The Moment (42 page)

“Now take off your jacket and hand it to me. And I want your watch as well.”

As I did this I could see Mr. Undercover eyeing me up and down. Fortunately, my shirttail covered the back of my jeans. But if they did make me take off the shirt, I was pretty certain the bulge in the back would be noticeable.

The guard searched every pocket of my jacket and also examined the black 1950s Omega watch I had inherited from my grandfather many years earlier. I was now beginning to feel sweat gather under my arms. My verbal cockiness with the guard masked a profound fear that I could end up being held for, at best, several days on suspicion of espionage, smuggling, whatever.

“Wait here, please,” the guard said.

Gathering up my personal effects, he shoved them all into my daypack and headed off with Mr. Undercover, locking the hut door behind him. I found myself wondering:
What next?

I was left alone in that hut for more than two hours. Or, at least, I sensed it was two hours, as he had also disappeared with my watch. Having been left with no reading material, no pen and paper, I could do nothing but sit down on the floor and lose myself in thought. I pondered the fact that Petra, when held for weeks in that Stasi jail, also spent day after day without any distraction whatsoever. Judging from the few hours I was left alone, it was a physically noninvasive yet profoundly effective form of torture—especially when augmented by the fact that I so desperately needed to pee, and the ever-enlarging fear that I was in way over my head. I wondered what nightmare scenario they were now devising for me.

But then, out of nowhere, the door opened and the guard came in, alone. He was carrying my backpack. He dumped it onto the table and said:

“Get up.”

Once I was on my feet he pointed to the pack and said:

“Here are your things. Please check that they are all there.”

I did so, confirming that nothing was missing.

“Now put your jacket on, put your things away.”

Again I did exactly as asked. Once I was finished, he handed me my passport.

“You are free to go.”

There were so many questions I wanted to pose right now. Why had they decided I was no longer a risk? Did they ever get a tip-off from Judit? Why didn’t they strip search me if they were concerned that I was carrying something compromising out of the country? But I also knew that I was being allowed to leave, which was actually all I needed to know.

So I followed the guard outside. He handed me over to a subordinate who walked me to the western side of the barrier and signaled that it be raised. He tapped me on my shoulder and pointed forward. As I headed toward the Kochstrasse U-Bahn station, the gate lowered behind me with a clank. Once downstairs in the underground I pulled the bent photographs out of my jeans and spent much of the ride back to Kreuzberg trying to flatten them out.

As soon as I approached the outside door of my apartment building and fished for my keys, I heard footsteps racing down the stairs and the door swinging open, and Petra threw herself into my arms.

“I’ve been standing by the window for the last hour, worried, desperate.”

“Hey, I’m early.”

“Did you see her?”

I reached into my jacket and handed her the envelope with the photographs.

“They came back here concealed against my back, so they got a little bent.”

Now Petra raced inside and sat down on the steps and frantically shuffled her way through the stack of snapshots, stifling sobs as she looked at image after image of Johannes. When the sobs escalated, I sat down next to her and put my arms around her.

“I shouldn’t have made you go there,” she said. “I shouldn’t have so wanted to see . . .”

But she could not finish the sentence and buried her face in my shoulder, weeping. When she subsided I got her upstairs. Once inside our apartment she kissed me with such passion, such need and desire, that we fell straight into the bedroom.

Afterward I was blindsided by fatigue, a delayed shock hitting me. So I nodded off for almost an hour. When I stirred awake Petra was sitting up in bed next to me, smoking a cigarette. The photographs were in her hand and she was staring with profound wistfulness at a snap of Johannes enraptured by a balloon.

“Hi there,” she said, leaning down to kiss me.

“You okay?” I asked.

“A bit better, yes. It’s just so hard.”

“I’m sure.”

“But what you did . . . to have these photos of Johannes . . . tangible evidence beyond all the memories inside my head . . . it means so much.”

“Good.”

I accepted the offer of a cigarette.

“And how was Judit?”

“That’s a long story. In fact, everything about the day was a long story.”

“Tell it to me.”

Petra said nothing throughout my recounting of it all. When I got to the end of my tale—how the senior border guard finally let me go after several hours of incarceration—she finally spoke.

“I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t be. I knew the risks involved in crossing over. I’m just glad I’m back here, and with the photographs. But as for Judit’s role in all this, do you think she called the Stasi as soon as I was out her front door?”

Her face became as hard and angry as reinforced concrete.

“Of course, she did. And, of course, she will spend the rest of her life denying that she did. Because that’s what Stasi informers do. They convince themselves to live a lie and pretend that they ‘have no choice,’ that it is all out of their control. Whereas the truth is, they inform because they are afraid. And they are afraid because they inform. Once you are caught in that conundrum, you never get out of it with your sanity intact. It destroys you. Utterly.”

