As night began to fall, I found a dingy little restaurant off Kollwitzplatz—which, like the café I patronized earlier, was all linoleum and fluorescent tubing. There was a smell of boiled cabbage everywhere. I drank two shots of Polish vodka (very agreeable). I ordered a schnitzel, which was heavily coated in batter and largely tasteless. I washed it down with two bottles of local beer. Very drinkable—and when combined with the two preceding vodkas, germinating a nice buzz. The entire cost of the booze and the bad food was one mark fifty. I checked my watch. It was now eight. I walked back to Prenzlauer Alle and caught a tram to Alexanderplatz, changing for the U-Bahn that stopped at Stadtmitte. Had this been a unified city, the station following this one would have been Kochstrasse. But the East Berlin U-Bahn system dead-ended at Stadtmitte. There was nowhere to go now but up onto the street—which, as before, was Friedrichstrasse. Again I turned and faced west—and saw the gates of Checkpoint Charlie in the very near distance. I wondered where I could go next. But East Berlin at this hour seemed shuttered, closed down for the night. I knew I would return here soon again and go to the opera or a play at the Berliner Ensemble or find my way to a jazz joint, and see if I could penetrate the city’s inaccessibility a little further. But with a heavy snow now falling—and nowhere now to go on this side of The Wall—I continued to sludge westward toward the checkpoint. By the time I reached it I was frozen. I was the only customer at the frontier. A guard emerged out of the little hut located next to the barricade and raised the arm that allowed me to enter the customs area. Even on this blizzard of a night I noted the three heavily armed soldiers standing out in the cold, eyeing me carefully as I walked into the customs booth.
I handed over my passport to the uniformed official in the customs booth.
“Are you carrying anything contraband on you?” he asked.
Do I look that crazy? I felt like asking him. But instead I just shook my head and said:
“No, sir.”
“You bought nothing?”
What’s to buy?
“No, sir.”
He scanned my face, trying to see if I was in any way nervous or anxious. I was just cold. Then, inking his stamp, he brought it down on my passport. Handing it back to me he said:
“Auf Wiedersehen.”
I nodded back. Passport still in hand, I passed through the final two security checkpoints before reaching the big gate that fronted the “American Sector.” Once there, I noted that there were three guards on duty: one to make a final verification of my exit visa and open the gate, the other two (I surmised) to watch their colleague as he let me out. Was this how they guaranteed no flights over the border by those guarding the border? Was everyone, in some way or another, watching each other and, as such, ensuring that they all remained within?
Perhaps the guard was reading my thoughts. Handing me my passport he said, in a flat, hard voice:
“You can go.”
Then swinging the gate open, he motioned for me to move forward. I walked back into the West. When I reached the entrance to the U-Bahn I turned back to look at Checkpoint Charlie. But it too had vanished, the snow purifying everything—as it always does—by erasing all that we prefer not to see.
SIX
FITZSIMONS-ROSS WAS AT work when I walked in the door. He had a paintbrush in hand and was vigorously applying a blue undercoat to a blank canvas. He had some sort of free jazz on the stereo—which was as cacophonous as it was wildly animated. And he currently looked like a member of some Touareg tribe, as he was half covered in aquamarine paint. But watching him dip and sway to this full-frontal jazz—wielding the paintbrush with such fluidity, such technical expertise—I found myself marveling at his sense of complete immersion, the pleasure, the release, the solace to be found in losing oneself in the canvas, and being actually able to control the trajectory of something. That’s the great consolation lurking behind all art: the fact that, during the act of creation, you have power over things. Once the painting is in the hands of your gallery owner—or your manuscript with your editor—you no longer own it or possess command over its destiny. But when you are at work, it’s still all yours. You own it. Every so often there is a here-and-now in the realm of creative work like the one I was currently witnessing. A strange switch is thrown in your brain. You are not pondering or cogitating or thinking about what happens next. You are simply doing. The work has taken you over. You are so totally immersed in its epicenter, so absorbed in its trajectory, that you almost feel possessed by this force that is currently driving you forward.
