The Invisible Circus (22 page)

Faith crouched at his feet, her hands on Wolf’s bare knees, and looked up at him. “Listen to me,” she said.

“I’m listening.”

“You have to find a way in, Wolf. You have to. This is it.”

“We’ve said that a few times.”

“No,” Faith said, vehement. “The other times were nothing, I promise. Wolf, it’s a
scene.”

“So take me there.”

“I can’t,” she said, moving away. “They’re huge, I’m one little piece. I can’t even talk to them, except for the lawyer—the other ones don’t speak English.”

Wolf shook his head. “What the hell do you do for these people?”

Errands, Faith told him. Little things. You couldn’t just go to the store when you were underground, someone might recognize you. So Faith went for them. “They need all kinds of stuff,” she explained, pulling her backpack from the closet. Then she lowered her voice. “They’re it, Wolf. And they’re planning something huge.”

He left the bed and went to her, still naked. “Baby,” Wolf said, taking hold of Faith’s elbows. “Don’t do this.”

She frowned. Wolf tried to clear his head because Faith seemed so clear; her posture, eyes, everything about her said she knew what she was doing, that it made sense. And no wonder, Wolf thought—where else had they been headed all this time? She was right, she must be right, if he just could clear his head … the gun in her pants—but when he pictured Faith holed away in some apartment running errands for people she couldn’t even talk to, Wolf found the vision so drab, desperate. As bad as everything they’d been trying to escape. “Hold on,” he told her. “Just—let’s slow this down a second.”

But Faith ignored him, counting out her traveler’s checks. “Wait,” Wolf said as she shouldered the backpack. “Faith, wait.” He moved in front of the door, not fully aware he was blocking it until the move registered in her face. When Faith tried to move past him, he held his ground.

“Look, if it’s not your thing, fine,” Faith said. “I need to split.” And she gazed at him so coldly, with such cold disappointment, Wolf felt like the enemy. It enraged him.

“I’m surprised you don’t pull your gun,” he said.

Faith just looked at him.

“Do it,” Wolf said. “You want out? Pull the gun.”

“Wolf, quit it.” She made a halfhearted effort to push his arm, his chest, but Wolf’s limbs were stone, they felt immobile even to himself. Faith seemed to droop under the heavy backpack.

“Pull the gun, come on,” Wolf said. “You know what you’re doing. So do it.”

Faith’s face tightened in anger. She put her hand on the gun. “Fuck you, Wolf,” she said. She pulled it out and held it, barrel down. “Why?” she pleaded. “Please, let me go! I hate this.”

“You hate it!” Wolf said, and laughed. “You’ll make a hell of a terrorist, Faith.”

An angry vein pulsed at her temple. She lifted the gun, watching her hands as if they were someone else’s.

“Safety off,” he said.

Faith released the safety. Eyes fixed to the gun, she pointed it at Wolf’s chest.

“Touching,” he said very gently, his eyes, too, on the gun until the cold round nub of it met his skin, Faith’s cold anger behind it. Her face was twisted in pained concentration, as if keeping the gun aloft required every ounce of her strength. Wolf searched her eyes but they looked strange, opaque, and he found himself thinking, amazed, She could actually do it.

“Is he watching you now?” he whispered.

Faith’s head jerked up. In Wolf’s eyes she must have caught her own reflection, for an awful recognition parted her face and she dropped the gun, which hit the floor and fired, jumping backward several feet, spinning. In the sparkling silence they stared at it. Faith began to cry. Wolf lifted the backpack from her shoulders and they clung to each other, shivering, the gun halfway across the room and deeply still, as if mortified by its outburst.

“Don’t go,” Wolf said.

Faith shook her head, crying—she didn’t want to go. Timidly she crossed the room, leaned down to the gun and put the safety back on. She stood up quickly but stayed there, gun at her feet. Wolf trembled in the night air, wishing he had clothes on. There were splinters on the floor near a moulding where the bullet had entered. After a while Faith squatted over the gun, and Wolf felt the battle in her, two things pulling opposite ways. Which ran deeper? That was the question. By then, somehow, he knew what it would be.

There was a long silence in Wolf’s living room. “Why didn’t you call my mom?” Phoebe said.

Wolf shook his head. “You didn’t do that—go running to somebody’s parents,” he said. “Plus, what could she do, your poor mom? Just get terrified.” He paused, lighting a cigarette. “I don’t know, though. Maybe I should’ve.” He turned to Phoebe. “You think I should’ve called her?”