NINE

P
ETRA KEPT FOUR of the snapshots of Johannes in a small photo book she carried with her everywhere. She kept two in her wallet. She kept two tucked away in the leather-bound writing case in which she always kept a large pad of lined paper on which she first drafted her translations in longhand. On the few occasions I ever ventured to her apartment—as she found it depressing and cramped and so preferred the space and airiness of my place—I saw a couple more of the photos adorning a bulletin board that was hung over the table she used as a desk. After my trip across The Wall she never again talked about Johannes or Judit or any further details of her former life over there. The only reason I knew about the photos she carried with her was that I saw them when her writing case or wallet was left open on the kitchen table. But she never mentioned them again. I could sense that, having told me all about her imprisonment and the loss of Johannes, she now didn’t want to enter that terrain with me again. And she seemed to be working very hard at keeping the titanic emotional distress of it all out of my field of vision.

Of course, the morning after I arrived back from East Berlin—and once Petra had gone off to work—I had a coffee with Alaistair. I’d poked my head into his studio the night before to tell him I’d made it back alive. Now I filled him in on my adventures at the border. I didn’t talk much about Judit, nor did I ever mention to him the fact that she had betrayed Petra to the Stasi. But I did ask him not to mention a word to Petra that he knew about my journey on her behalf.

“As I said before, I never betray a trust,” he said. “Especially because I myself have had my trust betrayed—and it is never less appalling. But poor Petra—the photos must provide cold comfort.”

Yet a week later, as we were having lunch in the Café Istanbul, he remarked, “Petra seems rather happier. I ran into her on the street yesterday. She was all smiles, as if she’s no longer carrying some sort of terrible grief.”

Alaistair’s assessment was a correct one. A change had come over her—a sense of lightness, an absence of those dark moments when she seemed to recede into herself, and an increasingly articulate optimism about the future. When that check for two thousand deutsche marks arrived for the Radio Liberty essay and I suggested five days in Paris she said, “I’ll let you know tonight.” When she came home that evening, she informed me that her boss had given her the entire following week off.

“I’ll go to the travel agent tomorrow,” I said. “Do you want to fly or take the train?”

“The train has to go through the GDR. Even though it doesn’t stop there and I now have a Bundesrepublik passport, I still couldn’t bear the thought of being within their borders.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “We’ll fly.”

I booked us a pair of seats on Air France to Paris, and six nights in a cheap one-star hotel on the Rue Gay Lussac in the Fifth Arrondissement.

“I have to tell you something,” Petra said as we boarded the flight at Tegel Airport and she stared around the jet with something approaching wide-eyed wonder. “I’ve never been on a plane before.”

She gripped my hand for most of the flight, staring out at the empty green fields of the country from which she had been exiled as we flew at the prescribed, bumpy 10,000 feet over the GDR. We knew that we had left their airspace as the plane banked steeply, achieving cruising altitude. For the next hour it was a smooth ride before our descent into Paris.

“It’s mad, isn’t it, thinking that there are even borders up here in the clouds,” Petra said.

“We love drawing lines of demarcation,” I said. “It’s always been one of the great human preoccupations—marking our territory, telling others this is my turf and you can’t cross into it.”

“Or, worse yet, you can’t leave it. Or if you do, you lose everything.”

She lit up a cigarette and added:

“But listen to me sounding so bleak while on my way to Paris. I don’t want to dwell on the impossible.”

And she didn’t again during our time in Paris. Those six days there were such heady, amorous ones. The little one-star hotel on the Rue Gay Lussac had a small double bed with a profoundly soft mattress. When we made love, the bed heaved and screeched like some wounded animal. The room was classic
Rive Gauche louche:
peeling floral wallpaper, a carpet with multiple cigarette burns, a wooden writing table on which someone had perhaps attempted to open a vein (it had a long deep crimson stain across its midsection), a shower in a corner of the room which was simply a small platform covered by an oily green curtain, a tiny shared toilet at the end of a badly lit hallway, an all-pervasive aroma of one hundred and fifty years of accumulated cigarette smoke, the endless soundtrack of fighting from the downstairs kitchen, a diminutive woman at the front desk whose style of makeup veered toward Kabuki theater, whose voice was a Gitanes-cured rasp, and who never had a smile for any of the guests.

We loved this little dive of a hotel. Especially because, once inside the thin door of our
petite chambre sans pretension,
we could not keep our hands off each other. There is something about a shabby hotel room—especially a shabby Paris hotel room—that seems to heighten need and desire.

Then there was Paris itself. Two days after our arrival Petra turned to me and said, “Let’s move here . . . tomorrow.”

We were sitting in a café on the Carrefour de l’Odeon in the Sixth, having just watched a new print of
The Big Sleep
at the Cinéma Action Christine nearby. It was a perfect day in early summer. We were drinking a serviceable and (for the Sixth Arrondissement) cheap glass of something Burgundy and red. Sharing cigarettes. Holding hands. Looking out at the pedestrian parade—the chic and the intellectually nerdish, the highly overdressed and the waiflike. The sense of urban life as stylized theater. The mutual realization that we were having one of those shared sublime moments because we were together, wildly in love, in this city, at this magical hour of early evening where the street was bathed in an Armagnac-like tint of receding light, and everything was just so damn perfect. So when Petra suggested we move here immediately, I countered with another thought:

“I’m all for that. But why don’t we get married as well?”

