Fellini Agrees

-Ross Klavan

Here’s how Tom became Addy—he was still a kid when this happened--he committed a crime. A small crime, true, but one that was cash-smart and earned Tom enough to “set Addy free.” That’s how she described it when she told me the story.

When she was still Tom (at least by name) he lived in some kind of weird aluminum half-trailer, half-house in upstate New York. One of the more always overcast, frightening areas, all rural despair, maybe even haunted. Lived there with a disappointed mother and nobody else. The mother was diligent at waiting tables but wanted another life, of course, that’s what Addy said, and so nights passed in a cigarette haze in front of the TV. They watched old movies mostly. Tom got to know those movies by what his mother explained in her nightly lectures. He also knew that he wasn’t Tom—oh, sure, in name, maybe, but not in the most Tom-like-sense. He told her so. She already knew, that’s what she said. And she knew something else—whoever Tom really was (as she put it) that person appeared most beautifully, most brazenly in dance. Along with that, she knew Tom had run out his string in upstate New York. He had to go to the city. He had to study with Balanchine’s guy, the great Nicholas Soress. 

You remember Soress. Balanchine saw him as next-in-line. Tom’s mother showed Tom videos, gifted him with articles and books and, later, Addy would tell me, “I liked his sadness.” She wasn’t even sure she knew what that meant. You’ve read or heard about what happened. How, at the top of his career, Soress walked off stage in Act One of “Giselle,” got in a cab and disappeared. Well, OK, it wasn’t just an easy walking off. This was in the scene where Albrecht dances with Giselle, wooing her as she plucks a flower in a she-loves me-or-not game. Giselle plucked the flower and Albrecht/Soress bent low, picked up the petal, suddenly straightened, stared out toward the back of the house longer than anyone ever had, stared at his shoes, then vomited. Just a little bit. Later, he told me that the gasps from the audience sounded like they’d been voiced in a cartoon. After this, Soress mumbled something like “fuck it” and stomped away, tossing off shards of costume as he made his exit.

I asked him about this once. He told me never to do it again, ask, I mean. And the way he said it sounded like a threat.

But let me tell you, I knew Soress long after his walk-away happened, long after some reporter found him teaching in a little college in Vermont. Soress was 75. I was one of his older students. Like a teaching assistant, that was his description. My dancing was mediocre on a good day and usually I was so leaden that I wondered whether I’d suffered a mini-stroke. But he let me in among all his adoring followers, all of them young, brilliant every one of them I thought, Addy first of them all. Only they didn’t know what I knew: at this point, what Soress wanted most was a drinking buddy. 

But back to Addy. She was 22. I think Soress was already sleeping with her. I didn’t press either of them about this and I don’t remember how we got on the subject but one night in a townie bar, me, Addy and Soress, she told me this: when she was still Tom (in name), hardly a teen, she was visiting a friend, a little girl, and was demonstrating a Fouette but kept falling in the spin. The little girl got tired of watching and took him up to her attic. There, some minor kissing took place and the way Tom got out of it was that he asked to see something the girl had mentioned, something a boy might be interested in, what her great grandfather had left behind. In a small wooden cigar box topped by the silver figure of an Irish setter, there were photographs and army patches and decorations from the Second World War. Tom asked to see this because it seemed like a boyish way to change direction.

Tom only stole one item. When the little girl left the room, he very deftly hid up his sleeve a drawing, a cartoon of a young American soldier, most likely the great grandfather. Tom figured—rightly as it turned out—that nobody ever looked through this box of souvenirs and that the drawing would never be missed. Tom knew what he was seeing, he trusted the hum along his flesh, the feeling of grab-this-chance. On the lower righthand corner of the drawing, the cartoonist had signed his name: Frederico Fellini. Tom’s mother had talked him through some of the movies: 8 ½, Nights of Cabiria, La Dolce Vita, The Clowns. This Fellini was an important artist, his mother told him, and Tom knew this drawing was probably worth some serious money to somebody. When he showed the drawing to his mother that evening she said something like, Oh my God, because she’d told him how the great Italian director kept himself alive during World War Two by drawing funny portraits of American GI’s when they occupied Rome. There were probably dozens of these drawings around. Somewhere. How lucky to find one. She said Fellini deserved much more than to be shut away in a box in upstate New York. 

