Therefore Choose (5 page)

George heard a shout, and jumped immediately out of bed. His uneasy thoughts dissolved.

There was Anna, in the kitchen, already seated, already having been out to buy a loaf, already having made coffee.

“You have become quite continental,” she said. “Each morning eat fresh bread. Take coffee.”

“I'm going to start an import business, in London,” he said. “Coffee. I'll make my fortune.”

She cut the bread and pushed towards him a little plate of apricot jam, with a silver spoon, that she had put out along with knives and plates.

“Would you like to see our office?” she said. “Meet my colleagues?”

“You mean this morning?”

“The very moment you have taken your breakfast.”

They walked along their side street, under broad-leaved trees, across the main road, into the S-Bahn station with its pale blue wall tiles, and up the stairs. A train came quickly. It was after the time when most people went to work, so they didn't have to stand. Through the window appeared a succession of images: the river, the park, grand buildings, as if projected from a cinematograph, sequence without plot, so one sees what is happening but without understanding. That's what literature does, George thought. It lets one understand. In life one can't, or perhaps not until too late.

Anna nuzzled his upper arm against her breast, which he found beautifully touching, helped a little by the shaking of the train as it rattled along its slightly irregular rails.

“What are you thinking?” she said.

“How literature is about meaning,” he said. “So, even if life doesn't have meaning, we still have literature.”

“The thing about literature,” she said, “is that you can enter the minds of people you never meet. You can be those people.”

George turned from the window and looked into her face.

“You think you can really be them?” he said.

“Humanity is broader than that,” she said. “Qualities of being human.”

“How do you mean?”

“We think of ourselves too much as individuals. A writer provides events, meetings, situations. Any of us can become a lot of other people.”

“For your magazine, you choose stories that do that?”

“Imagine someone writing about us, here on the train. The writer must offer sufficient hints about who we are, what we're doing, how the world appears through our eyes. The reader becomes one of us. Or becomes each in turn. Our hopes and preoccupations. It must work even if the reader is in Moscow or München or Marseilles.”

Anna's office was on the third floor of an elderly building. The office was two large rooms that were at the front of the building, with sash windows open. Sounds came up from the street, of people and motor vehicles, but, rather than being disturbing, they gave one the sense of being at the centre of things. The first room had filing cabinets and two desks on which were typewriters, though no one sat at them. Anna took George through to the second room, which was lined with bookshelves and had three desks.

“Good morning, esteemed colleagues,” said Anna. “May I introduce my friend George Smith. He's from England. If we are extremely nice to him, he would perhaps become our London correspondent. This is Judit Frijda, my co-editor. From Amsterdam. And this is Odile Dufour, our executive editor. She does the business side and seeks out new writers. She's a Parisienne.”

Both women got up from their chairs and came to shake hands.

“I commission poetry and stories,” said Judit. “Do you have a poem to contribute?”

Judit was fair-haired, with a roundish face. She seemed shy, but her smile was friendly.

“I couldn't write a poem to save my life,” George said. “Certainly not in German.”

“We accept submissions in several languages,” said Odile, who was carefully dressed, the most elegant of the three. “We're very international. If you're a friend of Anna, I don't believe you couldn't write a poem to save your life.”

“Do you have to be female?”

“That is contingency,” said Odile. “We have nothing against men; nothing fundamental.”

The three laughed, not unkindly.

“We don't want to be only a local magazine,” said Anna. “Most of our readers are in Berlin. Our distribution is not as we would like. We want to be European. Or wider, but none of us knows Chinese or Hindi, so that must wait for next year.”

“We want to represent everyone,” said Odile. “That's what art and music and literature do. That's what we think. I know three is not many compared with the population of Europe, but perhaps it's a start.”

The women laughed again.

“Sports and politics, all sorts of things, tend to competition,” said Judit. “Us and them. Not so many tend to unite. Us and us. But literature is one.”

The women suddenly looked serious, as if this was something that united the three of them, something they discussed frequently and earnestly.

Odile broke the silence. “As executive editor, allow me to present you with a copy of our next issue. Be most careful when you go to the street, that you are not set upon by a mob who will wrench it from your hand before its date of publication.”

“Why, thank you,” he said. He looked at the cover, which bore an accomplished charcoal sketch of a woman's profile. He turned the pages. Then he looked at the three women in turn. “Beautiful,” he said. “May I take you all out for coffee?”

“We have the equipment here,” said Odile. “We have the very latest Bialetti coffee pot, imported specially from Italy. Not only does it make coffee, it makes Italian coffee noises.”

She went to a small side room, then reappeared and held up an aluminum pot shaped like a polyhedron.

“Elegant, you see.” She waved the pot in the air. “Art deco design, Italian engineering, what could be better? Do you like espresso?”

“Perfect.”

“Our magazine,” said Anna. “We started with three principles. Four if you count our stupid, idealistic theme of being for everyone. Mostly it is in German, but each issue has also one thing in French and one in English.”

“Anna looks after the classics, and also commissions book reviews,” said Judit.

“We review literature and some non-fiction,” said Anna. “Philosophy, psychology, that kind of thing. We are quite interested in the psychology of fiction. Our second principle is to choose reviewers who know more about the subject of the book than the person who wrote it.”

“Sounds daunting.”

