The Moment (63 page)

Then I turned into the U-Bahn station and took a train back to my hotel, where I stripped off all of my new clothes and had a very hot shower. I checked my watch. It was just 9:09. I had an hour or so before I needed to leave. I messed up the bed, so when the maid arrived tomorrow morning there were signs that somebody slept there. Then I opened a bottle of vodka I brought with me and drank three shots and smoked three cigarettes. I gathered up my suitcase and went downstairs. Again luck was on my side, as there was nobody at the front desk as I left. A quick walk to the U-Bahn, a quick ride to the Hauptbahnhof, and the 11:07 back to Berlin.

I was at home and in bed in my room before two this morning. I didn’t sleep well, expecting Stasi agents to burst in here any moment and cart me away.

I hid at home all Saturday and translated the documents Haechen gave me. In an attempt to keep busy I also drafted my essay to be submitted with my US green card application. It’s now just after midnight. I snuck downstairs an hour ago to retrieve this notebook and start writing. I will see Thomas in less than eighteen hours. I’ll bring my suitcase with me, pretending that I’ve just arrived back from Hamburg. I must try to appear calm, try to mask all the fear I have right now.

I know that, with Haechen’s people briefed, it’s obligatory that I photograph the interview transcripts on Sunday night and sneak out with the film while Thomas sleeps. The idea now is to play for time. Dropping off everything they’re expecting from me will cover my tracks. Because my story to them, should I be forced to tell it, will be:

I arrived in Hamburg as directed. I waited at the hotel, but Haechen never appeared. I hung on until 10:00, then decided to leave—because Haechen and I had an unspoken rule that if he didn’t show up at a rendezvous I was to return home. And since home is Berlin, I caught the last train back. However, being the loyal operative, I still scored for you the transcripts of the interview with Hans and Heidi Braun
.

Indeed, being able to proffer these transcripts will be my alibi should the Stasi accuse me of having anything to do with Haechen’s disappearance.

Anyway, when Haechen’s body is found, the knife wound, the missing wallet, the trousers around his legs will all make it seem like he picked up somebody for a bit of rough sex in a back alleyway and that somebody turned larcenous and homicidal. My hope, though, is that the lack of a wallet or identity papers means the body will go unclaimed. I doubt very much that the Stasi would send a representative to collect it. I checked into the hotel using false identity papers, thus there is also no official record of me ever having left Berlin.

Perhaps, in the weeks remaining before Thomas and I move to the States, their new Haechen will get in touch and insist on meeting me in another sleazy hotel room. This time I will refuse to see him. Would they really expose me as their operative at Radio Liberty? That would be counterintuitive and hurt them, as it would have the American and West German security services on high alert for other operatives in other governmental bodies. Yes, they could kill me, but I gave them the big counter-propaganda coup by leaking them the Braun transcript days before the broadcast. Were they to kill me thereafter, it would probably expose the fact that I had been their mole at Radio Liberty. Again, would they really want that sort of interest around a lowly nobody like myself?

I’m frightened. Frightened and desperate to get through these next few days. Though I feel a great shocked numbness in the wake of murdering Haechen, there is no guilt whatsoever. It had to be done. There was no other alternative if I wanted to be able to walk away, turn the page, start anew. Especially with this new life inside me.

Can I do all that? Can I somehow shove this all into a dark room deep within my psyche and slam it shut, never to be opened again? I doubt it. But I do plan, as soon as I finish this entry, to go down to the basement and place this journal, alongside the first one, on the shelf inside the disused ventilation shaft that has always been their hiding place. Only this time I plan not to retrieve these journals again before Thomas and I leave the city. With any luck, ten, fifteen years from now, when I visit Berlin with Thomas and our two children, I will excuse myself for a couple of hours, make a pilgrimage back to Kreuzberg, loiter outside until someone enters or exits the building, then go downstairs and recover them again—as if they were a time capsule from a part of my life that has always shadowed me and made me what I am but which I have been able to compartmentalize. Not the loss of Johannes. I know that until the day I die, I will never be able to fully block that out of my life. Nor do I want to. Because his loss was such a profound one. But I will now try to slam the door on everything else, most especially the fact that I had to kill a man in order to live again. Haechen would have insisted on a termination as soon as my pregnancy started to show. His death allows me to keep the child that is now inside me. With strong effort I will be able to bury the memory of what I did to gain my freedom. Toss those remembrances into the darkest hole imaginable, cover it all with reinforced concrete, walk away from the burial site, never to visit it again.

