Red Pill Read online

  I hesitated on the sidewalk. I wondered how far it was to the U-Bahn. Anton could tell that I was about to slip off the hook. “Don’t be a pussy,” he said. “Come inside or stay in the dark.” So much of what he said had that particular tone, that suggestion of double meaning. Come inside or stay in the dark, as if he were about to initiate me into a mystery, offer me the red pill. What the hell, I thought. I was hungry. As we walked in, we were hit by heat and smoke and the mouthwatering smell of lamb cooking on a charcoal grill. The room was decorated in blue and white tile, and packed with men sitting on plastic garden chairs, smoking and drinking beer and watching a football game on a screen mounted on the wall. A harassed-looking waiter took us to the back, where a table with no view was still free.

  As we sat down, Anton’s friends arrived, a couple in their thirties. He was heavyset and bearded, his features squashed together in the middle of a broad, high-cheekboned face. As he took off his cap I saw that his hair was shaved into a foppish undercut, much like Anton’s. His partner was the kind of well-groomed blonde you see a lot in New York, rigorously skinny, fashionably but conservatively dressed, in the way that Rei had once characterized to me as “calculated to appeal to the crucial forty-plus finance demographic.” She kissed Anton’s cheek. They put their hands on each other in a way that suggested prior intimacy.

  “Why this restaurant, Anton? Are you making a joke?”

  She spoke English with a German accent.

  “Exactly, Tara. A little joke.”

  “I walked in and I felt relieved to have Karl with me.”

  “We’re all lucky to have Karl. Hi Karl.”

  “Hello Anton. You don’t really want to eat here, do you?”

  “Sure I do.”

  Karl shrugged and Tara made a face. They spent a few moments stripping off coats and sweaters, gloves and hats, all the heavy layers needed to function outside in the Berlin winter. We sat down under a tourist calendar with a picture of the ruins of Ephesus. Anton threw an arm round Tara’s shoulders and introduced me. At first sight she had the look of a Victorian doll, her pale heart-shaped face framed in ash-blond hair and decorated with a little pointy nose, rather red from the cold. She said hello with a condescending half-smile, and I responded as—I regret to say—I am programmed to do to a certain kind of woman, a woman who is performing superiority and desirability, demanding a tribute of attention. I twisted my mouth into a raffish grin and heard myself make some half-joke about her dislike of Turkish food, which she let fall without a hint of amusement. Karl asked me what I was doing in Berlin, and to my surprise seemed to know all about the Deuter Center. That building has an interesting history, he said. There is a wartime bunker under the house that I’ve always wanted to see. I was curious to know more, but he started telling Anton something, leaning over the table and using a low voice. I couldn’t hear much, but he was obviously unhappy. Anton shook his head. This is all stuff for Paris, he said. We can deal with it then.

  The waiter threw a couple of laminated menus down on the table and started laying out bread and cacik and olives. We ordered beers, which came almost at once. Cheers erupted around the room as a goal was scored. I tried again with Tara. Was she in the film business too?

  “I’m a journalist.”

  I asked what kind, who she wrote for, but she just shook her head. “I can barely breathe in this room,” she said. “All this sweat and smoke.” Her edge of dislike was a challenge, and once I would have tried to harden it into a flirtation, to force her to find me charming. Now I just felt depressed. I wished I was with Rei. She would have liked that place.

  Greg was vaping and looking at his phone. “What are we even doing here?”

  Pensively Anton wiped a piece of bread through the yogurt dip. “You’d hardly believe you were in Europe, right Greg?”

  “I don’t get it. We could still be at the party. There was crazy pussy, a dance floor, open bar. And you want to come and sit in a toilet with fucking al Qaeda.”

  “But I guess this is your kind of spot, right? Multicultural and whatnot. Diverse.”

  I realized Anton was speaking to me. “It’s not really diverse. Everyone’s Turkish except us.”

  Karl snorted. “It’s very nice when you’re the person adding diversity in your own country.”

