The Moment (17 page)

“And now you must meet my compatriot, Malgorzata.”

“That’s Margaret in your language,” she said in very good English.

“But we speak German here,” Pawel said,
auf Deutsch
. “And how did you know that Herr Nesbitt was an Anglophone?”

“He looks so American. The okay kind of American.”

“You hear that, Thomas? Thirty seconds after meeting you, my
Zlota Baba
is flirting with you.”

Malgorzata immediately said something back to Pawel in Polish—a slight edge creeping into her voice.

“Did I miss something here?” I asked.

“He called me his
Zlota Baba,
” Malgorzata said.

“What’s a
Zlota Baba
?” I asked.

“His ‘golden woman.’”

“It is a term of endearment,” Pawel said in German.

“No, it is a term of annoyance. But I am now going to do the intelligent thing and ignore you and ask your nice American friend . . .”

“We’re not friends,” I said, interrupting her.

“Then I like you more and more. I do rock and roll around here. I get to program all the degenerate music we send over The Wall. And what do you do around here?”

“I scribble.”

“I’m certain you scribble interestingly. Hope to see you again.”

Then the headphones covered her ears. Swiveling around in her chair, she showed Pawel her back.

“You really have a way with women,” I said as we moved on from Malgorzata’s desk.

“Actually I do, as she was another of my conquests.”

“Let me ask you something. Who haven’t you slept with around here?”

“Her,” he said, nodding toward the woman now crossing the office floor and heading into one of the studios. Petra. I doubt she heard Pawel—but at the precise moment that he said “her,” she glanced over in our direction. Seeing me she seemed a little taken aback. Then another smile seemed to cross her lips before she quickly inhibited it and simply acknowledged me with a nod. Again, a curious electrical charge ran through me at the sight of her. Even though our moment of eye contact only lasted seconds, I found I couldn’t take my gaze away from her as she turned away and headed into one of the studios, a sheaf of papers in her left hand. This time I noticed the slenderness of her legs, the graceful movement of her hips, the way she tossed her hair as she moved forward. Then, just as she reached the studio door, she turned around quickly and glanced my way again, giving me yet another nod. It was a look that meant nothing and everything. Nothing insofar at it was just
a look
. Everything insofar that she turned back and made a point of regarding me again. I found myself beaming at her. Her response was to lower her head and turn directly into the recording studio. Immediately I wondered if I had made the wrong move by giving her such a large smile—perhaps showing my hand far too soon, or stepping over some invisible boundary, the limits of which I had yet to discern. Whatever the reason she had ducked and turned at that particular moment, it threw me. And I knew immediately that it was going to continue to gnaw at me in the days ahead.
Knock it off, knock it off now,
the rational part of my brain told myself.
This is an invention, a fantasy you are playing out on a romantic theme
—
and with someone with whom you have exchanged less than a dozen words. You are weaving a fiction from nothing more than a look across a room
.

Pawel, meanwhile, didn’t seem aware of this momentary glance between Petra and myself. Instead he just kept talking. But what he was saying interested me.

“She is untouchable,” he said, motioning toward the studio where Petra was now conferring with a man seated behind a microphone.

“I see,” I said, my eyes glued to the soundproof glass on the other side of the room. Petra seemed to be laughing with this not unattractive thirty-something man, touching his shoulder as he apparently said something amusing.
That’s her boyfriend,
my bullshit meter hissed.
So much for your romantic reverie.

Pawel kept talking:

“Not only that, nobody knows a thing about her, except that she’s from the East and got expelled from the GDR for some political bad behavior—which, in this place, counts as very good behavior. I heard a rumor once that she had a man on the other side who was also ‘political’ and is still locked up over there. But outside of Herr Direktor and our benevolent spooks in USIA nobody has the actual goods on Petra Dussmann.”

“Is she seeing anybody?” I asked, trying to sound as casual as possible.

“No idea. But if you are thinking about asking her out, don’t waste your time. She is the most closed off person here. Always punctual, always professional, always thoughtful and intelligent when asked to comment on her translation work. Beyond that,
nothing
. Never socializes with any of us. A few months ago, at the Christmas party, she stayed for an hour, chatted with a few people, then left. I gather she lives in Kreuzberg.”

Now this was news, but I decided not to share with Pawel my pleasure in discovering that she resided in the same neighborhood as me. Instead I kept my eyes fixed on the recording studio. She finished conferring with the man behind the microphone, then headed to the door, shooting him an ironic wave good-bye as she left.
Surely if they were involved she would kiss him or—even if she was working very hard at keeping her private life out of public view—shoot him a look that was meaningful
.

Oh God, how pathetic. Trying to gauge meaningful glances from a distance of around thirty feet. And wildly interpreting banter between colleagues as having some other overriding meaning. What on earth has sent you down this distracted cul-de-sac?

The door to the studio opened. Out came Petra, head down, not looking anywhere toward me, turning left and leaving the office area entirely. All I could feel was a jumble of thoughts, most of which centered around a sense of longing that had never entered my consciousness before. Though I kept telling myself this was all the stuff of silly instant infatuation, I refused to accept such a facile explanation. Something else was at work here. Something formidable and unfamiliar. I was in a new landscape, a terrain wholly different from anything I had ever experienced or traversed before . . . and it was still only minutes after seeing her.

And why the hell didn’t she look my way as she left the studio?