She was caught off-guard by this proposal and took a minute or so to absorb it all. Then she said, in a voice as hushed as it was considered:

“I’d like that. I’d like that more than anything. It’s just . . . are you sure, Thomas? Of course, I want to say ‘yes’ on the spot.”

“Then do so.”

“I just fear . . .”

“What?”

“I fear . . . letting you down.”

“I could also let you down,” I said.

“No, you couldn’t. Or, at least, not like I could.”

“But how?”

She suddenly stood up and said, “Give me a moment.”

She disappeared into the café, heading for the toilets. As I waited for her to return, I fretted that I had overplayed my hand, that, given all she had gone through, this was too much too fast. But, damn it,
I knew.
Just as she had let me know repeatedly that she knew, too. Now my great fear was that part of her so understandably distrusted other people that the prospect of happiness with someone else was beyond her. As I always thought that it was beyond me, until I met Petra.

But when she returned to the table a few minutes later she was all smiles.

“I was just . . . overwhelmed. The idea that you want me as your wife . . .”

“More than anything.”

“And I want you as my husband more than anything.”

“Then what’s stopping us?”

“Nothing, I suppose. But . . .”

“We’re brilliant together. You want to live in Paris, we can live in Paris. You want to live in New York, we can live in New York—and as my wife you’ll have immediate right of residence. You want a child, we can have a child. As I told you before, I want a child with you.”

“You paint the most seductive pictures, Thomas.”

“But not based on some skewed sense of reality.”

“I know, I know. Okay then,” she finally whispered.

“Okay then.”

And we sat there looking at each other, absorbing the enormity of it all.

“I think this calls for champagne,” I said.

“And the East German girl in me worries that it might break the budget.”

“It won’t. Even if it did . . .”

“You’re right, you’re right.”

So we ordered a bottle of house champagne. When the waiter brought it over and I told him, exuberantly, “We’ve just gotten engaged!” he gave us both a small, sage nod and said one word:

“Chapeau.”

We toasted ourselves and drank the bottle of champagne. Somewhere between the second and third glass, I said that we should think about a trip to the States sometime soon.

“Will your father like me?” she asked.

“I’ve no doubt about that . . . though when I tell him we’re engaged he will initially say something charming like, ‘Giving up your freedom so young.’”

“Might he not have a point?”

“Not at all. And I only mentioned that to underscore the fact that my dad is a rather gruff customer. But once he meets you, he will envy me.”

“What I said before—about wanting to move to Paris or New York tomorrow—I truly mean it. And even though I know ‘tomorrow’ really means a few months from now . . . please, Thomas, take me out of Berlin.”

“With pleasure,” I said.

Much of that night—as we moved on to dinner in a brasserie on the Rue des Écoles—we began to talk seriously about our future life together. Petra knew about my studio apartment in Manhattan—and I said that, if we moved back, we could easily camp there for a couple of months while we found something bigger.

“For around seven hundred dollars per month we could probably get two bedrooms up near Columbia University.”

“Could we afford that?”

“I’d need to get one more book review or magazine article a month.”

“But say I couldn’t find any work?”

“You’ll find work—teaching, translating. I bet you could talk your way into the German department of some private school, even find something at Columbia.”

“But I have no advanced degrees.”

“But you have been a professional translator for years.”

“That doesn’t mean I can teach.”

“Why not?”

“You really are relentlessly optimistic.”

“It’s an optimism for us.”

“I don’t want to be dependent on you in New York.”

“But say, five years from now, when you have a full-time post at some college or at the UN, and I can’t get a book published . . .”

“That will never happen.”

“It happens all the time in the wonderful world of letters. Two or three books into a career—bad sales, indifferent reviews—and suddenly nobody wants to know you anymore.”

“But that is not you.”

“How can you be so sure of that?”

“Because I read your book—and all the essays of yours I’ve translated . . .”

“‘
You really are relentlessly optimistic.’”

“Ouch.”

“You take my point?”

“It’s the old East German indoctrination kicking in. One should be optimistic about the future of revolutionary Communism. But when it comes to oneself . . .”

“You’ll learn to be easier on yourself.”

“Only when I finally get out of Berlin. Staying there has all been about being near Johannes. Now I realize that it’s all futile. I’ve lost him forever.”

“I think that’s a very brave thing to admit.”

“What? Accepting that there is no hope?”

“Yes, that is exactly what I mean.”

We fell silent.

“Paris,” she finally said. “It once seemed as remote as the far side of the moon.”

Three days later—as we boarded the bus to Orly and the flight back to Berlin—Petra held on to my hand so tightly it felt as if she was in desperate need of ballast.

“You okay?” I asked.

“I don’t want to go back.”

“But it will only be for a couple of weeks.”

“I know, I know. It’s just . . .”

“We can expedite our exit by me booking an appointment with the US consul as soon as we’re home and finding out what we have to do to get you a green card.”

“How long do you think that will take?”

“I haven’t a clue, as I haven’t exactly had a string of foreign fiancées in the past.”

“Let’s see if they can get it done as soon as possible.”

“You mean, before you change your mind?”