The Moment (52 page)

When, after six feverish weeks, I completed this memoir—stopping at that very moment when I wrote the words,
I had never gotten over it
—I got a call that same evening from my wife. She told me she was coming home earlier than expected from Washington and said that she had missed me while she was away.

This was a somewhat bemusing revelation, made all the more curious by the way she arrived back at midnight and essentially threw me onto the bed and made love to me with a passion that had been absent for more than a decade. Afterward she turned to me and—without saying that her fling with Mr. Mergers and Acquisitions was over—told me that she herself realized that many of the shortcomings in our marriage were down to her and that she wanted to make a strong effort to try to see if we could “find again the love that was once there.”

I felt like saying:
“But the problem is, it started as a companionable romance with no real passionate depth. And can we now, after fifteen years together, really believe we can find untapped reserves of affection for each other?”

This was the thought that first came into my head as we lay sprawled and—for a change—satiated on the bed we had shared so distantly for so many years. But I stopped myself from articulating it as I was still stinging from the end of my involvement with Eleanor, and because, for the first time ever, Jan was displaying vulnerability and worry about losing this edifice of a life that we had built together. Perhaps part of me—the part that always traveled away from discomforting truths—thought that after all these years, we could find a proper fondness for each other. We were so used to each other’s quirks, and there was a wonderful fourteen-year-old daughter whose stability in the midst of the usual hormonal roller coaster of adolescence we both wanted to preserve. Surely, this was a moment of great possibility between us.

The Berlin memoir was the first thing to get shelved. I locked the manuscript away in my fireproof cabinet and took Jan and Candace on an assignment that brought me to Easter Island. I returned home and spent six months writing a travel memoir called
The Door Marked Exit
—which talked about the need to escape that had so shaped my life. During this time my marriage reverted back to the icy construct that it was, our era of good feeling lasting around six weeks before all the old habits and pathologies (both individual and shared) began to rear up again. When the book was published a year later, my father—now living in Arizona—wrote me a three-line letter after receiving his copy:

Glad to hear your screwed-up parents made you the writer you are today. I commend you for your lack of self-pity. Just as I am relieved that your mother is not around to read your drivel about your childhood.

I wasn’t surprised by this reaction—even though I thought myself pretty even-handed in the book about my father, painting him as a rather robust, larger-than-life mid-century American ad guy, trapped into doing what was expected of him but nonetheless blessed with a certain independent streak and no-bullshit charm. Mom came across as Mom: frustrated, disappointed, always thinking the denouement of her life should have turned out differently. And later on in the book, I also talked about a certain inherent loneliness that I always carried with me and never seemed able to shake.

Intriguingly, Jan had little to say about the book when it came out, though when we were out to dinner a few weeks later with some mutual friends and someone commented how we were one of the few couples they knew who had managed to remain married, given all my travel and Jan’s high-powered and professional legal career, my wife’s reply to this was:

“The reason we’re still together is that, over the past sixteen years of marriage, Thomas has only been here for a total of five of them.”

That certainly cast a momentary pall over the dinner. On the drive back home, when I tried to raise the issue with her, she said:

“Why even talk about the obvious? You have a life. I have a life. They are separate entities. We share a house. We share a bed. We share a daughter whom we both adore and who remains the only plausible reason we are still together.”

“What a romantic picture you paint.”

“I am just stating facts, Thomas.”

“So what do you want?”

“I’m too damn busy right now to think about major personal upheavals. But if you want to go, I won’t stop you.”

But I didn’t “go.” I just kept voting with my feet. Once Candace was accepted at college—and effectively away for eight months a year—I too was barely seen. Jan, having made senior partner and having all sorts of new high-end pressures to deal with, raised no objections. When I was in town, we would share meals together, make love on occasion, and do the family thing at Thanksgiving and Christmas, and the three weeks every August when we took a house in a remote corner of Nova Scotia. The curious thing about this detached marriage was that the era of withering looks and unspoken emotional frustration and the episodic blow-up had been replaced by an era of indifferent civility. Even the sex was conducted along the lines of two people who were fulfilling a need, but no longer had much in the way of any amorous connection with each other.