“Of course, I asked her out once,” Pawel continued on. “Not even a glimmer of interest. Everyone—even Big Soraya—engages in a bit of flirtation, even if it never intended to be anything more than that. Not our
Ossie
—our East German. She is a remote fortress. Back in Poland we always used to joke that the only thing worse than a Soviet practicing Communism was a German practicing Communism.”

“But if she was ejected from the GDR, she evidently wasn’t practicing Communism the way a German would.”

“Perhaps—but she was still indoctrinated in the system. So it is there, within her.”

“Not that ‘within her’ if she ended up a dissident.”

“The thing about most dissidents is that they start out as true believers, then become so profoundly disillusioned that they go down the opposite path. It’s a bit like excommunicated priests. They always end up the biggest heretics, fucking as many women as possible.”

“Is that what happened to you?” I asked.

“Ah, you have that typical American view that everyone who fled a Warsaw Pact country is Ivan Desinovitch. Or that we are so oppressed that we simply dream of fleeing westward.”

“You did.”

“But for far more ordinary reasons. I was accepted at film school in Hamburg and received permission from my government to attend.”

“With no strings attached?”

“Of course there were bloody strings. There are always bloody strings. But that is not a conversation I am interested in having just now. Perhaps later, when we know each other a little better. But for the moment I want to know about your idea for the essay.”

By this point we had reached Pawel’s desk. It had a large Solidarity poster covering one corner of his divide, with photographs of himself in dark glasses and a leather jacket, standing next to an older man, fifty-something, also in a black leather jacket and square dark glasses.

“Know who that is?” he asked me.

“A fellow compatriot?”

“You have your intelligent moments. Ever heard of Andrzej Wajda?”

“Your greatest living film director.”

“You do know a thing or two. And Wajda was something of a father figure to me, and even pulled the strings necessary to get me the scholarship to the
Filmschule
in Hamburg. The directing program and all. The full ticket.”

“So how did you end up here?”

“You mean, why am I making programs for American propagandists instead of making my own films?”

“That’s more of a harsh assessment than I would have made.”

“But, perhaps, it’s what I think every day. Making films takes work, my friend. Work and big money and an ability to cajole and schmooze and promote and play all those games that I find anathema to me. I am lazy. And it suits me to be lazy. Which is why I am here at Radio Liberty, churning out programs so people in Leipzig and Dresden and the other Frankfurt—the eastern one on the Oder—can feel they are connected to the bright, shiny little world we allegedly have over here, and our bright, shiny sad little lives. I’ve now said enough, as you’ve sidetracked me away from the subject of our conversation: your essay. As I have been assigned to be your producer, I need to know the parameters within which you plan to work.”

He locked both hands behind his head and rocked back in his chair, signaling that he was all ears. I cleared my throat, took a deep breath, and essentially repeated the same pitch that I had given to Jerome Wellmann. Pawel sat impassively as I spoke, his face a mask of indifference. When I finally stopped speaking, he shrugged his shoulders, ran his fingers through his thick hair, and finally said:

“So you cross ‘the great divide’ and find that the food is bad, the clothes are synthetic, the buildings gray.
Plus ça change,
as they say in the spiritual home of the bourgeois left. The thing is, my young American friend, what have you to say about East Berlin that hasn’t been said before? What are you going to tell your listeners in the People’s Paradise, which somehow makes them think: for once here is an
Ausländer
who doesn’t throw clichés at us. Nothing you’ve told me so far sounds like it has its basis in original thought or observation—and, as such, it doesn’t interest me. Come back in, let us say, four days with something original and perhaps I will consider putting it on air. However, come back with something as banal as you have outlined . . .”

The effect of his words was akin to a full frontal slap across the face. Whatever about Herr Direktor’s enthusiasm for my ideas, Pawel Andrejewski was going to act the role of traffic cop, standing in the way of any forward progress I made here. More tellingly he was informing me that he had the power in this newfangled relationship between us. I wanted to say something back to him, along the lines of: “Herr Direktor thought the idea was just fine.” But I knew what the reply would be:
“Herr Direktor isn’t producing this slot. I am—and I think your ideas are trite
.” At moments like these—when I was coming up against a formidable opponent—I often thought back to my dad, who had this habit of telling people to go fuck themselves whenever they did something to cross him. The result was a career that was all false stops and starts with no purchase, no lasting success. As such, at a moment like this one—when I could have easily informed Pawel that I was a published author, that his boss had already given me the green light, and that I was certain that this whole business was a head-trip game on his part to see if he could throw me—I knew that the best tactic was to say nothing except:

“So what length do you want and when do you need it by?”

“Ten double-spaced pages due in four days, no later,” he said. Turning away from me and picking up a pile of papers, he let it be known the conversation had ended. So I stood up, saying:

“See you in four days then.”

Pawel gave me the smallest of nods. I walked off, scanning the office floor in the hope of catching sight of Petra. But she was nowhere within range. Zipping up my coat I headed out to the reception area, handing in the badge they gave me, and picking up my passport from the security officer. Then I hit the street. I was home in Kreuzberg within an hour. Back in my apartment I opened my notebook and went to work. Petra kept looming everywhere in my thoughts. I kept trying to reason with myself, insisting that I be realistic about such matters.
Listen to what Pawel told you about her. She’s closed off, an ice queen—and intensely private. Why on earth would she be in any way interested in you? And even if she did smile at you, that was either her being polite or simply being embarrassed by your evident display of interest. You’ve blown it, my friend. She is just one of many women upon whom you have laid eyes and felt that strange rush of emotional adrenaline, as you have wondered: might she be the one
?