“A time line? What exactly—”
“Use the files in my office. Start a new one for the Wall. And you can clip Le Canard enchainé too, but only if you see something interesting. I find it so hard to follow, don’t you? Oh, and did Olivier mention a package for me?”
“There’s a bag in the kitchen with your name on it.”
“Could you look inside?”
“It’s a bottle of what looks like vitamins.”
“What does the bottle say?”
“Extrait de papaye.”
“God, that’s a nice accent.”
“Thanks.”
“I’m going to have to have you make all my French calls. Anyway, you’re sure that’s what it says? Good. What about the paint?”
“It looks like the entryway and the living room are about half-done.”
“Listen, do me a favor. When Clarence shows up tomorrow, do a walk-through with him and get him to tell you the names of the colors. He won’t tell me, but I’m sure he’ll tell you and I need to know what he’s up to.”
“The names of the colors?”
“Yes. Find out what he thinks the colors are. Find out what is going on in his mind. Then you can tell me what they really are, but right now I have a very important meeting. I don’t mean to be abrupt, but you’re fine, right?”
“Great, I’m great. Thanks for everything.”
“Your chambre is clean? She didn’t sabotage it?”
“No, she left me tea and sugar.”
“I’m sure she didn’t mean to. Anyway, Olivier didn’t say anything in particular? Nothing going on?”
“I barely saw him. He had to leave right away.”
“Well, good. I’m glad you’re settled. Now, call your mother. She’ll want to know you’ve landed. Do you know how to make a collect call from France?”
“Sure. I just have to wait until it’s late enough in California.”
“Listen, my German translator has shown up. Tell Clarence, when he gets there, to expect a call from me tomorrow evening, around five.”
Clip and précis. Knowing the definition of the words didn’t illuminate Lydia’s meaning. How did one keep a time line? How could she trust me to synthesize international events and to fathom her husband’s ideas about paint color? And which part of my job was the more important? All the tasks she listed sounded equally urgent. “A little bit of everything.”
I went into Lydia’s office, off the main hallway, to investigate. The room’s two windows framed the small interior garden, one degree further removed from the street than the quiet courtyard, the gem within the gem. Almost no one ever saw this garden, with its pleasantly overgrown geometric plots, outlined in pale stone, and its wrought iron table with a glass top where someone, Olivier surely, had left a china cup that must be full of rainwater by now.
Despite its harmonious view, the office was unsettling. Its topography was like nothing I had experienced. There were piles of papers everywhere. There were file cabinets, an enormous desk with a giant computer, an armoire full of supplies, a Rolodex. There were envelopes from Condé Nast and from a photo agency called Maxim. There were proof sheets full of people I had never seen and places I did not recognize, all marked up in white china marker, in a mysterious and beautiful code of circles and X’s and arrows.
I picked up a magnifying glass from Lydia’s desk and looked through it. At first, all I saw was a close-up of a boy in a knit hat with a faraway look in his eyes. Then I noticed a guitar strap over his shoulder, then a tank rolling behind him. There was a Post-it above the boy that read, “learning English from Bob Dylan records, hopes to go West.”
There was another sheet of soft circles of light over shadowy-colored backgrounds. It proved to be a candlelight vigil on the West Berlin side of the Wall. A bearded man held a white candle up in front of a silver-gray vulture with clenched claws and an alarmingly focused downward glare. A baby in a pouch slept in the glow of her mother’s candle, behind them the word TRACE spray-painted a ghostly outline over layers and layers of bold block letters. There was a couple sharing a candle by a soaring Japanese manga boy, with a lean muscular chest, white wings and red hair whipped upward by the wind into the shape of a flame. There were German names and cartoon animals bathed in candlelight. An old woman smiled behind her candle, her teeth sparkling from the depths of her shawl. So this was how people looked in Berlin.
But what about clipping and précising?
In the top drawer of the first file cabinet I opened, I found a manila folder labeled “Germany Time Line.” I smiled. On the front of the folder was a magazine cutout of a pillared monument. On closer look, there was a rushing bronze chariot on top. I didn’t recognize anything about it until I read a quote below: “‘The German Question will remain open as long as the Brandenburg Gate is closed.’—JFK. The Brandenburg Gates.”
Mom had a recording of the Brandenburg Concertos that she had played during breakfast on almost every morning of my childhood in order to make me smart. Now I realized where those concertos came from. I opened the Brandenburg file. There were Xerox-ed clippings and a date-by-date summary of the articles. The summary ended a little over a week ago, when the last girl must have gone. A time line. Perhaps I could be trusted after all.
I took some cash from the box in Lydia’s drawer, went out, found a news kiosk, bought Le Monde, Libération and some strawberry Hollywood chewing gum.
It had stopped raining.
The German story of the day was about a hundred arrests at a demonstration in Liepzig. Helmut Kohl, the prime minister of West Germany, had denounced them.
Back in the office, I turned on the electric typewriter. Lydia had told me not to touch her computer. It was easily sabotaged, she said.
I found the scissors in a mug that said VOGUE.
I took a moment to feel impressed by my new boss. She was creating art that would refract for years through millions of eyes and brains and hearts. Even though she was probably driving some poor translator in Germany crazy right now, she was giving meaning to her times.
My own mother back home, what was she doing? She was smoothing things over for a powerful man, a lawyer who was not her husband. She was organizing lives, his, mine, hers to some extent. But what was she making? What did she mean?
I stopped cutting Libération and picked up the proof sheet closest to the computer, all close-ups of a half-smiling man labeled “Portraits of Salman” in red crayon.
Even I knew who Salman was. Muslim extremists had put a price on his head for “offensive” passages in his novel The Satanic Verses. In these images, he appeared quiet and resolved. I gazed into his sympathetic eyes.
My communion with Salman Rushdie was short-lived. When the phone rang, I dropped the pictures, leaped to the ringer on Lydia’s desk. It was touch-tone. Modern.
“Allo?”
“Who is this?” It was a young woman’s voice, soft and faintly accusatory.
“This is Kate. I’m Lydia Schell’s assistant. Can I help you?” I asked, pleased with my imitation of professionalism.
“I’m Portia, Lydia’s daughter. My mother is very busy right now so she has asked me to call you with some instructions for the house.”
‘’Hi, Portia.”
She came back quick and breathy. “Hi, listen, my mother asks that you call the plumber—his name is Monsieur Polanski and you’ll find him in the Rolodex—because the