Of course, Candace—being a more than perceptive young woman (and also someone who, from the age of fifteen onward, sparred constantly with her mother)—picked up early on the fact that her parents’ marriage had become putative. The summer before she started college I bought her a transatlantic air ticket and an InterRail pass, handed her two thousand dollars, and told her to knock around Europe for a month. I received an email from her on the Greek island of Spetses, telling me she’d finished my travel memoir and “though I was, of course, flattered by everything you wrote about me, what really got to me was the way the whole book was really about trying to cope with the idea of being alone in the world, which, I suppose, we all are. But I do want you to always remember that you have me, just as I always remind myself that I have you.”

I actually teared up upon reading that email. Just as I also had a moment’s pause some weeks later when an email arrived from my father, saying that his new girlfriend had just read my memoir, “and she thought the way you depicted your old man was both affectionate and interesting . . . so what the hell do I know, right? And yeah, I guess I went for the jugular the last time I wrote you. My hard-ass style, right? What can I say, son? I’ve never done touchy-feely very well. So don’t expect me to start now. Holly—that’s the girlfriend’s name—thinks you can write, but also that you tend to show off your smarts for all to see. But, hey, she isn’t exactly Madame Curie.”

I had to smile while reading this. My father—who never apologized or paid me a compliment in his life—was doing both in that backhanded way of his. Though our contact was nominal in the subsequent years—a phone call every few weeks, an annual three-day visit to the tacky retirement village to which he had retreated in the Arizona desert after things went all wrong for him professionally in New York—his death in 2009 rattled me so deeply that on the way home from his funeral, I jumped in my car and ended up in some hotel outside of Edgecomb, Maine.

And thus began the trajectory of events that saw me buy this cottage, lose my marriage, and fall into a melancholy that I refused to acknowledge for months afterward and which I only accepted after I stopped myself, at the very last minute, from a fatal encounter with a very large tree while on a cross-country ski hill in Quebec. And upon returning from Canada—psychically and physically bruised, but quietly relieved to be alive—the box from Berlin was waiting for me. The box with her name in the upper right-hand corner and her address in Prenzlauer Berg. Though I couldn’t go near the box after bringing it home, the fact that I noted that her address was in Prenzlauer Berg made me want to know everything about her life since that final night together in Berlin some twenty-six years earlier. Then again, that desire to make contact had never left me. Why hadn’t I fulfilled it? For the same reason I had never once returned to Berlin in all those years. Perhaps because I had known something so extraordinary with Petra—and once it was taken from me, once I learned of her treachery and then felt propelled to respond with an act of willful destructiveness (which, I realized only moments after it was perpetrated, was also an act of self-destructiveness), I couldn’t bear to set eyes on the place again . . . let alone on the woman with whom I once thought I would spend the rest of my life.

Over the years, whenever the ache returned, I would try to reason that, of course, it had all just been youthful intoxication, passionate infatuation at its most open-throttle, something that was too fever-pitched, too intense, to survive on a long-term basis. Just as I would also remind myself that she was a woman living a double life and, because of that, all further trust between us would have been impossible.

But these statements were designed to dull the unresolved ache of it all. Why then did I feel compelled today to pull the Berlin manuscript down off the shelf and, for the first time in ten years since its composition, sit down and reread it?

Because of the goddamn box from Germany, that’s why. Because of the sight of her name and her address. Because . . .

I checked my watch. It was well after midnight now. I’d been reading for more than six hours. Moonlight lit up the bay. I went into the kitchen, poured myself a small Scotch, opened the side door that led to my deck, braved the night-time boreal wind coming off the water, downed the Scotch, and told myself:
There’s no use trying to dodge things any further. You have to open the damn box.

So I went back inside and did just that. Reaching in I found myself first in possession of two large notebooks, of the type used in schools. Brown cardboard covers, spiral bindings, thinly lined inexpensive paper. On each cover was drawn in ink a large number indicating their sequence—and in the space that allowed the owner of the notebook to write his name were simply two initials:
P.D.
I opened the first notebook and saw page after page of her tightly wound handwriting. Each entry was undated, a series of asterisks indicating the end of a statement, a thought. Many of the pages had a residual gray smudge, hinting at fallen cigarette ash that was embedded on the page when the notebook was closed. Occasionally there was the long-dried watermark from a glass that had been used to prop the book open. The sight of her immaculate penmanship unsettled me further. It was all so intimate, so private, that I could only begin to wonder what had possessed her to send me these notebooks so many years later.

