The Informer (34 page)
Authors: Craig Nova
“I’ll get out here,” she said.
Then she climbed over the side of the jeep and got down, glancing at Armina only once and then turning away, dismissing this moment with a sad acceptance and an obvious hope that this was another thing that could be forgotten. The jeep left Armina off, too, about a few blocks from the house where she had her room.
“Mind yourself,” said the man with the mustache.
On the street women worked with an unstoppable insistence as they picked up the bricks as though solving an enormous puzzle, which, if just
assembled correctly, would allow them to live again. Armina went by them, toward a wider, more cleared avenue, and when she turned into it, she hesitated and stood on the corner with her eyes closed: she could see those black birds, quivering in the air, swooping around in an enormous circle, and then settling down again to feed on the last glittering insects.
The trembling in her legs was more noticeable when she climbed the stairs to her room. It was not only constant but also left her with a sense of weakness, too, as though she had been sick and in bed for a month and was now standing for the first time. She found a place in the middle of the room, as far from the walls as possible, since there, at least, she had no possibility of being touched. Her fingers, against her lips, felt like the flutter of a moth’s wings.
She took off her clothes and put them on her single bed. The stockings were run in long ladders, from the tops to the knees. She balled them up and put them in the trash and then piled some waste paper on top and pushed it down. She wet a washcloth from the jug of drinking water and tried to wash herself, but the dampness only made her feel cold in the room. Then she toweled, powdered herself, and put on some clothes so she could go downstairs and empty her waste basket, with the stockings included, into a bin where old and useless things were discarded. She dropped the stockings in as though she could get rid of the memory this way and then went back upstairs, angry now at the trembling weakness but not able to do anything about it.
She waited for the light to fade in her room. Maybe as it became dim, as the sun set, as that time came in the evening when the first bulbs filled the buildings with a golden light of the domestic, the trembling would stop. It lingered, though, like a note played in a church that left all of the wood—the timbers and beams and pews—vibrating with that last emotional intent: the touch of the young Russian’s fingers as he tore her stockings, the smell of the cigarette, the sparks at the head of the match on the abrasive surface of the matchbox, contained in memory, even more than at the moment, the frank, ill-meaning atmosphere of the men in the rubble. It was the realization of the essence, in the most personal way, of those actions she had tried to resist those years before the war in Berlin and that haunted
the city as though nothing had happened at all, as though some things are eternal.
She hoped the electric lamp in the corner would make the room warmer, not in temperature but in mood, and as she pulled the small chain on the light fixture, a man knocked at the door.
He gave her an envelope. It had obviously been carried in a pocket and had gotten wet in tropical rain, soaked enough so the ink of her name had run, just as it had probably been held in a hand so covered with dirt as to look like skin with a speckled and gray birthmark.
Dear Armina
,
Of course I have been thinking of you. This thinking of you is a part of me, and I don’t even notice anymore that I try to imagine what you are thinking and how you are feeling, to remember the scent of your skin and hair, to remember your eyes when you make a joke. It is like breathing, and how often during the day do you stop to say, I’m breathing
.
How can I describe what it is like to miss you? When we were together it was as though an invisible film covered the two of us so perfectly that we didn’t notice it, but now your part, the part that went over you, is empty, and I can feel it dragging on the ground behind me, its tug and its airy weight. It is a delicate thing, but it carries an enormous impact. And what could a small sound convey? Imagine, for an instant, the tick of the trap beneath the condemned man. It is like that. When I concentrate on this empty thing I drag around it is both a sound and a sensation, like leaves in the wind. But now, of course, this hush, this rustle, this susurrus is a reminder of how, without you, I am incomplete. And when I am aware of this, when I put it into words, I have the terror of almost dissolving, of being on the edge of vanishing
.
This has been the most difficult part. I am one way when I am with you, but a different man when we are apart, and this sense of losing myself, combined with your absence, makes that rustling, dragging sensation a validation of how alone I am. Well, this is hopelessly
romantic, but if I can’t feel that after what happened on Truk and Palau and other places, if I can’t admit how diminished I am without you, then I am less of a man than I would like to be. My job is not to be reduced by horror, but made more knowledgeable of what is precious
.
