The Foreign Correspondent

He looked up, to see Delahanty strolling toward his desk, hands in pockets. At work, the bureau chief looked like a workman-a consummately rumpled workman: jacket off, sleeves rolled up, collar points bent, trousers baggy and worn low beneath a big belly. He half-sat on the edge of Weisz’s desk and said, “Carlo, my oldest and dearest friend…”

“Yes?”

“You’ll be pleased to hear that Eric Wolf is getting married.”

“Oh? That’s nice.”

“Very nice indeed. Going back to London, he is, to wed his sweetie and carry her off for a honeymoon in Cornwall.”

“A long honeymoon?”

“Two weeks. Which leaves Berlin uncovered, of course.”

“When do you want me there?”

“The third of March.”

Weisz nodded. “I’ll be there,” he said.

Delahanty stood. “We’re grateful, laddie. With Eric gone, you’re my best German speaker. You know the drill: they’ll take you out to eat, feed you propaganda, you’ll file, we won’t publish, but, if I don’t cover, that little weasel will start a war on me, just for spite, and we wouldn’t want that, would we.”

The Cinema Desargues was not on the rue Desargues, not quite. It was down at the end of an alley, in what had once been a garage-twenty wooden folding chairs, a bedsheetlike screen hung from the ceiling. The owner, a sour-faced gnome wearing a yarmulke, took the money, then ran the film from a chair tilted back against the wall. He watched the movie in a kind of trance, the smoke from his cigarette drifting through the blue light beamed at the screen, while the dialogue crackled above the hiss of the sound track and the rhythmic whir of the projector.

In 1932, Italy is still in the grip of the Depression, so nobody comes to stay at l’albergo del bosco-the inn of the forest, near a village outside of Naples. The innkeeper, with five daughters, is beset by debt collectors and so gives the last of his savings to the local marchese for safekeeping. But, through a misunderstanding, the marchese, very decayed nobility and no richer than the innkeeper, donates the money to charity. Accidentally learning of his error-the innkeeper is a proud fellow and pretends he wanted to give the money away-the marchese sells his last two family portraits, then pays the innkeeper to hold a grand feast for the poor people of the village.

Not so bad, it kept Weisz’s interest. The cameraman was good, very good, even in black and white, so the hills and meadows, tall grass swaying in the wind, the little white road bordered by poplars, the lovely Neapolitan sky, looked very real to Weisz. He knew this place, or places like it. He knew the village-its dry fountain with a crumbling rim, its tenements shadowing the narrow street, and its people-the postman, the women in kerchiefs. He knew the marchese‘s villa, tiles fallen from the roof stacked hopefully by the door, the old servant, not paid for years. Sentimental Italy, Weisz thought, every frame of it. And the music was also very good- vaguely operatic, lyrical, sweet. Really very sentimental, Weisz thought, the Italy of dreams, or poems. Still, it broke his heart. As he walked up the aisle toward the door, the owner stared at him for a moment, this man in a good dark overcoat, glasses in one hand, the index finger of the other touching the corners of his eyes.

Citizen of the Night

3 MARCH, 1939.

Weisz had taken a compartment in a wagon-lit on the night train to Berlin, leaving at seven from the Gare du Nord, arriving Berlin at midday. A restless sleeper at best, he had spent the hours waking and dozing, staring out the window when the train stopped at the stations-Dortmund, Bielefeld-along the way. After midnight, the floodlit platforms were silent and deserted, only the occasional passenger or railway porter, now and then a policeman with a leashed Alsatian shepherd, their breaths steaming in the icy German air.

On the night he’d had drinks with Mr. Brown, he’d thought about Christa Zameny, his former lover, for a long time. Married three years earlier, in Germany, she was now beyond his reach, their elaborate afternoons together destined to remain a remembered love affair. Still, when Delahanty had ordered him to Berlin, he’d looked her up in his address book, and considered writing her a note. She’d sent him the address in a farewell letter, telling him of her marriage to von Schirren, telling him that it was, at this point in her life, the best thing for her. We will never see each other again, she’d meant. Followed, in the final paragraph, by her new address, where he would never see her again. Some love affairs die, he thought, others stop.

Now, at the Adlon, he would sleep for an hour or two, preparing for rest by unpacking his valise, stripping down to his underwear, hanging his suit and shirt in the closet, turning down the bedspread, and opening the Adlon’s stationery folder on the mahogany desk. A fine hotel, the Adlon, Berlin’s best, with such fine paper and envelopes, the hotel’s name and address in elegant gold script. Life was made easy for a guest here, one could write a note to an acquaintance, seal it in a thick creamy envelope, and summon the hall porter, who would provide a stamp and mail it off. So very easy, really. And Berlin’s postal system was fast, and efficient. Before ten o’clock on the following day, a delicate and very reserved little jingle from the telephone. Weisz sprang like a cat-there would be no second ring.

At four-thirty in the afternoon, the bar at the Adlon was almost empty. Dark and plush, it was not so very different from the Ritz-upholstered chairs, low drink tables. A fat man with a Nazi party pin in his lapel played Cole Porter on a white piano. Weisz ordered a cognac, then another. Perhaps she wouldn’t come, perhaps, at the last minute, she couldn’t. Her voice had been cool and courteous on the phone-it crossed his mind that she was not alone when she made the call. How thoughtful of him to write. Was he well? Oh, a drink? At the hotel? Well, she didn’t know, at four-thirty perhaps, she was not really sure, a terribly busy day, but she would try, so thoughtful of him to write.

This was the voice, and the manner, of an aristocrat. The sheltered child of an adoring father, a Hungarian noble, and a distant mother, the daughter of a German banker, she’d been raised by governesses in the Charlottenburg district of Berlin, attended boarding schools in England and Switzerland, then university in Jena. She wrote imagist poetry, often in French, privately published. And found ways, after graduating, to live beyond wealth- for a time managed a string quartet, served on the board of a school for deaf children.

They’d met in Trieste, in the summer of 1933, at a loud and drunken party, she with friends on a yacht, cruising the Adriatic. Thirty-seven when the love affair began, she maintained a style conceived in Berlin’s, and her own, twenties: very erotic woman costumed as very severe man. Black chalk-stripe suit, white shirt, sober tie, chestnut hair worn short, except in front, where it was cut on a sharp bias and pointed down at one eye. Sometimes, at the extreme of the style, she pomaded her hair and combed it back behind her ears. She had smooth, fair skin, a high forehead, wore no makeup-only a faint touch of seemingly colorless lipstick. A face more striking than pretty, with all its character in the eyes: green and pensive, concentrated, fearless, and penetrating.

The entry to the Adlon bar was up three marble steps, through a pair of leather-sheathed doors with portholes, and, when they parted, and Weisz turned to see who it was, his heart soared. Not so long after that, maybe fifteen minutes, a waiter approached the table, collected a large tip, half a cognac, and half a champagne cocktail.

It wasn’t only the heart that absence made grow fonder.

Outside the window, Berlin in the halftones of its winter twilight, inside the room, amid the snarled and tumbled wreckage of the bed linen, Weisz and Christa lay flopped back on the pillows, catching their breath. He raised up on one elbow, put three fingers on the hollow at the base of her throat, then traced her center down to the end. For a moment, she closed her eyes, a very faint smile on her lips. “You have,” he said, “red knees.”

She had a look. “So I do. You’re surprised?”

“Well, no.”

He moved his hand a little, then let it rest.

She laid a hand on top of his.

He looked at her for a long time.

“So, what do you see?”