The Moment (50 page)

I nodded my head, many times, thrown by the ferocity of his tone.

“Your role in all this is finished. You did the right thing. Now it is over. Here’s the deal I am willing to cut you. You pack your bags and you get out of Berlin now—and if I never read or hear anything by you about any of this, I will let you get on with your life. But if you make trouble . . . if you start raising shit . . .”

“I’ll make no trouble,” I said.

He let go of my shirt.

“Smart guy. Now go upstairs and start packing your bags. There’s a BA flight to Frankfurt at seven tomorrow morning. It connects with a Lufthansa flight at ten twenty-five a.m. to New York. You have an open round-trip ticket, don’t you?”

He knows everything about me. Everything.

“I am going to have my people call the two airlines and book you on those flights. No objections?”

And no choice in the matter
.

“No objections,” I said.

“You’re a
truly
smart guy. On behalf of the US government, I thank you for your sterling work. She was a piece of shit, and you got duped and then you settled the score, which is the way I like to see these stories turn out, not that they ever really do. Still . . .”

I lowered my head and said nothing. All I felt right now was shame and horror.
“Please, please, please,”
she’d said to me over and over again, begging me to let her tell her side of things. Instead, all full of righteous rage, I had thrown her into the clutches of these men whose games were as dirty as those played by the other side.

“If you’re feeling guilty—and I’m a good read of these things,” Bubriski said, “lose it now. She knew what she was getting into when she got into bed with those people. She’ll be traded in a few weeks for some people they have imprisoned over there and will probably be awarded with a bigger apartment and a Trabbi. Until then we won’t deprive her of sleep or try to break her down—because there’s little she can tell us that we don’t already know. She’s just a minor pawn in all this. Just like you.”

“And how about Haechen? Will you be arresting him?”

“That’s confidential. My advice to you is: go back to New York. Write your Berlin book. Find some interesting neurotic junior editor at the
New York Review of Books
to sleep with. Never mention any of this to anybody, but I told you that already, and I sense you’re a fast learner. Just be thankful you walked away relatively unscathed. My report about you will praise your cooperation and the fact that you delivered the ‘package’ to us. But it will also insist that a close eye be kept on your literary output. By all means continue to be somewhat snide about your country in print. It shows we don’t clamp down on creative types who play the critical card. But if word ever reaches us that you have told this story . . .”

“What story?”

“I’m actually beginning to moderately like you.”

“If my roommate asks why I’m leaving in a hurry?”

“Tell him you broke up with your girlfriend and it’s too hard to bear remaining in Berlin. Then be on that plane tomorrow morning at seven.”

He stepped back from me.

“So this is where I wish you
Auf Wiedersehen und gute Reise
—as I doubt our paths will ever cross again. Once again, good work,
comrade
. You’re one of us now.”

And he turned and disappeared back into the shadows.

I went upstairs—my brain so rattled that I had to grasp the railings all the way up to keep myself steady. But when I reached the door to the apartment I found Alaistair standing outside it. He looked at me with cold contempt.

“What have you done?” he asked, his voice hard, disdainful, full of scorn. “My God, Thomas. What have you done?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I was in my bedroom. I heard everything upstairs. I was about to intervene when Petra ran down the stairs. Then peering through the blinds I saw what happened in the street. And when that compatriot thug of yours dragged you back in here I quietly stepped out onto the landing and eavesdropped. I got it all. Everything.”

“And what are you going to do about it?”

“Nothing . . . except to tell you that if you weren’t being ordered to leave Berlin in a few hours I’d be ordering you to clear out of my apartment. I want nothing to do with you again.”

“You don’t understand what she did, how she betrayed—”

“The biggest betrayal here—after turning the woman you loved over to those bastards—is the one you have perpetrated on yourself. You’ve ruined your life, Thomas. Because you’ll never get over this.
Never
.”