“Even more,” she said. “Fellini would’ve said yes to this.”

Selling Fellini was how Tom’s mother paid for Tom to become Addy. When Tom returned to dancing (now as Addy) it was Nicholas Soress who she went to find.

“And a good thing, too,” Soress already knew the Fellini story. This was the night he told me his big news. We were in that townie hangout where you sat straight at a perfect right angle because that’s how the beat-up wooden booth was constructed, no slouching.  The perfect atmosphere for a beer haus, their idea of a touch of Germany.

The thing about Soress—women fell all over him. It was annoying as hell. He might have been there at The Creation but he was tall and slim with an old roué charm, white hair combed back and a perfectly trimmed white goatee. Now he moved like the bill was coming due for a life of daily 12-hour classes and rehearsals and shows but his voice? It still made a mark like a brushstroke. And he’d seen everything. He was a check-sheet of life lessons and disaster. The last weeks of the Vietnam war? He’d been there. In New York, too, for the AIDS plague, the Blackout riots, he was downtown on 9/11, he’d been hospitalized before anyone knew it was COVID. And he’d danced for Balanchine. He’d walked away. I couldn’t take it. Along with dance, over the years he’d done his share of Zen sitting, Taoist meditation, yoga, Tai Chi, breathwork, autogenic training, he’d gone in for psychoanalysis, Gestalt therapy, he’d studied Kabbala and several other techniques of non-ordinary consciousness with and without pharmaceutical help.

“That’s not for anyone but you,” Addy said, “my Fellini story.” She made sure to sit next to me, across from Soress. “I told Nick a few days ago.”

“She was going to save it for the honeymoon,” Soress said. “But she couldn’t wait.”

“Order me another beer,” Addy made a beautiful bend out of the seat and I watched her move off to the bathroom.

Then Soress said, “I’m serious. About the honeymoon.”

“I think you have to be married first.”

He must’ve thought he was smiling.

“What?” I said. “No. Bullshit. Are you out of your fucking mind?”

“Fifth time lucky,” because he’d had four other wives. “This is the last one.”

They’d “snuck away,” he said, for a small, private ceremony with a Buddhist monk and a hired witness. It was all “on the up-and-up” he said. And more importantly (as he explained it) he was leaving everything to her. Money, of course, which he had, position, reputation. She was the anointed heiress. Everything was still very “hush-hush” he said, but it would all be made public “when the Big Bell rings” and here, he actually did smile, and actually did point up to the sky. “Hey. How much longer am I going to be around?”

“Is that how she’s thinking about it?”

“She didn’t marry me for my good looks. Although, she could have.”

He talked more about keeping it secret. There would be real trouble if anybody found out. And it got worse. He told me about “the honeymoon.” They were going to Europe. 

“And you’re coming along,” Soress said. “All expenses paid.”

I’d like to tell you there was a pause after this but, no. We dropped right into a mindless series of “No-I’m-not-yes-you-are” as he explained, laughing through it all, that it had to “look legit,” like there were three of us and if any romance was involved, it was between two students, me and Addy. Just in case anyone asked. 

“You told him?” Addy was seating herself beside me again. “He knows?”

“He’s all for it,” Soress said. “With blessings.”

“The honeymoon, too?”

“Addy. Nick. Gang,” I said. “Not happening.”

“Won’t cost you a dime.”

“No way. But, Nick, Addy, against my better judgement, I wish you well. Send pictures.” 

“You’re a sweetheart,” Soress said. 

On the plane to Germany, I drifted into a years ago memory of heading to the altar for my one-and-only ex-marriage. With every step, a little voice behind my right ear kept pleading, warning, whispering that I was making a terrible mistake. I didn’t listen. 

We flew first class. Soress sat with me, Addy across the aisle, asleep almost as soon as we were in the air. That’s when Soress told me he hadn’t realized Addy was transsexual until the first time they got in bed when she whispered, “You might find my vagina slightly different.” That was true. But it was only as they lay in bed afterwards, talking, that he understood.

“I don’t want to know any of this,” I said.

“She’s a remarkable person,” turning to watch her sleep. “Gifted. Her energy. Her newness. Addy’s created herself, really. But she still only knows what’s from home. She needs to be tempered, if you know what I mean.”

“I don’t and don’t want to.”