  I was saved from having to answer by the arrival of the waiter. I ordered a döner, everything on it. Anton said he’d have the same. None of the others wanted to eat. The tension at the table was palpable. Anton hammily mimed concern and turned to me. “What are we to do? Karl seems to feel uneasy. Perhaps we should be concerned. Unlike us writers, Karl is a man of action. He’s the kind of guy who—well, if he’d been born a few hundred years ago he’d have been bathed in Ottoman blood at the gates of Vienna.”

  “So why did you come here if you knew he didn’t like it?”

  Anton laughed and nodded, as if I’d won a debating point. Karl sat with his hands in his lap, staring into the middle distance. Greg looked at his phone. For a while Anton and Tara spoke about something innocuous, a car that she wanted to buy. The food arrived. A Berlin döner is a beautiful thing and as it was set down in front of me, I was reminded that I was very hungry. I ate with relish, gulping beer, drunkenly spilling sauce and shredded cabbage on my plate. After a while I noticed that Tara was watching me with palpable disgust. Anton was scrutinizing me too, picking vaguely at his own sandwich with a fork. I felt as if I were doing something unclean, snapping and nosing at my food like a dog at its bowl.

  “What?”

  Anton laughed. “So you like kebab.”

  “Yes.”

  “But we have a problem. Greg thinks it stinks.”

  Greg made no eye contact with me, examining his phone as if this had nothing to do with him. Anton continued. “Greg’s another crusader. He’s from LA, like me, so we essentially grew up knee-deep in Jews, but we both have a feeling for our heritage. And here’s another thing. My friends have an aversion to being told what to do. To having things forced on them. Karl doesn’t like his culture being polluted by immigrants. Tara doesn’t want to have to worry about rape. Greg just doesn’t like spicy food. The question is do Greg and Anton and Tara have a right to their preference?”

  “What preference?”

  “To live a life without kebab.”

  I kept my tone even. “So that’s it? That’s your big reveal? Plain old-fashioned racism?”

  They all broke out laughing. All four of them, as if they’d just heard the punch line to a joke. Anton made a sweeping gesture. “And there it is! We are ruled out of play. No need to listen to us anymore.” He turned to Tara, whose expression had hardened into a grimace of contempt.

  “So, Tara. Do you feel ashamed? Are you going to change your ways now you’ve found out you’re a racist?”

  Tara shrugged. “Well Anton, racism is just another word for exercising choice and I choose to be with my own kind.”

  Their tone was artificial, like a pair of TV announcers sarcastically reading an autocue.

  “And you, Karl?”

  “Shit, Anton. I don’t even know this guy.”

  “OK.” I got up, staggering slightly. “Fuck you and fuck your friends. I’m out.”

  Anton looked disappointed. “Oh come on. Don’t you have any more than that? I brought you here because I thought you might have some fight in you. I wanted to hear you explain why kebab is so great and tasty. Why Tara should feel good about being skewered by an Arab.”

  I wish I could say I fired back a devastating retort. To tell the truth I was too stunned by the sudden blast of hostility. I just wanted to get out of there, to disengage. I started putting on my layers of clothing, feeling absurd as I pulled a sweater over my head and hunted for my scarf and gloves.

  “Can we go somewhere else, now?” asked Greg, as if oblivious to the tension.
/>   “Sure Greg,” said Anton. “Your weakness,” he added, turning back to me, “is that you’re always surrounded by people who think just like you. When you meet someone who your silly shame tactics don’t work on, you don’t know how to act. I’m a racist because I want to be with my own kind and you’re a saint because you have a sentimental wish to help other people far away, nice abstract refugees who save you from having to commit to anybody or anything real.”

  “I feel sorry for you,” I said. It did not feel like a strong comeback.

  I made my way through the crowded restaurant and pushed open the door. Outside, the cold cut my face like a knife. I found a single taxi waiting at a rank and fell asleep in it on the way back to the Deuter Center. I woke up to find myself being driven around in the Grunewald, the darkness of the pine forest absolute and disorientating. It was impossible to tell if the driver was genuinely lost, or just clocking up the fare. After a testy conversation, he found the right road, and deposited me outside the Center’s gate. Ulli or Uwe the porter buzzed me in, and I dragged myself up the main stairs to bed.