Three days later I sat up half the night with my mathematician friend Stan in his tiny apartment near MIT in Cambridge. With several weeks left to go before my subletter vacated my place in Manhattan and in desperate need of a friend, I rang Stan from Kennedy, saying I needed refuge. He said the lumpy pull-out bed in his living room was mine for as long as I needed it—and I grabbed the bus to La Guardia and the shuttle to Boston. I showed up at his place around ten that night, having not slept in more than thirty-six hours. He saw the exhaustion etched on my face and asked no questions. He just made up the bed for me and managed to leave the next morning without waking me up. When I finally came to, it was approaching one in the afternoon—and though rested I felt as if I were locked into some manic vortex without exit. For the next two days I never left the apartment, terrified of the world beyond these secure walls. Stan let me be, never trying to engage me in too much conversation or find out why I had turned into an agoraphobic. Then, on the third night, I turned to him and said:

“If I tell you a story do you promise . . . ?”

“You know you don’t have to ask,” he said.

So I told him everything. And when I finished, he said nothing for a very long time. Then:

“Don’t blame yourself. That Bubriski fellow was right when he said that you and Petra were just minor pawns in a very large game.”

“But I went crazy and destroyed everything.”

“You went crazy because you loved her more than you have ever loved anyone. She will know that. Believe me, for the rest of her life, she will not think that you were a demon for going mad when you found out the truth about her. She will think: ‘That man so loved me his whole world was upended when he found out who I was.’ And it will haunt her forever.”

“And will it haunt me forever?” I asked.

“You already know the answer to that question.”

I hung my head. I said nothing. But Stan filled the silence.

“You’re never going to get over this, Thomas. Try as you might, it just won’t happen.”

When Stan died suddenly many years later, his words filled my inner ear and refused to be dislodged for days. Not that they had ever really vanished from my consciousness in the decade and a half since they were first spoken. On the contrary, they were always there. Just as she was always there. Every day. That part of my past which I shared with one good friend and then banished from any further mention. Because to share it with another person would be to admit the one thing I didn’t want to articulate, even though I knew it to be so profoundly true.

I had never gotten over it.

ELEVEN

T
HE MANUSCRIPT ENDED there. As I turned the last page over, I pushed it away. Just as I had done back in December 2000, when I finished writing it all—six breathless weeks of solid work for a book that would never make its way into print, because I would never let it. And having gotten it all down on paper, I immediately locked it away in my manuscript cabinet, certain that I would never read it again. It wasn’t as if, at the time, I was still taking Bubriski’s threat of retribution seriously. After all, The Wall had fallen eleven years earlier. The Cold War was in the past tense. The city—to which I had never returned from the moment I was ordered out of it all those years earlier—was now a reunified construct. And, of course, I had published, in mid-l986, a book about my time in Berlin . . . but one that dodged all that I knew could never be made public.

In fact, I started that book just a week after my atrocious exit from Berlin in the summer of ’84. After spending a few catatonic days at Stan’s place in Cambridge, he said, “I’m ordering you out of Dodge and to somewhere where you can recuperate while looking at wide open spaces.” He threw me the keys to his family’s summer cottage on the shores of Lake Champlain just outside of Burlington. His parents had died two years earlier in a car accident. He was their only child. Since he was now back finishing his doctorate at MIT while teaching there fulltime, the cottage was empty.

“Hang out there as long as you like,” he said. “If you even try to pay me rent I won’t ever talk to you again.”

I took the bus north to Vermont. The cottage was simple but livable. It was three rooms right on the shores of the lake and just a ten-minute bike ride from downtown Burlington. It had a decent bed, a decent desk, a comfortable chair for reading, books, records, a shortwave radio, and a small desk with an impeccable view of the lake and the looming presence of the Adirondack Mountains that defined the far shoreline. There was even a bicycle with panniers—which meant I could bike down into Burlington to buy groceries, sip coffee, haunt bookshops, watch a movie, and generally fill the time that I wasn’t spending writing.

Yes, I started writing immediately. Within a day of getting there, I set up my typewriter on the desk in Stan’s cottage. In that mad rush to get to the airport for that seven a.m. flight I had taken with me just some basic clothes, my typewriter, and my all-important notebooks. Everything else I had acquired in Berlin—books, records, additional clothes—I left behind with two hundred dollars on the kitchen table and a note to Alaistair with my New York address.

If you can bring yourself to pack up what remains for me, please ship it all. The $200 should adequately cover costs. If you decide to simply dump it all into the nearest charity shop, I will understand.

I could have gone on, saying how this was not the ending I wanted. But I simply signed it and stuffed what remained in my two suitcases, then hauled everything downstairs. Alaistair was there, an open vodka bottle on the table, a cigarette in hand, staring at the empty blank walls behind him.

