The Invisible Circus - Jennifer Egan [94]
They’d drifted among the sights, Nefertiti’s bust, the spangled halls of Charlottenburg Palace, Hitler’s Olympic Stadium, where, crossing the moth-eaten grass, Faith had turned suddenly to Wolf and said, “We’re doing something wrong.”
Wolf didn’t want to talk, he felt too many things of his own. “Something can’t be happening every minute,” he said.
“Something is,” Faith said. “You’re either with it or you’re not.”
“Hey. Look where we are.”
Faith glanced around them at the vast field encircled by walls, long white flagpoles vanishing into the mist.
“I meant Berlin,” Wolf said, uneasy.
“Everything is the same,” Faith said. “Same people running the world, stomping on the same other people. Nothing is different, Wolf, after all this, nothing!” She sounded panicky. “I’ve still got fifteen hundred dollars.”
“You’ll run out.”
“I know,” Faith said, pensive. “I need to think of something big. It has to be big.”
“Let’s start a fire,” Wolf said, tossing her his lighter. Faith flicked it, the tiny flame pulsing in the fizzy air. She pulled a joint from her antique cigarette case and fired it up, Wolf peering around nervously, half expecting SS guards to come goose-stepping out and arrest them. But no one came. The place was a museum.
Faith took a long hit and passed the joint to Wolf. “If IBM built a stadium, it would look like this,” she croaked, holding in smoke. “They’re fascists, you know. All of them.”
“I’m the converted,” Wolf said.
As they finished the joint, the place softened before his eyes, rippling like there was music pulsing through it. Wolf flicked away the roach. “Adolf Hitler built this place,” he said, “and we just got stoned in it.”
Faith took his hand. Wolf kissed her hair. “When you feel like nothing changes, think of that,” he said.
They had gone to a party that night on the outskirts of Berlin, in a massive building where someone said bombs used to be stored during the war. It was a wild scene, acid bands, freaks from all over the world. Faith and Wolf met a guy there, Eric, who wore a pink leather coat and looked a little like Manson: dark, lunatic eyes, handsome with a kind of fanatical edge. Wolf had seen him before at the Gedächtniskirche, this bombed-out church on the Ku’damm where all the hippies hung out. Eric’s mother was English, so Faith could talk to him without Wolf having to translate. Somehow the RAF came up, and Eric mentioned the fact that he’d gone to university with Baader’s girlfriend, Gudrun Ensslin, another Red Army member.
“Do people ever join the group?” Faith asked. “Or is it just the original members?”
“They’re accepting CVs as we speak,” Eric said.
Faith looked doubtful. “What’s a CV?”
“He’s goofing,” Wolf said. “It’s a résumé.”
Faith’s eyes narrowed. She hated being mocked. “I shot a rabbit one time,” she said, deadpan.
Eric stared at her, and Faith burst out laughing. Wolf laughed, too.
Eric smiled sardonically. “And when did you perform this … action?” he said.
“I was ten,” Faith said, still grinning.
“A prodigy. But haven’t you any more recent experience?” He poised phantom pen to paper, a mock interviewer.
“Coke bottles,” Faith said.
Eric looked blank.
“Targets,” she explained. “Clay pigeons, too.”
“The gun?” Somehow the discussion had turned serious.
“A .38. Revolver.”
Eric’s brows rose. But he said only, “Americans. Always the revolver.”
Wolf tried to lure Faith away from Eric, but there was no budging her. So he ate a tab of acid and hung around, kind of drifting in and out of the conversation. It wasn’t long before Faith brought up Gene, how IBM had ground her father down, drained his spirit away until he was empty, until his very blood revolted. She said things Wolf had never heard before: