Secret Father (27 page)

"From Schöneberg, the colonel said. If they were coming here from Schöneberg, they would have come, not as we did by S-Bahn, but by U-Bahn, crossing at Hackescher Markt. The procedures would have been the same—currency tables, passports,
Volkspolizei,
et cetera. If Stasi wanted to hold them with flexibility, the possibility of a minor detention, but perhaps leading to something more, Hackescher Markt is where it would have happened. A routine interrogation, a routine detention—those Marlboros. A middle initial missing from a signature. A penknife construed as a concealed weapon. Of course, if they were not Americans, they would simply disappear."

"And as Americans?"

Krone looked at his watch. "Eventually, the U.S. consulate in Dahlem would be notified, but if that had happened, one presumes Cummings would know it."

"And if a roll of film is an issue?" I asked. Mrs. Healy and I exchanged a look. Her expression was keenly reined. Still, I sensed her anguish, as ifwe were friends with access to each other's secrets.

"Hackescher Markt," Krone repeated. "Perhaps an inquiry is in order into transactions occurring there this morning."

"Of whom?"

"Why do you dear people not have a coffee while I make a telephone call, or perhaps two telephone calls. I shan't be long."

He looked through the filigree of leaves to the top of the television tower. "There is a tourist café up on the
Fernsehturm.
It goes around like a carousel. It is where you are expected to go now if you are what you pretend to be, a place to spend your East marks."

We began walking toward the tower, leaving the trees behind. Krone had fallen easily into his tour-guide mode. "East Berliners do not go up there. The view of two cities, for them, is too depressing. You from the West are expected to marvel that the elevator works. So be off. A cup of rotten Russian coffee, half Turkish. A bowl of watery borscht. A piece of strudel, cooked yesterday. A cigarette or two. Before you have finished, I will have joined you."

S
O HERR KRONE
is our Virgil?" She said this with her lips above the rim of a cup of tea, a good china cup that she held at her chin, as if for its moist warmth.

We were seated at a table by the floor-to-ceiling window of the rotating tower restaurant. The waiters wore tuxedos, and mostly stood idling in corners or at the service counter. It was late afternoon, too early for diners. What crowds had been drawn by the May Day celebration had dispersed from here, too.

The restaurant was a carpeted ring around the tower's core, from which came the soft purring of the engine that powered the movement of the room. We turned so slowly it was as though the flat world outside were doing the revolving. The tables, including ours, were covered with white linen, slightly threadbare, a bit gray from rough laundering. Most were empty, although a trio of burly, prosperous-looking men sat drinking schnapps at a table across from us, the end of a leisurely meal. Visiting West Germans, probably, versions of the men I rode an elevator with every day in Frankfurt. At another table, a pair of matronly women sat with their tea and tortes. They were easy to take as wives of Politburo members, in from one of the upperechelon suburbs, extending their outing.

I had been in restaurants at the tops of buildings in New York, and they, too, made me dizzy. This one seemed less a skyscraper restaurant than the luxury dining room of one of those monstrous dirigibles that the Germans had so loved before the war. Outside our window, Stalinallee ran east to the far edge of the city. I recalled reading that it was wider than the Champs-Élysées, but its housing blocks and government buildings lacked not only the mansard splendor of the Champs but also its cushioning twin hedge of trees. On both sides of Stalinallee were the stretches of ruins and vacant lots and pyramids of rubble I had seen from the plane. There were warehouse clusters and a pair of massive cemeteries—grim enough to make one wonder why the authorities would allow tourists up to this perch to view them.

"I'm sorry, what? Virgil?"

Her eyes remained on the city below. She'd made her remark, clearly expecting no response. Just as well, since once more I was struck by the thing that was not to be discussed, her rare beauty. Was it possible that I had first set eyes on this woman only this morning?

The silence between us built until it, too, became an expression, as I felt it, of the inadvertent intimacy that now defined our partnership. "Tell me what you see when you look down there, I said, picking up where we'd left off in the plane. I touched the ash of my cigarette to hers where it sat streaming smoke in the faux-crystal ashtray.

