These Dreams of You (24 page)

H
e waves this away like it's the least sensible thing anyone has said in a while. “Oh but I learned long ago I'm not who I think I am, I'm who the public thinks I am or I'm not anyone, am I? I steal
everything
, don't I? And someday, somebody shall steal
me
—put me in a movie or novel and,” he cackles maniacally, “I'll be bloody indignant!” He says, “Tell me, luv, if I may ask. Where are your people from?”

“Ethiopia,” she says.

“Truly? That's fantastic! Have you ever been?”

“I was two when my parents moved me and my brother to London. I went back for about a week, eight years ago.”

“Fantastic, fantastic,” he keeps muttering, “how perfect it is, then, that you're from there and now you're here.”

“Perfect?”

“Abyssinia! The beginning of time, Ethiopia, and L.A. is the end of time, and this,” Berlin at his fingertips, “is time in the crosshairs, where the latitudes intersect.”

“On what map?”

“Not any map you
look at
, Jasmine,” he says, “the map you hear. Come on, don't you like me by now? A little?”

“I've actually come to quite like you.”

“There, you see? I'm so very, very glad to hear it,” he says so wholeheartedly that she can't help being moved.

“You're not a Nazi,” she points out.

“No. Thank you.” He picks up the thick novel again. “I'll never live that down and,” he says quietly, “probably don't deserve to.”

“Probably not.”

“Well, no more headline chasing for me, for a while. I'm laying low. An Old World man who plunged into the heart of the New and it almost destroyed him.” He tosses the paperback to her. “Try not worrying too much what the words mean. They're just notes. It's all really about the Old World discovering the New and waving goodbye to itself.”

H
as he forgotten that on the opening blank page of the paperback he's drawn a picture of her, one day as he sat in the recording studio gazing out the window at a couple by the Wall? He was a painter once, back before the music, before he concluded there was no future in painting. Or does he remember perfectly well and, very calculatedly, finds this an off-handed way of showing her? Whichever: Later when she opens the book she can see that the sketch on the inside is unmistakably her, in all her shades of brown but for the misplaced gray of her eyes.

She doesn't remember him drawing her, doesn't remember being in the recording studio when he did it. Was it absent-minded on his part, his eyes happening to fall on her as his thoughts drifted; or if she wasn't in his presence, was it therefore more conscious? If she wasn't within sight, then she would have to have been on his mind. She has no particular interest in him that way and hasn't been aware that he has any in her; she has no interest in any of them—him or Jim or the Professor—and still hasn't on the night that it happens, she and the three of them. But she doesn't give the book back and in a few months when she leaves on the run she'll take it, with the sketch of her on the front page and carrying inside her belly the daughter named, by coincidence perhaps, since she never really reads the book, after the woman who voices the century's greatest yes.

B
ut if there's truly truth in wine then she must wonder what really she feels on the night it happens, because there's so much wine that night, Jim having brought up from the club in Kreuzberg five bottles of a French vintage, trying hard as he is to stay away from the smack. And if there's not the wine then there's the marsh of the city in late summer, the body of Berlin swathed in ponds, the Havel and Spree rivers overflowing until by the fourth bottle the waters are splashing over the window sills of the upper flat above the Turkish garage.

By the fifth bottle Jasmine can perfectly see the submerged garage below, Turkish men and women and children floating among the automotive shrapnel. The sirens of distant Neuköln drone in the fog, yearning for the space age. About the time that Jasmine takes off her clothes and lies across one bed or another in one room or another of the flat, wrapping her naked body in a string of pale-blue beads until she's rendered herself Berlin and its ponds, made herself into the city, with the hinge where her thighs meet rendered the Wall mined with bombs, it's occurred to her that Jim somehow has hallucinogized the wine.

