Encounter in Munich

"We can't bear America," my hostess was saying with the uneasy casualness of a Smith graduate dismissing her coming-out party. "My mother says in every other letter, 'You've been gone eight years. You're going to be one of those Americans who never come home.'" Her gesture with the glass of champagne punch was in shorthand. "But if you can't stand living in America, why feel you have to do it? Why apologize?"

What could I reply? It was her apartment and her party and her evening. Or, rather, it was her husband's. He was a professor of drama at the branch of an American university outside Munich and we, the 20-odd guests, had just attended the first performance of his psychedelic production of Pirandello's Henry IV, and then had blundered about through the Bavarian night (full of that piny, astringent odor, those fierce unblinking stars and that hint of hoarfrost in the autumn air that so powerfully suggest the presence of mountains nearby) to find this particular apartment in a rank of identical projectlike buildings, no different from their counterparts in Denver or Seattle.

My hostess was the tall, horsy type, glib and genial and assertive in a black-lace minidress and silver-mesh stockings--adroitly maintaining, at that moment, the balance between expatriate snobbery and native enthusiasm that seems to overcome the wives of American intellectuals abroad. A nice young woman blurred by chic.

The professor, in his solemn tuxedo, was indulging himself in criticisms of his own production that were so unreasonable as to elicit heated objections from his friends. His theatrical ideas were mostly derived from Antonin Artaud via Peter Weiss and he dropped them into his conversation with the offhand italics of a radio announcer in Topeka mentioning "Liz and Dick."

"Of course, I couldn't have done it this way in any university at home," he was saying with the tone of an orphan rejecting what has rejected him. "Can you imagine mounting this production in--in Iowa City?" looking to me as a recent escapee from America's bleak shores.

I gave him back a dim smile and kept my own counsel, because, though I had liked the play and the young actors, both had been so fatally encumbered by an overlay of psychedelic gimmickry that my mood at the final curtain was irritable. What in God's name had Pirandello failed to say about guilt and psychic identification with the past and the mysteries of human responsibility that all these masks and strobe lights and slide projections could better illuminate? My host's conception of the play involved such a misunderstanding of its content that it constituted the most urgent reason for his hying himself back to the artistic upheaval in the States on the next possible plane. But one does not carelessly mar another's moment of triumph, and I barely knew the man and was drinking his liquor. So I escaped to the punch bowl, refilled my glass and found a spot out of the conversational line of fire, to savor a not-unpleasant sense of dislocation.

Forty-eight hours before, we had been gaining altitude over the sparkling pattern of Paris boulevards below, laid out--like some incredibly intricate lavaliere on a piece of black velvet--in strings of tiny, pearl-hard lights radiating outward from the bright pendant of the Arc de Triomphe. Just that afternoon, I had had an encounter on chilly Ludwig-strasse, the meanings of which were still to be sorted out. And this very evening, while tooling along the autobahn out of Munich, on the way to see a modern Italian play performed in English by a group of "Army brats" on an American Armed Forces complex that had once been a Nazi military installation, I had found myself listening on the car radio to an Israeli folk song sung in German by a Frenchman. So I was full of the time-and-culture shock for which I had come to Europe, and I was in Germany--the one leg of our trip that I had undertaken as a duty rather than a relief to the state of my nerves.

Germany! To a man of my age (World War Two vet) and persuasion (radical without an ideology), Germany had the unhealthy fascination of De Sade's Les 120 Journées de Sodome. It was a dark part of all our nightmares and there hung over it that aura of the nadir, that faint stench of the pit to which only the morally unimaginative can feign indifference. I knew intelligent and talented men who, these 20-odd years after the war, still refused to go to Germany and said so with the complacent disinterest of people stating that they loathe escargots on the basis of having tried them once at 16. I knew others, like myself, for whom Germany--the very name, with its myriad associations, Nietzsche, Himmler--was an embodiment of a contemporary human problem of such huge and indistinct proportions as to be inexpressible in any terms less stark than Malraux's "Is man dead?" The source of my attraction to Germany was the testing of old aversions and new knowledges that it demanded, and I wanted to walk German streets in this time of Vietnam and see if any shred of America's fatuous sense of moral superiority remained in me.