Can I actually do this? Can I force myself into willful amnesia about all that I have just done this weekend? Time will only tell.

What I do know right now is this:

All the murder evidence has been scattered. No sign of my ever having been in Hamburg exists.

I’ve gotten away with it. I’ve gotten away with it all.

And now . . .

Now I’m free. Well and truly free. Now life with Thomas can really begin. Thomas and our child. I am going to be a mother again.

I’m free.

We’re free.

PART
FIVE

ONE

T
HE NOTEBOOK ENDED there. As I shut it and pushed it away from me, I glanced up and noticed darkness had fallen outside. In the few hours it took me to read through it all, I had been oblivious to the world outside of Petra’s words.

I’m free.

We’re free
.

I snapped my eyes shut and thought back to that scene in my apartment one day after she wrote this. When I confronted her with her “treason” against me. When she begged me to listen. When I refused to listen. When I was so enraged I couldn’t hear what she was telling me.
Please let me explain
.

But instead, I only heard my own hurt pride, my own sense of outrage. Instead, in that crucial instant, I slammed the door.

I reached for the bottle of Scotch near my elbow, poured myself another shot, threw it back, and stepped outside onto the deck that fronted my kitchen. As always, the Maine night was so black, so impermeable. The mercury was well below freezing, a light snow was falling, but I was indifferent to it all. For I was thinking back as well to that moment in that bar in Wedding and that CIA spook, Bubriski, explaining to me the theory of radar and telling me:

“Radar works when a magnetic field—almost like a field of attraction—is set up between two objects. One object then sends out a signal to another object in the distance. And when that signal hits the other object, what is transmitted back is
not
the object itself. Rather it’s the
image
of that object.”

Then he revealed all about Petra. And he used the radar metaphor to rub in the fact that I had fallen in love with the “image” that I had projected onto her and, in the process, had failed to see what she really was.

Since then, whenever I found myself wondering whether I had made a desperately wrong call, when my guilt for shopping her to Bubriski and his fellow spooks sometimes loomed up out of nowhere, I tried to console myself with the thought:
but she was projecting an image of herself that didn’t tally with the truth
.

Privately I always knew I was trying to validate the angry, impulsive decision I had made, a decision that, as I now learned, had destroyed everything.

One moment. Why hadn’t I let her tell me what she was so desperate to tell me? Why had I allowed my hubris, my arrogance, to deny her the chance to explain everything?

What page after page of the notebook told me was . . .

“Love. Real love. Something—I have to admit within the safe confines of this journal—that I had never known
.”

Those were her words. One of so many declarations of love. For me.
The man of my life,
as she wrote so many times. When I read her thoughts about my vulnerabilities, my defenses, the way she so understood how all the childhood sadness still shadowed me. Had anyone ever really “got” me the way Petra did?

Standing out on that deck, staring out at the tenebrous void beyond, all I could now think was: you lost the one person in the world who ever truly loved you. And you lost her because you killed it. Killed it through self-righteousness. A need to be aggrieved. To punish without considering the circumstances.

In page after page of the notebooks she also informed me of what she so wanted to let me know back then—that her role as a Stasi operative was one that had been imposed upon her, a form of maniacal blackmail that she only accepted because she knew it was the one and only way she might ever be reunited with her son. And I wouldn’t let her explain that to me.

Or explain the horror of her indentured relationship with Haechen, and how she had finally resorted to murder because . . .