S
he's shocked at herself. She doesn't know herself at this moment, or what to make of the person she is right now; she's never done this before or anything remotely like it, even in her rock and roll life in L.A. and London where she was conspicuous for her sexual reserve. Istanbul hashish ground to a fine powder, she thinks, whispering, “Jim, Jim, you bastard,” in the dark from one bed or the other in one room or the other, and someone whispers back, How's that, luv? or is it the Professor, whom she immediately knows in the intuition born of such wickedness is the most depraved of all. “That you?” she murmurs again but can't be certain to whom. As the song that snakes up the center of her to the back of her mouth shifts from the alien's croon to the iguana's deeper baritone, the touch must be the time traveler's, fingers spinning her red dial forward to the future—or perhaps she succumbs to her assumptions too easily, perhaps the Professor sings and the alien touches . . . until in the dark she's only confused. When it's over, swollen from their occupation and listening to the cascade of white waves inside her like the lapping of the Spree at the garage below, she muses dreamily
ah well they'll sort it all out down there, won't they?
and a few hours later, all tides receded, Schöneberg streets revealing barely a drop of the night's flood, she wanders the flat in blue morning light looking at each of the three men passed out on their beds in their rooms and wondering which of them made it across the Wall first, when she already knows quite certainly that she's pregnant with Molly.

I
t isn't only because the paternity is destined to be ever so unspecific. Jasmine would just as soon believe that among the three men, one is as much the father as the other. It isn't because any of them would reject her or paternity; rather it's because any or all might accept paternity that she leaves. This is something she prefers to do on her own.

She begins planning her getaway the afternoon that she and the two singers are driving down the Ku'damm and the crimson spaceman behind the wheel of the car spots out of the corner of his eye a stranger in the street getting in another car—
who
, will never exactly be clear. To an extent, Jasmine realizes, she's responsible: Flushed with some soup of hormones, bad dreams, unfounded premonitions and half-digested newspaper articles, she's convinced for a split moment that the stranger getting in the car is the assassin himself, the man behind the .22-caliber gun she read in the newspaper some months ago would be up for parole in five years. “It's him!” she cries, surprising herself.

“Yes!” agrees the spaceman next to her. “It is!”

W
hat? She looks over. “It
is
him!” he says again, by which he means a dealer who sold him bad drugs or a businessman who cheated him in a contract or someone who slept with his wife (whom he isn't sleeping with anymore anyway)—none of them necessarily more or less likely than the man Jasmine has mistaken the stranger for; in fact the man in the street is a cabbie, getting in his taxi. Regardless, he's the object of no small ire, as becomes clear when calmly, with the tremendous focus and determination that the driver next to her brings to anything he wants to, he aims his car at the other and plows into it.

Jim cries out from the back. Of course there's an outburst from the surrounding throng on the busy boulevard and particularly from the cabbie, who leaps from his taxi and then, mid-protest, bolts, leaving the singer with the bright red hair to reverse the car, back up and then plow into the other again, and to keep doing it again and again. In the passenger seat in front, Jasmine grabs her belly so instinctively and protectively that had either man noticed, immediately he would have known; but the driver is only intent on demolishing the other car even as he demolishes his own, and his cohort in back is only intent on surviving the onslaught. “Stop!” is all she can keep saying.

T
he singer has brought with him back from L.A. a new-world madness to mix with the old-world's. “Don't tell me I'm not insane,” he says to her the next blue morning, not unlike the one when she knew she was pregnant; she finds him standing in a window muttering.

“Right,” she says.

“I know about insanity, don't I,” he says matter-of-factly, “I have a brother who's insane, it runs in the family. My good fortune was I found a method for my madness,” and he looks at her and says, “I'm going to be the first rock star assassinated.”

“Brilliant,” she sputters, “we're grabbing headlines again, are we?”

“It's not a romantic notion,” he insists.

“Look here,” she says, “I won't try to tell you about insanity if you don't try to tell me about assassinations. And just how disappointed will you be, mate,” she adds scornfully, “if it doesn't happen?” But she feels the chill, and when she leaves forty-eight hours later, the only thing she takes that doesn't belong to her is the paperback with the portrait of her that he drew, some mysterious moment when she wasn't looking.

She means to have her daughter in London but gets as far as Paris and a flat in Montparnasse. A New Jersey punk poetess' record plays through the window of another apartment across the courtyard. No sooner has Molly slipped into welcoming hands than the midwife holds her up astonished at the hum from her little body; already the baby transmits on Molly frequency. For six months she has her mother's gray eyes, before they turn brown.

If no one can be sure where the frequency comes from, it makes sense anyway for Jasmine to try and return Molly to its source. Fifteen months after her daughter's birth, the little girl already walking adeptly, the mother spots a familiar redheaded rock star coming out of a hotel on the rue des Beaux Arts off St. Germain-des-Prés, and she pivots, sliding around the corner of rue Bonaparte just as he turns to do a double-take. Some mysterious music from some unknown place has gotten his attention. The next day from the window she spots him in the street below as though searching, and she lets loose the curtain from her fingers just as he looks up; she hurls a blanket over the child to smother her broadcast. The next morning the girl finds outside her door a small box.

