Free Berlin Cantata by Jeffrey Lewis Page B

reduced, where Electra with her brood of seekers came every other Tuesday night. I would serve them tea afterwards. Slowly I got to know a few of their names.
    The American was the hugest distraction. After her first appearance with the Russian slut, she began to make regular visits, every two weeks, every week, looking around, imagining. Mrs. Baum would hear her coming in her cute little fixed-up car. Who did she think she was? These were always Mrs. Baum’s words. More to the point, who did we think she was? She had a claim. We had no idea how long it might take to be processed or if it was valid. We had little idea of her intentions, because she never said. She was unfailingly polite and mild. She came and wandered around, in the house, in the fields, down to the lake. She was like a visitor from another planet. This, too, is what Mrs. Baum often said. And when and if she took over, would she dismiss the caretakers first? And would her last living tenant last-of-the-Mohicans-Stasicollaborationist-despised-by-all-for-her-honest-accounting-of-the-reality-of-how-things-were Simona Jastrow be given the boot as well? By all accounts, I should have been the first to go. It turned out my room was this Miss Anholt’s parents’ old bedroom. I let her in to look around. I imagined she hated everything that was mine. When she saw Bear-Bear, I cringed. Or perhaps it was she who cringed as well.
    Obviously I tried to ingratiate myself with Miss Anholt. I brought her fresh local tomatoes. I showed her this and that around the house, ooh’d and aah’d at her old bits of film. My initiatives of course came with risks, in that she might have become more attached. At the same time I could imagine her thoughts, the nights she was at the top of the stairs while Electra conducted our proceedings in the library. I gleaned and wheedled. I tried to establish what her timetable was and her intentions. She had some boyfriend in the city, which for a certain period was a godsend, keeping her away most of the time. But inexorably her visits grew more frequent and longer, until it was clear to me that all my hopes that she would soon tire of us, or split with the boyfriend and so return to the States or Paris (or wherever it was she imagined she came from – really, it takes one nomad to spot another) were not to be realized. Finally I had it out with her. What else could I do? I accused her of many things. I told her how she had invaded us, how she had no thought for others, how she was a slave to little pieces of paper, money and deeds, how she could scarcely imagine how others’ lives had been led, how limited she was, how small and pathetic, how everyone in Velden loathed her, how we knew perfectly well her plans to kick us out. Don’t say that I went too far. I went as far as I needed to. She was taken aback. She admitted that yes, it was a possibility, that she would have to evict me. She claimed to have made no decisions, but I knew the truth.
    And yet, from that confrontation, I grew to like the girl. She absorbed my attacks with bewilderment. She tried to explain her own quandary. For she had one, just like me. Something was hidden from her. She wasn’t even certain what it was, except that it might be here, in this house or in the woods. She was very indefinite, and sad. I hugged her like a sister, and she hugged me back.
    But now I had not a crutch left, not even my room with its pretty curtains and its view to the lake that I woke up to. My life here was over. My last defenses were down. Those whom I’d written little notes about haunted me and I woke up from nightmares begging their forgiveness. Surely this was too melodramatic, yet it created still another fault in me which I could not avoid. I put my things away, took them off the dresser, packed them up. My life felt over. I felt overwhelmed by my life’s lovelessness. An endless waste, all of it. I wept and trembled.
    Nor was it even any