Germany! Aside from the above, my relationship to it was especially ambivalent. My grandfather had studied medicine in Berlin in the Nineties, my grandmother had been raised there and German was often spoken in their home. Two relatives by marriage from Alsace, brothers, had fought through the brutal wallow of the First War, one for the French, one for the Germans. The bitter, romantic carnival nihilism of Berlin in the Twenties had always exerted a stronger pull on me than the bohemianism of Paris during the same decade, and on troublous summer evenings in 1937, a second cousin, just home, had described Nazi youth rallies in the mesmerized voice of Trilby trying to shake off an evil spell. Hitler's guttural, hypnotic rant, seeping through the static of the transatlantic radio, was as much a part of my adolescence on the Eastern Seaboard as the Lone Ranger. But I found that I had read Erich Maria Remarque too early and listened to Marlene Dietrich too closely and studied George Grosz too long to view the Second War, when it came, with the simple, two-dimensional ethics of a Western; and if most of my 19-year-old idealism failed to survive the unspeakable revelations of the concentration camps, a few of my emotions matured forever while listening to scratchy Kurt Weill records smuggled out of Amsterdam.

I suppose, at the last, Germany was modern history to me, a capsule history of my own era, encompassing both the human lamp shades of Ilse Koch and the human eyes of Bertolt Brecht that, to this day, stare at me from my wall, keeping me honest; a deeply thwarted land that found its true voice in the totalitarian sentimentality of music like the Horst Wessel song and Paul Dessau's incidental music for Mother Courage, by both of which it is impossible not to be stirred, despite your politics; a terrible laboratory of extremes in which Jack the Ripper and Wedekind's Lulu had murdered and copulated ceaselessly throughout my lifetime.

In Paris, James Jones had told me, "Go to Munich. Go to Dachau. It's an experience you owe yourself," and there I was, in an apartment full of expatriates, in a Germany that had been occupied by Americans for 25 years, in the Munich where Thomas Mann had written The Magic Mountain and Hitler had established National Socialism, where Jews had died by Nazi gas and Germans by American bombs and where, ironically, no one but I seemed to feel guilty. I swallowed the urge to spoil everyone's evening by swallowing champagne instead. If the truth be known, I felt silly, perplexed, cheated, morbid, square, and the reason was that afternoon's encounter on Ludwigstrasse, about which I hadn't told a soul.

• • •

The best way to absorb a foreign city in a short time is to map it with your feet, and my habit was to drift without specific aim toward the center of a town, turning down every street that looked intriguing. My wife and I were staying in a small hotel next to the Armed Forces Network on Kaulbachstrasse. Our room was up under the roof--large, alcoved, dark--with casemented windows looking out over those broad, blunt Munich rooftops that are so indefinably Gothic after Enlightenment Paris. A fountain riffled all night in the paved, leaf-strewn back court below (where Peter Lorre had crouched in the shadows with his pathetic fantasies), and the bed was smothering and womblike with goose down. Nevertheless, I was up early and impatient to be out. But my wife lingered under the quilts. I smoked a cigarette and studied maps. She kept dropping off.

(continued on page 207) Encounter in Munich (continued from page 140)

"Come on," I said. "We've only got today and tomorrow. We'll change traveler's checks and book a flight to Venice on Saturday, and then find a restaurant around Marienplatz somewhere."

She stirred and blinked and turned over again.

"Listen," I said, "let's get going. It's already after nine. What's wrong, anyway?"

I looked down into her face and realized that she was wide awake and had been for half an hour. And I knew the shifty, distracted expression in her eyes. She was frightened.

