The Moment (54 page)

But, God, the apartment in that compound, it was so lavish, so comforting. And so outside of the world—which is what I loved most about it. I was still safe here. Once beyond its secure walls, I would be back in a world I knew would close in on me shortly thereafter. Because the call would one day come from their “contact” in West Berlin. And then . . .

So I really did talk up my fear of the world beyond theirs. But it wasn’t playacting. It was an absolute terror of what lay in store for me. Frau Ludwig and Frau Jochum together did their best to reassure me that what I was feeling was profoundly normal, given the number of political prisoners they had welcomed here and shepherded toward integration in Western society. Frau Jochum said:

“I’ve often seen people who, like you, have been released from the most psychologically damaging detention—and then simply cannot cope with the sense of choice, the sheer liberty, that life over here provides. You must learn that you can have a conversation with somebody and make a sardonic comment about Chancellor Kohl—and you will not lose your career on account of it.”

Unless you happen to work for Chancellor Kohl’s party.

“You are just going to have to be patient with yourself,” Frau Ludwig told me. “It’s a steep learning curve, I know. But, in time . . .”

I was able to stay in the compound for more than four weeks. As tedious as I found the interviews, I cooperated fully. Because I knew that as long as I was proving useful to them, they would let me stay. Around the end of the third week Herr Ullmann informed me that, as I had been a translator back east, he had found an opening for me at Radio Liberty.

“It will allow you to keep in contact with the land of your birth by doing something positive for your compatriots. And it will also allow you to meet an entire group of fellow refugees in West Berlin.”

Is that supposed to please me? To be tossed in with the other lost souls from the Eastern Bloc, all harboring sadness and resentment and all the psychic scars that come with the territory. The thing is—and I explained this to Stenhammer so many damn times—I never wanted to be a dissident. I didn’t have extensive grievances against the state. I didn’t long for a life in the West. I never once took part in a political activity that compromised my loyalty to the German Democratic Republic. Yes, I wanted a nicer apartment. Yes, I would have liked the opportunity to go to Paris in my lifetime. But I accepted the limitations, and I loved the community we made for ourselves in Prenzlauer Berg. When Johannes arrived, it didn’t matter that his father virtually ignored him. It didn’t matter that he was going off the rails. All that mattered was this new life, this child whom, if I had been in any way religious, I would have called a gift from God. Because his presence in my life changed it utterly. I had never felt such unconditional love before toward anyone. Whatever about the drabness of our material lives. Whatever about the tedium of my job. Whatever about Jurgen’s increasing withdrawal from our lives—to the point where we stopped sharing a bed and I didn’t really care if he went off whoring for days at a time—I had my son there. He was the center of my existence, my future,
our
future. He made everything else that was dismal and joyless in my life seem less significant. He gave me an
Existenzberechtigung
—a reason to be. A reason to live.

And without it I have nothing. I am nothing.

* * *

I moved in here last week. Five days ago to be exact. Frau Ludwig went apartment hunting with me. Or, rather, she told me she’d found a nice
Einzimmerwohnung
—a bedsitting room, or what is called in French a
chambre de bonne
—in the area I had requested. She’d even gone ahead and put a deposit down on it, and was getting the landlord to repaint it and retile the shower. When we visited it, I was impressed by the fact that it smelled new. White walls. Brown painted floorboards. A plain single bed with a wooden headboard. A desk in matching dark wood with a bentwood chair. A small kitchen table with two chairs. A galley kitchen with a new fridge, a cooker, a hot plate. A tiny shower in a far corner of this fifteen-meter room. One window, with a simple but new white blind, that looked out on a rather grubby alley—but at least was away from the main road, down which traffic rumbled day and night. After the sumptuousness of the compound, this was a return to reality. Still this
reality
was still more comfortable and well equipped and airy (despite its small size) than anywhere I had ever lived before. What’s more, two days before I moved in here, Frau Ludwig took me shopping. They’d already supplied me with several pairs of Levi’s and T-shirts and underwear, a double-breasted dark blue military overcoat, even a leather jacket. Now she brought me to this extraordinary department store on the Ku’damm called KaDeWe which we had, of course, heard about back in the GDR—but which surpassed my expectations. I had never seen a place so opulent, so crammed with goods. And the choice,
the choice,
was overwhelming. We went to buy plain white sheets. But Frau Ludwig stated that I would probably not want to have to iron them all the time, so she suggested we buy two pairs of a style called “easy care.” She also told me about a duvet that was “good for all seasons.” And she insisted on buying me a small set of pots and pans that, she said, you never had to clean too thoroughly as they all had something called “a nonstick surface.”

We also bought a set of white crockery, a box of cutlery, a wooden chopping board and a few kitchen knives, a coffee press, and (because it was the one appliance I had always craved) a toaster. She even brought me to the hi-fi department to buy me a radio and a little record player with two speakers. I felt like a child being spoiled by a rich aunt—and both loved it and felt profound guilt, as I knew I would be called upon to betray such generosity and had done so already. Because I’d not had the courage to come clean with them about . . .

Enough
. You know why you have to follow their command. You know it’s the only possible way back to Johannes. Stop the soul searching. The sooner you give them what they want the sooner this waking nightmare will be over.

