Less(27)
Bold instead of perfect, Less’s tongue is bruised with errors. Male friends tend to switch to girls in the Lessian plural, becoming Freundin instead of Freund; and, by using auf den Strich instead of unterm Strich, he can lead intrigued listeners to believe he is going into prostitution. But, even at four and nine, Less has yet to be disabused of his skills. Perhaps the fault lies with Ludwig, the folk-singing German exchange student who lived with his family, took Less’s ostensibility away, and never corrected his German—for who corrects what is spoken in bed? Perhaps it was the grateful, dankbaren East Berliners whom Less met on a trip with Robert—escaped poets living in Paris—astonished to hear their mother tongue working in the mouth of this slim young American. Perhaps it was too much Hogan’s Heroes. But Less arrives in Berlin, taxiing to his temporary apartment in Wilmersdorf, swearing he will not speak a word of English while he is here. Of course, the real challenge is to speak a word of German.
Again, a translation:
“Six greetings, class. I am Arthur Less.”
This is the class he will be teaching at the Liberated University. In addition, he is expected to give a reading in five weeks, open to the public. Delighted he was fluent in German, the department offered Less the chance to teach a course of his choosing. “With a visiting professor,” wrote the kind Dr. Balk, “we can often have as few as three students, which is a nice intimate room.” Less dusted off a writing course he had given at a Jesuit college in California, put the entire syllabus through a computer translation, and considered himself prepared. He called the course Read Like a Vampire, Write Like Frankenstein, based on his own notion that writers read other works in order to take their best parts. This was, especially translated into German, an unusual title. When his teaching assistant, Hans, brings him to the classroom this first morning, he is astounded to find not three, not fifteen, but a hundred and thirty students waiting to take his extraordinary course.
“I am your Mr. Professor.”
He is not. Unaware of the enormous difference between the German Professor and Dozent, the former being a rank achieved only through decades of internment in the academic prison, the latter a mere parolee, Less has given himself a promotion.
“And now, I am sorry, I must kill most of you.”
With this startling announcement, he proceeds to weed out any students who are not registered in the Global Linguistics and Literature Department. To his relief, this removes all but thirty. And so he begins the class.
“We start at a sentence in Proust: For a long time, I used to go to bed early.”
But Arthur Less has not gone to bed early; in fact, it is a miracle he has even made it to the classroom. The problem: a surprise invitation, a struggle with German technology, and, of course, Freddy Pelu.
Back to his arrival at the Tegel Airport, the day before: A baffling series of glass chambers, sealing and unsealing automatically like air locks, where he is met by his tall serious teaching assistant and escort: Hans. Though about to sit for his doctorate exam on Derrida and therefore, in Less’s mind, his intellectual superior, curly-headed Hans willingly takes all of Less’s luggage and brings him, via his beat-up Twingo, to the university apartment he will call home for the next five weeks. It is on a high floor of an eighties building whose open staircases, and open walkways, are exposed to the chill Berlin air; in its goldenrod-and-glass severity, it resembles the airport. Additionally, there is no apartment key but instead a circular fob with a button—like a mating bird, the door chirps in response, then opens. Hans demonstrates this quickly; the door chirps; it seems simple. “You take the stairs to the walkway, you use the fob. You understand?” Less nods, and Hans leaves Less with his luggage, explaining that he will be back at nineteen hours to take him to dinner, and then at thirteen hours the next day to take him to the university. His curly head bobs good-bye, and he disappears down the open staircase. It occurs to Less that the graduate student never met his gaze. And that he should learn military time.
He cannot imagine that the next morning before class, he will find himself hanging from the ledge outside his apartment building, forty feet above the courtyard, inching his way toward the only open window.
Hans arrives precisely at nineteen hours (Less keeps repeating to himself: seven p.m., seven p.m., seven p.m.). Unable to find an iron in the apartment, Less has hung up his shirts in the bathroom and run a hot shower to steam out the wrinkles, but the billowing steam somehow sets off the fire alarm, which of course brings a burly, cheerful, English-free man from the lower depths to tease him (“Sie wollen das Geb?ude mit Wasser niederbrennen!”) and return with a sturdy German iron. Windows are opened. Less is in the process of ironing when he hears the Bach chimes of the doorbell. Hans bobs his head again. He has changed from a hoodie into a denim blazer. In the Twingo (evidence of cigarettes but no actual cigarettes), the young man drives him into another mysterious district, parking beneath a concrete railway where a sad Turkish man sits in a kiosk, selling curried hot dogs. The restaurant is called Austria and is decorated everywhere with beer steins and antlers. As is true everywhere else: they are not kidding.
They are shown to a leather booth where two men and a young woman are waiting. These are Hans’s friends, and, while Less suspects the grad student is cagily sponging from the department’s expense account, it is a relief to have someone other than a Derridean to talk with: a composer named Ulrich, whose brown eyes and shaggy beard give him the alert appearance of a schnauzer, his girlfriend, Katarina, similarly canine in her Pomeranian puff of hair, and Bastian, a business student whose dark good looks and voluminous kinky hairstyle make Less assume he is African; he is Bavarian. Less judges them to be around thirty. Bastian keeps picking a fight with Ulrich about sports, a conversation difficult for Less to follow not because of the specific vocabulary (Verteidiger, Stürmer, Schienbeinschützer) or obscure sports figures but because he simply does not care. Bastian seems to be arguing that danger is essential to sports: The thrill of death! Der Nervenkitzel des Todes! Less stares at his schnitzel (a crisp map of Austria). He is not here, in Berlin, in the Schnitzelhaus. He is in Sonoma, in a hospital room: windowless, yellowish, encurtained for privacy like a stripper before her entrance. In the hospital bed: Robert. He has a tube in his arm and a tube in his nose, and his hair is that of a madman. “It’s not the cigarettes,” Robert says, his eyes framed by his same old thick glasses. “It’s the poetry that’s done it. It kills you now. But later,” he says, shaking a finger, “immortality!” A husky laugh, and Less holds his hand. This is only a year ago. And Less is in Delaware, at his mother’s funeral, a hand softly pressing on his back to keep him from collapsing. He is so grateful for that hand. And Less is in San Francisco, on the beach, in the fall of that terrible year.