The last days in Paris had been difficult, demanding, not gay. She had come down with a bug and had had to call a doctor, which had taxed her convent French to its limits. And now, for the first time in her life, she was in a city where she couldn't understand a single word that was spoken. She hadn't much wanted to come to Germany. There was something ponderous and gloomy about it that was antithetical to her Mediterranean soul. Its air of logic baffled her intuitions. Its streets were without nuance, its people strangely shrouded, its language lugubrious with abstraction.

The afternoon before, as we walked through the dense, still woods and open meadows of the Englischer Garten under a dreary, somehow stricken sky, she had seemed depressed, and bewildered by her depression. It was cold there, the paths wound on and on, the sad rustle of leaves only accentuating the melancholy silence of Bavarian autumn. The hunting-lodge restaurant in the center of the Garten was shuttered for the winter, the huge mastiff chained by the service entrance--strings of slaver hanging from his savagely barking jaws--explaining the Achtung! signs that were posted on the trees.

There was a forlorn hint of early snow, and twilight fatalism and muffled Beethoven in the air. She was shivering and wanted coffee and it was all deeply alien to her. That night, when I attempted to thank the hotel's Frau Müller for calling us a cab, only to be told with humorless rectitude, "But no. Do not thank me. It is my duty," my wife had visibly winced, something in her recoiling, as if from a glimpse into the heaviness, the narrowness at the nation's heart. And now, vulnerable with sleep, she simply couldn't bring herself to get out of the bed.

"I can't. I just can't. Not this morning. I feel like the woman in Bergman's Silence. If anyone looked at me and said something, just anything, I'd break into tears." She was furious with herself, but she was even more frightened. "But you go on. Don't wait for me. I just can't make it."

If I was a little miffed at this, I suppose it was because, since I spoke no language other than English, I had long ago got used to functioning with my hands and eyes and didn't clearly remember any longer the stifling sense of absolute estrangement that can over come you when you can't even ask the way to the john, much less understand the directions if they're offered. So I went off by myself.

I walked. The teller at the Deutsche Bank in Schwabing spoke English, and so did the girl at Alitalia. They conducted my business with dispatch, without small talk, correctly. But they weren't cold, they were shy. Their reliance on form was the result of an inhibition, rather than an absence of emotion. They eyed me distantly, but there was hunger in their eyes--the hunger of the socially unpoised, the oversensitive adolescent who is excruciatingly polite. It is why so many Germans love music. They are as full of chaotic, unclear feelings as so many 17-year-olds, and music expresses the inexpressible.

I walked. Munich was in the midst of completing a subway that had been begun by the Nazis, and making one's way along Leopoldstrasse was like navigating in a modern city after a devastating air raid. Huge craters yawned in the middle of the sidewalk and you had to detour at least once in every block; at one point, I could see all the way under the street to the other side. Drills stuttered, dust rose in a weird unfocusing haze, men crawled about below the pavements in hard hats, traffic snarled around temporary excavation fences plastered with posters, rubble was heaped in neatly numbered piles.

In the vicinity of the university, throngs of easy-hipped, long-haired students milled about among the wanfaced hippies, who, with their knapsacks and scarred boots, looking as blank-eyed and passive as DPs, crouched against signs asking Marx-Mao-Marcuse? in that attitude of eternal waiting for Godot that is now characteristic of certain streets all over the world. Munich was an important way station on the caravan route across Europe along which Dutch Provos, American hippies, English Mods, French dropouts and Scandinavian acid-heads moved toward some remote mecca in the desert of their psyches. A kind of walking madness seemed to have afflicted youth everywhere, a lemminglike migration of the young with their grass and guitars and copies of Hermann Hesse, as if some crucial taproot had been pulled in everyone under 25. They were the first flotsam of an as-yet-undeclared war, refugees from an impossible past and an inhuman future, LSD trippers on the chemical thumb, gypsies who had kidnaped themselves out of the straight world. And they looked at the strafed arches, the dreary institutionalized buildings, the disemboweled streets and the impersonal crowds right out of a G. W. Pabst film and did not see them. But then they had never seen anything else.

