The Invisible Circus - Jennifer Egan [98]
Phoebe shifted uncomfortably.
“I couldn’t disconnect myself from the thing,” Wolf said. “So I stayed, I waited. Then, out of the blue, she found me.”
It was late October, already getting cold, and Faith had none of the right clothes. Something was the matter with her. She was just—broken somehow. Wolf wrapped her up in sweaters, turned on the oven and burners full-blast so the windows steamed white. Faith shivered convulsively; it took all day before he could get her to talk, but finally she did.
“She was involved in the robberies,” he said. “Her job was to cut a hole through the fence behind a building next to one of the banks, so the gunmen could crawl through after they made the hit. Some of them thought she wasn’t strong enough to cut the wire, but Faith insisted she’d done it before. So they put her in a dress, gave her a little white purse with a book on Berlin inside it, a subway map—the ingenue tourist. Faith wanted to dye her hair like some of the other girls, but instead they decided she should cut it. Ulrike Meinhof thought long hair drew too much attention; she’d cut off her own weeks before. So Faith had no choice but to go along and have her hair cut short, the last thing on earth she wanted to do. Petra Shelm, a former hairdresser in the group, did the honors, spread Faith’s own shirt under the chair to catch what fell from her head. Faith stuffed some hair in her pocket when they weren’t looking, but later she threw it out.
“Anyway,” Wolf said, “it turned out she really wasn’t strong enough to cut the fence. She struggled wildly out there for about an hour, got so desperate she damn near asked some guy she saw down the alley to help her. Tried using her wrists, feet, ended up ripping the hem of the dress. When they came back to get her, she was all disheveled, the fence uncut; they totally freaked. Horst Mahler jumped out of the car and did it right there, everyone watching. Faith held the clippers for him while he wrestled with the wire.”
Phoebe tried to imagine her sister struggling, failing so publicly, but couldn’t. In her mind’s eye, Faith always found a way. “Was it, like, a disaster?” she said, feeling anxious.
“Not at the time, no,” Wolf said. “Faith said the whole experience of the robberies was incredibly intense. The adrenaline gets you high as a kite; for days everything had this LSD clarity. The gun, too, carrying it on your body, like having a second heart. Even being ‘wanted’ she liked; feeling marked, incognito when she walked around, thinking, if that grocer, that streetsweeper knew who I really was, they’d freak. Everything they did went straight into the news—instantly, this druggy out-of-body thing, seeing yourself from miles away, knowing zillions of people were following each little thing you did … I mean, imagine it.”
“It sounds incredible,” Phoebe said.
“It was. I mean, she said it was.” He was silent a moment. Phoebe felt a pull of regret in the room, like an undertow.
“She couldn’t read German, obviously,” Wolf said, “but Horst Mahler would translate for her. After the banks they’d never even had to count their take—it was all over the evening papers, down to the last pfennig. They sent Faith out to buy them. Her hands were shaking so hard she dropped the papers on her way back, got one wet in a puddle. No one even cared, they were too excited.”
Wolf fell silent. In the absence of his voice a dullness bore down upon them, Phoebe thought, as if some faint glow had been snuffed. They could laugh all they wanted.
“Anyway, the triumph was pretty short-lived,” he said. “About a week after the robberies, the cops busted two apartments and got four Red Army people, including Horst Mahler. After that, the RAF decided it was too dangerous to stay in Berlin, so they pared down their operations, started moving people into West Germany. At that point Faith was out, more or less.”
“Out?”
“You know, they cut her out. Sent her on some long errand to a suburb of Berlin, and by the