Watching as Fitzsimons-Ross now attacked the canvas, all I could think was: That’s it. The moment. The most unbridled form of romance imaginable. Pure mad love.
I crept upstairs, not wanting to disturb the flow of his work. Once I entered my rooms, I saw a scrap of paper left on my table, on which had been scrawled:
Was in the Café Istanbul this afternoon and His Eminence Omar said that the secretary of a Herr Wellmann called for you today. She asks that you call her back.
And below this was scrawled Alaistair’s name.
The music blared on downstairs. Though I was deeply tired after my long day on the other side, I knew that to ask Fitzsimons-Ross to turn it down would be to kill the moment. So I opened a bottle of wine and my notebook and got the rest of the evening down on paper. The music snapped off at four. Still awake, I wandered downstairs. Fitzsimons-Ross was seated at the kitchen table, a vodka bottle and a glass on the table, looking spent, punch-drunk, and so covered with paint it was as if he’d been in the line of Jackson Pollock’s fire. He was lighting a Gauloises and refilling his glass. I stared over at the canvas on which he’d been at work. The sharp lines of his boxes and rectangles which so characterized the previous canvases had suddenly blurred at the boundaries. The effect was instantly hypnotic, as if his crisp geometric world was now becoming less distinct, more progressively edgy. The blue undercoat was no longer that bright azure or lazuline shade that so called to mind Santorini on a white-hot midmorning in summer. Rather this blue was more darkly hued, more troubled, more inclement in its chromaticism. A blue that reflected a worldview closer to Berlin than to Greece—though unless I wanted to be subject to a torrent of abuse, I wouldn’t dare voice such an observation to Fitzsimons-Ross. Anyway it was he who started the conversation, looking up from his vodka with eyes that, despite their late-night, post-work-marathon heaviness, still had that strange, focused incandescence, a radiance that only dimmed after he had given himself his twice-daily fix.
“Didn’t see you come in,” he said.
“You were busy.”
“You didn’t tell me to turn off the music.”
“I didn’t want to disturb you. You looked rather involved.”
“So you were spying on me.”
“It’s good, that canvas.”
“It’s not ‘a canvas,’ it’s a fucking painting.”
“I still like it.”
A shrug from Fitzsimons-Ross. Then he picked up an object from the shelf behind him.
“Just been reading this rubbish.”
He tossed the object across to me. It was my book on Egypt.
“Where did you get this?”
“I actually bought a copy.”
“Really?” I asked.
“Don’t sound so fucking surprised. There’s an English language bookshop not far from The Café Paris in Kantstrasse. And, voilà, Thomas Nesbitt on Egypt.”
“I’m pleased.”
“That doesn’t mean I liked it.”
“You didn’t?”
“Actually I thought it pretty damn accomplished for a first book—and that is not damning with faint praise. You’re talented. You’re a first-rate observer . . .”
“I hear a ‘but’ on its way . . .”
“The ‘but’ isn’t a criticism. Rather, an observation . . .”
“Which is . . . ?”
“You haven’t been fucked over enough by life as yet. Maybe you believe you have. The
unhappy parents, a couple of relationships that went nowhere, largely because you couldn’t commit . . .”
“I never said that.”
“No need to, Tommy Boy. It’s tattooed on your bloody forehead. Please love me . . . please don’t crowd me.”
“That’s not fair,” I said, thinking: how the hell did he get me so damn well?
“Perhaps not—but it’s spot on accurate. Bull’s-eye. And how can I ascertain that? Because I am cut from the same flinty cloth, my child. You need to let yourself get hurt, Tommy Boy. It will move you out of cleverness—of which you possess a great deal right now—and into darker realms. But don’t take my word for it. I depend on smack twice a day to level the playing field on which I operate.”
“You’ve never been in love?”
“Repeatedly.”
“I mean, ‘seriously.’”
