The Moment (59 page)

Once we were outside in the street I did something wildly impulsive. I pulled him toward me and kissed him right on the lips. But then, again, I pulled back before I went crazy. I so wanted him right there and then. Still he took my hand as I pulled back and said:

“Until tomorrow.”

And I could see in his gaze that he was as smitten as I am.

* * *

Shit, shit, shit.

After saying good-bye to Thomas I went home and ate a sad omelette by myself, thinking all the time how I could be with him. I was still furious with myself for having pushed him away this evening, still wondering whether—in the wake of that kiss—he might find me the worst sort of tease.

Shit, shit, shit.

I keep seeing his face in front of me. Keep remembering how bright and knowledgeable he is. How he knows his East German writers. How curious and engaged he was. And how I saw again that vulnerability and solitariness in his eyes. How I so wanted to tell him I loved him; that I would, if I could, make him feel less alone in the world; how he could trust me.

Which he could. Utterly. Until it came to the issue of . . .

I knew I had to go to Der Schlüssel this evening to find out my next rendezvous with Haechen. I dropped by the place. Ordered my usual beer and vodka from Otto—the big, heavily tattooed bar man with a shaved head and two enormous circular earrings expanding each ear lobe. Then, after a few minutes, I went to the bathroom and . . .

Shit, shit, shit.

The card he left gave the address of a hotel way up in Wedding, and he wanted me there tomorrow night at ten.

Shit, shit, shit.

I have to see Thomas. And if I don’t show up for my rendezvous with Haechen . . .

* * *

I didn’t sleep again. I phoned in sick. I fretted all day. The restaurant was the Italian place near me: a little hole in the wall where I had eaten twice before. We arranged to meet there at eight, which gave me just seventy-five minutes with him before I had to meet Haechen.

Say I didn’t show up in whatever horrible hotel Haechen was now perching. Say I skipped this rendezvous. What could he do to me? What vengeance would he actually wreak?

I knew the answer to that question. He would, as he always promised, be merciless. I had to work out some sort of way to escape from Thomas in a little while but do it in such a way that . . .

I can’t lose him. I won’t lose him.

I walked into the restaurant, and there he was. Seated with his notebook open in front of him, the same fountain pen he always has snug in his hand, his head lowered, his concentration total. The longing I had for him at that moment was overwhelming. He looked up at me with such a big welcoming smile, but I could see that he noticed my tiredness, the dark circles under my eyes that I unsuccessfully tried to mask with makeup. He attempted to kiss me on the lips, but I turned and gave him my cheek, again hating myself for deliberately playing distant. I mean, what could he be thinking now after me kissing him so passionately yesterday? As I sat down I suddenly felt so desperately tired, all the sleeplessness finally catching up with me, terrified that I would somehow show all the contradiction raging inside me. But then we started to talk. For the next two hours we couldn’t stop. I got him speaking about his Egypt book—and was able to drag out details from him about his parents’ marriage and the reasons he was so reluctant to reveal too much about himself in print, preferring the stories of others. Everything I had sensed about him—the lonely childhood, the self-protective need to hide away, the parents who were unhappy and therefore couldn’t appreciate their interesting, different son—was also hinted at by Thomas. It was so fascinating to see how we were both drawing each other out, both more eager to hear the other person’s story than tell our own. There was a real kinship there—and an unspoken understanding that we both had firsthand knowledge of life’s larger disappointments . . . whether it be a mother and a father who took such little pleasure in you, or a husband with whom there was none of the shared destiny that should be such an essential component of a marriage. But mine with Jurgen was never a real marriage—and I see that so desperately clearly now. I even went so far as to admit something I never mentioned to anyone in my life—the way that the parents of my friend Marguerite were (I was so sure) shopped to the Stasi after I mentioned to my own parents that we watched Western television at their little cottage near the border with the Bundesrepublik . . . and how I felt so profoundly guilty about this after Marguerite’s mother and father got into such terrible trouble. Thomas could not have been more understanding, more sympathetic. When he covered my hand with his I didn’t pull away, even though I got cross at him for being so reasonable. But instead of being offended, he took my other hand and said the same thing he told me yesterday: that I was wonderful. No one’s ever said that to me. Not a parent. Not a lover. Not even a friend. And we drank another half-liter of wine at my insistence because I was so unsettled by his decency. Because everything he was saying—his incredible empathy, the way he seemed to be hanging on to every word I spoke, the way he looked at me—made me realize he was in love with me. The panic within me was growing wilder by the minute—the sense that if I gave myself to Thomas, I would never forgive myself for then having to betray him with the man who currently controlled my life. I didn’t want to live a lie, but I also knew that Thomas was now everything to me.