"The Soviet sector," she said, "was the most heavily bombed because the old Reich chancellery, the new Reich chancellery, the Führer's bunker, the
Rathaus,
Albert Speer's constructions at Wilhelmsplatz—it was all concentrated in the eastern half of the city.
Stossers
—you say 'boosters'—of the West Berlin miracle tell you this not at all. The Soviets were designated custodians of the abyss. When I first came here, the rubble was obscene. What you see there now is cosmic order by comparison." She sounded like an objective reporter, an academic historian, that evenly paced, that unemotional. "The city was full of ghouls," she added. "One of them was me."

She sipped her tea. She had, of course, taken off her gloves, and again I noticed her hands, fingers splotchy and thick, nails blunted, knuckles too knobby for rings. Now I noticed that she wore no wedding ring.

"Why did you come here?"

She looked away from me. Why did everything I asked fall on her like interrogation? Was I really that oafish? Or were the boundaries of what she had to protect really that expansive? I had begun my probing hours before by asking her that very question.

This time she said, "To swim in the Spree." She put her cup on its saucer and sat back against the chair. "That is what we called it—arriving in Berlin from the East, crossing to the American sector. Radio Free Europe called it the 'dash for freedom.' The Voice of America called it 'voting with our feet.'" She took up her cigarette, inhaled, then, with the acrid French smoke a veil, she repeated, "We called it 'swimming in the Spree.' The river was the dividing line."

"It still is."

"Yes, but now there are bridges."

"Krone makes it sound like the bridges will close Do you buy that?"

She shrugged.

"You and your husband haven't discussed what may happen here? Or, now that the May fest is past, could already be happening?"

"I told you. My husband and I do not discuss these things."

"I don't believe that. You know about the film."

"Only because it involves my son. That is the only reason." She was angry. The way she put her cigarette in her mouth made it clear:
No more of this.

We watched as the river came fully into view, our perch rotating to the west. In the far sky, the red disk of the sun had begun the slide toward its slot on the amazingly flat horizon. The sun's glare obscured the distant landscape, but nearby, below, the beautifully laidout Tiergarten was turning toward us, just beyond the Spree. West Berlin.

"There was not one tree standing in 1946," she said, referring to the park. The past, apparently, she would speak of. "The trees in the Tiergarten were a gift from the queen of England in 1948. We gathered in groups to watch the British soldiers, gardeners in helmets and combat boots."

"We?"

"We women of the work crew. All work crews in Berlin were women then. The British soldiers loved us for their audience." She laughed, a surprising sound. "The soldiers were kind. They allowed Rick to help them. He took great pleasure in planting these small shoots, smoothing the dirt around each one. He formed the mistaken impression that rifles were garden tools, that soldiers planted things. I did not find it necessary to correct him. But he did not believe me when I told him the shoots would grow to be trees. That is because he had yet to see a tree."

"I remember when Michael was that age. I didn't believe he would ever grow to be a man."

"Because of the polio?"

"No, before that. He just seemed complete to me already as a little boy."

"But he was not complete, was he? Michael is complete now." She said this with an assurance I can only describe as motherly, hinting at the bond of intimacy this stranger had established with my son. And how, then, could she be a stranger? Was her clear feeling for Michael the current on which my feeling was being drawn to her?

"It is a problem for you, I think. Your son is a man now. A young man, but a man. But you do not know this."

Her speaking to me so matter-of-factly seemed somehow normal, and suddenly I saw why. "That is exactly the kind of thing that Edie, my wife, would have said to me. She was always explaining me to myself."

"Which I think you did not like."

"At the time, true. I used to tell her that I thought she was hypercritical. To which she would say it wasn't criticism, just the truth." Unexpectedly, I laughed. "And the funny thing is, that's what I miss most about her. The way she spoke directly to me, uncensored. If I showed up at the breakfast table with the handkerchief misfolded in my pocket, she would reach over, take the thing, and make it neat, which irritated me no end. Now I am surrounded by people who, if they see the flaw in how my handkerchief is folded, are paid handsomely not to mention it."