But the subject I want to discuss with you is what do I have to offer you after what we have been through? I am convinced that you had moments in which you were left with an animal existence, just eating, enduring, living in the moment of the endless or dreary present. Or maybe not so dreary. Maybe terrifying
.
So, I come to you on this basis: what can I do in the face of the life we have lived over the last years? Perhaps the answer is so deep that I can’t articulate it, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t there. So I want to invoke a memory from a long time ago when we exchanged presents and when these gifts revealed an attachment and understanding so deep that we were in the midst of it without being able to say what it was. How can I convey that understanding when, in the touch of your lips, in that warm, full pressure, the certainty of attachment runs into me like a shock of recognition. Like something already known and just noticed when we are together? And whatever this quality is, it binds us together and makes us better people than when we are apart. I am much less of a man when I am separated from you. So it is this mysterious presence I am offering you, this quality I can’t name but which is there and which makes itself known by its pleasures, its gifts, its potential. It is what we have, and, you know, it isn’t small. It is everything
.
I think of the perfume of your hair, of the trembling in our fingers when the fireflies in the woods glowed with that warm, greenish light. Can you remember that color, that yellow verdant glow, which in its delicacy suggested the unseen, the only felt and suspected, but which in our case is quite real? And this unseen quality is the most keen sense of not being alone. We have had enough ofthat, of existing in that interior discomfort, that turmoil in the darkness when we close our eyes
.
Here a new sheet had been added.
Does this give you any idea of how I feel and what it means that I have now crossed the Pacific and am mailing this letter from San Francisco? It is as though I am approaching the shore of myself. Or of us
.
And I want to say this is not only theoretical. We are practical people, and I want to take some action that is more than words on paper. And what I have done shows the power of beauty, although that may be overstating the case. I went into the jungle on some of the islands in the Pacific with a general, a man who was interested in orchids, and I showed him some he had never seen before (chains of purple blossoms, cascades of petals that look like butterflies with an icy sheen on their wings). This botany, this searching for hidden beauty, was a small thing that helped us both after some of the worst moments
.
When we returned to San Francisco, the general asked if he could do me a favor. Should we go out to dinner, to the top of a hotel with a view of the Pacific (which would have reminded me of you), but I said no. I only wanted one thing. And what was that? he said. I asked if he could arrange air transportation for you to meet me in New York. And, after some maneuvering and a bribe or more than one bribe, and some promises of one sort or another, it is arranged. You will receive a letter in a day or two with a ticket and the necessary paperwork, which of course is sent with what you must know is love, if that word can possibly sum up the feelings that attend this note, Rainer. P.S. I also want to say that no matter what we have seen, or how dreary we feel, no matter how appalled we may be, our sense of beauty returns, like a surprise hidden in the depths. This is what makes us human and gives us hope, and that is what I want to leave with you
.
The light in the room was now golden from the electric lamp, and Armina hoped the power might last a little longer than usual and that the
sense of the domestic would linger. She put the letter on her bed, one sheet of paper stained and running with ink, the other crisp and neat. Her fingers seemed odd, somehow more precise, her gestures untroubled. She realized that the trembling had stopped. The suitcase was under the bed, and she dragged it out with a jerk, opened it, and started to put in her clothes, her few skirts and blouses, an extra pair of shoes, a few books, the package of letters that she had tied together with a piece of string. Outside, when the dark came, the lights pierced it with a steady, warm glow.
Author’s Note
T
he author wishes to express his gratitude for information obtained from Hsi-Huey Liang’s
The Berlin Police Force in the Weimar Republic
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970).
About the Author
C
raig Nova is the award-winning author of twelve novels. His writing has appeared in
Esquire, The Paris Review, The New York Times Magazine, Men’s Journal
, and on
Craignova.com
. He is the Class of 1949 Distinguished Professor of the Humanities, University of North Carolina, Greensboro.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2010 by Craig Nova
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Shaye Areheart Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
Shaye Areheart Books with colophon is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Nova, Craig.
The informer: a novel / Craig Nova. —1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Prostitutes—Fiction. 2. People with disabilities—Fiction. 3. Serial murders—
Fiction. 4. Berlin (Germany)—Fiction. 5. Germany—History—1933–1945—
Fiction. 6. Historical fiction. I. Title.
PS3564.086I54 2010
813’.54—dc22 2009023689
eISBN: 978-0-307-46256-5
v3.0