When the conversation edged into this—when we both admitted that, indeed, this was now
everything—
I suddenly found myself telling Thomas that he had to go, that he should leave now and spare himself so much grief. He was looking incredulously at me as I kept repeating that it just couldn’t be. But then I blurted out what I wanted to say to him from the first moment he came into my life:
Ich liebe dich
.

And I fled.

I raced up the street to the main thoroughfare and got lucky. An empty taxi was coming by. I hailed it and jumped in, just as I could see Thomas dashing into the street. I gave the driver the address in Wedding—and fell back against the rear seat, sobbing uncontrollably. I didn’t stop until the taxi reached the grubby façade of the hotel. I was in a terrible place. I sat in the back of the taxi for many minutes, not moving. To the driver’s credit, he didn’t ask me to get a move on and get out. He just turned off the meter and waited until I was ready to leave. But I wasn’t
ready
to leave. I simply had no choice but to go upstairs and deal with that monster again. When I reached for my bag and asked the driver what I owed him, he simply said: “No charge.” When I found myself sobbing again at this spontaneous act of kindness, he said:

“Just say yes and I will drive you away from this. Drive you to wherever you want to go.”

“You are too kind,” I whispered, then got out and staggered into the reception area, where a sad-looking man sat behind the desk (in none of the hotels in which I was forced to meet Haechen did I ever see a desk clerk who looked even vaguely happy—and who could blame them?). When I mentioned Haechen’s name he tonelessly said: “Room 316.”

Business as usual. Haechen in his dirty T-shirt and stained Y-fronts. I asked him why we had to meet so late. “Because I couldn’t meet you earlier” was his reply. He motioned for me to take off my clothes. “You messed up my evening with friends,” I said. He just shrugged and said, “The faster you get out of your clothes, the faster you can go back to them.”

Tonight was, by far, a new low point—as he insisted on kissing me, and I tasted his acrid breath, the cheap beer I sensed he drank all day, the four decades of cigarettes he inhaled, the diet of grease on which I was certain he subsisted, and, most of all, his supreme vileness. He shoved his tongue into my mouth the way he shoved his pathetic penis into me—like the malevolent yet profoundly insecure bully that he was. A man who, I sensed, knew he was anything but a man—but was willing to use whatever pitiable power he had to force this woman to be an unwilling receptacle for his wretchedness. Did he privately know this, or was he one of those profoundly amoral creatures who had developed the sort of innate, animal mechanisms that allowed them to sidestep any self-reflection whatsoever?

Fortunately, he had no erection problems tonight—which meant that it was all over in a few minutes. I got dressed. I tossed him four new tiny canisters of film, thinking guiltily that among the many documents contained within, were photos of the translation I made of Thomas’s piece about crossing over to East Berlin for the first time. Might they stop him at the border the next time he tried to visit, all because of me? Why did I include this? Because Haechen informed me that
they
listened to Radio Liberty all the time. They had day and night monitors. They were aware that I had become the chief translator. Which meant that anything written by a non-German that was broadcast on the station I had probably translated. And Haechen was very menacing about the fact that “they will be most displeased if they hear things being broadcast about which they weren’t already aware.” In other words:
you give us everything you work on
.

Still, Haechen seemed pleased with double the usual quota of film. Handing me a few fresh rolls he said what he always said at the end of our “sessions.”

“Now go.”