Until, that is, I pulled the second of the notebooks out and found myself staring down at a newspaper clipping attached to a single sheet of paper on which a brief letter had been written. A woman’s face filled half the clipping. Picking it up I could see that the woman looked well into her sixties, given the grayness of her hair, the puffiness of her face, the deep lines that even the graininess of the newspaper print seemed to accentuate. The face of a woman I had never seen before.

But then my eyes moved to the name above the photograph. And I realized that I was staring at a recent photograph of Petra.

And below this was a small headline:

Petra Dussmann Stirbt am 2 Januar in Berlin.

Petra Dussmann dies in Berlin 2 January.

Her death notice.

My eyes swam over the few short German sentences that followed:

. . . daughter of the late Martin and Frieda Dussmann of Halle. Mother of Johannes Dussmann. Worked as a translator at Deutsche Welle in Berlin. Died at the Charité Hospital in Berlin after a long battle with cancer. Funeral at the Friedrichshain Crematorium at 10:30 am, 5 January.

And behind this clipping was a line scrawled in German on a piece of plain white paper:

Mother wanted you to have these.

Below this—after a home address, an email address, and a phone number—there was a signature: Johannes Dussmann.

I sat down slowly in my desk chair. Have you ever noticed how—when first presented with dreadful news—the world goes so profoundly quiet? It’s as if the shock of the appalling deadens all ambient sound and forces you to hear the great empty chasm that it the beginning of grief.

Only in this case, the grief had begun twenty-six years ago.

And now . . .

Three words kept repeating themselves in my head:

Petra. Meine Petra
.

I sat in that chair motionless for I don’t know how long. I simply had no cognizance of time. Just:

Petra. Meine Petra.

This can’t be.

But there it was. In black and white. Like the inked words that cascaded across the thin watermarked lines of the two notebooks in front of me.

Mother wanted you to have these.

Because she wanted you to read these. Now.

PART
FOUR

NOTEBOOK ONE

L
IPSTICK.
THAT’S THE
first thing she handed me when she welcomed me. She introduced herself as Frau Ludwig—and said she would be looking after me during my stay here. And then Frau Jochum and Herr Ullmann—who had collected me from the hand-over point—wished me a good night’s sleep and said they would see me tomorrow afternoon.

I had no idea where I was. I had been turned over to Frau Jochum and Herr Ullmann in the middle of some bridge—what I learned later was the Glienicken Brücke, which spans the River Havel between Potsdam and Berlin, and which I found out later from Herr Ullmann is known as the Bridge of Spies, because that’s where they often trade agents who’ve been imprisoned by “the other side.” Frau Jochum introduced herself as a representative of the West German intelligence service. Ullmann—thin, tall, dressed in a severe suit, wire-rimmed glasses, very American looking—introduced himself in good German. He said he was from “the American mission here in West Berlin” . . . but I knew that, if he was in this car with an agent from the
Bundesnachrichtendienst
, he was definitely CIA. What surprised me was how he told me that he was so pleased to meet me, as he had been following my case for several weeks now. He also said that I was the sort of person they were working to get out. I emphasized the fact that I wasn’t a dissident, a politico. They said they knew all that—and that they had much to talk about with me, but would wait until I had a good night’s sleep.

Though I was still trying to appear bewildered—as I had been instructed to appear—so much about all this was genuinely bewildering. The glare of the headlights turned on me on the bridge. Was that to ensure that the agents on the GDR side could not see the faces of their Western counterparts awaiting me? The fact that Frau Jochum was so well dressed. The leather interior of the most luxurious car I had ever entered (of course, it was a Mercedes). The low murmur of its engine as we drove off. The way Frau Jochum and Herr Ullmann spoke in low, comforting voices, designed to put me at my ease. But when I asked them about Jurgen I could see them exchanging glances, looking ill at ease, trying to communicate to each other with their eyes. That’s when I knew. When I pressed them to tell me what had happened to my husband. they said they’d rather talk to me after I’d had a good night’s sleep.
He’s dead,
I told myself. And those bastards over there—in the prison where they kept me—told me nothing about this. Nothing.

