Eight Girls Taking Pictures (6 page)

“Ah, this is clearly the Bavarian Room, and located, as it should be, next to the Viennese Room through the archway there, so noted for its own overblown operatic bluster. But first, let’s step out onto the Moorish terrace.”

She followed him in a daze, taking in the abundant national clichés that decorated the rooms (Bavarian, Viennese, Spanish) where patrons dined, drank, gambled, or all three at once. The serving staff were clothed according to their assigned countries, serving the German interpretation of each location’s cuisine.

Cymbeline and Julius leaned on the carved balcony of Black Forest hunting scenes that divided the Moorish terrace from the main floor. Along the man-made lake was a replica of a Paris quay.

“And I thought you were going to corrupt me,” said Cymbeline.

“I said you’d be shocked.”

“Shall we see what’s upstairs?”

As they mounted one of the curved stairways, Cymbeline said, “It’s a kitsch palace.”

“No!” Julius exclaimed as they arrived on the second floor. “It’s France! Next to Vienna!”

The third floor revealed a Budapest ballroom, with champagne, caviar, dancing, and cabaret. Tucked off in the far corner was a café festooned with enough draping to mimic a Bedouin tent, where harem girls served Turkish coffee.

The American Wild West Bar, located on the fourth floor, had patrons dancing to a black jazz band.

“Chicago jazz? In the Old West?” she said.

“What were they thinking?” He sighed. “It was all so perfect until the jazz. What do you say we return to the Rhineland and I’ll buy you a beer?”

Back on the main floor they settled into a swan boat, with a Japanese parasol resting against the upholstered bench. They floated on the indoor lake, under the imitation night sky studded with tiny lights,
watching boys in lederhosen serve steins of beer to patrons sitting on blankets along the “shore.” Italian opera played in the background.

Cymbeline opened the oversize parasol, saying, “Do you think someone left this here?” Then she was startled by the sudden clap of thunder and a traveling crack of fake lightning that illuminated the fake night sky, followed by a brief downpour. She laughed as she pulled in close to Julius, who was laughing too. “That was like a one-sided conversation with God,” said Julius.

“I rather like their interpretation of the Old West as Indians waiting on cowboys. You think it’s a government land issue when it was about tipping all along.”

The stars twinkled above them in a field of indigo as Julius rowed over to the bank to receive more beer from one of the lederhosen boys. Cymbeline, who rarely drank, was feeling the alcohol. She reclined in the swan boat, relaxed, her eyes closed. Julius trailed his hand in the water. They didn’t speak, but it was a silence of contentment.

“Aren’t you glad you made me bring you in here?”

“Oh, my God,” said Cymbeline. “I love this place.”

“I was being sarcastic.”

“I know. But I love it anyway.”

Then she did something a little out of the ordinary; she picked up her camera, saying, “I want to take your picture.” The thing that made the moment unusual was her desire to capture something she never, ever wanted to forget. Her photography was by turns pragmatic and struggling for art, not for memories, not an attempt to record a moment.

Maneuvering around in the swan boat, given the beer, made her sloppy and apologetic. When she’d finally positioned herself across from Julius, she said, “You’ll have to put down the parasol,” allowing the light from the ersatz moon to catch the planes of his face.

But the first shot was wrong. She knew it even as she took it. She knew it wouldn’t look like him. “I’m a little drunk,” she confessed.

“Let me offer a suggestion,” he said. “I’m going to do a mathematical problem in my mind, and when you think I’ve come to the point of the greatest intensity of thought, take the picture.”

It turned out to be an excellent portrait. But he didn’t look like he was thinking about mathematics; he looked like he was thinking about love.

When they went back into the searing light of day, Cymbeline, shielding her eyes, asked, “Why did you let me drink?”

Without thinking, she reached for his watch. It was 2:00 in the afternoon. She moaned a little, to which he said, “It seems I corrupted you after all. Come on, we’ll get you something to eat.”

The Tiergarten was less like a city garden and more like a garden city, with its wide boulevards, meadows, woods, flower beds, gazebos, outdoor theaters and café. Like those of the train station and the Piccadilly, the dimensions were impressive. “Does everything in Berlin have to be so excessive in size?” asked Cymbeline.

“Only when you have a kaiser with a child’s arm,” answered Julius. Kaiser Wilhelm, the German emperor and King of Prussia, had been born with a withered arm that, it was rumored, emotionally ruled his life, and not in a good way.