“She’s going to wind up with somebody else someday and maybe someday soon.”

I tried to get comfortable in my seat. For a moment there was only that strange sound, that jet-in-the-air murmur. I leaned back, hoping to escape but Soress had these fearsome, luminous blue eyes—maybe you’ve seen pictures—fading but not to be ignored. Now I was the target. 

Eyes closed, I said, “You’re not thinking of me, I hope.”

“For what? My legacy? One day she’ll talk about how, ‘My first husband was Nicholas Soress. He took me from the personal where I was lost…he dropped me into human history.’”

“Maybe she’s been through enough,” I put the seat farther back. “Maybe don’t do her any favors.” Go ahead, I was thinking, stare, give me the fucking laser eyes, I’m not buying it.

“What are you two talking about?” this was Addy. Across the aisle.

Making it sound like a pompous joke, Soress said, “History.”

“History is like a leg cramp,” Addy said. I think that was it, anyway. I was drifting off.

A nice trip to Europe, is what she was probably expecting. I asked Nick why he didn’t want to fly into Paris. Or London. At least start the trip there. She’s never travelled, was his outlook. Psychically, maybe, but not in miles. Theater, museums, some sitting in cafes and coffee houses? She’d get all that. Eventually. 

“And I want to remember Pina Bausch,” Soress said. “I worked with her. In Berlin. And Wuppertal. Addy needs to know that kind of work.”

“That’s why?” but he’d gone off somewhere else.

I’d look at Addy sometimes and wonder what it was like to have that experience, Addy’s experience, such a stark meet-up with the physical body. I look in the mirror sometimes and think that who I’m seeing isn’t really me, you know what I mean. But Addy? That’s taking it so far to the other end that it becomes something different.  

Soress, the dancer, would often talk about “the body.” And he’d tell me that what Addy  needed was to get closer to what he called “the bullseye,” because, he said, “there’s that exquisite, intangible joy of living, yeah? But it can’t be relished, not without knowing a fathomless scarring. Human abomination…” I don’t know, I let his words get scrambled after that. And he was doing that voice again so you weren’t sure he was serious. I told him to calm down. 

“It’s always a shock,” he said, “when you find that  you don’t know what you think you know.”

“She’s a dancer. So, hey, I know people can’t fly. But I’ve seen her leap into the air and get pinned there and come down only because she wanted to.” I took a view out the window, thinking we were 30-plus thousand feet off the ground. “Leave her alone, Nick.” 

He told me not to step in between a man and his wife. And he wasn’t joking. 

On the train from the airport to Berlin, with Addy quiet and fascinated by the scenery, a German woman sitting across from us began asking questions. She wore a small, round, green hat from the Weimar Republic, that’s how it looked—Soress mentioned this to her, in German, and got polite silence in return. The woman’s questions, in English, began with thinking that Addy was on a trip with her husband (me) and her grandfather (Soress) and then she began asking about Addy’s experience as a transsexual woman. 

The German woman said, “It must be very interesting to have been both male and female.” 

Addy told her, “Isn’t everyone, sort of? Anyway, that’s not the experience. I was never a man. I was just inside a man’s body.”

The woman raised an eyebrow and nodded. That ended the conversation.

Soress had booked us three rooms in the Hotel Adlon Kempinski, in the Mitte, a grand place with a touch of the old world.  He said we had tickets to the Staatsballett and also to a performance at the ADA studio. The Pergamon, he said, was closed for renovation but we could go to the Neues, and Addy could walk among the antiquities. He wanted to watch her join with the pieces, learn their angles, move in that space with those perfectly sculpted dancer’s steps. (Soress would tell people later—after Addy left him—that he’d never before seen that kind of concentration, that transport of emotion through bone and sinew.) Finally, in the café, softly tapping a finger on the table, Soress suggested we visit the Topography of Terror museum—the former headquarters of the SS and Gestapo. Addy said she was hungry and what she really wanted was a soft pretzel and a beer. 

“Why don’t we go out of town tomorrow,” Soress made it sound like the idea had just dawned on him. “Be nice to get out of the city for a day, you know.”

“We just got here,” I said.  

Addy squeezed his arm. “I saw something about the Berlinische Galerie? Modern art. Let’s go there.”