I walked. There was an idealistic green Volks with the sticker Make Love Not war and, a block away, a Citroën that countered Gallicly, Make Love Not Babies. There were the amputated stumps of Bismarckian linden trees and the brightly lit windows of aluminized stores, where everything was dirt-cheap, and the steamy, jammed Gaststätten, where all speculations could be numbed by wurst and dumplings and strudel and lager. There was a street corner in the canyony, Wall Street bustle of Marienplatz where I paused to watch the 11-o'clock glockenspiel up in the Rathaus tower, the two opposing files of life-size knights and peasants moving with the precise, automated jerks of figures in a silent movie; the crisp, thin air of mountain-girt Munich on that cold morning pierced by the pealing of silvery bells and the strong sense beneath everything of some Black Forest in the German soul, stranded at last in reality but unreconciled.

All was hurry, commotion, chill. Early Beckmann faces were everywhere--thick, secretly sensual, metallic. Platzl struck me with a sharp pang of déjà vu, which, upon investigation, proved to be grounded in Fritz Lang. An old infatuation with expressionism hallucinated me with the feeling that I understood everything I saw--the heavy overcoats muffling the body but not the will, the gluttonous menus stupefying both, the mood of public propriety and private quirk, of unexamined urges and a damning sense of social distance. All this framed itself into an unhappy question as I walked. Why did I seem to know, instinctively, how to function in a German city? It was everything about myself from which I was trying to escape.

I started back up Ludwigstrasse, pondering again the awful mystery that had obsessed my generation 20 years before and, in another context, had set the hippies wandering: the eruption of barbarism at the very core of Christian civilization, the mass slaughter of real human beings so that a few abstract ideas might live. Dachau. My Lai. Concentration-camp commandant Hoess, with his love of dogs and Brahms. The American captain who said of the Vietnamese village he had just burned, "We had to destroy it in order to save it." If these people passing me in the street were "good Germans," who hadn't known what was going on just ten miles away, what did that make of me, who knew too well the horrors that were being committed halfway around the world in my name? Would anyone see the conscience under my overcoat?

I looked into the faces around me with an unpleasant understanding--new to Americans--of how terribly difficult it is to hate one's own country, to force it to live up to its dream or judge the dream inadequate, to isolate in all the welter of policy, ego, blunder and avarice that make up a nation's acts the germ of future evil, and to stand against it, no matter what. Some of us had been standing against America's current "evil" since 1965 with a growing feeling of impotence and outrage, and a few of us were tired and hopeless and had escaped to Europe. I thought, with a pinch of guilt, of friends back home, still there, refusing to relinquish stewardship of the dream to its debauchers, and I felt again the old dull pulse of that resentment of America's leaders that had driven me away. But no matter how uncompromisingly one opposed the sickness in one's own land, one could not avoid a feeling of complicity in it. It was as if one had discovered a murderer in one's immediate family but remembered the carefree, winning youth he had once been. Dachau? My Lai? Though different, both posed an identical moral problem, and one's anguish was not lessened for knowing the answer. The awful mystery was within.

"Is colder than New York?" a voice said.

A small, disheveled man had fallen into step beside me. He had the eager, worried, paunchy face of a bank clerk proving his trustworthiness with every overfriendly "Good morning, sir." At that moment, the face had a high flush from the cold and it hadn't been shaved in a day. His watery, agitated eyes begged my patience with his skeletal English and his wan smile revealed a mouthful of neglected teeth. He wore a thin black raincoat in need of reproofing, a baggy-trousered summer suit with that junkie rumple at the crotch, a frayed white summer-weave shirt buttoned to the throat, no tie and a shapeless felt hat that had been handled by greasy fingers. He talked steadily, stubbornly, falling over his words, picking himself up, falling again, laughing at his mistakes, encouraging me to laugh, too. Though there was a certain charm about his comic self-deprecations, I had been accosted in half a dozen foreign cities by then and I was on guard. Nevertheless, he seemed to be interested only in talk, and since the talk was in English, I went along with him.

He was, he said, a Polish refugee, a teacher, who had been in Dachau during the war and worked as a laborer in Munich just afterward, and now, after years back in Poland, had managed to get out and was waiting in a relocation camp to go to America.

"Student?" he said and, at my "No," "Teacher, then, too?" concluding this, I suppose, from my glasses and loden coat and rugged walking shoes--a lucky guess, as it happened, in that I did teach now and then.

He had thought so, yes; and, of course, he realized that he could not expect to teach in America, but just last week the refugee committee had gotten him a job in a library on Long Island. Perhaps not as a librarian in the beginning, perhaps only as a janitor, but he didn't mind.

"I don't know even where is Long Island," he said with an expressive shrug. "But it pays two tousand. Can live in America, with family, for two tousand?" To which, at my faint "Perhaps," he added hastily, "Well, I want roof, and to be in blessed America, it is enough.... But can live on two tousand there?"

Somehow I got the impression that he knew you couldn't and that there was a question within the question that his rudimentary English could not quite frame, but then he said, "You like München? Have seen the sights? ... No? Must show you something, then. You have a few minutes? One more time before I leave München, I must see, too. I show you, and then show you bus to Schwabing. Just over here."

We turned off Ludwigstrasse and he talked on and on, asking the same questions over again, opening the raincoat to show me his suit. "They give me suit. Committee. Worn before," fingering a fraying lapel, "but what do I care? Only to get to America. Sail in fifteen days now. I tell my wife soon we be all right. ... But tell me, you think I need scarf--you say it, scarf?--in America? Is cold there, too?"

He laughed, but he was cold, his teeth actually chattering as he blew on his raw, chapped hands, the tears standing in the corners of his weary little eyes, his ears as red and numb as a rooster's comb.

He hurried me along through the empty, formal Hofgarten, with its austere pavilion, withered flower beds and pebbled walks. The sky was aching with snow and the city seemed bleak and unfriendly. Winter there would be bitter if you were poor: slush, cold doorways, leaky shoes; all that heavy, spiced food behind the steamy windows, all those accordions and violins. Then, over a high privet hedge, clipped with a precision that seemed fanatical, I caught sight of a large official building at the back of the garden, once a palace of the Bavarian kings and now a modern ruin; that is, bombed out 20-odd years ago and left as a monument to--what? The disasters of Nazism? The barbarity of the Americans? Grass grew out of the wide, smashed steps, the ornate stonework was fire-blackened, a dead sky showed through gaping windows where direct hits had been made on the walls beyond. There was about it that echo of rats scuttling over littered parquet that haunts ruined buildings of some magnificence. A rusty chain link fence had been erected around it and just in front, at the bottom of what appeared to be an empty reflecting pool, there was a mausoleum made of blunt, modernistic slabs of concrete, and it was to this that my friend, who had identified himself as Adam and who was now calling me John several times in every sentence, was leading me.

We walked down into it, and there, in a damp, chilly, oppressive crypt, a massive bronze figure lay almost buried beneath wreaths of dead flowers. The walls were carved with casualty figures--18,000, 30,000--but I couldn't read the epitaphs accompanying them and learn who these people were or in what manner they had died or why they were memorialized there. Germans or Jews? Victims of the bombers or the ovens? An old habit of mind made it seem to matter.

My friend's English could get no closer than "innocent dead," somehow leaving the suggestion that they were workers from Dachau (why else would he want to have a last look?) but not excluding the possibility that they might have been Münchener killed in the raids. I stood there, sobered by the grim arithmetic.