Because it was the only way she thought she could be free to be with me. And because she was carrying our child.

I’m free.

We’re free
.

Our child.

What happened to our child? Was it a boy, a girl? And he or she was now . . . ? My God, twenty-five years old.

Immediately I reentered the kitchen, grabbing the cover letter from Johannes that accompanied the notebooks. On it was an email address. I moved quickly to my office, turned on my computer, and sent him an email that read:

I am coming to Berlin the day after tomorrow. Can we meet up?

And I signed my name.

Then I switched over to a last-minute travel site and scored a cheap fare from Boston to Berlin via Munich. The flight would leave Boston tomorrow night at eight-thirty. On the same site, I found a hotel in a district called Mitte.

Mitte. The former East. Once forbidden territory. Now . . .

Radar.

“. . . when that signal hits the other object what is transmitted back is not the object itself. It’s the image of that object.”

I was convinced by that postulation—because, in my outrage at having been cheated on, cuckolded, betrayed, I was thinking only of the image.

But now I realized the “image” was anything but that. The love was not an illusion. It was profoundly real.

Now my sense of shame was only surpassed by the thought: pride is the most destructive force in the world. It blinds us to anything but our hubristic need to be right, to defend our own fragile sense of self. In doing so, it stops us from seeing other interpretations of the narrative we’re living. Pride makes you take a position from which you cannot be budged. Pride makes you refuse to even consider the reason someone is begging you to hear them out. Pride insists that you toss away the one person you’ve met in the course of five decades who offered you the chance of real happiness. Pride murders the love of your life.

I sat down at the table and stared again at Petra’s obituary notice—the photograph so cruelly delineating the devastation of the past decades. A devastation that started with Johannes being taken away from her, and continued throughout that horrifying year of servicing Haechen, and then culminated in my wholesale betrayal of her.

Our child.

I delivered her into the hands of the security services when she was pregnant with our child.

Who was now where?

And how did Petra manage to be reunited with Johannes?

Our child.

I was going to Berlin to find our child.

* * *

I tried to sleep, but failed. So, as first light broke, I stopped staring at the badly flecked paint on the bedroom ceiling. I got up. I packed a small bag. I checked my email. There was a reply from Johannes:

Café Sibylle. Karl-Marx-Allee 72. Friedrichshain. 18h00 tomorrow. You need to take the U-Bahn to Strausberger Platz, then walk ten minutes. Don’t worry about finding me. I will recognize you.

* * *

Land. Fields. Buildings. The outline of a city on the curved edge of the horizon. And all refracted through the numbness of a night spent sleeping sitting up in a cramped seat.

Those words came back to me as the flight from Munich banked and headed toward the city below. Only this time Berlin’s defining aerial landmark—the structure that cleaved the city in two—appeared to have been simply expunged from its cartography. Up here you could imagine some divine hand wielding an eraser and simply rubbing away that barrier—once so stark, so ruthless, so all-defining. And now? Now down below was just a metropolitan sprawl.

Then we were on the ground in Tegel. When I piled myself into a taxi and gave him my hotel address in Mitte, the driver didn’t make any noises about having to go east. Berlin was a construction site. New buildings everywhere. A game of architectural one-upmanship as ultramodern designs competed with each other for audacity and über-style. Suddenly I was looking at the recently opened Hauptbahnhof—a huge glass and steel box, multileveled, in and out of which trains shunted with metronomic regularity. Then, looming up ahead was the television tower of Alexanderplatz. We were now no more than a kilometer from it. Somewhere within the last few minutes we had crossed the frontier that no longer existed. The remnants of The Wall were nowhere to be seen. All was free flow, unmarked. It was as if that thing had never existed.

