if he’s seeing anyone these days. He draws to a halt, theatrically. Takes off his hat, which he had just put on.
“Is what I’m telling you confi dential?”
“Gogarty. It goes without saying.”
“I’ll be needing your help with a divorce in a few months’ time, David.”
“Who’s getting divorced?”
“I am.”
“You are. From who?”
“My wife.”
“Your wife. This is some sort of metaphor, Gogarty, or did I miss something? For example, the wedding? Your wedding ring is what, invisible?”
“That’s why this is confi dential.”
“Okay. I apologize. Start from the beginning.”
“Remember Ana, the German girl, the photographer, the maniac?”
“Very vaguely. She was in your life, when, mid-nineties?”
And I did remember her. She lived with him at the place in Gramercy. She was a gorgeous girl, but a bit terrifying. When she learned I was a lawyer, she said, “How can you stand all these typical days you must have?” A real charmer. But then again, maybe the bad attitude is what she and Gogarty liked about each other. Gogarty starts to tell me about this divorce he needs, and within two sentences I cut him off, because I don’t want to be disbarred. Not for some INS bullshit!
ANA KAGANOVA defies a polite question about what her typical day is like (early August 2000):
Typical days are for other people, weiß’ du? You want to see my typical day? Here, here is my typical day:
STEFAN MAYR reports on the front page of Berlin Blick (June 27, 1979, translated from the original German):
EXCLUSIVE! ONLY IN B. BLICK!
“I Came from an Ape”
EAST GERMAN BEAUTY ESCAPES COMMIES INSIDE WORLD-FAMOUS GORILLA
BERLIN, 27.6: When the 1.8-meter-tall, eighteen-year-old Venus from Karl Marx Allee walked into the police station in Wedding last Tuesday, the officers on duty could not believe their eyes. But when she told them how she escaped from the East, it was their ears they could not believe! In an exclusive interview with B. BLICK, Ana Kaganova told of her fl ight to freedom—inside a gorilla!
“I always dreamed of life in the West,” said Ana, who sat with a B. BLICK reporter this weekend and unfolded a harrowing tale of intrigue, romance, and courage! “I only needed an opportunity.”
Love gave her the opportunity in May, when her West German boyfriend, a student whom she met at a youth conference in Danzig last winter, made contact with a smuggler named Wolfi.
“Wolfi wanted six thousand marks to bring me west, which my boyfriend was able to borrow from his parents and his friends,” Ana said, enjoying an American cigarette and a French café au lait at a bar off the Ku’damm. “The next step was for Wolfi to meet me in the East. For several weekends we met for beer in Marzahn, where he traveled on a fake day pass as an Austrian diplomat. He wanted to establish a pattern, so that we would not raise suspicions on the day of the escape.
“On the fourth visit, he told me he had a plan. I was to meet him the next Saturday morning at ten o’clock, but he would tell me nothing more!
“I couldn’t tell anyone what I was doing, or thinking, and yet I had so many people to say goodbye to! How could I tell them that I might never see them again? And yet I was in love, and I had so many hopes for my new life of freedom!”
When the appointed day came at last, Wolfi arrived in a truck, accompanied by a stranger named Klaus. All three climbed into the truck’s rear cabin, and they closed the door behind them.
“At first I didn’t know what to expect. Wolfi still had not told me the plan. I thought that maybe he was going to hide me inside the wheel panels; I had heard of such escapes before. But I never could have expected what was waiting for me instead!
“Inside the truck was a stuffed gorilla!”
It was Bobby, the prize possession of the Commie Museum of Natural History. Bobby the Gorilla was born in French Africa in 1924, but in 1928 he was purchased by the Weimar authorities at the Berlin Zoo. Bobby was among the first great apes to arrive in Europe, and his gentleness and size made him the zoo’s favorite attraction and Berlin’s leading citizen. Even as the dark hour of Nazism descended on Germany, Bobby provided hope to decent Berliners, an ambassador of peace in troubled times.
When Bobby died in 1934, at the young age of ten, all the newspapers in Berlin ran obituaries commemorating his heroic life. And so, in a bald play for public sympathy, the Nazi authorities had Bobby taxidermied and put on display in the Berlin Museum of Natural History.
Ana picks up the story from there: “Wolfi had impersonated a museum curator from the West and had convinced the head of the Museum of Natural History to lend him Bobby for one week, as part of an international exhibition on the history of taxidermy in Germany. And the museum believed him!
“Wolfi had faked many documents, including the necessary insurance bonds from the West. And he had all the necessary paperwork from the East to bring Bobby through the checkpoint. All we needed to do was get me inside Bobby!
“Klaus was an expert taxidermist brought in especially for the operation. It took Klaus four hours to open Bobby up, carve out a place for me to curl into, and then sew Bobby shut again. But this is exactly what he did!
“It was very uncomfortable inside the ape. Bobby smelled like chemicals, and it was hard to breathe. I had to sit with my head between my knees, because that was the only way for me to fit inside Bobby’s belly.” The Amazonian Ana demonstrated this feat for B. BLICK’s photographers, in the full-color recreation attached.
“At the border, I was very nervous! I heard the border guards questioning Wolfi, but all the paperwork checked out, and so they let us through! Then it was just a matter of letting me out and sewing Bobby back up.
“For the next week I hid in a hotel room in Wedding with my boyfriend, until we heard from Wolfi that Bobby had been safely returned to the East. And then I went straight to the police to tell my story! I was so happy to be free at last!”
Both “Wolfi” and Ana’s boyfriend declined to be interviewed by B. BLICK for fear of prosecution by the West German authorities for their roles in faking the necessary paperwork. The Museum of Natural History could not be reached for comment.
ANA KAGANOVA addresses, sort of, a polite question about what her typical day is like (early August 2000):
This is the sort of typical day that I had in 1979. Now my typical day, I have to get from Hano a donkey head.
I do have in actuality the one typical thing, which is to go to the bodega and buy coffee in a paper cup. This is the true symbol