The next morning, dressing for the day trip, Soress handed us each a small bottle of water and put our passports in his waist pack. Addy said, “Are we leaving the country?” and Soress told her, “Just to be safe.”

We took the S-Bahn S1 train to Oranienburg. I told Soress that I didn’t like the feel of this even with Addy calling the countryside “luscious and so different from America.” 

“We have a lot to learn back home,” Addy said. 

In Oranienburg, we transferred to a bus. Soress pointed out the Havel River. “Absolutely gorgeous, this place,” Addy said. Soress told her that during World War Two, this had been a center of where the Nazis were trying to develop a nuclear bomb. It was hit so heavily from the air that 80 years later whoever still looks was still looking for unexploded bombs, high explosives, bombs called Tallboy and Grand Slam. “At one point,” Soress said, “we dropped almost 5,700 bombs in 45 minutes.” Soress waited for us to connect. We didn’t. I guess it sounded like mayhem but that was all. I knew he’d once tried to develop a dance piece about all this but failed, he said, because he got futile about futility and he was pinned in place, humbled by brute fact.

We got off the bus in Sachsenhausen.

OK, I got it then. “I know where we’re going,” I said to Soress. He ignored me. We walked through town. The whole place  was “so, so charming,” Addy said, “this was such a good idea, thank you for taking me.” All these delicious, dollhouse buildings, Addy said, they were so colorful—painted partly red, some of them, or yellow, blue, some with the crisscross dark lines of timber framing. 

“Why don’t we do that back home, make more buildings for people to enjoy?” 

The outdoor cafes were crowded. “You’re so quiet,” Addy nudged Soress with her hip. “I think we could come back here to live for a while. What do you think?”

Soress said, “Hang on, I have to ask for directions.”

We stopped outside an antiques store, painted a glaring, bright white, the broad window showing several pieces of ornate wooden furniture and some formal wear on a headless mannequin. Soress said it was all very Old Europe, staid, oppressively formal, leftovers from the long dead. 

“Like movie costumes,” Addy said.

The wide showroom was a glaring, musty jumble, too much to take in. I went blank for a moment. There was no order to anything. The faded furniture, the prim clothing, the canes and swords and plumed helmets, it was all scattered around like it had been thrown there, on the floor, against the wall, leaning atop one another. I watched Addy drift among the objects, sometimes smiling and running her fingers along the contours of some once-loved, now forgotten piece. I pictured her as going down the hole into Wonderland. Soress, too. He’d suddenly slipped into a trance of some kind. He was watching Addy and I thought then that he really did love her, at least in that moment, for whatever that meant to him. 

That’s when another sight caught him. There, on the floor. A small, heavy statuette. It was nearly hidden, taking cover among the dusty folds of cloth, decorative boxes, hats and a dulled saber with the point broken off. A Nazi soldier.  He was wearing the classic Nazi helmet. Crouched, running but poised in movement, a rifle clasped in his dark metal right hand. 

Soress surprised himself, speaking with unusual force. “Look at that shit, this kind of fucking antique is supposed to be illegal.” He stopped. There was somebody else in the room. 

The proprietor walked over from an unseen place in the back. He said to Addy, “Hallo,” a slim, bald man in his 40’s decked out in an old-fashioned dark vest, his white shirt sleeves rolled to the elbow. “Bitte, kann ich ihnen helfen?”

“I’m sorry, I don’t…my husband…” Addy nodded towards Soress who caught the way the man’s eyes popped in a shock-flash at the “husband” word. 

“We’re Americans,” Soress said. “Do you speak English?”

“Yes, of course,” the proprietor smiled. “Welcome. Please look around.”

“We need directions,” Soress said. “To the camp.”

I could hear a hollow dip in the silence of the room. The quiet widened, becoming even deeper, developing into a hot whirlpool. Then the proprietor said, “Get out,” softly, before he said, “GET OUT! RAUS!” loudly, in a growling accent that made me think of World War Two movies and a real attacking tank. The man’s tiny hands made shooing motions as he closed in on the three of us, forcing us towards the front door. “This is a beautiful town! Why do people always come here only for the camp! Why can’t they leave it be! Get out!”

I was sun-blinded for a moment when we were abruptly back on the street. And the proprietor, he hung in the window like one of his antiques, waiting for us to move on. I started to laugh.

