Kino (5 page)

Then she realized that the plane had turned around and was docking at the gate again. People were craning their necks to see what was wrong. The announcement came in German. Mina watched as people sighed and began to close their books and magazines.

“English, please,” she said out loud, unable to contain her frustration. “For God's sake.”

Mina was angry at the Germans for speaking German.

“Folks,” the captain's voice crackled over the intercom, this time in English. “I am terribly sorry, but federal regulations require that at this time, we deboard the plane for a routine check. Please stay calm, and we'll be in the air in no time. Thank you for flying Lufthansa.”

“Deboard?” Mina said to the man seated next to her. “Federal regulations? What's that supposed to mean?”

The man closed his book and shrugged. “You can't be careful enough these days.”

Once all the passengers were back at the gate, a man in an airline uniform made another announcement: there had been an anonymous bomb threat and the plane would have to be combed. This would take several hours, and unfortunately there were no available flights to New York today. Everybody was welcome to rebook for the next day. Business class upgrades were available at a discount.

Through the terminal glass, Mina took a good look at the plane. Was there really a bomb on it? She couldn't help but wonder if the anonymous threat had something to do with her, with her grandfather, with
Tulpendiebe
.
Oh shit
, she thought.
I'm getting paranoid. There's a war going on in the Middle East and I am wondering if the terrorists are after
me.

Through the cotton calm of the Xanax, she felt a kind of weight come down on her. Mina sank into one of the plastic seats and put her head into her hands. It was all too much, too fast, too close. She had no comfort zone left and she was all alone.

On that crisp September morning, Mina had slept late and woken up with a hangover when Sam called her. He worked on 23
^rd
Street, in an office overlooking lower Manhattan. “Look out the kitchen window,” he said, but it faced another apartment building and she didn't know what he was talking about. “Look up,” he said, and that's when she noticed the plume of smoke rising above the roofs.

After the second plane hit, Sam's building was evacuated, and when the subways were shut down and the towers vanished into white clouds that seemed to cover the lower part of the island, Mina feared for Sam's life. She was so afraid for him that it wasn't until hours later, after he'd called from the Brooklyn side of the Williamsburg Bridge, which he'd crossed on foot, after she'd spoken to her parents, afraid for her, that it began to finally dawn on Mina that the buildings she had watched collapse had been full of people.

Six months later, Mina had dropped out of law school and was engaged. She didn't know what mattered anymore. She just stopped going to school one day, just couldn't get herself to get out of bed, and it didn't seem to change a thing. When Sam asked her to get married, she had surprised herself by saying yes right away, almost before he could finish his proposal. Her parents, who had barely spoken to her since she'd dropped out of school, seemed genuinely happy. It had made her happy, too, made her feel as if she had a future and a purpose. It all seemed connected somehow.

But now she was alone and afraid, an ocean away from Sam.

Mina took a coupon for the Tegel Ramada and added her name to the waiting list for the first flight the next morning. Then she found a payphone and called the only person she knew in Berlin.

“You do sound a little paranoid,” Dr. Hanno said.

Mina couldn't stop glancing over her shoulders. “I'd like to get out of here. Can you pick me up? I don't feel safe.”

“Why don't you want to go to the police?”

“They're useless. They told me there was nothing they could do about the movie getting stolen, so what are they going to do about a bomb?” Mina bit her lip, wishing she'd whispered. Was that man in the long red leather jacket by the Mövenpick counter watching her?

“The police merely informed you of the statistics,” Dr. Hanno said. “Burglarized property is rarely retrieved, that's a fact. You should have left the film with me.”

Finally, Mina thought. A little resentment. Sooner or later, everybody got irritated with her; she was used to it. Nobody put up with her better than Sam. Sam would already be on his way. He would hold her tight and she would calm down. Wasn't that why she had gotten married in the first place?

“Please,” she said. “You have to come and get me. Somebody doesn't want me to leave Berlin. What else do they want from me? They've already stolen the movie.”

“You must refuse to let yourself be terrorized,” Dr. Hanno said. “That's just what they want. Follow the advice of your President Bush.”

Mina sighed. Was he serious?

“And what's that?”