I pressed Frau Jochum again. This time she told me that Jurgen had hanged himself in his cell. It was strange, my reaction. Yes, I was shocked. But because she had first hesitated before telling me, I was already prepared for such extreme news. While it still had a certain kick-in-the-stomach impact on me, it didn’t cleave me the way the death of a spouse should. Perhaps because, though he was officially my husband, he was a man with whom I shared an apartment and little more. But I sensed Frau Jochum and Herr Ullmann knew this from my file. Just as they would also know that it was his insane behavior that landed me in prison some weeks ago . . . or, at least, I thought it was weeks ago. They kept me so disorientated I could never work out how long I had been locked up. Whenever I asked Colonel Stenhammer—the Stasi man who interrogated me daily—if my husband had been saying mad things about me, he would always tell me not to ask questions, and then demand to know if I had something to hide.

“If you come clean with us, the path back to Johannes will be an easier one.”

But as I had nothing to confess . . .

Weeks this went on. All the while they were keeping the light on in my cell twenty-four hours a day, letting me out only for a half hour of exercise in a concrete block topped with barbed wire, and for the five hours of interrogations that took up the mornings. In other words, they were rapidly grinding me down. All I could think about, day and night, was the fact that they had now taken Johannes from me and were telling me—as I was now classified as a traitor to the State—that they would never let my polluted influence infect “this child of our People’s Republic.”

You will never see him again unless you cooperate with them,
I told myself so many times. And the knowledge that Jurgen—his self-importance, his childishness, his lack of responsibility when it came to his wife and, most especially, his child—created this catastrophe that had seen Johannes taken away from me . . . well, when Frau Jochum told me of his death, all I could think (after the initial jolt that accompanied the news) was:
at least you now do not have to live with the pain and consequences of your aberrant behavior
.

The windows of the Mercedes were tinted, which meant that all the neon of the city—neon like I had never seen before—appeared refracted through a darkened prism.

Eventually we drove into a compound. Gates. Men in uniforms. Bright lights. Security everywhere. We pulled up in front of what seemed to be a small house within these grounds. A woman was standing outside. This was Frau Ludwig. Forties. Quiet. Professional. Kind in a professionally competent way.

“You must be Petra,” she said as Frau Jochum handed me over, saying good-bye after informing me that we would continue our conversation tomorrow afternoon. I was suddenly feeling an exhaustion and a fear that almost matched the exhaustion and fear that I felt all those weeks locked up in that prison, being told I had to cooperate with the Stasi or I would be left dangling in this limbo for years, with no hope whatsoever of my son being returned to me.

In the end, I did everything they asked of me. Including signing those fucking papers, allowing them to place Johannes with another family.

But it was all entered into as “a deal.” A deal that would involve me doing some work for them.

“Greatly serious, important work,” Colonel Stenhammer told me.

“Work that will be of such benefit to our Democratic Republic that I can see no reason why you shouldn’t be honored to do it.”

And then he presented his proposition to me. A proposition that, as he put it, “offers you the possibility of hope.”

How could I say no, knowing that if I did, all hope would be quashed?

So I said yes—and so quickly that Stenhammer insisted I be returned to my cell for forty-eight hours to truly ponder whether I was up to the task. Forty-eight hours in that cell without any contact. With the knowledge that my one and only chance was by doing exactly what he demanded?

That’s when I broke down completely in front of him, begging him not to lock me up again, promising him my full and utter cooperation, my complete fealty. I even used that word, “fealty”—which in German is
Lehenstreue
. Stenhammer smiled when he heard it.

“A very medieval word, Frau Dussmann,” he said. “Yet one with strong semantical connotations. Knights swore
Lehenstreue
to the realm. And although the feudalism of the medieval system runs so contrary to the democratic tenets of our Republic, I do acknowledge and appreciate—as one who has sworn to defend the Republic from its capitalist enemies—the metaphoric resonance of
Lehenstreue
as regards your response to our proposition. Just as I can also see that, having finally accepted your duty to the state that has given you so much, you wish to get to work as soon as possible, knowing that the faster things progress, the closer you will be to . . .”

He didn’t finish this sentence, because he knew it was more effective to let this “payoff’ dangle. It was the bait—and I had no choice but to swallow it.

Perhaps that was what was so unnerving about these first hours in the West. The civility of Frau Jochum and Herr Ullmann. Their evident decency. The way they were so solicitous toward me. And all the while, me feeling like a bad provincial actor forced to play the role of Faust at the Deutsches Theater in West Berlin—and wondering endlessly if they were accepting my performance.