But all at once, he seized my hand. his eyes watered and averted themselves from mine and he was saying in a stumbling little speech: "America must aid the Polish people, John. They would do the same. I bless you forever. Americans--such good people, so generous. See, they send me this suit. Help the Polish people, John--"

I was moved and a little shamed by my recent thoughts, because, yes, I believed we were generous; I still believed that, at bottom, we were good; and the old tarnished dream of haven in America lived on in him, despite what we had made of it. I felt a reflex of pride in my country, in its instinctive decency, now so bafflingly obscured; its honesty, now so appallingly compromised; its idealism, now buried in a file somewhere in the antiseptic warrens of the Pentagon--but there, still there, in the hopes of Europe's displaced and uprooted. I was moved enough to grasp his shoulder and say, just as solemnly, that I would tell people in America, that they would help, that I wished him a good life there, a happy life, only to hear him say with redoubled urgency, "I kiss your hand, John. I never forget you. We have to live. Do not forget the Polish refugee ... a few marks--"

It had been a con, a pitch, all along. I suppose I was afraid that he might actually kiss my hand. I suppose I was embarrassed by the tears--were they real?--that started out of his beseeching eyes and by my own chagrin at having failed to realize that he was asking me for money and had brought me there for no other reason, there to that evil spot, from which no memorial could immunize me against the knowledge that thousands had died nearby, senselessly, in terror and despair, aflame (whether at their hands or ours no matter), our century forever indicted by such butchery, none of us ever to be quite whole again because it had happened. I registered the suffocating pall it had laid over my own life and the fierce hunger for human solidarity that human viciousness always arouses.

In the midst of these lofty thoughts, I saw him realize that I had misunderstood him and abruptly change his tack.

"One more thing you should see," he said insistently, "and then I put you on bus to Schwabing," hurrying me up the steps out of the crypt and along a path, almost babbling now, toward nothing more than some gloomy bushes along a wall bordering the garden.

Suddenly I stopped in my tracks. All musing ceased. I re-entered the moment. The suspicious vigilance of an old Central Park walker came back to me. He wasn't a refugee at all. He might not even be Polish. He was a thief. He was desperate, he was probably half cracked. What did I know of the Munich underworld? He intended to rob me in those bushes, by force if necessary. Or was it only some further reminder of the obscene past that waited there--some plaque, some grave, some bullet-riddled statue--with which he hoped to finally shame my pockets open? I still don't know. But I stopped dead and he knew I wouldn't go any farther. He could feel me bridling, so he talked on, stubborn pridelessness replacing the charm, wet eyes searching the pebbles at our feet.

"No food. ... I tell my wife about the kind American professor.... Could you think to yourself about the Polish teacher who only wanted to get his family to America? ... And my little girl--what does she know of the bitterness of life?" A sad and desperate ramble. Was it true? Did it matter?

"Look," I said, interrupting him as you interrupt someone who is embarrassing you by humiliating himself. "Would it insult you if I gave you money? I don't want to insult you, but if it would help--"

If he was a con man, working the oldest dodge in postwar Germany--evoking guilt or horror in feckless American tourists--this must have amused him mightily when he recounted it later to his cronies ("Ah, the Americans; always so naïve, so childlike, so trusting. To wonder whether it would insult me! How can you respect such conquerors?"). But dare you treat a man as if he is not a man, as if he cannot be insulted? Dared I assume that conning was not demeaning, even to a con man? Somehow I couldn't call him on the truth, whatever the truth might have been, so I kept up the fiction, if it was a fiction.

I thumbed out 50 marks--worth about $12 then--which he pocketed without even looking at the bills, thanking me effusively but with embarrassment now, and, that being over, his agitation eased a little, and he walked me back through the Hofgarten to Ludwigstrasse. A certain formality, a certain chatty reserve entered our conversation. One could not keep the image of the posttransaction whore and client out of one's mind, for we had trafficked with each other, we had reduced whatever emotions we shared to a crude exchange of money and it was necessary for both of us to act as if it hadn't happened. Each of us felt that sudden recoil from the other that results from some kinds of intimacy.

We reached the bus stop, eager to part, and, though it seemed painful for him to have to mention the money again, he said, "I never forget you. And do not worry. This go for food, only for food. ... Who needs a scarf--you say scarf in American?" gesturing at his throat in such a way that I realized it was probably a necktie about which he was so concerned. "But now," he said with a curious, sly, almost comradely hint of humor in his voice, "now you broke." That was the very word he used.