“Go shopping. I will take you to the finest department stores in Berlin, and we will buy new clothes for you to stay warm in. I'll be outside the baggage claim area as soon as I can get there.”

Relieved, Mina hung up. Maybe Dr. Hanno was right and none of this had anything to do with her. The man in the red leather jacket was gone.

Dr. Hanno drove a black Mini Cooper with a white racing stripe, and they headed straight to Friedrichstrasse, where a series of large department stores had recently opened. “Berlin is doomed to always become but never to be,” Dr. Hanno said as they entered Galeries Lafayette. “Karl Scheffler said that, when the twentieth century had barely begun.” He pointed. “If you follow this street down, you get to Checkpoint Charlie. Fifteen years ago, I couldn't get across. Just imagine, a whole country, like a prison!”

“You were born in the East?”

“I grew up on Karl-Marx-Allee,” Dr. Hanno said. “You want to guess which part of the city that was in?”

Mina stopped to look at Dr. Hanno. He was attractive but not her type. Also, Mina was married. She did not want to know about his life, where he grew up, if he had brothers or sisters. Nor did she want a German history lesson.

Shopping, at least, took Mina's mind off things, and for a while she stopped looking over her shoulder. She picked out a pair of jeans, boots, a purple sweater and a bulky parka. A black velvet scarf. Like the plane tickets, the hotel room, and everything else, she charged the clothes to the joint account. Mina had assumed they would keep separate bank accounts, but Sam had insisted–and since he made all the money, it was hard to argue against it.

“Much better,” Mina said, dressed in her new things. It was good to be warm, finally. She thought about calling the hospital and remembered the nurse, chastising her. It seemed like it was only ever the middle of the night in New York. “Now show me around this ever-becoming city of yours.”

They walked down Unter den Linden, a wide boulevard lined with postcard shops that led to the Brandenburg Gate. “The wall ran right across there,” Dr. Hanno said, chopping his hand like a hatchet. Mina nodded. She hadn't realized how much time she'd spent cooped up, in the hospital, in planes, in hotel rooms, and there was a normalcy to walking with this man, in new, warm clothes, that soothed her. It began to feel like the burglary and the bomb threat had happened to someone else. She almost liked Dr. Hanno.

“I still can't believe it's gone,” Dr. Hanno said.

“The wall? Wasn't that over a decade ago?”

“The film.”

Mina shrugged in her new parka and stroked the new scarf with her fingers. She wondered if Sam would like it. He noticed every new thing she bought. “I thought it was kind of ridiculous.”

Dr. Hanno looked at her, his disappointment obvious.

“Perhaps that's true by contemporary standards, but it is nonetheless a fascinating work from a historic perspective.” He made a gesture that he probably thought of as academic, like a professor at a lectern. “The film uses the tulip craze as a metaphor for the inflation, as a way to talk about the situation in Germany, which was suffering under the lost World War and the Treaty of Versailles.
Tulpendiebe
is about a group of outsiders who interfere with an unjust, doomed system. In the end, the sailor, the Englishman, and the widow restore order, but they do it through anarchy. Politically, it's a paradox: authority has gone insane and the revolutionaries want things to return to normal. The film seems almost deliberately constructed to be at cross-purposes with itself. Does the tulip notary represent the abuses of the Weimar Republic, corrupt capitalism, or the Kaiser, who was forced into exile? In current terms,
Tulpendiebe
is about a gang of terrorists who bring about democracy. No wonder reactionaries hated it as much as the communists. It's utopian without buying into any of the prevailing ideologies. It anticipates the stock market crash of 1929, but despite of all contradictions, it is optimistic and humane. Kracauer just lost the last shred of credibility.”

Mina stared at Dr. Hanno, amazed that he had gotten all of that out of the same movie she had seen. “And that's in addition to ‘Eisenstein and Dreyer need to be reevaluated' or whatever you said yesterday?” Mina said, smirking. “Aren't you exaggerating? In the end, the townspeople get rewarded for their idiocy. They traded everything they had for tulips, but then they get it all back, plus a bunch of gold. I don't see how they deserved that.”

They had reached the Brandenburg Gate. Mina thought the iconic structure was disappointingly small. She stopped underneath the arches.

