Then We Take Berlin Read Free Page B

translation from the fifties.
    “I don’t know this book.”
    “I’ve been meaning to read it for years. An old friend once told me that if he’d read it at sixteen his life would have been totally different.”
    “Did you buy anything American?”
    “Keep trawling.”
    She pulled out Kerouac’s Lonesome Traveler and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.
    “Indeed you did. In fact you may well have polarised the nation in a single bag. Frank thinks all these Beats and bums are pretty much the Antichrist. America in its decadence, heading for addiction and misery and death. To say nothing of homosexuality. I doubt there’s anything Frank hates more than faggots.”
    “And the other one?”
    “Oh . . . America looks at something it’s done so very very badly and . . . and manages to redeem itself. Childhood threatened, childhood challenged and somehow innocence restored. Huck Finn, revisited. The nigger didn’t do it and the boogeyman at the dark end of the street really isn’t the boogeyman. And the guy in that white suit is your father. We all think better of ourselves after we read it. Besides, I could believe anything Gregory Peck says. I’d vote for him for president. I’d vote for the guy in the white suit.”
    The waiter set down the cocktails. Wilderness sipped at his and asked her what was in it.
    “Mostly they just add lemon juice to whiskey, maybe a hint of sugar.”
    “Pure heresy in Scotland.”
    “That’s OK, they make it with Kentucky bourbon. Do you actually like it?”
    “Oh, I could get used to it. There’s a lot about New York I could get used to.”
    When it came to discussing a meal, each of them turned around and looked around.
    “We’re still the only people here,” Wilderness said.
    “It’s Wednesday. Let’s go somewhere where it isn’t Wednesday.”
    Outside, Dorothy’s hand up for a cab, Wilderness said, “Let’s take the subway. I’ve never been on the subway.”
    “Are you kidding?”
    “No. It just didn’t feel right. I caught one cab today and for the rest I just walked. The subway felt like it needed a guide.”
    She steered him over to Park Avenue. To the subway station at 23rd, the IRT Lexington Avenue local to Brooklyn Bridge. It was like whiskey sour, he could get used to it. The rattle and the roar, the pure, shrill screech of metal on metal as the train pulled into Union Square.
    Walking down the side of the bridge, Wilderness began to think of New York as a city in the sky. Not simply the scale . . . more the perfection, although that was far from being precisely what he meant as he told her over dinner in a tiny restaurant boasting “the oldest bar in New York,” at the corner of Water Street.
    “London’s far older than New York, but . . . all the bomb damage. The rubble sat around for years. I thought we’d look that way for ever. London’s like a bad set of teeth. There are gaps, there are bad dental bridges just about holding on and there are rotting stumps that needed to be pulled ages ago.”
    “I’ve never been to London,” she said. “And I get the feeling I’m going to have difficulty holding on to the dream.”
    “I’ll try not to ruin it for you. But . . .”
    “But you will anyway?”
    He shrugged this off. It was a thought so hard-won it had to be uttered.
    “Now there’s new buildings—ugly, flat, featureless new buildings going up at a rate of knots. Paternoster Square, the district around St. Paul’s has gone from piles of rubble to a concrete nightmare. London lives with the old barbarism of the Blitz and the new barbarism of 1960s architecture fighting it out at street level. New York . . . the old and the new seem to sit together so much better. It seems like an American talent. One we don’t have back home. And I never realised New York would seem quite so old.”
    “You’re surprised to find New York is old?”
    “Nothing has surprised me more in the last two days.”
    “And you just fell for the bridge,