Addy said, “Why was that man so angry? Where are we going?” and Soress said, “Next time we’ll talk to him about Goethe or Beethoven or Mozart. Nietzsche, maybe, all the rest of the…” stopping, I guess, because he knew he’d slipped into that tired, sour subject, the Great Culture/Great Evil paradox. I knew Soress—easy thoughts, he said, they float on the surface like shit. I was about to call him on exactly this, too, but he’d already moved on.

“OK, right,” he said. “There.”

Before Addy could ask anything Soress was nodding towards a sign, the one with an arrow pointing tourists in the proper direction of the “Memorial.”

“That’s for us,” Soress said. 

My nervous system started to go. I could pretty much bet what was coming and when Addy shot the evil eye to her husband I got a glimpse of what he called her “what-gives look.” She reached for his hand.

“Let’s just go get some lunch, Nick,” I brushed my fingers on the sleeve of his jacket. “You’ve made your point.”

“That’s really young of you,” he said. “You still think there’s a point.”

Years later, letting the images run in memory and after lots of research and reading and trying to connect, my own attempt to choreograph all this failed, too. Hundreds of thousands of prisoners had been put through where we’d visited, tens of thousands of people murdered. This burbled up from under the surface until I was thinking that “somebody with more skill might…” and then I stopped thinking altogether. I crumbled up a lot of paper, deleted pages and pictures and videos, tossed my notes away and lay down on a couch. I was making myself sick.

And as we entered the camp, I retreated into a cold-eyed survey: a wide expanse of flat earth, a leftover building, the outline where barracks had been, a marking in the dirt, ruins. Farther off: small museums. A commemorative column. I drifted into a buzz of detachment. Not Soress. I don’t want to seem crazy when I tell you this, but he had a weird aura coming off him, like he thought he was imbued with some kind of larger connection, maybe a union with the dead. We passed among us a forced, hallowed quality that resonated along the skin. Walking, in a fog, we approached a small brass plaque set in the ground. Easy to miss. We stopped for a moment to read: this too long, empty expanse of earth had once been the location of the main gallows. I watched Addy go angry, then blank.

“This is stupid, Nick,” she said. “You brought here for what?”

Another gallows was further on, a small one and still standing. And a whipping post. Nearby, a gas chamber, the ruins of ovens. Soress, I knew, once worked his way through libraries of Holocaust reading, studied all the documentaries and even the insultingly saccharine films, which was most of them. He didn’t share my low-grade state of shock. I saw him put his palm against Addy’s back and watched as she pulled away. At the front gate of the concentration camp, there was that motto, “Arbeit Mach Frei” in large steel letters. When Soress started translating, Addy sniffed a lecture coming and stepped away. Off to the side of the asphalt path, she slowly curved into some slow stretches, shaking off whatever it was. I was positive we were being watched by the dead.

“I don’t get it,” I said. “Look at her. There’s no reason for this.”

Everything got disheveled. Soress walked over and gingerly took Addy’s hand, then led us down another path. He stopped when we found the shooting pit, a lengthy expanse, lined with logs. Posted against the wood were aging, wrinkled letters. Soress had enough German to read: “My mother was sent here in March of 1943. If anyone knows what happened to…” Addy pulled her hand back, rubbing her knuckles. Not far off, we came to a small area, a ruins, where a doctor had once ordered prisoners to stand against a wall for medical exams and through a small hole behind them, they would be shot in the back of the head.  

“Somebody thought this up,” Soress told Addy. “He kissed his wife goodbye in the morning and came here. To work,” It was all done, he said, with an underlying, severe delight. A weird force of disconnect that molded the illusion of the ordinary. 

Addy said, “I’m ready to leave,” and Soress could only shake his head “No,” while I felt my steps becoming drunken, off-balance, I couldn’t locate myself in space. 

And I felt bad for her. OK, for myself, too. I heard my voice go toneless, slipping into a ridiculous stab at explanation. “I guess he thinks this is important for you to learn about…see…well…what happened was…” and then I caught myself. Why was it up to me? How the hell did I end up sounding like an old machine grinding loudly to a halt? 

“Go ahead,” Soress said. “Let’s hear it. What happened was…” 

“Look over there,” Addy said.

