Shirin will live—not forever, of course, but long enough for you.
A brief intermission
Half an hour later I was beginning to regret turning down Bonnie’s offer of a ride. I’d wanted to be alone, but now I was groaning for a chance to take my shoes off for ten minutes. At this hour there was nowhere to head but the park. It had occurred to me as a remote possibility that Shirin might be there, but this was just a pipe dream born of booze rather than opium. By the time I actually arrived, I had nothing in mind but stretching out on a bench and letting go, and if I couldn’t find an isolated bench, I’d find an isolated glade and let the beetles see how far they could get with putting me underground. In the event, I skipped the isolation and took the bench.
It was my first great lesson in homeless living: If you’re going to go the park-bench route, you’d better be ready to sleep like the dead. I was ready to do that when I crashed at four in the morning, but by seven I only wished! was dead. I was now personally enlightened as to why bums will take booze over food anytime. If somebody had stuck a bottle of screwtop in my hand, they wouldve had a helluva time getting it back.
Around eight I gave up the struggle and limped out in search of coffee, aspirin, and breakfast. The first place I came to was a working-man’s joint, and I looked sufficiently wasted that they just pretended I was invisible till I showed them some money. I soaked up some caffeine, some painkiller, and as many carbohydrates as I could get into my system and tried to figure out my next move. If my divination was to be trusted, I knew where Shirin was not: She was not buried under a million tons of rubble at the site of the Schauspielhaus Wahnfried.
City officials claimed the theater was empty when it blew up, but this was improbable, to say the least. If the theater was empty, why would Herr Reichmann bother to blow it up? No, Shirin was in the theater when it blew up but somehow managed to escape. Of course there was an escape route there—the bomb shelter running from the sub-subcellar of the theater to an adjacent government building. I hadn’t overlooked the existence of the shelter, I just hadn’t figured it into my reconstruction of the event, because you can’t outrun a bomb blast. When, without warning, a ceiling explosively collapses on you, the best reflexes in the world will not get you up out of a chair—much less up out of a chair and into a shelter four paces away. Only in the movies do things like this happen in slow motion. Of course, the operative words here are “without warning.” If someone had been on hand to give her a few seconds of warning, then this would account for her survival. And of course there was someone on hand to give her a warning—me, though naturally I have no recollection of it, if that’s what happened.
/> Even if all this supposing was valid, I still only knew where Shirin was not to be found. But it did give me a new place to start.
Succes fou
The government building was there, it was open, and people were dragging around in the dull way people do in government buildings all over the world. The stairs down to the subbasement were also still there, as was the middle-aged guardian at his desk. He watched me approach with a suspicious squint appropriate for someone he didn’t recognize. I wasn’t interested in him, I was interested in the door to the bomb shelter, which was now very securely barricaded against access, with a pair of two-by-fours screwed into place across it. I went over to inspect it, and the guardian barked at me in German, which I ignored.
I left after a minute to think things over. The workmanlike way to remove the barricade would be with a screwdriver, but I didn’t think the watchdog would allow me the leisure for that. The fastest way to remove it would be with a power saw, but I didn’t think the watchdog would help me find an electrical outlet. The fairly quick, nasty way to remove it would be with a crowbar, and I figured I could get that done before the watchdog managed to summon reinforcements. In retrospect, all this reasoning sounds completely cuckoo, but at the time, hungover, still jet-lagged, and operating on three hours of sleep on a park bench, I judged it a perfectly sensible and appropriate response to the situation. I returned in an hour with a pry bar—not quite a traditional crow, but one I thought would do the trick—cunningly hidden in the sleeve of my jacket. When I reached the barricade, I whipped it out, jammed it into place, and knew in a millisecond how wrong I was. For all the effect I was able to produce, I might as well have been trying to pry a beam off the Eiffel Tower.
The guardian was already summoning help, but he didn’t stop at that. After hanging up the phone, he marched over and put me in a choke hold. Luckily for me, it wasn’t in his mind to strangle me but only to immobilize me till help arrived. This gave me plenty of time to study what was in front of my nose, which just happened to be a name and a phone number neatly engraved in the wood of the top beam of the barricade—and it was the name and number I’d crossed the Atlantic to find.
When the cavalry finally arrived, it included one person who understood enough English to be persuaded that I was a harmless lunatic who would now go far away, never to return, leaving my pry bar behind.
Reunion
I almost didn’t recognize Shirin when she came out of Michael’s charming little chalet-in-the-woods twenty-odd kilometers west of Radenau. The scarlet lupus butterfly across her face had faded to almost nothing, signaling a remarkable remission, however temporary.
It was an awkward moment. Neither of us knew quite how to play it or even quite how we wanted to play it. In the end, we made it a comradely hug that we pretended had to be gotten through so we could get down to the important business of bringing each other up to date.
Driving me to the chalet, Michael had already told me most of it. My reconstruction of events at the theater was accurate enough not to need further elaboration here. Thanks to the warning shouts I was able to deliver, Shirin, Michael, Frau Hartmann, and Monika Teitel were halfway across the bomb shelter when the blast occurred. They produced a sensation when they emerged in a cloud of dust in the subbasement of the adjacent government building, but there was enough confusion so that they were able to slip away without being detained at the scene. As told by Michael as we drove to the chalet, Shirin had wanted to return to search for me in the rubble, but the others had managed to talk her out of such folly. As told by Shirin in her version, it was Michael who had wanted to return to search for me in the rubble.
Everyone had agreed it was time to run for cover and lie low for a while. The group was sharply divided by the news of my survival. For some, the fact that I hadn’t died confirmed my guilt. For others (Shirin and Michael, mainly), the fact that I almost died confirmed my innocence. The Teitels, convinced that Shirin should be protected from her own bad judgment, had kept to themselves the fact that I’d called them from the States. Neither Bonnie nor Albrecht had been in the theater at the time of the explosion and neither knew where Shirin was—or even that she was alive.
Neither Shirin nor Michael had ever heard of a sleight-of-hand artist named Giinter.
• • •
That brings this diary up to the present moment.
The household is governed by a strange rule: We don’t talk about what’s next. Michael is single, the only offspring of fairly well-off parents, without dependents; we have no financial worries.
It’s too early to tell if Shirin and I are moving toward anything more than we presently have. Her reserve is profound, as is her need to be independent and unpitied. Time will tell.
I’m in no hurry.
Undated
Back to the burrow
As I mentioned earlier, I entrusted to a friend the tape of my recent conversation with Fr. Lulfre. I just got word from this friend that his apartment was broken into and ransacked two days ago, and the tape cassette is now gone. I’d urged him in the strongest possible terms to make a copy for safe deposit somewhere else, but of course he hadn’t gotten around to it. My fault, for not telling him it was a matter of life and death. My fault, for not checking up on him. My fault, for still being too trusting.
Shirin and I must now leave Michael to his woodsy retreat and go truly underground. He’ll be safe enough when we’re gone, because neither Fr. Lulfre nor Herr Reichmann really understands what this is all about.
Where do you come in?
I end as I began, wondering if there was ever a diarist who wasn’t in fact writing for posterity, who didn’t secretly hope that his or her (oh-so-carefully hidden) words would one day be found and cherished. In any case, if there are such self-effacing paragons, I’m not one of them. From the beginning, I knew I was writing with the possibility of being read by others—by you, in fact.
From the first episode of my adventure—that initial conversation with Fr. Lulfre—I guessed something was afoot that would eventually have to be shared with a wider audience than is found inside my head. To put it bluntly: Though I tried to pretend otherwise, I knew I was making a record here, and I wouldn’t have kept at it so diligently otherwise.