Mrs. Healy leaned toward me. "You have folded your handkerchief well this morning."

I found myself smiling. "When Edie told me that, it made me very happy."

"You were the one with whom she felt free to be herself. From what Michael has told me, she never made him feel he had any flaws whatever. In his mother's mind, he told me once, he was perfect. Which was a very large gift to him, as he knew very well how far from perfection he was. His mother's love was what was perfect, as he felt it. That is why he is so mature. Accepting of himself. Of others."

"Michael misses his mother, that's for sure."

"Michael became a man when she died. Her death made him a man. Perhaps that is why you have not seen him that way as yet. While he is a child, she is still somehow with you. When he is no longer a child, she becomes a mere memory. A beloved memory, but only a memory."

"Strange, Edie feels present with me—with you. I mean, talking about her with you makes her seem..."I had to stop, to allow the rush of my emotion to flow on ahead without me.

After a moment, more calmly, I said, "I haven't talked about Edie like this. I haven't spoken of our arguments, of how difficult—" To my horror, I felt a burning behind my eyes, and pinched it off. I looked away, out the window. The view was of the Kurfürstendamm, and I saw my own building, the Chase building, the Lindenhof.

"'Real love, compared to fantasy,'" Mrs. Healy said, "'is a harsh and dreadful thing.' It is normal to feel her presence when you speak of her truthfully. The difficulties were no denial of love, were they?"

I shook my head.

"They are the condition of love. You and your wife—the difficulties, the flaw, it was Michael's polio, I think. No?"

"That is true. We dealt with it very differently. No matter what she made Michael feel, it was a massive imperfection in her mind. Edie felt terribly guilty, as if the disease were her fault."

"When you knew the fault was yours."

"Yes."

"So, since you were both at fault, you punished each other."

I brought my eyes back to hers, amazed. No one had ever said such a thing to me, nor had such a thought ever crossed my mind. Yet I saw her simple statement as the exact truth—truth of our marriage, truth of what we were doing to each other, up to our last moment together. The slamming of those doors.

But Mrs. Healy wasn't finished. "Do you not see?" She leaned toward me again, as if examining my face. "You were hard on each other to avoid being hard on Michael. You worked very well together—to protect him. It was how you had to do it. Your love for each other would have meant nothing if it was at his expense. So I repeat, 'Real love, compared to fantasy, is a harsh and dreadful thing.' Dostoyevsky."

I sat back, still with that feeling of amazement. But I also felt embarrassed, caught again. Caught at being human. I forced a laugh. "What are you, a shrink?"

"Shrink?"

"Psychiatrist."

"How American of you, Paul. To think that grief is a medical condition, a mental illness. To discuss these things—you do this only with a doctor?"

How was it that now she had called me Paul?

"And you?" I said. "With whom did you discuss the things you had no words for? In my experience, grief, since you bring it up, has been a long silence. I do not believe you are so different from me in that."

"I know that silence."

"And then, here in Berlin, you found a man who lives by silence. Who is professionally bound to speak to you of nothing."

"That is not so. Of the things that matter to both of us, we speak freely. Because of David, I have not depended on my son for the things a person must have—feelings of dependency, mutuality, partnership."

"And you think I have?" I felt a rush of the old resentment, imperfection being flagged. "You think I depend on Michael?"

"It would be natural in this period. And, as I say, Michael is not a child. His strength would be a comfort. His simple presence, I imagine, a consolation. I am not judging you, Paul."

"I do enjoy his presence. I've been living for the weekends this year. I need his presence, Charlotte. Why does it feel like a confession when I tell you that?"

"The grief you feel for the loss of your wife is also grief that Michael is trying to get free of you."

What a fool I was. Overly aware of having just used her first name, as if now we were friends, I took her statement as a grave accusation. "Does Michael tell you that? That he's trying to get free of me?"

"He does not have to tell me. The thing is clear. It is normal. The same is true of my Rick."

"But your husband is not Rick's father."