her hip, looking very tough.
She led us to a table, and Leslie said, My usual, thank you, and she said, Got it, then frowned down at me. Out of panic, I picked the first thing I saw on the menu, the Voltaire, a drink with cognac and quince. Leslie said, wisely, To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize, and raised an eyebrow. What? I said. Voltaire said that, Leslie said. And you call yourself a college graduate? He still had his phone in his hand and got distracted, poking and prodding it, so I was left alone to look around. The bar was full of Berliners, gorgeous girls with ratty mullets and 1970s eyeglasses, skinny boys slouching in all black. The bar was illumined by candles and an uplit line of mostly esoteric liquors along the full-length mirror against the back wall. Only when Anya delivered our drinks did my old friend remember I was there with him and put the phone away.
He gulped down half of his drink in one go, then leaned forward and filled me in on all the gossip from our town, his face lighting up the way it used to. The divorces, the affairs, the tragedies in the lives of our classmates, people I didn’t think about more than once a decade. Nothing about himself. I watched Leslie speak, until I suddenly understood what had become so strange about his face. It wasn’t Botox or any kind of plastic surgery, subtle or not; he’d had his teeth fixed, and that glorious gap in them that I’d loved so much had disappeared.
Oh, I interrupted him, Leslie. Your teeth. He put his hand up in alarm, then, remembering that I knew him best with his old set, grimaced to show off the new. He looked like a chimp demonstrating aggression. Aren’t they wonderful? he said. I feel like a new man. Damien was against it, he said the gap gave my face a certain rakishness, but I’ve hated it ever since I first looked in a mirror. You know, when I was a kid, if I forgot at dinner and accidentally smiled with my teeth and my dad saw the gap, he’d make me stand up and show my teeth while he threw toothpicks at me like darts, trying to get one through the space, Leslie said, smiling. I could tell that this was a story he’d told many times at parties, and that it had made people laugh.
Oh, Leslie, I thought, sick. Don’t break bread with the kind of person who’d laugh at that. Aloud, I said, bitterly, Your goddamned father. At this, Leslie flinched, saying, Jesus, have some respect. My dad is totally demented right now, it’s the saddest thing I’ve ever seen, he’s in a nursing home down in Sarasota crying all the time because he has no idea where he is or who he is or what’s happening to him, all day he’s just wandering around so confused, it’s like watching someone tormented, like someone in hell. My poor mom is just devastated, she visits him every day, it’s wringing her out, she’s never been strong anyway, you know that. It’s just breaking her to bits. So yeah, okay, fine, he wasn’t the best father, but he’s still a human being, damn. He deserves our pity.
I suppose I still have a biter in me, because I said, Right, right, and does his dementia automatically absolve him for everything he did? Are you actually kidding me right now, Leslie?
What are you talking about, he said, in a very low voice, because mine had made the Berliners around us stop in their conversations and look at us. You mean that time when I came out? Yeah, those were some shitty years, but I got through them, look at me, I’m absolutely fucking thriving, they made me what I am, I pulled myself up by the bootstraps, I didn’t make any excuses, I worked. I’m the fucking American dream, baby. Anyways, not that you care, my father apologized, I forgave him. Why the fuck would you still be angry when I’m not? What the fuck is wrong with you?
This is when it all came boiling up out of my molten core, the mystery that all these decades I’d felt deep down, this terrible thing sensed, those sudden interruptions when we were talking in our separate beds across the village at night, that vision or dream I’d had of his father in a parted robe in the doorway, my revulsion for the man, the way my friend had made himself small in the world, apologetic, hiding himself, the way his father had watched with a gleam in his eye when he made dumb-blonde jokes at me until I cried, that fascist soul of that fascist man spreading its tarry blackness all over everything he touched. I couldn’t know, I didn’t know for sure what he had done to my friend. But I did know. I did. Somehow. Perhaps.
Maybe the knowledge was written on my face—maybe, for a brief moment, Leslie could hear inside my mind again the way we’d spoken when we were little. He pushed back from the table so violently that my Voltaire splashed all over the table and onto my lap. In the shock of cold, I thought he was angry that I was witness to his deepest shame, but he hissed through his new, perfect teeth, Fuck you. You knew. All along.
And then he was gone through the door. I was alone with my wet lap, my confusion, my rage, Anya glaring down at me, the angel of punks.
I paid, I escaped. Out in the street, rain had begun for real, a rain that would turn overnight into ice and raze back all the tender new green that had emerged, leave the tulip blossoms withered brown twists on the stem. I dialed Leslie again and again, walking through the rain to the S-Bahn station, but he did not pick up, and at last my phone informed me regretfully that I was blocked. On the train, shivering, I tried an email, but he had preemptively emailed to say, You’re dead to me. Don’t contact me again. And when I tried to respond, my email bounced back.
Now June is here, the lengthening days so rich with sunshine that light spills out everywhere like coins and bars of gold, spilling upon the vigorous green leaves fully and lushly emerged, upon the real cuckoos marking crazy time and the swans in their elegant glissades across the water, upon the crowds of naked youths sunbathing on the hillsides around Schlachtensee and Krumme Lanke, upon me in my endless all-day walks around Wannsee and Potsdam. I can only walk now, because I injured myself trying to run out my grief in the weeks after I saw Leslie—and I have to walk so much, often from the moment I wake up until the moment the boys come home from school and I can hold their animal bodies against my animal body and feel the batteries of their hot hearts recharge me again.
Leslie is a person who holds fast to his actions; we have been severed, I know, I can feel it inside me, it is permanent. Voltaire did not in fact say, To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize. That’s the wisdom of an actual neo-Nazi. When I cry on my walks, the ghosts laugh at me from their heaving white masses at the center of the lake, where the sailboats slice over them; the ghosts of Wannsee mock me.
They, by existing, remind me of what a new friend said once during the winter, a friend who is both German and American. She said that being German has a sense of heaviness to it—that the Germans are at least wrestling with their guilt and that we Americans have been trained to pretend that the wounds don’t exist, which only means they fester inside.
A few days ago, I took the ferry across to Pfaueninsel, thick now with roses and wisteria. The castle at the center of the island was wrapped in renovation plastic, not in peacock feathers; peacocks did not seethe four thick upon the ground. I saw only a few dozen at most, shouting out in their strange, catlike cries. One approached me as I sat on a bench in my desolation, a male trailing his feathers behind him like the long train of a ball gown. I gave him the pretzel I’d bought but didn’t want, and he pecked at it for a long while, then rewarded me by lifting the strong muscles that carried his tail, unfurling his great glorious fan only a few feet from me so that I could be intimidated by his beauty, his shine, the shocking colors, the eyes on his feathers all at once winking at me, as if to say, Don’t worry, this will pass, we will survive. This is the way of things, we carry our gorgeous burdens, we go through life losing. By autumn, all his tail feathers will have fallen out; he will go into the long, dark winter bare of his glory. But this is the nature of the greatest gifts, the eyes of Argos say; they are never meant to last forever.
