The Invisible Circus - Jennifer Egan [92]
Still, Wolf said, plenty of things had gone wrong in Paris. Faith leapt into the Seine on a dare and was sucked downstream, so a tourist barge had to rescue her. Another time she got hold of a bottle of absinthe and spent the night in a hospital with a stomach pump down her throat. “We exhausted each other,” Wolf said, “Faith always lunging at things, me always trying to resist.”
The final blow had come when someone fell off a roof and shattered his leg at a party Faith helped pay for, a bunch of bands playing outside, people dancing, the guy just slipped. Faith blamed herself—thought she should have seen it coming, should have insisted they put up a railing. In her mind everything flipped, their luck was gone, they had to get out of there fast. She visited the broken-legged guy in the hospital, gave him five hundred dollars in francs. He had no idea who she was.
“The whole time, we’d been hearing stuff about Germany,” Wolf said. “How there were all these anarchist groups in Berlin doing crazy stuff. Whenever we met a German, they’d talk about this student leader of theirs, Rudi Dutschke, who got shot in the head by a neofascist in ’68, paralyzed for life. It broke their hearts. People literally wept, talking about this guy; they were always toasting Rudi. For the student radicals it was like Kennedy getting shot—this anguish, this incredible rage. I guess by 1970 it was really starting to boil.
“Anyway, in Paris we met a German woman, Inge, who wrote for a lefty German paper called Konkret. She was in Paris with her French husband, and couldn’t wait to get back to Berlin—Paris was dead, she said, but Berlin was just starting to peak. They were driving back there right after the roof incident, so Faith and I thought, What the hell? We got in the car with them.”
Wolf paused, as if gathering his thoughts. Phoebe waited in silence, craving some grand gesture from her sister, a triumph. She longed for this and dreaded it, too, the way you dread the loss of something.
“On the ride to Berlin,” Wolf continued, “Inge told us about this friend of hers named Ulrike Meinhof, a pretty well-known journalist who’d suddenly chucked everything a couple of months before and gone underground with a terrorist group. She’d been the ultimate chic lefty—in her thirties, married for years to the editor of Konkret (same paper Inge worked for), had a big house in Frankfurt, twin daughters. Inge had been reading her stuff since university, so when Ulrike left her husband and moved to Berlin, she tried to befriend her. But Ulrike kept to herself, seemed kind of depressed. Her articles were getting more and more radical—she was sympathetic to these student anarchist groups that were starting to use violence.”
“What kind of violence?” Phoebe asked. She was thinking of Patty Hearst.
“Guerrilla-type stuff,” Wolf said. “Disrupting things, throwing a hitch in the works. They’d all gotten hold of this handbook for urban guerrillas, I think it came out of Brazil. They threw Molotov cocktails, rocks, slashed some tires. Little things. I guess the notion was if you made enough cracks, the whole fascist thing would come crashing down under its own weight.”
“Students?” Phoebe said. “Like my age?”
“About, yeah,” Wolf said. “Anyhow, Ulrike Meinhof decides to do a TV play and asks Inge to be on the filming staff. A story about girls who run away from a welfare home. So they start working on that, and meanwhile one of these anarchist kids, Andreas Baader, gets thrown in jail for having set a department store on fire two years earlier. He wants to write a book. Ulrike Meinhof hears about this and volunteers to help him. The kid’s lawyer, this well-known lefty lawyer, Horst Mahler, strikes a deal with the government so Ulrike Meinhof can meet with Baader a few times at the Dahlem library to help him do research. The first visit comes right after the TV show is finished. It’s midday, guards close off a wing of the library and bring in