But Phoebe was empty, a vacuum. “I have no idea.”

“Anyway, I left Berlin the next day,” Wolf resumed after a long pause. “I had a friend in Munich, Timothy, who’d lived with my family freshman year of high school. I nailed Tim’s address to the wall of the carpenter’s pad, went to Munich and waited.

“On the last day of September, I saw this giant headline: the RAF pulled off three bank robberies the morning before. Twelve people involved, three cars, they got something like 230,000 marks. I looked at that and I thought, Oh Christ.”

To Phoebe’s confusion, laughter rose in her chest.

“I know,” Wolf said, glancing at her, smiling uneasily.

Loose, tooth-chattering laughter overwhelmed Phoebe. “Why am I laughing?” she said.

“What else can you do?” Wolf said. “Bank robberies. Shit.”

“How many?”

“Three. Four, originally—one didn’t work out. Damn,” he said, finally yielding to his own mirthless laughter. “The thing is, it really wasn’t funny.”

The laughter drained from Phoebe suddenly, leaving her tired.

Wolf was working illegally by then, loading boxes at a shoe factory on the outskirts of Munich. He’d sublet a room in someone’s apartment, leaving word with his friend’s family on the off-chance that Faith would track him that far. Days passed, then weeks, Wolf scouring the paper on the streetcar to work, following news of a police raid on the Red Army, a few big arrests, but no mention of a young American female. It was early October by then, soon to be 1971; Janis OD’d on the fourth, Hendrix had died mid-September, in London. A lot of people were starting to head back home, but Wolf felt paralyzed. “My head was messed up,” he explained. “Reading about the Red Army every day, knowing Faith was part of that, I’d just panic sometimes, thinking I should be there, too, like I’d made the mistake of my life. She was in the world, you know? Out there doing something real, and here I was, following the story in the fucking newspaper.”

Phoebe shifted uncomfortably.

“I couldn’t disconnect myself from the thing,” Wolf said. “So I stayed, I waited. Then, out of the blue, she found me.”

It was late October, already getting cold, and Faith had none of the right clothes. Something was the matter with her. She was just—broken somehow. Wolf wrapped her up in sweaters, turned on the oven and burners full-blast so the windows steamed white. Faith shivered convulsively; it took all day before he could get her to talk, but finally she did.

“She was involved in the robberies,” he said. “Her job was to cut a hole through the fence behind a building next to one of the banks, so the gunmen could crawl through after they made the hit. Some of them thought she wasn’t strong enough to cut the wire, but Faith insisted she’d done it before. So they put her in a dress, gave her a little white purse with a book on Berlin inside it, a subway map—the ingenue tourist. Faith wanted to dye her hair like some of the other girls, but instead they decided she should cut it. Ulrike Meinhof thought long hair drew too much attention; she’d cut off her own weeks before. So Faith had no choice but to go along and have her hair cut short, the last thing on earth she wanted to do. Petra Shelm, a former hairdresser in the group, did the honors, spread Faith’s own shirt under the chair to catch what fell from her head. Faith stuffed some hair in her pocket when they weren’t looking, but later she threw it out.

“Anyway,” Wolf said, “it turned out she really wasn’t strong enough to cut the fence. She struggled wildly out there for about an hour, got so desperate she damn near asked some guy she saw down the alley to help her. Tried using her wrists, feet, ended up ripping the hem of the dress. When they came back to get her, she was all disheveled, the fence uncut; they totally freaked. Horst Mahler jumped out of the car and did it right there, everyone watching. Faith held the clippers for him while he wrestled with the wire.”

Phoebe tried to imagine her sister struggling, failing so publicly, but couldn’t. In her mind’s eye, Faith always found a way. “Was it, like, a disaster?” she said, feeling anxious.

“Not at the time, no,” Wolf said. “Faith said the whole experience of the robberies was incredibly intense. The adrenaline gets you high as a kite; for days everything had this LSD clarity. The gun, too, carrying it on your body, like having a second heart. Even being ‘wanted’ she liked; feeling marked, incognito when she walked around, thinking, if that grocer, that streetsweeper knew who I really was, they’d freak. Everything they did went straight into the news—instantly, this druggy out-of-body thing, seeing yourself from miles away, knowing zillions of people were following each little thing you did … I mean, imagine it.”

“It sounds incredible,” Phoebe said.

“It was. I mean, she said it was.” He was silent a moment. Phoebe felt a pull of regret in the room, like an undertow.