Rows of tulips bloomed in the plots next to them. When Cymbeline looked at Julius as he was telling her a story from his own student days, she noticed that it appeared as if the flowers were arranged on his head, like a strange sort of floral crown. Asking him to hold very still, she took another picture.

She didn’t know what she expected the night she shared a room with Julius. He meant to sleep on whatever furniture there was in the room to allow Cymbeline the bed, but there was nothing usable. No sofa. One armchair. One small dresser. A rug on a floor that was mostly wood. He was almost apologetic about the whole thing, as if it were his fault.

They were fortunate to have any room at all, since the train derailment had stranded so many passengers. There would be no trains until
the early morning; there had been two casualties and many more injuries. “I’m trustworthy,” said Julius. And Cymbeline found herself thinking, I hope not.

Julius said he was going to walk to the drugstore to buy them toothbrushes.

As soon as he left, Cymbeline unfolded her camera and waited until he appeared, four stories down, on the street below.

“Julius!” she called, causing him to look up, his hand shading his eyes. “Think of an impossible chemical compound,” she called. As he was posing, people passed all around him, so that he was only another face in the crowd. She took the shot anyway, knowing that he would be the clearest figure since he wasn’t moving.

The awkwardness of their situation, made more awkward by their being unable to speak of its awkwardness, had them avoiding the room. In response, they stayed out as late as possible, which was how Cymbeline ended up seeing her first operetta, an entertainment that reminded her of the Piccadilly in that it wasn’t quite a musical, and not quite an opera, and less entertaining than advertised.

Afterward they walked down a street of beautiful homes. Then a street of businesses. A street of bars and cabarets. A street of immigrants. They stopped beneath the Brandenburg Gate, huge, Neoclassical, with Victoria, the Roman goddess of victory, being pulled in a chariot by four horses. As Cymbeline stood between two of the Doric columns, running her hand on one of them, she asked, “This isn’t about the child-arm again, is it?”

Julius laughed. “Someone else beat him to it.”

“I think I saw one of these in the Piccadilly.”

“Was it made of strudel?”

“No, it was schnitzel.”

The lights from the avenue of linden trees that stretched behind the gate created a ghostly effect. She stepped back from the gate. She unlocked her camera case. “Can you stand in the central arch? Under the horses?”

“It’s not allowed actually. I’m not royal, so I must use the spaces
at either end.” He positioned himself, without posing in the slightest, between two columns near the end.

“Think about being allowed to walk through the center of the gate but choosing not to, and when you get to the most ridiculous part of that edict, I’ll take the picture.”

As it happened, he was smiling.

Julius gallantly tried to sleep on the floor, but his tossing and turning distracted Cymbeline from sleep, and, for the tenth time, she asked him to sleep beside her. On the eleventh time, he said yes.

They arranged the sheets so that he was on top, and she was underneath, and the blanket covered them both. They kept on as many clothes as they could without looking too rumpled in the morning.

Cymbeline must have dozed off because she awoke within that strange consciousness where you are awake enough to know that you aren’t in your own bed but can’t for the life of you figure out whose bed you are in. She must know the man beside her, she told herself, as she struggled for understanding. Her eyes scanned the room, fixating on the light from the window to adjust to the darkness. The sounds of the city, muted in the very early morning hours, were unfamiliar. Her heart knocking against her chest as the adrenaline surged through her so that she was suddenly fully awake. The calm aftermath was like recovering from a sprint, full of relief and exhaustion. The man beside her was Julius. Without shifting her position as she lay on her back, she slipped her hand into his.

“You’re okay,” he said. “It was just a bad dream.”

Later, she could not say how it started, but the way it ended was unforgettable. She remembered her fingers threaded through his hair and his kisses in places that made her long for him years later.

Then everything wound down to nothing, Julius quiet as he lay beside her, his fingers lightly resting on her arm.

“What are we doing here?” she asked.

“I thought you would understand Berlin.”

“No.
Here.
”

“Waiting for the morning.”

They were silent.

“Do I mean anything to you?”

He said nothing.

“I love you, you know.” Then, because she couldn’t take back what she hadn’t intended to say, she added, “I love you.” And that was when she felt the rearrangement of every molecule in the room.

“Schiss, schiss, schiss,”
he said so softly she almost couldn’t hear it. He said, “I wanted to have Berlin to remember you by, you know, so maybe I would miss you a little less.”

But I can stay!
she wanted to cry out.
I want to stay!

“I’m sorry,” he said finally.

His apology scraped across her heart, leaving her angry and confused and in love and angry and confused.