recalling my pre-self in fetal state, all I wanted was to make peace with my legs, in fetal position and craning at the screen I couldn’t follow a word of this un-subtitled American film, my English isn’t good enough for me to do without subtitles and even with subtitles I wouldn’t have understood a thing for I don’t have enough German to follow German subtitles or only haltingly and frankly to infantile level, and even if I’d been perfectly able to understand the film I’d have understood nothing, I couldn’t have got myself engrossed in it being too involved with my legs and sounds of crunching popcorn, not to mention my fundamental not-caring. I did make a few attempts to understand the film, didn’t want to watch it without caring from the start, more than anything fearing this natural tendency of mine of which I’m now aware thanks to my mother-in-law that day we played our unnatural tennis match, I focused on the images applying maximum concentration in order to extract data towards a vision of the whole, did my best to appreciate the gist, envisaged the plot and intention but in the end understood nothing because of my legs and my uncaring nature which I always factor in too late. It was a spy flick with deserts and mosques, jeeps and tanks, eastern extremists and big hotels, GIs and terrorists, at the end a young man in the prime of life launched his speedboat straight at an oil tanker while praying to God, he could just as well have blown himself to smithereens in Café Einstein or the Sony Center but this was cinema. The lights went up. I was free to let go of my legs, disentangle them, to the pianist I said thanks for the film sesh, I can only see this kind of film with you, and the pianist laughed loudly, I don’t know if he was being polite or if I was funny but it was true, I’d never have seen that kind of film without the pianist, I needed him so I could see it, but the film increased the distance between the pianist and me, after the tanker’s final explosion I was floored, not because of the explosion though it was big enough to bring down any girl of my type, but because of the pianist’s laugh. That laugh marked precisely the beginning of the end, I knew at that moment that this laughter was the very most the pianist could give me and that we would go downhill from here, from the laugh onwards I would always say too much whatever I said, even if it tickled the pianist at the time, for I’d already talked a deal too much at the Einstein and the Kaiser Café and anything I might say could never overwrite everything I’d said before but would accumulate to it, much too much said indeed even before I asked the pianist to excuse my chatter, entschuldige, ich habe zu viel gesprochen, not at all, it’s quite all right the pianist had replied in French but he had nevertheless taken me to the cinema in the Sony Center.
If I hadn’t been standing right by the Sony Center when he’d called this would have been a different story, I thought in the plane. The significance of the place came back to me thanks to Thomas Mann, who believed deeply in the power of time and place, of ambient conditions, as the pianist had pointed out, knowing the Manns father and son like the back of his hand, in other words knowing the Mann spirit as shared by the whole Mann family, Venice and its temporal conditions can change a man, the pianist had said during the conference at the Humboldt University, the sanatorium alters you from top to bottom, the effects of the Mediterranean and the North seas are not identical, exile in America transforms you, you’re different in Davos than in Hamburg, different in Venice than in Munich, in Munich than in Zurich and in Zurich than in Pacific Palisades. Yet the pianist had not included the Sony Center in his vision, he couldn’t see himself evolving positively inside this symbol of capital writ large, I understood straight away though too late. Actually he had imagined another place and so another climate, the place determines consequent conditions, he’d talked about Brecht’s house, would indeed have felt much better in Brecht’s house than in the Sony Center’s Kaiser Café, so much better that, at the Einstein, he’d proposed our next rendezvous be at Brecht’s house, to spend an evening in that house nowhere else, we could’ve gone for a stroll round the Dorotheenstadt cemetery which is next door, the cemetery where Brecht himself is buried, he’d suggested a little stroll in the cemetery, there’s no comparison with the Sony Center, besides at no point had he thought of going for a wander in the Sony Center yet here he was against his will, nothing to do here but go to the cinema, the only place in the whole Sony Center where you can forget the Sony Center, forget both the Center and Sony the multi-national, while at Brecht’s house it would be nonsense to forget the house where Brecht lived or Brecht himself and sensible rather not to forget, everything being quite charming here, Brecht’s tables and chairs, Brecht’s unfussy decoration, Brecht’s simple garden, Helene Weigel’s homely cooking which was Brecht’s food, the ambiance of Brecht’s cellar and the warm, intimate ambiance with Brecht smoking and drinking into the small hours, reciting poems and drawing on the tablecloth. No one would ever think of planting a bomb in Brecht’s house, none of the hubris of a United States of Germany in this house. Next door you can visit the cemetery where Brecht, Helene Weigel and all their friends are buried, the pianist said, Brecht’s philosopher friends, the musician friends along with the poet friends, there’s a crowd of them in