Soress’s gaze began clicking off the areas and buildings of the camp and I couldn’t tell whether he was on high alert or going deep into contemplation. The huge memorial column, the museum, the gas chamber, whipping post, the shooting pit, the way the earth itself in imagination was flattened like the dead. I couldn’t see anything else.

“What?” Soress said. “What are we looking at?”

“Over there,” Addy pointed back towards the shooting pit. “There’s a mime.”

The word vanished like a cloud of breath. “A mime,” she said. “Near that, that pit. Where they shot people. Right there…”

The muscles in his jaw tightened. “Stop it,” he said. “What are you talking about? That’s ridiculous.” 

“A mime,” Addy said. “I saw him. Doing mime. He was even in costume.”

I peered around, tried to picture it: the traditional white make-up, the little hat, the striped shirt and black baggy clown pants, someone in costume moving in artistic pantomime and dance among the millions of whispers from the murdered. 

I saw nothing. 

Soress said to Addy, “This isn’t a joke. A Goddamn theater. You don’t have to understand it, nobody does. But, Goddamnit, have some respect.”

“I saw him,” Addy said. “I mean, what are you so mad about?”

Soress began saying, “Yeah, OK, yeah,” over and over, breathing heavily. His face suddenly got the color of dull pearl and I noticed that on the cheek above his goatee, he’d missed a spot shaving. “I could hate you,” he said, “all that superior innocence…” and here, he waved a hand as if he had an orchestra to conduct, all the instruments of industrial murder. The pit, the gallows, the whipping post, the gas chamber, a play of feral remains. 

“But you’re not innocent, are you. You little twit.”

“Nick, man, you gotta back up,” I felt stupid but I needed to chime in.

“Stop it,” Addy said. “Please. You don’t hate me. I never saw you like this. There was a mime. So, what? If you don’t believe me, let’s go see.”

“Yeah? OK. Goddamnit. That’s what we’ll do,” Soress took her wrist, his fingers like he was feeling how sweet it would be to crack her bones. “Show me.” They began walking. I had to hop to catch up. 

“Let’s not do this,” I started calling to him. “C’mon, there was that nice little café back in town…”

The whole situation seemed ludicrous. No, worse—poisonous.  I had a poetic moment thinking that Soress was feeding his beautiful new wife the arsenic of history. Maybe he’d be jarred by some hectoring, interior voice asking, “Why are you torturing this poor girl? I thought you loved her?” OK, and maybe he’d answer with a “Fuck you,” but at base, I know he’d feel bad about it, this being a valid question. He pulled Addy along the gravel path, passing another tourist couple, one of the very few, nobody willing to meet eye-to-eye, and I could hear Soress begin mumbling. It was something about “certain regions of the psyche…important...you’ll see…” and I was sorry I’d let myself get talked into the trip.

“Where are we going?” Addy was pulling back, “stop it, slow down.” She halted, snapped her arm away, began rubbing her wrist. She’d been hurt, too, and she was letting him know that he’d pay. Soress got the message--she was in dancer’s shape and still had some moves from her original, wrong body. That pull against his fingers didn’t come only from a ballerina. 

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean…” Soress didn’t know what he didn’t mean. Why he’d been dragging Addy or where he was taking them. A head-shake followed, then he was saying something about how he had to know if there was actually a mime in Sachsenhausen, a mime working to the no-one’s-watching-crowd in this onetime concentration camp. 

It felt like we’d been standing in this one spot forever. “We’re doing this because you said you saw a mime.” 

“Yes, that’s right, I saw him,” Addy said. “Some street performer, probably. He wandered in. Why? What’s it matter? There’s probably a million street performers here. This is Europe.”

“I’m not going to let that happen,” Soress said, and to himself, “what the fuck am I doing?” in something that sounded like a stage whisper but wasn’t. 

For a moment, even standing in this horrible place, it was like watching a clash of fantasies, visions charging against visions. Soress with images of the macabre and skeletal, a vast murderous factory system that worked through poison gas, gunshot, fire, bludgeon, disease and starvation to produce nothing but faceless mass death. And Addy’s inner world, filled with jugglers. Mimes. Tightrope walkers and other street performers. You know exactly what I mean: you had to mix it all together and after you did? All you were left with was the question, “Now what?” and for an answer, you were on your own.

“You look so sad,” Addy said. 

