The Invisible Circus - Jennifer Egan [93]
“What’s that?”
“Literally, Red Army Faction. But ‘faction’ is more like ‘gang’ in German.”
“I’ve heard of them, the Red Army Faction,” Phoebe said, mildly electrified. “So did you—meet them or something?”
Wolf shook his head. “They were underground,” he said, “you wouldn’t meet them. In fact, you couldn’t get near them. They’d spent most of that summer in Jordan, learning guerrilla tactics from the PLO. I remember hearing that and thinking, Shit, here we just pissed away our summer getting stoned and throwing feathers around.”
Phoebe remembered the charge of excitement she’d felt in Harrods during the bomb scare. People her own age changing the world by force. What guts it took.
“So we got to Berlin,” Wolf said. “And there was this incredible charge to the place, almost this simmering. We crashed with a carpenter friend of the guy we drove with, he had a big place in Kreuzberg, this tenement district near the Wall full of immigrant Turks, where the freaks had sort of collected.”
“And were the anarchists all around, like you thought?”
“Totally,” Wolf said. “The Hash Rebels, Black Help, this one group called the Socialist Patients’ Collective, literally a bunch of mental patients—and their doctor—who’d decided society made them sick and the way to get well was to fight it. Tupamaros West Berlin, named after some Uruguayan group … they were a whole world, these people. Tons of underground papers, 883, Extrablatt, D.P.A.; they’d print letters from this jailed Hash Rebel named Michael Baumann to his girlfriend, Hella, and I’d translate them for Faith …”
Phoebe heard the lift in Wolf’s voice, as if the very memory excited him. “We got swept along by the scene,” he said. “Clubs, taverns like the Zodiak, the Inexplicable Shelter for Travelers, the Fat Host and the Top Ten. We kept crazy hours, crashing at dawn, sleeping whole days. And whenever we woke up, the good feeling was still there—that was the thing—like finally we were moving, like if somehow we could just keep to this pace, we’d do more than survive, we’d catch hold of whatever it was the Weathermen, the students in Paris, the Hell’s Angels—what all these cats had missed. Faith was in heaven. Parties in old blasted-out warehouses—I’d look out through a pane of broken glass and see the moon, smokestacks, ashy glittering stars and think, Christ, here I am, like I was about to be lifted away.”
Phoebe listened intently, overcome by a familiar sense that she herself was slipping from the scene as if literally fading, becoming physically less solid. She felt an urge to grab hold of something, anchor herself, but there was only Wolf, and he’d vanished into the story. “What about the Red Army?” she said.
“Oh, you felt them,” Wolf said. “They’d come back from Jordan that August, literally just a week or so before Faith and I got to Berlin, and everyone was just—aware of them, you know? Especially in Kreuzberg. Walking around, I kept thinking I saw them. Later it came out that their trip to Jordan was a disaster … Baader, I guess, was scared of guns; also there’d been some flap about the German girls sunbathing nude on the compound roof. But no one pictured it like that, I can promise you.”
“Did you ever really see them?” Phoebe asked.
“No,” Wolf said. “We never did, that was the thing. After a while it got to us.”
It was August, each day shorter than the last. “You could taste fall on the air at night,” Wolf remembered, “this tang under the heat. I’d catch myself thinking