  I woke up late the next morning wracked by a vicious hangover that wasn’t alleviated by water or painkillers. I needed to think, and after so many weeks without leaving Wannsee, I suddenly couldn’t stand being there. In the face of an icy wind, I trudged to the station and took a train back into the city. I got off at Hackescher Markt and drifted around Mitte, eating a bowl of pho at a Vietnamese restaurant and then holing up in a bland but low-lit café where I could pretend to read Kleist as I watched the well-heeled young patrons check their social media accounts. My hangover gradually loosened its grip and for a while I was happy. I couldn’t really remember why I’d shut myself away in the suburbs. As long as you have walking-around money and are capable of following basic behavioral norms, anonymity is yours in a city, or if not actual anonymity then its ghost, what remains of it for us. No one in the café expected anything of me, and I didn’t care what they thought of the way I looked or dressed. I didn’t feel on edge. It was as if I’d suddenly remembered how to exist in the world.

  I turned over what had happened the previous night, trying to put a good complexion on it. An unpleasant experience, an event without consequences. I was ashamed that I’d allowed myself to be manipulated by Anton and angry that (as far as I could see) he’d invited me out for the sole purpose of humiliating me in front of his friends. I suppose I’d wanted to provoke some kind of confrontation with him, I’d foolishly imagined that I’d be the inquisitor, haughtily demanding answers about the bad politics of his TV show. Instead I’d been blindsided, caught off balance. I didn’t want to admit it, but the things he’d said hit home. Was I just a squeamish intellectual, incapable of action? Was my capacity for human relationships so stunted that I replaced real people with abstractions, “deserving” refugees who I’d never have to meet or interact with?

  A good-looking young man came into the café wearing a military peacoat, his hair styled in the same nineteen-thirties undercut as Anton and Karl. I felt suspicious of him, and realized that this was yet another sign that things had changed. When had I stopped assuming that a fashionably dressed man in his twenties, in a cosmopolitan urban neighborhood, would hold liberal social views? Now I was wondering if he went on the internet and posted about throwing people out of helicopters. The barista found him attractive. She kept glancing in his direction as she made his coffee. In a past age he might have made a good model for a propaganda picture. The handsome young soldier, the explorer, the mountaineer. Would it matter to the barista whether or not he knew where he was from? Was she looking for a man with pride? A man who wanted to secure a future for his children?

  As I rode the S-Bahn back to the suburbs my mood worsened. All the equanimity I’d accumulated during my day in the city began to drain away. It was mid-afternoon and the sun was already low in the horizon as I walked up the driveway, the gravel squeaking under the soles of my boots. I had a sense of jeopardy as I held my keycard up to the reader. The porter came out of his lodge to meet me as I stepped through the door.

  “Sir, I’m glad you’re back. Professor Starhemberg and his colleague are here. They’re in with Dr. Weber.”

  “Who?”

  “Your guests.” I must have looked puzzled. “The historians? You invited them to tour the house?”

  It must have been obvious that I had no idea what he was talking about. Filled with foreboding, I went upstairs to the director’s office and knocked on the door.

  “Come in!”

  Dr. Weber was standing behind his desk with two other men, examining one of the framed Chinese paintings on the wall. All three turned round as I entered. Dr. Weber smiled and nodded and so did Anton and Karl, who were both wearing thick-framed glasses, theatrical “intellectual” props. Anton grinned ironically. Karl’s smile vanished like a set of shutters coming down on a shop. I was so appalled that I just stood there, my mouth opening and closing like a fish.

  “Come and see!” Dr. Weber’s tone was warm and hospitable. He was obviously enjoying himself. “I hang it here because it doesn’t receive so much direct sunlight.”

  Anton stepped aside to make room for me, just the faintest hint of irony in the courtly sweep of his open hand. My mind raced, trying to game out the possibilities. What were they doing? Was the point to embarrass me further? Did they want something from me? Money? I didn’t understand.