It was sleeting when I hit the street. I didn’t care. I went home. I stood under a shower for half an hour, trying to wash away all traces of Haechen. The idea of climbing into bed now was impossible. So I hurriedly dressed and fled into the night. I walked for hours. Winding my way down from the north of the city all the way to Kreuzberg. It must have taken three hours or so, as I stopped at four cafés along the way to smoke cigarettes and drink vodka, while all the time ordering myself to go home and slam the door on the world and quietly mourn all that could have been with Thomas and reason with myself that it was all for the best.

But I knew his home address, as it was typed on the title page of his essay. As I passed the Heinrich Heine checkpoint—my entire body drenched from the constant sleet—I couldn’t stop thinking all the time about Thomas, and the fact that Johannes was sound asleep just moments from where I now stood. Those two thoughts became so overwhelming that I suddenly found myself running, my gait unsteady due to the wetness of the pavement, the lateness of the hour, all the vodka I’d drunk, the emotional havoc of the evening, the fact that as I turned the corner onto Mariannenstrasse I began to run headlong toward his front door, deciding that as soon as he opened it . . .

It took around three minutes for him to come downstairs. He looked as if he had been asleep. But his eyes grew wide with wonder and (yes) relief when he saw me there.

“I’m cold,” I said, falling into his arms. As he held me, I whispered: “Never let me go.”

* * *

I wrote the above immediately upon getting to my apartment this morning. I took a risk I never took in the past—retrieving the journal from the basement during daylight hours, so I could get everything else down before heading to work and then (thank God) back to Thomas’s tonight. I’ve closed the blinds in my room, so no one can see me writing. As soon as this entry is finished, back goes the journal to the cellar—and out I go to work.

But first . . .

I don’t know what time it was when I reached Thomas’s front door. All I know was that it was cold and I was shivering, but so determined to get there, to tell him that I loved him, to fall into bed with him, to ask him to never let me go.

As soon as we were upstairs, we were in bed within minutes. And when he was inside of me for the first time . . . again, I just knew that this was the man of my life. I’ve never experienced such extraordinary intimacy (it’s the only word for it) before. Yes, there was a guy I saw for two years at university—a law student named Florian—with whom sex was rather wonderful. However, there was no love between us. But that first time with Thomas—it was all about love. As were the second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth . . . I lost track of how many times we made love, how often we pulled each other into bed. I do know that, over and over again, we kept saying how much we loved each other, kept our gazes locked on each other, a real overwhelming sense of certainty always there. At some point that first night, before finally falling asleep, I apologized profusely to Thomas for running off earlier in the evening. He was so kind about it, so understanding, that I easily fell asleep in his arms.

When I awoke it was morning. Thomas must have been up before me, as all my once-wet clothes had been hung up to dry on the radiators. My love was fast asleep in bed. Sitting up beside him I simply spent several long, wondrous minutes looking at him, stroking his hair, watching the rhythm of his breathing, thinking how handsome he was, wanting so much to have a life with him, vowing to myself to somehow find a way out of the situation with . . . no, I don’t even want to mention his name here.

I got up and had my first proper look at Thomas’s apartment. So clean, so airy, so organized, so simple, but urbane in a way I’ve only seen in magazines. Yet there’s no expensive furniture, no big stereo or television (in fact, no television at all). But the walls are very white, all the furniture has been stripped down to the original wood, and everything seems exactly in place. Looking around—noting how all the dishes and glasses and books and records were so carefully ordered and stacked on their respective shelves, how his clothes were all hung on wooden hangers in his closet, how his shoes seemed polished and never run-down—my first thought was: he did tell me his father had been a military man. But I also sensed that this need for order was a form of self-protection—the same self-protection he found when he was allowed to go to the library for the first time (God, how that story has stayed with me). I found myself loving him for that—and feeling such a kinship there, too. For we had both experienced the sort of sadness that comes from strange families and never having connected with anyone before. This is why I couldn’t help but think: the gods have, for the second time, smiled on me. The first time was the birth of Johannes. And now . . .