* * *

I left the room today for the first time in three days. After moving in here on Monday I went to the local store—it’s a small supermarket—and bought enough food to last me several days. They’d opened a bank account for me in the local Sparkasse—two thousand marks. So much money. Enough to cushion me until I receive my first month’s salary from the job that I don’t want to start. Herr Ullmann told me that the director of Radio Liberty, Herr Wellmann, would be expecting a call from me this week. But I decided that “this week” could also mean Friday. Once I arrived here on Monday—and found everything that Frau Ludwig had bought for me at KaDeWe already delivered here and piled on the bed and kitchen table—I just ventured out the one time to shop. I bought the food and carted it home. Then I spent the balance of the first day and night organizing the apartment. Once it was set up, I made one last trip outside, as I had seen a used record and book shop on a side street near mine. I bought a record by Wolf Biermann.
Chauseestrasse 131
. Jurgen had a copy of this album. It was a prized possession, as it had been banned and Biermann stripped of his citizenship while on a tour of the West in 1976. The great irony of this action by the state was that Biermann himself had been born in the West and emigrated to the GDR because he was a socialist idealist. And then, when he became far too critical of his adopted land, they threw him out. Like the son rejected by the father whose love he always craved.

I also bought
Sgt. Pepper,
letting out a little excited yelp when I saw it in one of the bins, as this too was so hard to find at home. Judit had a copy, and we listened to it together on several occasions, drinking vodka, smoking, trying to imagine what London must be like, wondering out loud if we would ever see the world beyond the sealed borders within which we lived.

Back in my room I played the Biermann and the Beatles over and over again. I found myself crying several times. Biermann’s sarcastic, sardonic lyrics bringing me back to Prenzlauer Berg and twenty friends crammed into a tiny apartment. A few candles burning. Bad Romanian wine and cheap vodka. Biermann on the record player. Everybody talking, talking. A real sense of animation, of engagement. Me still feeling out of my depth around so many proper writers and artists. Me going into the alcove every fifteen minutes to make certain Johannes wasn’t crying amidst all the music and talk and laughter. Judit joining me there once, looking down at my sleeping son and starting to sob that she knew it was now too late to have children, and how I was the only real friend she could count on in the world.

Judit.

When Frau Jochum revealed that it was Judit who had been reporting on me to the Stasi for months, maybe years . . . no, I didn’t feel hatred. Just desperate shock, then the most crippling sort of sadness. Whom could you trust? Who
wasn’t
in their pocket? Who wouldn’t betray their closest friend to maintain some sort of détente with those bastards?

But she told me repeatedly that she valued our friendship more than anything.
“We are sisters—and we will always look after each other.”
And I believed her and told her everything. Now it turns out she was meeting her Stasi man and telling him everything I told her. It was all taken down and used against me—even though I can’t remember a truly subversive comment I made in front of her. But Stenhammer was able to quote to me things that I had allegedly said—but they were all passing sarcasms about life in our little Republic, and all very Berlin in their sardonicism. The sorts of things we all said all the time during those long, alcohol-driven evenings in somebody’s apartment up off Kollwitzplatz. When I heard them quoted back to me during my daily interrogations, I realized that somebody among our group had been the Stasi’s eyes and ears into our little bohemian circle. But Stenhammer was clever. He never quoted me anything I said that was so specific, so intimate, as to make me realize it was Judit who had been their mole. So when Frau Jochum told me, I couldn’t bring myself to believe it. And still don’t. Even finally writing it down doesn’t lessen the blow, doesn’t make me feel any less alone. Which I am. That’s why I haven’t been able to go outside. Seeing people on the street just emphasizes my feeling of total sequestration. I have no family. I have no friends. I am living a lie in the hope of undoing a monstrous wrong. And this room—it’s clean and well heated and nicer than anywhere I’ve ever lived, albeit tiny. Much of the time I envisage a crib next to my bed and my son sleeping in it. I worry that the people he has been placed with will not give him the love that he needs, that they will be formal and distant with him. He loves to be cuddled. And I could never stop holding him, touching him.

And now . . .

Now I keep hoping that writing about it will allow me to understand it. To accept it. But it just heightens the nightmare. Every morning I wake up from a restive night and there are about ten, fifteen seconds when I am not aware of things, of all that constitutes my life. The world does not look bad at all. But then the daily realization hits—they have taken away my son—and I understand that this is a sorrow without frontiers. A sorrow that will never be excised.

* * *

I finally got up the courage and went out today. A snowy day. Snow—the great temporary purifier. The world goes silent and is baptized white. Even Kreuzberg—ugly Kreuzberg—takes on an aura of wonder under snow. Even the sad-eyed Turks I see everywhere—their dislocation and homesickness so etched on their faces—seem less forlorn in the face of all this cascading
Schnee
.

I went to a phone booth on the corner of my street and dialed the number for Radio Liberty that Herr Ullmann had given me. When the switchboard answered I asked to be put through to Herr Wellmann’s office. A very officious woman came on the line. Introduced herself as Frau Orff and said she was Herr Wellmann’s secretary. When I told her my name she said:

“We were expecting to hear from you sooner.”

“I was told to call you this week.”

“So you leave it to three p.m. on a Friday afternoon? Not very professional, if I may say so.”

“I am still finding my feet here,” I said, sounding so lame.

“Eleven a.m. Monday,” she said. “Unless your schedule is so busy that you cannot find the time to meet with your prospective employer.”

“Eleven a.m. Monday is fine.”

“Be prompt, Frau Dussmann. In fact, be early.”

* * *

I bought food again after the phone call and went home. The thought struck me: I still haven’t heard from
him
. The man they said would contact me.
Their man.
I have a momentary reverie. He will never contact me. Maybe he’s been picked up by the police, or they have decided not to use me . . . and I am free.

But if they don’t “use” me, I never see my son again.

* * *

I am such a coward. Another two days locked up inside. And a sleepless night Sunday out of fear about the interview. The insomnia was murderous.

I must have smoked twenty cigarettes before the sun squinted awake. And the reason I could not surrender to sleep? Worry about not getting the job—and displeasing my masters who would then simply tell me I hadn’t kept my end of the bargain. So now they weren’t keeping theirs.

But if I did get this job, I was certain their man would come calling. Cause and effect. They would be highly pleased, no doubt, that I was working in what was essentially the propaganda department of the enemy.