Frau Ludwig also could not have been more hospitable—and, in her own controlled way, truly compassionate. The apartment into which I had been ushered was so plush, so beautifully furnished, so redolent of security and safety, that I was nothing less than overwhelmed by the way they were trying to cushion me. Then, after telling me she was going to run me a bath, she said that she had a small gift for me—and placed in my hand a very elegant chrome lipstick. My eyes immediately welled up. For I remembered instantly something I had read once in a book about the Second World War by an English academic, a book that had been briefly considered by the state publishing house where I worked as a translator. It was only considered, I learned later, because the man had impeccable socialist credentials. But it was tossed into that pile of books that had been rejected and were to be incinerated, for that is what we did with foreign books from outside the fraternal socialist nations which we knew we wouldn’t publish and which we didn’t want to fall into the wrong hands. I saw this book at the top of one of those bins. It looked interesting and—from a GDR perspective—revisionist. So I took a risk and snuck it into my shoulder bag and brought it home, hiding it in a hole in a kitchen cupboard in my room. This was just a month before I moved in with Jurgen. Late at night, when I couldn’t sleep, I would take the book out and learn that everything we had been taught about Nazis coming from the west of Germany was a fantasy. They came from all corners of
Das Vaterland
. Although we knew certain things about the concentration camps, the details were never spelled out in all their horror. This historian did so graphically, but with great technical control. He didn’t try to embellish the monstrosity perpetrated there. He simply let the facts speak. Just as he also made the parallel with the much less documented horrors of the Stalinist gulags which, of course, we only knew about in a sort of hearsay way.

It’s strange, isn’t it, how, amidst all the accounts of children being forcibly separated from their parents, and the hideous medical experiments (women having liquid concrete shoved up their uteruses) and the gassings, and the harvesting of teeth for their gold fillings, a small detail suddenly illuminates everything. And it was the mention, made by this Oxford historian, that when the British troops liberated the concentration camp at Belsen, they handed lipsticks to all the surviving women inmates. Those women broke down at this small gesture—a materially tiny but psychologically huge bit of luxury that acknowledged the femininity of women who were, at best, lice-ridden, emaciated.

So when Frau Ludwig handed me that lipstick, I was so overcome that I had to excuse myself to go to the bathroom. Once I had the door closed I began to weep. I cried because I couldn’t bear being separated from Johannes, because the ache I felt without him was limitless. But I also cried at the simple humanity of the gesture that Frau Ludwig just made to me—and all that it implied.

But the weeping was also bound up in the fact that I would now have to betray everyone I encountered in this new world. To realize that in the face of such a simple act of kindness . . .

I can’t live with myself.

I have to live with myself. It is the only way back.

* * *

I can lie to others. I cannot lie to myself. Jurgen lied to himself constantly. He told himself he was the great playwright. The great radical thinker. The great subversive. What he was—what he saw in those sad moments when I could see him catch furtive glances at himself in the mirror—was a man who had squandered his early success. Instead of taking steps to recapture the brilliant spark that illuminated that one extraordinary play of his, he gave in to all those voices that told him he was a genius and that simultaneously whispered to him that he would never fulfill the promise he briefly showed.

But who am I—a woman of no creative talent whatsoever, a minor little translator who hasn’t ever even been given the privilege of applying her craft to a major novel—to disparage a man who did write one significant play that, until he landed himself in trouble with the authorities, was performed everywhere in our strange little country.

So yes, I see myself with a certain hard clarity. Just as I know that this is but a half truth, that a very large part of the human condition involves having to modulate truth in order to make living with yourself possible.

So I try to justify my actions to myself all the time. Just as the other more brutal side of me grabs me by the scruff of the neck, shoves me in front of a mirror, and says: stop the self-deception, the pretense, the fraud. Look at yourself—and don’t be magnanimous.

That voice—it’s my mother’s. She always had the hard words for me. Praise, she once told me, is an overrated tendency. It creates narcissism and self-absorption. Whereas self-criticism, fault-finding, keeps you grounded, bona fide, principled.

I could have added one last word here: joyless.

Am I joyless? I think back to all the joy I had with Johannes—how he made every day worthwhile, and his presence in my life so counterbalanced everything else. It’s what I once said to Colonel Stenhammer:
Johannes is my entire reason for living.
To which he dryly replied: “Then you will, I am certain, do everything in your power to convince the state that you merit his return to your care and custody.”

Of course, I said I would do whatever was asked of me.

I can lie to others. I cannot lie to myself.