Preview: Berlin Blues

A brief excerpt from Sven Regener’s Berlin Blues:

“Question? What question?” she retorted irritably.
“Why, mother? That’s what I asked you. Why have you been up since seven?”
“What nonsense! I always get up then.”
“Yes, but why?” Herr Lehman persisted.
“What do you mean, why?”
“Mother!” Herr Lehmann had gained the upper hand. She’s listening to me, he thought happily. She’s reacting instead of acting — she’s on the defensive now. Don’t let her off the hook, follow up your advantage, bring the subject to a satisfactory conclusion, settle it once and for all, get things straight, et cetera . . . Unfortunately, he’d rather lost the thread.
“What do I mean?” he asked, annoyed with himself. “Why? That’s obvious . . . I mean . . . Surely I can ask why, it’s a perfectly reasonable question . . .”
“You’re talking rubbish, Frank,” she said sternly. “And speak a bit more clearly, I can hardly understand you.”
“Come off it!” snapped Herr Lehmann, who was now feeling decidedly ill-tempered and totally aware of his wretched situation. It’s humiliating, he thought, for someone who’s nearly thirty years old — someone who’s had only three and a half hours sleep preceded by a brush with a canine killer and two dumb policemen, someone with a throbbing head and dry mouth — to be insulted by a member of his family, let alone by his own mother, the one person in the world who’s supposed to be wholly in sympathy with every act committed by the fruit of her womb. Celebrated examples flashed through his mind: mothers of serial killers who declared that they loved their sons above all else and blamed themselves for everything — who rose at dawn every morning and went to prison to bring their depraved offspring home-cooked meals and/or supplies of heroin. That brought him back to the point at issue.
“Now listen, mother,” he said, resuming his counterattack. “My question was this: Why–”
“You’re very indistinct. Have you got something in your mouth?”
“Yes,” Herr Lehmann said spitefully, “a tongue!” If you want plain speaking, mother, he thought, you can have it. “Is that better?”
“No need to shout, I’m not deaf. All I ask is that you speak a little more clearly or at least refrain from eating while we’re talking. It really isn’t good manners.”
“Don’t change the subject, mother.” Herr Lehmann spoke with exaggerated clarity, which wasn’t easy in view of his dehydrated condition. Dehydration is a major cause of hangovers, he told himself, but so is lack of electrolytes. “Why do you get up at seven, that was the question. You’re a housewife, and besides, today is Sunday. You don’t have anything to do all day, or at least, nothing you couldn’t do later than seven o’clock, so why, if I may make so bold — why in the name of all that’s holy — do you get up at seven purely in order to terrorize me with a phone call whose main purpose is to inform me that you’ve been awake for three hours? Why, mother, why?”
“Well . . .” The voice on the line sounded rather nettled and very far from defeated. “Why not?”
That, thought Herr Lehman, is remarkable. She’s tough, and you’ve got to hand it to her. It must be one of the traits I inherited from her, thought Herr Lehmann, who had always felt that tenacity — instilled by long experience at life without a regular income — was one of his most salient characteristics. . . .

To Air Is Human

Mind you, I’m not a Scot. I’m the typical American melange, a great dollop of English, scoops of Irish (could be a smidgen of Scotch-Irish lurking there), doses of German and French, a tablespoon of Welsh, with a tincture of Cherokee. Neither genealogically nor culturally does Scotland have a claim on me,* though Kansas does.

Moreover, on the verge of blasphemy, I must confess that at times I find the poetry of Robert Burns nearly as inaccessible as Chaucer (though each has also amused, enlightened or cut me to the quick), and should I wish to evoke a Scottish spirit in my soul, I’d reread Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped, Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, or Gerard Manley Hopkins’ incomparable little gem of a poem Inversnaid, not Burns. Then finally, surely placing me well beyond the pale, past all redemption, I’d turn down a Scotch of any origin and regardless of age for even the most pedestrian, quintessentially English, gin and tonic. As for haggis, yet another compelling argument for vegetarianism. There you have it.

Having dispensed with all requisite disclaimers, allow me to declare that if the converse of any of these conditions applies to you — if you are a Scot by nature or inclination, if you thrill at the wail of bagpipes or Robert Burns, if you relish haggis, revere the memory of Bonnie Prince Charlie, view kilts as the epitome of traditional fashion, long for the smell of heather or peat, if Scotch is the fluid of the gods for you — Thomas Fox Averill’s The Slow Air of Ewan MacPherson is just the novel for you. For the rest of us, it’s well worth reading, too.

Set in Glasgow, Kansas, during the latter half of the twentieth century, The Slow Air of Ewan MacPherson is a tale of what Nietzsche described as “wie mann wird was mann ist” — “how one becomes what one is.” As the fourth and last book in our discussion series of Literature with a Kansas Connection, scheduled for discussion on Monday, November 17th, it is the story of young Ewan’s emergence to manhood and his hard-won reconciliation to the oft-ambiguous imperatives of human love. Informative, finely textured, at times disconcerting and even exasperating, often wistful, tinged with sadness, yet glowing with a kind of melancholy warmth, The Slow Air of Ewan MacPherson is a worthy gloss on Robert Burns’ words —

Misfortunes gie the wit of Age to Youth;
They let us ken oursel;
They make us see the naked truth,
The real guid and ill.

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* Though, perhaps a month or two down the road we’ll discuss Arthur Herman’s How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe’s Poorest Nation Created Our World & Everything In It; had I been clever, I would have brought it with me to Berlin, but instead brought Herman’s other fascinating history To Rule the Waves: How the British Navy Shaped the Modern World. Perhaps the very choice betrays deep-seated loyalties. Perhaps not.