He started walking fast, saying “I’ll bet he’s over there,” but he slowed, grimaced, began limping like something was wrong with his knee. That didn’t stop him from leading us to the far end of the Sachsenhausen camp, a deserted area cordoned off with cyclone fencing. It was impossible to go farther. There was no mime. Empty. Only two metal signs posted on the fence. That was it until Soress started reading.

One sign began with the large black letters that said, “Achtung!” followed by a statement in German. I saw Soress blanch. Out loud, he read the English translation, making that first word, “Warning!” in a growl with a comic German accent. That didn’t last. The rest of the translation, he read, let us know the area was off-limits because a mass grave had recently been uncovered. At least 500 bodies. Not all had been removed. No one could yet authenticate the identity of the dead. That was because Sachsenhausen had been first used as a concentration camp by the Nazis, then the Soviets made it a prison and slave labor camp and then it became a museum. Soress turned to us, “If they’ve discovered more bodies, not museum enough.”

He turned away from the sign, saw that Addy was peering studiously through the wire toward the gravesite, her features like a little girl’s, fixated, intent. 

“A new mass grave,” I said. “Come on. Let’s get the hell out of here. This was a mistake.” Doing something like a pained pivot, Soress turned to survey the camp behind him. 

“She didn’t see anything, Nick. C’mon, I’ll even spring for lunch.”

“Don’t tell me what I saw,” Addy said. “I’m not making it up.”

The day was now cool and slightly overcast. It made for the kind of somber mood that I sometimes got from certain movies, downbeat but oddly comfortable. Soress kept scanning the area around him, making a serious search for somebody in white-face wearing a striped shirt with a clownish hat, somebody concentrated on moving as an expressive body, somebody doing his comic art dance. Nothing, nobody. Those few tourists, very few. Here and there. That’s what he saw. That was all. I couldn’t take it anymore.

“Did you know,” I said to Soress, “that the great mime Marcel Marceau was a war hero? A bona fide fighter with the French Resistance.” I waited for an answer but he kept quiet, so I said, “Probably because they knew if he was captured and tortured, he wouldn’t talk.”

“Little bitch,” Soress sensed Addy shift away from him, moved to see her and now he watched with a rising, palpable disgust.

I said, “You’re an asshole, Nick. If you feel that way, why the hell’d you marry her?”

Addy was dancing. This wasn’t some kind of mindless charade, she’d suddenly thrown herself into a trance. Addy was away, untouchable. Eyes closed, lithe limbs drifting fluid and full of life. She created slow, evocative actions with the frame of her body, her arms yearning, even her fingertips alive, like she was run through with a controlled but passionate energy. And impossibly, she made it seem like she could go on forever, that’s how she danced.

Afterwards, I think Soress was embarrassed by his reaction. There, as her audience, in the tone of the immediate moment, if only for an instant, Soress looked like everything he’d ever done or cherished—much of it secret—had collapsed. He stood perfectly still, he kept clearing his throat like he felt sick. 

“What’s this?” Soress said. “You shouldn’t…” He looked lost.

I was ready to bolt. Addy kept moving. I was certain that the tiniest of smiles flashed at the corner of her mouth. Following some cue Soress couldn’t see, Addy’s features gradually softened and abruptly, she stopped. 

For a moment, Addy stood there at attention, arms down at her sides. It might be that she wanted one, final study, a last look, because she walked over to the new mass grave with its “Warning” sign and here, Addy’s head lowered for a moment and then she relaxed. With the new grave behind her, she looked straight at Soress, who knew he was in for it.

“Fuck you,” Addy said. “I’m going back to the hotel.”

Soress had to do a quick-step to catch up with her. Clumsy--he was that way more often--walking like his knee was in the last stage of ruin, limping like a broken puppet. “It’s just that I’m upset,” he said. “C’mon, let’s get some coffee, let’s get a drink.”

We left the camp. On a small, winding cobblestone street we found what Addy called a café that must be “just like Paris. Where we should go,” she said. “Like tomorrow. They really know how to live over here, it’s different. We can take the train,” Soress nodding in pretend agreement.

We found an empty table outside, near the café window. Soress ordered espresso for all of us, speaking English, not bothering to ask if the waiter understood. There was no problem. Language floated around like fireflies, German, French, Scandinavian, Chinese, all mixed. Addy stared at Soress without needing to say anything until Soress said, “Why are you looking at me like that?”

