The Moment (55 page)

After I showered I took a long look in the mirror and didn’t like what I saw: Big deep rings under my eyes. My skin ashen. Lines already forming in my forehead. I’ve aged ten years in the past few dreadful months. I look worn down, world-weary. No man will ever come near me again. Because I exude too much sadness. A woman carrying far too much troubled baggage behind her.

I applied copious amounts of makeup to my face in an attempt to mask the sleeplessness, the damage. I drank five cups of coffee and smoked a commensurate number of cigarette. Then I put on my boots and my new leather jacket, conscious of the softness and quality of the leather, and took the U-Bahn up to Wedding.

Radio Liberty. A bland industrial building with serious security. I had to hand over my newly minted papers to the uniformed functionary at the gates, then wait until clearance was given. Once I was ushered inside, Frau Orff—severe, contemptuous—was there to meet me at reception.

“So you deign to come and see us,” she said.

“I was having some difficulties.”

“You people always do,” she said.

I said nothing, though I felt a certain rage inside.
You people
. Yes, I am an Ossie—an East German. Yes, we are a thwarted race. Yes, our country is a repressive tragedy. So, by all means, be contemptuous of me if it makes you feel better about your own little life. Because all our lives are, in the great cosmic scheme of things, so minute, so ephemeral. Who will know any of this one hundred years from now? The fact that my child has been taken from me; the fact that a secretary at a radio station that broadcasts Western programming to Eastern Europe was rude to an insignificant translator; the fact that I am shrieking inside all the time with grief; the fact that our personal dramas mean nothing beyond this moment when we are sentient and playing out our minor destinies.

But when you are engulfed in loss, how can you detach yourself from the transience of everything? How can I take a theoretically long view of things when every waking moment without Johannes is agony? And how was I to explain all this to the bumptious, overbearing Frau Orff—who, like any little functionary, had her own tiny bit of power and was determined to wield it? I simply made one comment: “I thank you for your understanding,” knowing that this would unsettle her, as she was being anything but understanding. As expected, she gave me a pinched smile and said she would see if “Herr Direktor” was free to see me.

She kept me waiting a good half hour before I was ushered into Herr Wellmann’s office. A rather bookish, unattractive man. Intellectual turned administrator. But decent and reasonable. He must have sensed how nervous I was and tried to put me at ease immediately. Told me he’d been briefed about my “personal circumstances” and “it must be a difficult thing to bear.” Again I felt a desperate stab of guilt and wanted to scream, “Stop being so damn nice. You don’t know who and what you’re dealing with.”

Then he opened a file, in which my curriculum vitae—which Frau Ludwig had helped me write one afternoon—was present, along with other substantial papers on me. He asked me many questions about my work at the state translation company and seemed genuinely interested in what kind of English-language books made it into print “over there.” At one point he switched into English and seemed pleased when I was able to converse with him for more than fifteen minutes in his own language. Then he handed me a page-long document—an English commentary someone had written on an antiques dealer in Berlin who specialized in Prussian memorabilia—and asked me to translate it out loud, on the spot. I did as requested, even though my voice was very shaky at first. But I managed to bring my nerves under control and got through this oral exam without stumbling over words.

“Impressive,” Herr Wellmann said. “And I like the fact that the German you used was conversational, not at all too formal.”

“Thank you, Herr Direktor.”

He then handed me another document—two pages long, something to do with a speech President Reagan just gave about Iran—and told me to go outside to Frau Orff and she would direct me to a typewriter. “Consider this translation a rush job,” he said. “So get it back to me as fast as you can.”

As soon as I emerged from his office, Frau Orff immediately pointed me toward a desk with an electric typewriter. IBM. A round ball on which were all the letters. I had never used such a sophisticated piece of technology before—and was a bit daunted at first. But I knew I had another test to pass and wrote quickly, translating the entire two pages in just less than half an hour. Then I reread my work, made some corrections with a pencil, and retyped it all in around ten minutes. After pulling it out of the machine, I headed back toward the door to Herr Wellmann’s office. Immediately Frau Orff ordered me to halt.

“You never enter Herr Direktor’s office without first letting me call him.”

“Sorry” I said quietly.

Frau Orff picked up her phone, hit a button, and spoke briefly to Herr Direktor. Then she turned to me and nodded that I had her permission to enter.

“That was fast,” Herr Wellmann said. He accepted the two pages I handed over to him, studied them, and complimented me on both “the fluidity of the translation” and the cleanness of the copy. When I explained that I had retyped my first draft, so he could read it without corrections, he smiled and said:

“Well, I suppose I have no choice but to hire you.”

Then he informed me that I would be on a weekly salary of five hundred deutsche marks—more money than I could have ever dreamed of. With tax taken at source and with the standard social insurance deductions, I would receive around three hundred and seventy-five deutsche marks in my hand every week.

“Is that acceptable?” he asked.

“Very,” I said.

I spent much of the morning filling out paperwork and being sent to a room to be photographed for an identification card. I was also interviewed by a man named Stüder who, I am certain, was their security chief, as he asked me many leading questions about my contacts with other East Germans here in the West. “I know nobody” was my honest reply. He informed me, with stern clarity, that there were strict regulations about all documents remaining on the premises and no work allowed to be taken home.

“Nothing we do here could be classified as high security. But the fact that we do broadcast specifically to the GDR . . . put it this way, their people would love to know in advance the content of our programs for all the obvious reasons. So you may occasionally have your bag searched by our security men when you leave the premises. We need you to sign a security agreement, stating that you will not discuss any of your work here with anyone outside of the organization, and that you will never bring documents out of the building or do anything to compromise our work here. Any objections to signing such a document?”

