Berlin Cantata by Jeffrey Lewis

patent, you know.”
    â€œThen fuck off.”
    He was so skinny he looked deflated to me then. Or he could have been both skinny and deflated, all that was left of him was bones and sorrow.
    â€œCome back. What shit. This is stupid,” I said. Suddenly it sounded to me like I was talking to a woman. The insane things you say to get her back.
    But I did want Richard to come back, despite all my pronouncements about open doors. He had always been my favorite. He’d become like a mascot. And I hadn’t even known it.
    He shook his head, or it seemed to shake itself, like the head of a raggedy doll. He disappeared into the maw of the sour apartment. I waited longer than I would care to admit for him to change his mind.
    In due course I conducted interviews and recruited a new fourth member for our crew. Günther was an efficient little savage whose specialties were carburetors and, as I later learned, harassing Africans on the U-Bahn. Skin Enterprises continued its mission of showing how the most discontented elements of the Eastern citizenry might yet be brought into the western settlement, and of course how a Jew could learn to love his enemies for fun and profit.
    I wrote more columns about it all, especially when I realized the columns worked as advertising for the cars. But I never wrote a word, until now, about Richard, whom I found I continued to miss. It wasn’t to protect him that I kept that silence. I may have been too successful in the love-thine-enemies area. I didn’t want the world to think I was a wuss.

HOLLY ANHOLT
    Boyfriend
    I ’ LL SAY ONE THING more about Nils, mention one thing more, something he said the night we met, at Oksana and Herbert’s party. It wasn’t only his words but their jagged, discontinuous appearance, they connected so tenuously to our trite back-and-forth up till then that they must have been waiting there all along, a certain pressure building, like a chick ready to come out of its shell, ready-or-not-here-I-come. We’d been talking about my fleabag hotel, where as a reporter he’d once covered a murder. Nils said: “You know the dirty secret of every professional in Germany today? That if it wasn’t for the mass murder of the Jews, half of us wouldn’t have a job.”
    He said it very calmly, very conversationally, as if it were no big deal, as if he’d hardly changed the subject. Maybe he hadn’t, really. Reporters, professions, his life, his career. Of course I didn’t know what to say.
    I caught his squint, then averted my glance, like a reluctant witness to a crime. My silence forced him to go on.
    â€œAnd how many would give their job up, if the Jews could come back to life? It’s what we call a competitive advantage, to be alive.”
    â€œDo you think about it?” I lamely asked, wanting to help, wanting to say anything at all.
    He said: “You don’t have to think about something when it’s in the air you breathe. There are ghosts around. Ghost doctors and ghost lawyers and ghost professors and ghost businessmen and ghost editors and ghost artists and ghost actors and ghost biologists and chemists, and ghost reporters. All you have to do is dream about them.”
    And: “We can even ask ourselves, we German professionals and intellectuals and artists of the post-war: are we doing as good a job as those who are missing would have done? Or is it even possible, our consciences pricked, that we’re doing a better job, or anyway a different job, or, heaven help us, a more German job?”
    He was still in that conversational voice, steady, a little bit steely, as if at cost to him somewhere along the line he’d learned the secret of preserving emotion in the amber of facts.
    So that’s my story and I’m sticking to it, of how I became sure that Nils would be my boyfriend. Later, after I met his friend David, I pointed out to Nils that his best friend David was a