Free Berlin Cantata by Jeffrey Lewis Page A

example: Oksana Kozlova. Top of the Red heap, nomenklatura through and through, now she comes around, she drives my new would-be landlord up to the house in her silver little shitty new Mercedes-Benz car, and what’s she saying, what’s she poisoning my new would-be landlord’s ears with? I don’t have to have been there to know. It was all in her knowing expression when she came to the door. “Oh, Simona, everyone knows Simona, pure Stasi!” What the hell does that mean, pure Stasi? She slanders me right in front of my new would-be landlord, tries to get me kicked out! I’ve lived here eight years. I’m the only one left. I told her, the would-be landlord, I tried to make it even a joke, so she’d understand, I’m from the States too, almost the States, so fuck it, so it’s Canada, so what, Canada, I’m from North America too, so I say, “Simona Jastrow, Last of the Mohicans.” And she didn’t laugh, and you know why she didn’t laugh? Because that cunt Red whore Oksana had already “told her all about me.” Fuck her and all her progeny, if she didn’t have too barren a womb to have any. And anyway it was true what I reported about Anja Mann, that she projected Zionist tendencies.
    There. That feels better. Now I can resume. Where was I? Oh yes. Electra Papaiannis. The séances. Which those too, by the way, the likes of Anja Mann and all the rest would savage me for: “From ardent Communist to ardent communing with the dead, in what? Two snaps of a finger? Some people need faith badly.” Fatuous self-righteous crap. She’ll see, Anja will, the West has no need for her moralizing, her endless boring starch. I slept with her once. No fun at all. There. Forgive me. The séances, on the subject of the séances. I invited Electra to come to the Writers Guild house and organize them. Every other Tuesday night, twice a month. Get out the candles, darken the library, Electra’s coming! They were the only moments of my weeks that I feared and looked forward to. Mama didn’t come. Father didn’t come. Nobody came for me, I had no idea what I was doing or supposed to be doing, I listened, I purified my mind, I invited celestial thoughts, I did whatever Electra said to do. And you know for the others, tables moved, whatever else, voices, trances. I thought they were insane and I wasn’t. What a distraction it was from everything else. To have something, however absurd and unlikely, that offered hope, or as I might rather put it, still the possibility of beating life at its own game. This went on for two months, then the American arrived.
    Was chauffeured, if you please, driven up by that little cunt Oksana in her whored-for car. Driven up like a princess out to do her shopping, “Ah yes, I’ll take two of these and one of those, and don’t those look delicious, and by the way I think I’ll just have that nice house over there. What? There are already people in it? But look, I have papers, I have a claim! My, my, we’ll just have to see about this. People already living in my house?”
    Obviously, I get excited about this. You see, this house, this empty old GDR house, this empty institutional functionaries’ house, had become my home. I had my room, I had my things, I had my curtains. My bedspread, even my bear. Yes, my bear, you admit you have a stuffed bear and people will think what a pathetic fool, what an insane one, who never lived past childhood! Well screw them, let them think whatever, I happen to know others who have a stuffed bear, I’ve heard, I’ve read, it’s not so unusual, but even if it were, the point I am making is that even when the Writers Union retreat in Velden am Moritzsee later claimed by some American who never lived there a day in her life was empty of every writer but me, it was not the center of my universe but its entirety, that to which my universe had been