“Who do you think stole the movie?”

Dr. Hanno turned to face her. It was possible he blushed. “You don't suspect me?”

Mina shook her head. “You're a scholar, not a criminal. But what about your projectionist? Could he have been paid off? Who would even want that movie?”

“Well,” Dr. Hanno said. “There
was
some interest.”

“The gentlemen from the board?”

But Dr. Hanno would say nothing else. Mina had forgotten about them, had been too frazzled to mention them to the police. Should she have? It upset her that the movie was gone without a trace, and no matter how little she cared for it or believed it could change her fortune, she wanted to know why it had appeared on her door step.

On the far side of the gate, Dr. Hanno pointed out the Reichstag, a bulky square building topped by a futuristic glass dome. “Our government moved back here recently. It is a more flexible democracy than the older American model. We have four parties in parliament, not just two, and we don't start preemptive wars anymore, either.”

Mina bristled. Was this German lecturing her about democracy? Did he think she supported Bush? He was the one whose grandparents had allowed Hitler to come to power–but then she remembered that her grandfather had been German too, that he had made movies for the Nazis, and then she didn't know what to think anymore at all.

Dr. Hanno said he needed to pick something up at the museum, so they walked south toward Potsdamer Platz. Mina didn't care where they went, as long as they kept moving. They came across a large field of square pillars, roughly the size of a Manhattan city block. The pillars, which were made from glossy, dark grey stone, marble perhaps, began ankle high and then grew higher and higher, forming a kind of maze.

“The new Holocaust memorial,” Dr. Hanno said. “The reviews were mixed. It's a colossal failure, in my opinion. It doesn't make you remember anything. Look, they're playing hide and seek.” He was right–a group of kids were darting in and out between the pillars, giggling and screaming. It looked like fun.

“Let's go in,” Mina said and started down a narrow path that descended into the maze. She took a few random turns, and already, she had lost Dr. Hanno.

She was surrounded by pillars in every direction. There were slight variations not only in their height but also in their angles, so that the view always shifted. There weren't any dead ends–although she was deep within the memorial's labyrinth, there were always multiple choices for an exit. She could hear children laughing. An American was taking photos of a woman posing next to a pillar. “Smile,” he said.

Mina took another turn and found herself face to face with a man blocking her way. He was wearing a red leather jacket; it was the man who'd been watching her at the airport. He looked like he was in his sixties, not unkind, but intent. Too intent. Fear shot up through Mina's spine as he put a finger to his lips and lifted the collar of his jacket to reveal some sort of official symbol. “Inspector Tobias Schnark,” he said. “
Bundeskriminalamt
, Division of International Cultural Crime. I'm sorry I have to contact you like this, but there's no other way.” He held out a manila envelope, and when she reached for it, he took her hand and stuffed the envelope into the roomy pocket of her brand-new parka.

“This is Kino's
Tagebuch
–your grandfather's journal. Read it and wait for me to contact you again. It is important that you do not show it to anybody–not to local law enforcement, not your father, and definitely not that–” he tilted his head in a direction that presumably indicated Dr. Hanno, “–film scholar.” He said it as if it were an insult. “Do not trust that man, do you understand? Do not repeat your mistakes!”

Then he was gone. Mina felt the envelope in her pocket. She tried to remember the name he'd given her, the department he'd said he was with, the government symbol he'd flashed at her, but all she could recall was his leather jacket and the piercing earnestness in his eyes.

“There you are,” Dr. Hanno said, coming up from behind, a little out of breath. “Well, what do you think of this place–does it make you feel the weight of history, or is it more like a playground?”

Chapter 7

Es war einmal vor langer, langer Zeit.

Do you know what that means, Herr Dokter? It's how all the fairy tales start, the Grimm ones and the not-so-grim ones, and mine, too. That's what you want, isn't it, a fairy tale? That's why you gave me this cheap notebook and pathetic ball point pen. As if writing ever solved anything. Dr. Freud would have given me a fountain pen, something with style-he was a man of impeccable taste. His cocaine tin was exquisite, oriental, encrusted with gold like a Fabergé egg. You shuffle in here with your prescription glasses, coffee-stained frock and rubber slippers, and I want to scream.