I assured him that I wasn't and we said a quick goodbye. He turned on his heel and went off into the crowd streaming in and out of a haberdashery, and the last glimpse I had of him was when he paused to inspect a window display. Something had caught his eye. Perhaps, after all, a necktie.

I turned off Ludwigstrasse and walked toward the river, searching emptier streets. I felt foolish, like the all-American sucker, the goodhearted boob so ignorant of the modern world that any reminder of the years of suffering and death there in Europe would automatically evoke the corniest sort of pity--and the money with which to buy it off. I had fallen for one of the oldest European cons, no less callow than a Jamesian heroine from Duxbury, and allowed myself to be bilked out of the cost of a full day of our trip, a day I had worked, schemed and, yes, conned for myself during most of the preceding year. Did every European think every American was rich? As an American writer, a little honored but without profit in his own land, I seethed with resentment, only to realize that I was mostly furious with myself for proving such an easy mark.

The nightmare of modern history had always been my secret albatross. But did it show on my face? Had these last years of anguish and dissent put lines there that anyone could see? Was it so clear that I had come to Germany, as to some heart of contemporary darkness, hoping to ease one guilt in the presence of a greater? Was it even true? I didn't hate the Germans, I never had. It was likenesses I looked for, not differences. I was not at odds with my conscience; I was at odds with my century.

But how could Adam have known the burden of human complicity that some of us feel, even in crimes for which we bear no responsibility? How could he have known that, at the last, I would rather stay human than act hip? I hadn't known it myself. I hadn't known it until the moment when it no longer mattered to me whether he was telling the truth or not. For he was a man, too, and even the shabbiest of sob stories is an appeal to a common condition, a common consciousness. It assumes that we are all indissolubly involved with one another.

I walked along the Isar escarpment, where delicate, pale-yellow leaves fluttered down into the fast, cold, murmuring rush of light-blue water over rocks. The few old men on benches seemed distracted by smoky, half-obliterated memories of pre-Sarajevo days. A black-coated woman, with that look of a stern governess that is typical of some German women over 40, waited patiently by a tree for her dachshund to finish. Across the river from me, rising stolid as a headstone out of the feathery trees, there was an official-looking building, cold and somehow spirit-withering, as official buildings in Germany often are. A vague air of sadness without cause, of exhaustion in the hopes, of some perpetual autumn in human affairs, hung over everything. It was, I must confess, not unpleasant to me. It was one reason I had come to Germany: to experience as keenly as possible my own relation to the strengths and weaknesses of my species in my time.

I thought of Adam and I decided to believe in him, realizing with delight that I had the choice. I had conned to get away from America in order to save a part of my Americanness that seemed in jeopardy, and Adam was conning to get there before something of himself was finally lost. Our spur was the same: to survive, to avoid hating life, to remain human. I settled it that way in my mind and relinquished the 50 marks with some relief. They had bought something, after all.

• • •

Standing with my glass of champagne amid the brittle, literate talk of American expatriates, living the privileged lives of Romans in Gaul, it seemed a trivial incident. Undoubtedly, something similar had happened to everyone in that room. But what had they felt?

The professor was talking to me about Tuscany, where he and his wife had a small country house, and scribbling down the names of friends for us to look up when we got to Florence.

"Italy," he said, a warm, surprisingly boyish smile coming over his face. "What can one say? You'll know the minute you get there. You'll rest.... Germany is a strain for Americans now. It's too much like home." He eyed me, wondering what I would make of this. "Of course, that's why some of us like it."

"I rather like it," I said. "I think it's been valuable to me."

"Yes, that's the word," he replied immediately. "It's valuable. Americans should have the experience of Germany. If they can receive it. And if they can go to Italy afterward.... By the way," he added, "did you get out to Dachau?"

"No," I said. "Well, not exactly."

A look of recognition flickered across his eyes, which he understood I understood, and, liking each other immensely at that moment, we turned to the punch bowl.