These Dreams of You

~ ~ ~

Should she note in a letter the bullet holes in the Hansa recording studio near the Wall? Will this be thrilling or frightening or both? In the International Herald Tribune she reads that in five years the assassin of Robert Kennedy will be up for parole; she can’t help regretting that he wasn’t executed, she who might have assumed herself opposed to executions. It’s not a matter of vengeance but rather some rightful order extracted from the anarchy of the world. Everything is personal.

When she goes to look for the clippings she’s kept these years, beginning with the first she read in London about the trip to South Africa and the others afterward that made their folded way from one volume to another, they’re nowhere to be found among any of her possessions. She’s filled with reproach at their loss. She thinks of the aging clippings hidden forever in L.A. with Kelly, who never will know of them unless one happens to flutter from some book she randomly opens. This is the price, believes Jasmine, of such a cowardly flight, of leaving a woman like a man would.

On their arrival in Schöneberg, Jasmine realizes the two singers haven’t entirely shed their bad habits so much as downscaled, trading drugs for garden-variety alcoholism. Methodically they carve up the calendar allowing for two days a week of prowling the clubs and bars and strip joints of Kreuzberg — the Exile, the SO36 overrun by German punks — then two days of calm and restitution at the flat, shaking off hangovers over coffee and books. The other three days are devoted to writing and recording at the studio within sight of the wall and its armed East German snipers, who are close enough to pick off one singer or the other and strike a singular blow against western decadence. For a while the two men and woman are tourists, driving in the Black Forest and visiting the Brücke museum, striking poses out of expressionist paintings and snapping photographs with a little polaroid camera picked up in a pawn shop. Sometimes the picture seems to vanish between the click of the shutter and the exposure of the negative; waving his hand, the flame-haired Old World wanderer given to believing such things says, “It’s in the air. A ghost camera, taking pictures of the Old World disappearing.”

“Yeah,” cracks Jim, “or a camera that doesn’t work.”

The men sink into the anonymity they’ve craved in their ramble eastward. Turkish immigrants around them trudge westward, worlds passing at twilight, the visibility of each to the other dying at dusk. Session musicians come and go through the cavernous studio, a converted movie set from the silent era before the rise of the Reich where epic visions were filmed of sexy robots in Twenty-First Century Babels. The air fills with the chemical smell of old celluloid rotting in the vaults.

She’s never seen musical instruments that look like these. It’s as though they’ve materialized from the same silent science-fiction German movies whose rot the musicians breathe in and out as they play; the instruments appear more like time machines, or what she imagines a time machine might look like, transporting the traveler from the execution of a song back to its inception or forward to its completion — bending the music from the end or beginning back into the middle, and bending the music of years from now back to the music of years ago, to produce this music of the moment. It’s as though Jasmine could climb into a song and ride it back ten years to the kitchen of an old Hollywood hotel, in time to prevent an assassination, or forward twenty years in time to prevent her own.

The first time that Jasmine sees the Professor, as everyone calls him, it’s the middle of a stormy afternoon. She’s arrived with recording contracts to be signed and finds him alone, hunched over one of the instruments in the barely lit studio; a tinny transistor plays a song from half a dozen years before—and Ray Charles was shot down—another musical age. He’s lost in thought, staring at the studio floor covered with a couple dozen cards that might be from a tarot except without images or icons. Rather they’re emblazoned with maxims and mini-manifestos that barely can be read in the room’s shadows: EMBARRASS YOURSELF and THE SONG HAS SECRETS FROM THE SINGER and DO NOT BE BLIND TO. . on one card and. . YOUR OWN VISION on the next. Alone, staring at the floor trying to divine its instructions, when the transistor sings I dreamed we played cards in the dark, and you lost and you lied, the balding man in eyeliner laughs and glances over his shoulder at the radio

these dreams of you. .

then looks up and smiles at Jasmine as though they’ve met many times. Over the days and weeks, sessions spill into other sessions, songs start out belonging to one man and end another’s. More often the music is of a no-man’s land like that which lies between the two western and eastern barricades that have come to constitute in the psyche of the world a single Wall.