He motioned to the vodka bottle and the empty chair at his kitchen table. I went over to a cabinet and took down a water glass, then joined him. He poured me a shot and pushed the packet of Gauloises toward me.
“Seriously?” he now said, repeating the word in a mock version of my accent. “Have I seriously been in love?”
“That was the question, yes.”
“Well, seriously, yes.”
“And?”
He downed his shot of vodka and poured another.
“The facts. I thought I’d met the person with whom I wanted to spend my life. A gallery owner in London. Not my gallery owner. I never mix those worlds. No, Frederick had his premises elsewhere—and he stayed well away from my commercial concerns. He was twenty-six years my senior to boot. Old Harrovian, Oxbridge, very posh, very aristo. Everything I hate, and secretly admire, about the fucking Brits. Being the scion of a rather well-known family, he kept his queerness out of sight. Married some unfortunate and rather stupid aristo girl—who, of course, was blond and named Amanda. Was flayed alive legally when she found his ‘dirty little secret.’ By this time I had come into his life. When I met him he was caught between the desire to live the life he wanted and the need to live the life he had told himself he must live. ‘Must keep up appearances, old chap’ and all that other Terence Rattigan sort of dreck.
“But then I came into his life—and he into mine. And it was just so bloody right. On every damn level. I’d met my match, so to speak, and he his. After a few weeks, shazam. He decided to leave the family home and live with me. I had a studio in Hackney—dreadful place, but cheap. Frederick being Frederick, he found us a flat in Mayfair. Small, but rather wonderful. We set up house together. We were seen together publicly, and very much as a couple. This was seven years ago when things were much more closeted. Frederick did pay dearly, both financially and socially, for taking up with me and not bothering to hide it. ‘Why should I hide the fact that, for the first time in my life, I am happy,’ he told me the day before he died. And this from a man who, even with me at the outset, was so bloody buttoned up about his emotions.”
“How did he die?” I asked.
“Cleanly. A coronary at his desk at the gallery. He was in the middle of a phone call when . . . snap. His heart simply gave up. A lifetime of cigarettes and red meat and all the complexities with which he struggled. It just finally caused his heart to give out. He was only fifty-three, and we’d been together just eight months. Eight sublime months. God knows Frederick had his tetchy side. And moi . . . well, I sense you know by now I am not the most balanced and straightforward man to have ever walked the planet. But, how can I put this? In those months together I woke up every morning thinking: I am with Frederick and life is bloody wonderful. It was the first and last time I ever embraced such an absurdly positive view of things. Frederick’s death killed that. Killed it permanently.”
“Don’t be so certain of that.”
“Oh, I am, I most certainly am. I know too damn well the truth of the matter, which is that I had my so-called moment in the sun, and now . . .”
“He mightn’t be the last love of your life.”
“There you go again on some Pollyannaish riff. That part of my life is truly dead and buried. I won’t be going to that place again. And I am happy to have an arrangement like the one I have with Mehmet—thrice weekly, no strings, no ties that bind.”
“Meanwhile, your paintings are getting darker.”
“Possibly because I have reconciled myself to my overall condition. I have my work. I have a lover who means little to me beyond the nuts-and-bolts stuff. I sell just enough work each year to pay for my vices. And courtesy of your rent each month, I now have subdued the rants and threats of that shyster landlord. So—as lives go—it’s a rather reasonable one . . . for a junkie.”
He stubbed out his cigarette, saying:
“On which note . . . it’s a bit after your bedtime, young man. As you well know, in order for me to sleep I need my ‘medicine.’ And since I sense you are rather queasy about needles, you pansy . . .”
“Say no more,” I said and headed up the stairs.
I slept in until noon that morning—and woke to the telltale sounds of Fitzsimons-Ross and Mehmet making love. I blared the radio to block out their soundtrack. After making breakfast and showering I waited until I heard the slam of the door downstairs announcing Mehmet’s departure. Then I ventured out. As always, after his encounter with Mehmet, Fitzsimons-Ross was mixing paint or stretching canvases or sketching—what he called “prep work that was also back of the head work.” When I came downstairs that morning, about to head out to the Café Istanbul and the nearest phone, he looked up at me with considerable wariness that also carried with it a hint of embarrassment.