“So you really are running away,” he said.

“That’s right.”

“Story of your life, isn’t it?”

Then he swiveled around in his chair and showed me his back, letting me know that there was to be no further conversation between us.

I struggled with my bags onto the street, waiting more than twenty minutes until a cab came along. At the airport I discovered that, yes, I had been reserved a seat on the seven a.m. Frankfurt flight and the onward connection to New York. Some hours later, well over the Atlantic, I locked myself in one of the toilets and lost it for the better part of ten minutes. I was crying so loudly that one of the flight attendants banged on the door and asked if I was all right. That snapped me out of my sobbing jag. I opened the door. The attendant eyed me with concern.

“You had me worried,” she said. “Such grief.”

“I’m sorry,” I said in a half-voice.

“Was there a death in the family?”

“I lost somebody . . . yes.”

Back in my seat, I stared ahead of me and kept hearing a line of an Oscar Wilde’s poem over and over again in my head:
“All men kill the thing they love.”

But she betrayed me.

And then you betrayed yourself
.

It was like a death. During those early days back—after collapsing with exhaustion the first night—I hardly slept, hardly ate, and never left Stan’s apartment. Even after spending an entire night with him talking it all out, there was no sense of purgation, no chink in the grief and the guilt I possessed. On the contrary, all I felt was a deepening of the despair, the sense that Alaistair nailed it when he said that I had ruined my life. I kept replaying those final moments in the apartment, when she pleaded with me to listen, and I couldn’t help but wonder what would have happened if I had heard her out. Yes, the fact that she was clearly working for the other side would have precluded her from entry into the US. But—and this was the ongoing
but
—there would have been some way through this. Especially as everything she said, everything that her grief showed me in those final moments, confronted me with the fact that, yes, she did love me.

And yet, how could she love me and so deceive me? How could she profess I was the man of her life, tell me these horror stories about her time in a Stasi prison, the way they cleaved her son away from her, and then turn out to have been one of their people all along? Were love and betrayal always so closely allied?

Writing the book was a diversionary tactic—a way of keeping occupied, of accomplishing something, of pushing time forward in the hope that its onward momentum would balm the wound or, at least, allow me to reach an accommodation with it all. I worked like a man possessed—which, I suppose, I was. I went for a run along the lakeshore every morning. I found time to bike into town most afternoons and buy a newspaper and kill time in a café. Once or twice a week I went to the local art house cinema and watched a movie. Otherwise, I stayed inside Stan’s cottage and wrote. When my tenant left my apartment in Manhattan, I dropped down to the city for a few days and met with a teacher friend who was looking for a short sublet. So I tossed him the keys, my rent covered until the end of November. Stan was true to his word when it came to letting me stay in the cottage for as long as I wanted. So I hung on there until Thanksgiving—when a first draft was finished. Stan showed up on Thanksgiving Eve with a turkey in tow.

“You’ve lost weight,” was his first observation. He was right, as I had dropped fifteen pounds since returning from Berlin.

“And I’ve gained four hundred pages,” I said, pointing to the manuscript now stacked neatly on a shelf.

“The consolations of art.”

“I suppose so.”

“What next?”

“New York. Delivering the manuscript. Another draft or two, given my editor’s predilections to get me to rewrite everything. And then . . . well, I was thinking about a book on Alaska.”

Stan thought that one over.

“Well, that place is about as extreme as they come. And if it continues the distancing process . . .”

I said nothing. Getting all the subtexts behind my silence, Stan simply gripped my arm and said:

“You will find a way of living with the sense of loss.”

There was some truth in that comment. My editor thought the Berlin book “very accomplished, very Isherwood-esque” in its portrait of modern Berlin as a rakish city of shadows, and “full of larger-than-life characters.” (Alaistair was reinvented in the text as Simon Channing-Burnett, and I made him a sculptor from English aristo stock.) But she also found it “curiously detached” and “emotionally distant” and wondered out loud in our editorial sessions whether the book could be given more heart.

“It’s Berlin,” I argued. “And Berlin is about decadent surfaces.”

“I sense there is, lurking behind all your decadent surfaces, a story you don’t want to tell.”

“We all have stories we don’t want to tell.”

“And I want to see more emotion in the book.”