“Over there,” Addy bobbed her head towards the outer tables at the far end of the café.

“What?” Soress said. “I don’t see anything.”

“No,” Addy said. “There.”

Soress followed her direction, being more careful, more exact this time. Then he went cold, dizzy. For a moment, I don’t think he even knew he was still with us. 

Sitting farther away at one of the outer tables of the café was a man in a mime costume—bright white face, soft black cap, striped black-and-white T-shirt, baggy black pants. The mime sat up very straight, drinking an espresso with slightly exaggerated motions. Only there was no cup and no coffee. His fingers were so artfully shaped that anyone looking could see the demitasse perfectly.

“Oh, fuck me,” Soress said. “Is that the guy you saw in the camp?”

Addy shrugged. Soress signaled for the waiter. 

“That mime,” Soress said to him. “Does he work the camp? In the memorial?”

“Would he do that? I don’t know,” the waiter said. “He comes here with his own coffee. You can see that, yes? We let him sit because it’s humorous. Unless it’s crowded. Then we throw him out.”

“I’ll ask him,” Soress stood up.

“He won’t answer you,” Addy said. “Mimes don’t speak.”

“He can dance the Goddamn answer,” Soress said.

“Why do you care?” I figured that was enough for me to add. 

“Oh, so you’re getting stupid, too?” Soress turned back, took one step away from the table and--of course, I knew this would happen--the little mime was gone. Soress said, “Did you see him leave?” And because nobody answered, he said, “Shit,” and sat down again.

“I’m learning new things about you,” Addy said, “and I don’t like them.” Soress bit his lower lip in a silent answer. “Maybe we shouldn’t have done it, this getting married.” 

“You’re through with me already?” He touched her cheek, smiled. “Hang on for the ride. I’ve got more to show you. Things might get even worse.”

“Where did you plan to take us next, after Berlin?” 

“Auschwitz,” Soress said. 

“I’m going to pack,” Addy stood up. “I’m going to Paris.”

“Don’t be in such a hurry to drop me. I’ll be dead soon, anyway. You’re taking it too seriously.”

Addy was looking down at him with what I saw was actual pity while Soress was sure, I’m positive, that he’d fix all this later tonight. His hand went to his waist and ran along the bulge of the belt where he held all of our passports. Addy didn’t catch that. OK, so he’d bought some time. Soress told us he’d go over to the concentration camp again, just to see if that Goddamn mime was there. We weren’t invited and, later, even though he didn’t make that second trip, he told me that he wanted to stand there alone. Soress said he needed to know if that one moment, near the new mass grave—his own tone of catastrophe and Addy’s dance—was that going to wheedle its profound way into what was left of him? Or was he just putting out more theater? 

Addy got up from the table in one fluid movement, sliding smoothly between the tables and the chairs. Soress watched, his attention on her back like he was aiming a rifle. She’d already stepped pretty far down the block when she glanced back at Soress. He waved. She didn’t return it. At the corner, she walked to the right, and in a beat she was gone. Soress said, “Things are OK. We’ll settle this. She’s not going anywhere, not for a while, anyway.” He tapped the passports again. 

“This might not work out the way you want,” I said. “Whatever way that is.”

“You know what Fellini said? The director? He said…”

Soress took a long pause and didn’t finish. He gazed off into somewhere, or nowhere, his eyes locked on Addy’s path but no longer seeing anything. He faced me again and slumped in his chair. “Let’s get shit-faced,” he said. And after a moment, “When I walked off stage…back then…”

I signaled to the waiter. 

“I could do anything,” he said. “I could fly. But that night, when I looked into the house, I don’t know why, this time what I saw was…it was just small lights and rows of seats. Empty faces. Nothing more. And I was just on stage in this stupid costume.”

“There are worse things,” I said. “Lots of them.”

He was going on now, something about the “physical body” but it was beyond me, or I didn’t want to hear it. Something about how he’d believed all his life that he could get away from it. Then, that night, he knew that everything he’d thought all these years, everything he’d been working towards, well, he’d been wrong. He was off about everything. So, he had to do it all over again, make it right, in some way. I think that’s why he married Addy. Maybe. Anyway, I’m not sure he knew that. I’m not sure he’d say it. I’m not even sure that I’m right.