“I think I was hit with an attack of garrulousness last night,” he said, looking up from a paint tray in which he had been mixing colors.
“Really? I hadn’t noticed.”
“Talking about oneself . . . it’s so tedious. So American.”
“And so Irish. Get you anything while I’m out?
“Two packets of Gauloises and another liter of Stolichnaya,” he said, mentioning the Russian vodka he always drank. “There’s thirty marks in my jacket hanging up by the door.”
The jacket, a battered brown leather item, was suspended from an old Victorian bentwood coat stand. I reached inside the jacket pocket and found the cash alongside a small packet of white powder, tightly bound up in a tiny plastic sack.
“Looks like you forgot something,” I said, holding up what was so evidently a bag of heroin.
“Oh fuck,” he said, dropping his stirring stick and marching over. “I thought I’d lost that.”
He held out his open hand and I dropped the sack into it.
“Well, it’s been found,” I said.
“And in the one obvious place I didn’t look. Jesus, I’m a catastrophe.”
I hit the street. Once inside the Café Istanbul I ordered a coffee and asked Omar if I could use the phone. He put it on the counter. Having previously copied down the Radio Liberty number in my notebook, I pulled it out and dialed Jerome Wellmann’s office. The same officious woman answered the phone. When I told her who was calling, her reply was as dictatorial as ever:
“Herr Wellmann will see you tomorrow at eleven a.m. Do you have our address?”
“Yes, I am free at eleven,” I said, “and no, I don’t have your address.”
“Well, write this down,” she said, “as we are certainly not in the phone book. You will need to bring your identity papers with you. No admittance without them. Do not be late, as Herr Wellmann has a very busy schedule tomorrow.”
The next morning I arrived at the offices of Radio Liberty a good ten minutes before my appointment. I wore the one slightly dressy jacket I’d brought with me—brown corduroy with brown suede patches on the elbows, a black turtleneck sweater, and dark blue jeans that I had bothered to press for the first time that morning. I sensed I looked very Greenwich Village circa 1955 and only needed a well-thumbed paperback copy of the collected Edna St. Vincent Millay sticking out of
my pocket to complete the picture.
The offices of Radio Liberty were in a bleak industrial corner of the city with the decidedly ironic name of Wedding. The pharmaceutical giant, Bayer, had a massive 1930s office block near the U-Bahn station where I emerged. It towered over a landscape of grubby apartment blocks and industrial buildings. Chauseestrasse—a onetime border crossing, now closed—loomed up ahead, as did The Wall which defined the immediate eastern horizon. Radio Liberty was located two streets away on Hochstrasse, not far from the Volkspark Humboldthain. It was housed in a low-lying, unmarked plain brick building. You could have easily imagined that the premises once housed a small precision tool factory. There was nothing on the outside stating that this was the West Berlin home of a well-known broadcasting outfit. But it was clear to anyone walking by that the enterprise contained herein was rather security conscious. There was a high wire fence of the type that surrounded school playgrounds in New York. Topping it was barbed wire. A bolted swing door had been fitted into a lower corner of the fence. There was a security camera focused on the street side of the entrance. As I approached the doorway and pressed the bell that was to its immediate right, a hefty man in a blue security uniform emerged from a small hut just inside the fenced-off area.
“Ja?” he asked, staring at me warily.
I had my passport at the ready and explained that I had an appointment with Herr Wellmann. He relieved me of my travel document, saying: “You wait.” Then he went into the hut, leaving me outside, hopping from one foot to another, my gloved hands plunged deep into the pockets of my jacket, as a way of staving off the bitter subzero cold. After about ten minutes he reemerged and opened the gate, telling me: “You walk straight ahead to the door marked ‘Reception.’ Frau Orff will be there to meet you.”
“Who’s Frau Orff?”
The Moment Page 14