“People like it. The readers like it. The reviewers like it because although we can't pay them much, we've composed a letter in which we invite them to do the review that explains this principle. The authors like it because it means their book is taken seriously. A magazine tends to be ephemeral. Use it to light the stove. That is its trouble. We'd like it to be more than that.”

“How many principles is that?” said Judit.

Odile came out from the little scullery.

“Another principle,” she said, “is that we include at least one short story and one poem that has been published before but that people might not be able to find so easily. We publish contemporary writers too, but because we can't afford the most famous and do not always know who the best are, and because short pieces that will be lasting are hard to find, it's more difficult.”

“You can see how idealistic we are,” said Anna. “Hopeless, really.”

“By publishing lesser known classics, we hope people would like to keep their copies of our magazine,” said Judit. “With these older pieces, with the story or poem, there's always a one-page essay. In the next issue, the one that you have, there is a translation of a short story by Chekhov, and Anna wrote the essay.”

George smiled at Anna, who looked away, embarrassed.

“I've heard three principles,” he said. “What's the fourth?”

“We have to enjoy doing it,” said Judit.

“And do you?”

Italian coffee noises were coming from the little scullery.

“When we're not worrying too much,” said Odile, who went to pour coffee into small green cups with matching saucers. “We try not to worry. Mostly we do enjoy it. A magazine is a good excuse for striking up conversations.”

“Odile is extraordinary at that,” said Anna.

“You worry about finances?”

“We manage, but a magazine is not the way in which one makes the fortune,” said Odile. “But Anna is very good. She puts on her best clothes. She becomes the Prussian aristocrat, and goes to see Herr von this or Baron that. She lets it out, almost by mistake, that we have not quite enough cash just now, and an infusion arrives.”

“Except when it doesn't,” said Anna.

“You think that the money you hand over when you buy a magazine pays for it,” said Odile. “It doesn't even cover the costs of producing and distributing it. So we need these infusions. Berlin's a centre. It is good for it to have a magazine like this.”

“Very much a centre,” said Anna. “International. There's a French Institute in Berlin. Interesting people come, who want to write.”

“Here's an example,” said Odile. “Was it last year, or the year before? I met someone called Jean-Paul Sartre, who was at the institute, who I thought was brilliant. He'd come from Paris to study the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, but he wants to write novels and stories in which these ideas are expressed, not just do philosophy. He said he would write something for us.”

“We're still waiting,” said Anna. “Odile introduced me to him. He is brilliant, also rather flirtatious. Exactly the sort of thing we are interested in.”

“Flirtatiousness?”

“Brilliance.”

George had a flash of recognition about Anna and her magazine. He had observed her when she met people. She had a mixture of confidence and warmth, no sense of ulterior motive, just the expectation that both she and this person would enjoy talking with each other.

“That's how we work,” said Judit. “Classics, but keeping up, also, with intellectual currents. So we are onto movements like phenomenology as they break into literature.”

“Judit's the avant garde,” said Anna.

“Just the three of you produce the magazine?” George said.

“A secretary comes in to do letters,” said Anna. “She wears high-heeled shoes. When we're busy there are two of them. Copy editing is done by freelancers.”

Anna saw him look puzzled. “Copy editing: dealing with the words,” she said. “Marking manuscripts with instructions for the typesetters. Try to minimize spelling mistakes, grammatical — how do you say? — lapses.”

She saw that George had finished his coffee, and she took his cup from him.

“Facts are another thing,” she said.

“The copy editor deals with these?”

“Whose facts? We don't want too many obvious errors of fact to intrude. Who knows where we would be?”

Despite the women's protestations of their precarious finances, their mood was confident, as if this was, without serious reservations, clearly the thing to do, the way to live, the means to contribute to society.

The summer with Anna was George's first love affair. Anna's gusts of warmth enthralled him. He had known nothing like them. Quite often, at breakfast or when they were walking along the street or were in the kitchen together, as if the idea had suddenly occurred to her in that very moment, she would take his head in her hands and give him the most tremendously affectionate kiss.

George had never felt so close to anyone. It was as if his self, previously individual, expanded to include both of them. He started thinking of their life together. She would move to England, live in London, perhaps somewhere like Hampstead, where they could take long walks on the Heath. Or perhaps they should live in Chelsea, near the river. What would their life be like?

He tried to understand her. Her speaking was sometimes abrupt, but he worked out that the occasions of apparent disconnectedness occurred because she was thinking all the time. New thoughts would come to her in unanticipated ways, and she would just say them, and he would have to make the jump too. It wasn't that she was self-absorbed. She was always present in the conversation. Just, as Werner had said, she was rather intense.

Her intensity frightened him. There was something demanding about it too. He couldn't believe he could sustain what it was she saw in him.

Anna took George
into the mind of Johann von Goethe in his writing of
The Sorrows of Young Werther
, into the mind of Mary Shelley as she wrote
Frankenstein
, into the mind of Anton Chekhov when he wrote “The Lady with the Little Dog.” He never had such a teacher. In the flat, in the evening, they would take turns at reading sections, then would dig down to their inmost parts. Anna could become Goethe, or Shelley, or Chekhov.

She enabled George to talk about things he had not said to anyone else. He said that although he seemed destined to become a doctor, he didn't know whether he would manage it.