“She couldn’t read German, obviously,” Wolf said, “but Horst Mahler would translate for her. After the banks they’d never even had to count their take—it was all over the evening papers, down to the last pfennig. They sent Faith out to buy them. Her hands were shaking so hard she dropped the papers on her way back, got one wet in a puddle. No one even cared, they were too excited.”

Wolf fell silent. In the absence of his voice a dullness bore down upon them, Phoebe thought, as if some faint glow had been snuffed. They could laugh all they wanted.

“Anyway, the triumph was pretty short-lived,” he said. “About a week after the robberies, the cops busted two apartments and got four Red Army people, including Horst Mahler. After that, the RAF decided it was too dangerous to stay in Berlin, so they pared down their operations, started moving people into West Germany. At that point Faith was out, more or less.”

“Out?”

“You know, they cut her out. Sent her on some long errand to a suburb of Berlin, and by the time she made it back, after dark, the apartment was empty. Everyone had just split. Faith had no idea where to find them.”

“God,” Phoebe said.

“Yeah, it was awful,” Wolf said. “Faith just bottomed out, like coming down from a two-month high. Hung around that empty ‘safe house’ awhile, crashing on a bare mattress. Incredibly dangerous—the cops might’ve raided it any minute. I think she was almost hoping they would.”

Phoebe tried to imagine her sister left behind, abandoned to those empty rooms, but nothing came to mind. Or no picture of Faith anyway; the apartment she saw, littered with the dregs of their haste, half-open doors, a bottle of milk, cigarette butts heaped on windowsills. The only sound her own footsteps. “Poor Faith,” Phoebe said, an ache in her chest.

“She kept trying to find her mistake,” Wolf said. “Should she have been more bold with them, or the opposite? Was everything fine until the fence, or had they already written her off? It went on and on, she couldn’t let go. Meanwhile, she was down to three hundred dollars.”

Phoebe felt the air in the room against her skin. It was painful, as if her skin were raw. “I wonder why,” she said.

“Why what?”

“They left her.”

“Who gives a damn why? They were assholes!”

They exchanged a hot look. Phoebe felt a swell of angry disappointment—in herself and Wolf for sitting uselessly in this dark room; in Faith, too, for failing to meet some expectation.

Faith had gone with Wolf to the shoe factory once, sat in the coffee room while he packed and loaded boxes. Afterward they’d stopped at the pub, a woodsy place with antlers on the wall, where the factory people went. Wolf thought it might revive her, flirting a little with the guys from work, and it did. But without her long hair Faith didn’t draw men’s attention the way she used to. She was thin, pale, both of which she’d been before, but with that gush of dark hair she’d always looked dramatic, wasted but spectacular. Now she looked more like any strung-out kid. Wolf liked it. It made her beauty his secret, not something every other guy could grope with his eyes as she walked by. But Faith despised the haircut, said she looked like an acorn. It sharpened her sense that the intensity of everything in the world—herself included—had been muted through some failure of her own. That night at the pub she had fun, though, was laughing on the streetcar home, and mid-laugh she turned to Wolf and said in this odd voice, “Maybe everything will be okay,” as if this were some crazy wish she hardly dared hope for.

“Two days later we went to the Hofgarten,” Wolf said. “I had the ring in my pocket, turquoise and jade, her favorites. Maybe I picked the wrong day. The minute I dropped to my knee she knew. ‘Don’t,’ she said, before I could speak. ‘Don’t, Wolf, please, I’m going crazy. There’s nothing left in me.’ I told her fuck all that, fuck it, here we are now, in this moment—zam—the head of a pin, we can do anything! But she couldn’t hear me, like some other noise was louder in her head. She just wiped her eyes, saying, ‘Please, baby. Please stand up.’ When I got back from work the next night, she’d left.”

Phoebe and Wolf sat in silence. “And that was it?” she finally said.

Wolf struggled to his feet and switched on a light. The room pounced. He moved to the kitchen stiffly, legs obviously asleep. Phoebe heard the glassy thunk of bottles hitting the garbage.

“You don’t know anything else?” she said when he sat back down. “Nothing?”

Wolf looked away. Phoebe gazed at the square of black window, trying to absorb the fact that the story was over. But of course it wasn’t over. Faith had simply eluded her, vanished just when it seemed the story might finally be at an end. And here it was, the triumph Phoebe had longed for and dreaded and known would come: Faith had disappeared.