  “I wasn’t expecting you,” I said, carefully.

  Anton nodded sympathetically, speaking in the tone of a concerned friend. “I didn’t want to bother you with the arrangements.” It was clear that whatever game we were playing, for the moment we were going to keep it secret from Dr. Weber.

  “I find this rather moving,” Dr. Weber said, unwilling to be diverted from his show-and-tell. “It’s a copy, sadly, but a good one. A leaf from a Ming Dynasty album called ‘The Garden of the Inept Administrator.’ You see him. He has been, what is the phrase? Put out to grass.” Pleased with his idiom, he paused. I peered at an ink painting depicting a pavilion in a garden enclosed by a high wall. Inside the pavilion, a man knelt at a desk, attended by a smaller figure who I assumed was a servant.

  “There is a poem that goes with it, mostly about the banana tree. How tall it has grown.”

  I followed where he was pointing and saw that there was indeed a tree in the foreground, with the broad leaves of a banana, curling over the pavilion’s pitched roof. In front of it was another object, dark and irregular, almost as tall. Vegetable or mineral? It was hard at first to say. Then I saw that it was a huge scholar’s rock, taller than a man. Dr. Weber turned to me. “If I do not often give these tours, it is only because people don’t usually ask.”

  “Tours of your collection?”

  “No, the building.”

  Anton smiled unctuously. “After our fascinating conversation last night at dinner, I took the liberty of having my assistant contact Dr. Weber’s office. You’d mentioned the Center, and as you know, my colleague and I both have an interest in the conduct of academic research under National Socialism. Dr. Weber was kind enough to offer to show us around.”

  Dr. Weber furrowed his brow. “Of course we keep no archive here. There is no institutional continuity with the National Socialist period.”

  Karl nodded sagely. He must have imagined that his pompous expression made him look smart. I wondered how Dr. Weber could buy the idea that these two were history professors. Karl was wearing a ridiculous wide-lapelled corduroy jacket that looked several sizes too small. It was bunched up under his armpits and stretched tight across his back. Greenish tattoos spidered up over the collar of his shirt. Weber was too wrapped in his tour guide persona to notice any of this. He led the way out of his office, talking in a steady stream.

  “The body you’re interested in, if I understand correctly, is the Institut für Nordforschung, which occupied this building.
It was set up in 1936 and dissolved towards the end of the war, when resources became scarce.”

  Anton pantomimed extreme attention, as if daring Dr. Weber to notice his insincerity. “This research into, I’m sorry, what was the word you used?”

  “Nordforschung. You would translate it as something like ‘research into the North.’ But this concept of North was more spiritual than geographical. Mystical nonsense, I’m afraid.”

  “A shared destiny among Northern Europeans,” suggested Karl.

  “That would be the sort of language they used. From what I understand, there were some credentialed archaeologists and linguists involved, but of course by then there had been the purge of the universities. Loyalty oaths, preference for those with early party membership and so on. These men were enthusiasts for the National Socialist cause. I’ve looked at a few of the publications. They were no more than propaganda.”

  “You have them?” asked Karl.

  “No, of course not. As I said, there is no institutional continuity with that time. It was the antithesis of what Herr Deuter wanted to achieve. Come, let me show you what we do have in the library. You may be interested to see the signature of Bundeskanzler Adenauer in a book he presented to Herr Deuter.”

  In the library Weber told various stories about the house, mostly illustrating the wisdom of Herr Deuter, who seemed to exist in his personal pantheon somewhere between Willy Brandt and Lao Tzu. Anton played the part of the fascinated historian. Karl seemed sullen, pent up. It popped into my head that he might be armed, and once it had taken hold, the thought was hard to shake. He seemed like a man who was about to do something, to break the tension with a knife or a gun. It seemed impossible that Weber hadn’t noticed the insanity of the situation. Occasionally Anton looked over at me, a sly grin floating over his mouth. “The North,” he murmured. “The idea of North. It’s very moving, in a way, what happened here. Machine-age Europeans who were longing for Ultima Thule.”