D
isregarding her mother's standing directive about answering doors to strange people and small boxes, the girl says, “Mum?” lifting the box's contents in her two small hands: the small camera from Berlin that catches images and strands them mid-air on their way to film.

When they move back to Berlin, taking a flat in Schöneberg not far from the one where Jasmine lived before, the small girl clicks ghost pictures from Checkpoint Charlie to the Branden­burg Gate. Sometimes the pictures themselves are ghosts, disappearing into the electric ether; sometimes the pictures are of ghosts, people who aren't there when she looks up from the camera. Sometimes the strangers in her pictures are ghosts of the past, sometimes they're ghosts of a future the girl may or may not know. Everywhere she goes, she trails visual octaves looking for a home; for years the only thing she prizes more is a paperback that her mother stole, with a drawing of her inside.

Not far from Checkpoint Charlie, near what used to be a recording studio and, before that, an old movie studio, a southern part of the Wall unravels into a stone labyrinth between east and west, provoking confusion on both sides. Lovers meet there and children play, and when Molly's mother takes her to it, the child hides in the maze of concrete, some of the passages sheltered by the debris of surrounding construction, others made blue tunnels by the sky above. Molly winds through the maze to the center and her mother always finds her, and only when Molly is older does she understand that Jasmine follows her music, left by the child like breadcrumbs.

R
aised among Turks and Muslims, every now and then the girl goes to the local mosque where the constant humming from her is frowned upon. At the age of twelve she's there at the Wall's fall, taking pictures of people dancing along the edge, wine bottles in hand, her own small tune filling the pauses of Beethoven's Ode to Joy.

Like everyone who's grown up in Berlin, she feels the sense of liberation, as a line down the center of the century is erased and replaced by a hole. The fallen wall is the city's ghost limb, history an amputee that feels an appendage no longer there; but with the fall, something dark is unleashed along with the dream. Even the girl feels the shift in sentiment. When the army of skinheads that calls itself the Pale Flame marches down the Unter den Linden and screams at the mother watching from the sidewalk with her young teenage daughter—who already has the body of a woman—Molly is old enough to understand what foreboding is.

I
s it the arc of the imagination bending back to history, or just coincidence the night that she seals her mother's fate? Molly enters a U-Bahn station near what used to be Checkpoint Charlie, not far from the Hansa recording studio, when she comes upon members of the Pale Flame beating a middle-aged man in the street. She darts into the shadows nearby, thanking the night for the color of her skin. Developed at sixteen years old and taught by her mother to keep herself covered and wary of male crowds, she's terrified, and only when the skinheads finish with the man in the street and leave him lying crumpled there does she run to him.

She hasn't seen a dead body before so she can't be certain about this one, but if this isn't dead then it ought to be what dead looks like. Kneeling by him, clutching all her papers and books, she barely can bring herself to whisper to him, afraid she'll make a sound, when to her horror she hears the song that's coming through her body grow louder, like someone has turned up her volume.

The body in the street stirs. She's so startled that she jumps back and flees, dropping by his side the old battered paperback with the drawing of her mother.

A few years ago, the first time she picked up the book, it wasn't her mother's picture she noticed. Molly just had turned twelve and it was the autumn the Wall fell and she still remembers, coming through the window of the flat where they lived, the music in the distance so celebratory and defiant that it drowned out her own; she picked up the paperback and there cascaded from its pages a folded newspaper clipping from more than two decades before. The girl stood in the middle of the flat scrutinizing the face of the man in the grainy newsprint photo when an astounded Jasmine said, “Where did you get that?”

The way she said it, the daughter thought she had done something wrong. “It was in the book,” Molly said, frightened.

Jasmine had no idea how the clipping got there. She had looked for it everywhere before the book ever came into her vicinity or possession. Something strange happened in this moment that Molly discovered the clipping: When Jasmine reached for it, instinctively the twelve-year-old pulled it back. “Give it,” Jasmine said quietly.

Molly looked again at the man in the photo. “He's very sad,” she said to her mother.

“Yes,” Jasmine said and turned toward the music coming through the window from the Wall. “He would have liked to be here now, to see this . . . and to hear it,” and she smiled, “though he never knew much about music.”