“None at all,” I said, hoping he didn’t catch the anxiety I was feeling.

I signed the document. I waited while my identification card was laminated. I was shown a cubicle in the main work area. I was introduced to several colleagues, including a Polish guy named Pawel who is one of the producers here. Not bad looking, but an aggressive flirt. He made a point of staring at my breasts and legs and giving me a sardonic smile while asking me if I had a boyfriend.

“I had a husband, but he’s dead,” I said, my tone letting him know that I wasn’t going to play the coquette. But my comment only seemed to encourage him further as he said:

“What a foolish man, dying like that.”

I wanted to lash out and slap his face. From the smile on his lips, I could see that this was exactly the sort of response he wanted from me. I immediately characterized him as a provocateur with a cruel streak and realized that this was unlikely to be the last such encounter with him.

Fortunately, I was called back into Herr Wellmann’s office. Herr Direktor had an urgent translation needed of a talk someone would be giving on a writer I had never heard of before: Sinclair Lewis. It was a long document—twelve double-spaced pages—and Herr Direktor wondered if I could have it finished in two hours, as the other resident translator scheduled to do it was off with one of her usual migraines today, and the actor coming in to read it had been booked for three p.m. And as it was now just one . . .

Of course, I said yes. Work gave me something to do. Work helped block out all the wild contradictory emotions crowding my head. Work kept me focused.

As I walked back to my cubicle, Pawel passed me by. I kept my head down.

“Don’t think you can ignore me,” he said. “I won’t allow it.”

* * *

Work. I have just finished my first seven days of work. As one of the other translators, Magdalena Koenig, has been suffering migraines repeatedly, the large bulk of translation work has landed on my desk. Half the writers for the station—they’re all freelance—are Anglophones. So the work load is constant and, as befits a broadcast organization, always pressing. Everyone here is under pressure. The staff should be twice as big—as Pawel keeps telling me—but the funding isn’t what it used to be, even given Reagan’s virulent anti-Communism.

“Reagan and his cronies speak about the Evil Empire,” Pawel noted one day when he dropped by my cubicle to bother me, “but they also believe in no government, no public broadcasting, paying for nothing in the fight against the Red Devils except ballistic weapons. No need to talk to the head. Just train a nuclear warhead at the Soviets’ collective testicles.”

Pawel. Intellectually clever, and he knows it. Otherwise, at best, a nuisance. Every day he attempts to engage me in conversation. But it is the sort of conversation in which the sexual is omnipresent. He keeps ogling me while trying to force details out of me about my life. I refuse to tell him anything. Just as I don’t enter into much in the way of conversation with anyone else on the staff. I went out to eat the other day with a contributor named Monica Pippig. An American writer in her late forties living here, who writes and presents a program twice a month about books. I’d been translating all her stuff. We met one morning to discuss some problems I had with an essay she’d written on Philip K. Dick—and how many of the science fiction terminologies she used were difficult to translate into German. We worked for two hours, then she suggested lunch at a nearby café. I heard all about her childhood in Manhattan, and the parents who didn’t love her, and the two terrible men she married—one of whom turned out to be gay. And how she came to Berlin after her last serious relationship broke up. And the fact that she can’t now seem to meet available men. And how, at her age, no one will ever employ her again, so she’s stuck at Radio Liberty, and “it isn’t exactly the BBC World Service.” And never allow yourself to be invited out for a drink with Pawel “because I did that and woke up next to him the following morning, and he told me that he wasn’t in the habit of sleeping with women so much older than him, but he decided to take pity on me.”

I certainly learned a great deal during that lunch with Monica—and, happily, she asked so little about me that I was never forced to be evasive. But I also decided afterward that if she proposed lunch or a drink again, I’d find an excuse to say no. That’s my rule with everyone here. I will be a diligent and helpful colleague. I will always be pleasant and courteous and on time and completely professional. Beyond that I will not let anyone near me. Nor will I talk about my life, the circumstances that brought me to West Berlin, the horrendous shadow that stalks me night and day. Just as I will also not be drawn into any friendships or after-work social activities because that could also leave me vulnerable to the interests of others.

I want no one to be interested in me.

* * *

There is a playground near my building. I only discovered it the other day when I took a different route home. It was a bright, unseasonably pleasant midwinter’s day—and the playground was packed with mothers my own age and their children. The moment I happened upon it I turned and started running, tears cascading down my face, a scream in my throat. When I got home I couldn’t stop crying for more than half an hour.

It just never goes away. Try as I do to negotiate with it, it refuses to leave me in peace. And I can’t mourn it like a death because my son is so very much alive. And just ten minutes’ walk from my front door. If only that wall wasn’t in the way.

* * *

I work. I come home. I cook something. I drink a few beers. I smoke cigarettes. I play records. I read. I sleep badly. I go to work. The pattern repeats itself. Day in, day out. I found a used bookstore near the Heinrich Heine Strasse U-Bahn station that has a very good English-language section. I’ve made a point of trying to read the American writers whose works have been under discussion in the broadcast essays I’ve translated for the station. Sinclair Lewis. Theodore Dreiser. John dos Passos. James Jones. J. D. Salinger. John Updike. Kurt Vonnegut. Writers I never knew existed. Because there is that bimonthly program, written and presented by Monica, which is all about American literature, I have treated it like a university course and an escape hatch. The very nice Herr Bauer who runs this vast used bookshop near me has been able to find me just about every novel or short story collection I’ve requested and all in the original English.

“Either you’ve fallen in love with an American or you’re planning to move there,” he told me one day.