Alexanderplatz. As Stalinist and brutal as ever—with a few changes. A big sprawling fitness center on the second floor of the tower. A big shopping complex constructed nearby. There were some of the old GDR apartment blocks—like the one that Petra initially lived in when she arrived in Berlin—but all renovated, modernized. An attempt to make palatable the aesthetically grim. As the taxi swung down a street toward my hotel, I could see that a big pedestrian precinct had been opened, lined with the same brand names and food outlets that you find in any metropolitan concentration of people worldwide these days. In my mind’s eye I could flash back to that cold winter’s morning in 1984 when I first crossed over to “the other side,” when Alexanderplatz was as bleak and as forbidding as a Siberian steppe, when I felt as if I was staring at an emergency edition of life: hard, unvarnished, lacking all notions of beauty or comfort.

And now you could shop here.

Shopping: the great barometric gauge of our times.

My hotel was very designer. Wildly stylized, as if someone was trying to create a brothel in minimalist style. Intriguingly, it looked right out on the concrete precincts of Alexanderplatz, as if you were being given an aerie over reinvented Soviet-era realities from the vantage point of a glossy magazine. I took a shower. I checked my watch. I had several hours to kill. I wandered the immediate area. Mitte had become something akin to SoHo in New York. Interesting galleries. Interesting cafés. Interesting loft spaces. Designer boutiques. Hip tourists. Backstreet cinemas and theaters. Renovated apartment blocks. Discernment and money.

I walked around, bemused. The lack of sleep had something to do with this. So too did the fact that I was still in shock after all that I had absorbed in the last two days, a renewed grief that now made me feel, in every sense of the word, so small.

But the befuddlement was also due to the radical change to the Berlin cityscape, and the sense that, systematically, understandably, the eastern part of the city was expunging all that it could of its past. Even the area of Friedrichshain—with its dense collection of socialist realist tower blocks—was remodeling these grim-looking boxes, using bright primary colors and redesigned finishes to take the harsh, functionalist edge off them.

Coming out of the Strausberger Platz U-Bahn station, I couldn’t help but now think that it was in one of these blocks that Johannes lived with the Stasi family to whom he was handed, one year old, as a gift. Just as I remembered that Petra insisted on living only a few streets—but another universe—away in Kreuzberg, because it was as geopolitically close as she could be to the son who had been taken away from her.

The Café Sibylle was something of an anomaly. It was located on the ground floor of a vast building constructed in that proletarian palatial style favored by Muscovite architects in the 1930s. Inside the décor was retro East Bloc circa 1955—as if the current owners were trying to preserve a glimpse of GDR café life as it once existed at the height of the Cold War. The travel writer in me is always taking mental notes—and I immediately spotted a small corner of the café given over to Communist-era souvenirs. There was a quartet of elderly women with severe faces sitting around a Formica table, talking to each other in conspiratorial whispers. There were a couple of menacing-looking skinheads who exchanged civil greetings with one of the old ladies, and a very plump woman with a huge bouffant hairdo seated on a stool behind the cash register, looking as if she had been positioned there for the past thirty years. And sitting in a corner was a rather introverted guy wearing a Manga T-shirt and an electric-blue hooded sweatshirt, his hair gelled into spikes, his skin retaining scars from adolescent acne, his eyes hinting at ongoing preoccupation. He was currently engrossed in some Japanese graphic novel. Something within its visuals or its text amused him, as his lips formed a half smile that hinted at a certain ambiguous and suspicious take on everything.

So this was Johannes.

He glanced up from his book, saw me watching him, and knew immediately who I was as he nodded gravely at me. I came over and extended my hand. He took it reluctantly and favored me with the most feeble of grips before pulling away.

“I’m Thomas,” I said.

“I know.”

“How did you know?”

“I’ve seen your photograph in your books.”

“You’ve read my books?”

“Don’t flatter yourself.”

“I never flatter myself into thinking that anyone reads my books, because so few people do. May I sit down?”

He nodded, motioning toward the vacant seat opposite him. I noticed the empty beer glass in front of him.

“May I buy you another?”

A shrug. Then: “Okay.”

“I appreciate you agreeing to see me at such short notice,” I said.

“I’m not exactly running between meetings,” he said.