Read The Berlin Connection for Free Online Page B

body. We were like lovers, the way we clung to one another, I with my naked chest, she in her green, tightly fitted suit.
    I opened my eyes.
    "You are very ill. You cannot make your film, Mr. Jordan."
    I closed my eyes again.
    11
    Have you had the same experiences, dear Professor Pontevivo: You hear the noise of a car driving away; you see a plane ready for take-off, a young girl descending some old stairs; you make a certain gesture . . . and since your senses register these facts, impressions, feelings, Since your consciousness is now aware and recognizes them, your memory is being awakened by a sound, a smell, a fragrance, a gesture. You close your eyes for a moment—^you find yourself back in a different time, a different country, among people. Your past, suddenly present, has displayed the present. In the opening and closing of your eyelids, in a second so much of yesterday rises up in you. ... ^
    I held Natasha in my arms, she held me. I closed my eyes. Suddenly I was not in Hamburg any more, but in

    Pacific Palisades where I held another woman in my arms.
    We clung to one another, lovers in reality, passionate, heedless and desperate.
    "Your mother . . . She might be back any moment.. ."
    Shirley's body was slim but feminine. She had a slim waist and smooth hips. Her legs were long and well-shaped. Her skin, firm and young. The thick ponytail of her brown-red hair, which she always wore forward over one shoulder, had come untied and I felt the flood of hair warm and exciting on my chest. She held my head with both hands, her teeth dug into my lips and she moaned. I could not stand it any longer. Fourteen days we couldn't embrace, not touch each other ... We did not see each ether for fourteen days.
    I had stood by the window in my bungalow, looking down at the ocean before she came. The bungalow, built on a steep hill thickly overgrown with gorse and prickly hibiscus, stood far apart from the main house. Only one path, bordered by orange trees, palms, and yucca trees with fan-shaped fronds hanging limply in the burning heat of this calm day in July, led up to the bungalow.
    At the foot of the hill were grounds where sprinklers were forever watering the lawns, creating rainbows, with flowerbeds, gravel paths and the swimming pool at the end of the property. Immediately behind a rose-studded hedge, a thirty-yard cliff dropped so steeply that the beach below was not visible, only the deep blue Pacific.
    The bungalow had been built in 1954. When my wife and I began to draw apart, a year and a half ago, I had had some of my books and records transferred to the bungalow. Then, when Joan was not well, or when we quarreled, I slept there. This is where Shirley came to see me.
    It had happened here, in this bungalow, for the first time, half a year ago. And since then again and again, in the bedroom, here on the carpet, on the oversized couch

    by the fireplace. We would embrace fiercely whenever there had been an opportunity: at night, early mornings, afternoon, whenever Joan went into town, when the servants were away, during violent thunderstorms, at high or low tide.
    From the windows of the bungalow the path leading to it was plainly visible. No one could have reached the bungalow through the surrounding thorny thicket. It would have ripped clothing, lacerated skin. It had become my habit to stare at the narrow path between that undergrowth when lit by the sun or by the floodlights, and always when Shirley was in my arms.
    "Your mother ... she might be back any moment..." I said it but still my hands were caressing her warm suntanned body covered only by a ridiculously tiny bikini. I wore shorts and sandals. It was inhumanly hot on this day but cool inside the bungalow.
    "We have to wait... wait until it is night..."
    "I can't wait, I've been away for such a long time...." Shirley was then learning to be a film cutter. She had spent the last two weeks in studios in Culver City. There had been too much work for her to