I did attempt to meet her demand by building up the relationship in the book between Simon and his married Greek Cypriot lover, Constantine, using much of the Alaistair-Mehmet breach that never healed. But my editor was right about the book’s inherent detachment, the way the “I” in the book was very much an onlooker: wry, ironic, closed off from the larger human dramas going on around him.

“You are one hell of an actor,” was Stan’s take on the book when he first read it, whereas the majority of the reviews noted that it was diverting, readable, and just a bit shallow: a verdict with which I couldn’t argue.

Yes, I did follow that book up with one based on the three months I lived in Alaska. When that came out I ventured immediately into the vast open spaces of the Australian bush, then spent a few months in western Canada writing my outback book. Of course, there were other women, other adventures. A photojournalist in Sydney with whom I spent three months—but who, toward the end of things, told me that I was always “elsewhere.” A jazz singer named Jennifer whom I met during my stint in Vancouver—and who, when she announced she was in love with me, sent me running back to Manhattan. A stockbroker in New York who thought that sleeping with a writer was exotic for a while, but eventually said she didn’t want to be with someone who seemed to be always thinking about the next flight out of town.

Then I met Jan. Smart. Confident. Sexy in a controlled way. Well read. My age. Willing to deal with my frequent absences. Wanting a life with me. Telling me that, yes, I was so different from anyone she’d been with before, but she liked the challenge that was me. Just as I was intrigued by her intellectual cogency as a lawyer, her organizational rigor, her need to exercise control over life’s inherent messiness. We’d met at a reading I’d given in Boston, and she’d been brought along by a college classmate who was a partner at the law firm where she was still an associate. We all went out to dinner afterward. I was impressed with her smarts and her dry wit. Just as she seemed genuinely interested in everything to do with me. Before I knew it, she’d convinced me to come live with her for a while at her very nice apartment on Commonwealth Avenue. Then I invited her down on a trip to the Atacama Desert of Chile. And then on an assignment to the Tunisian island of Djerba. Around six months into our romance, she forgot to put her diaphragm in one night when we were having a weekend at some Cape Cod inn, and when she discovered she was pregnant, she did tell me that, as much as she wanted to keep the baby, if I strenuously objected . . .

But I didn’t object. Though I told Jan that I did love her, I quietly knew that the love I felt for her was qualified, perhaps because it seemed like a pale shadow of all that I had once known with Petra. And though I never mentioned Petra’s name to her, Jan still knew that ours wasn’t the great love story of the century. When she was five months pregnant, we rented a house for two weeks in August on the Maine coastal island of Vinalhaven. One night, sitting on the deck that faced the ever-choppy waters of the Atlantic, she turned to me out of nowhere and said:

“I do know, Thomas, that your heart is elsewhere.”

“What?” I said, thrown by this out-of-left-field statement. Jan trained her sights on the breaking waters of the Atlantic, never once looking toward me, as she said again:

“I know you may care very much for me. And I sincerely hope that you will adore the child that I am carrying right now. But I also understand, deep down, that I am not the love of your life. As hard as it is for me to say it, I do accept that.”

This comment was spoken with no lethal edge. It was just a cold, hard statement of fact. And it caught me so unaware that my reply was a lame one.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Yes, you do. And if you’d like to tell me all about her . . .”

I looked over and saw that Jan’s eyes were brimming with uncharacteristic sadness. I reached out for her hand, but she pulled away.

“What was her name?” she asked.

“There was no one important.”

“Please don’t try to placate me, Thomas. The truth I can handle. Bullshit I cannot.”

But to tell her about Petra, to admit the fact that, even when we made love, I saw her face superimposed on hers, would be to invite grief. So all I said was:

“I want to spend my life with you.”

“Are you certain about that? Because . . . and this is the
truth
. . . I can handle raising this child largely on my own.”

“I want this child more than anything.”

That was the truth. Because I was tired of the shifting nature of perpetual motion. Because I thought that being a father was one of those things in life you really regretted not doing. And because I instinctually understood that I needed to put down roots and try to properly build a life with someone else. Here was a hugely bright, intelligent, capable woman who wanted the same thing, who grasped so much about me, and seemed to want to accommodate my wanderlust while also providing me with the domestic ballast I needed. She also saw in me (I sensed) a man who wasn’t intimidated by her intellect (as so many others were) and could handle the flinty side of her nature.