So I started to talk. Telling her about my mother’s intrinsic unhappiness, and the way she and my father baited each other endlessly, and the accusations that would emerge repeatedly that the only thing holding them together was their only child . . . and how this knowledge just made me want to hide myself away further. By the time I was in my final year of high school, I was spending most weekends by myself, hiding out in cinemas and theaters and bookshops and not minding it at all.
“And your parents, they never suggested you do things en famille?”
“Not really. By the time I was in my last year in high school they were essentially living separate lives. Dad would be ‘traveling on business’ most weekends—which, I know now, was a euphemism for seeing one of the many girlfriends that he had. Occasionally, he’d be in town—and would suggest a movie and a late lunch at an Italian place. The thing about my father was, he was never authoritarian or one of those ‘my way or the highway’ dads like his own father. On the contrary, when I was sixteen he gave me my first cigarette and my first glass of wine, telling me he wanted me to learn how to drink and smoke properly.”
“Sounds like a man’s man.”
“That he was, except when it came to the question of my mother. She made his life awful, as he did hers. But they still couldn’t do the sensible thing and separate.”
“It sounds like my parents.”
“They were unhappy?”
“Not exactly. It was as if they had worked out a way of living together and not being together. I know my father had a girlfriend who worked at DDR Rundfunk in Halle. Just as Mother was involved with the director of the middle school where she taught—though I only accidentally discovered this when I was walking home from school and took a shortcut down an alleyway, and saw her locked in an embrace with her boss in the front seat of his Trabant . . . the director of the local middle school being a Party member of such standing that he could jump the queue for a much-desired car—”
“Did your mom see you?”
“Fortunately, no. She was far too locked in the embrace of Comrade Koelln to notice me.”
“And you never said anything to her?”
“Are you mad? Even at this early age—I was fourteen at the time—I understood a basic principle of life in the GDR: in a society where the motto of the secret police is ‘to know everything,’ the one thing you learned very early on was keeping information to yourself . . . especially if you were beginning to question the way things worked in your country.”
“What did you first question?”
“My God, they so indoctrinated us into looking upon the GDR as a great humanistic project. A workers’ paradise. An egalitarian dream.’ The thing was, I bought into it all. Because from age seven onward, I spent several weeks every summer at a Young Pioneers camp. We also had ideology classes every day in school, in which we were taught about the evil capitalist world that existed to the west of our frontiers, where children were forced to work in sweatshops, and where the majority of Americans were so indoctrinated into a culture of insane consumerism they were all wildly fat and killing themselves by endlessly feeding their faces . . .”
“You know, there’s more than a little truth to that last comment.”
“Of course. That’s what Orwell said about clichés: they are all, on a certain level, true . . . not that we were ever permitted near Orwell in school or university or at any other point in our lives as good citizens of the most humane country the world had ever spawned.”
“So when did you first read Orwell?”
“When I started living with Jurgen.”
“Who was Jurgen?”
“My husband.”
So he finally has a name.
“But you were asking me when I started to question things,” she said, stubbing out a cigarette and reaching for another while quickly shifting the conversation back to safer terrain. “That was when I spent a weekend with a school friend named Marguerite. Her parents had a cabin in the country. A tiny place, three rooms, very basic. But they did have a television. Because we were twenty-five kilometers from the border with the Bundesrepublik I had my first introduction to West German television. All the commercials for all the things we never saw in the GDR. All the color. All the cool clothes. Then there was this film, dubbed into German, but set in Paris. I’d heard of Paris because of geography classes and our antifascist history courses, where we learned that the Nazis invaded France in 1940, and where (so our teachers informed us), outside of a few brave French Communists, the majority of the population collaborated with the fascists. But here, for the first time, I saw Paris. The movie was some love story—I forget its name—and the city looked so beautiful. I remember being enraptured by it all.
“But when I got home the next night and told my father that I wanted to learn French and move to Paris when I was eighteen, he did something very uncharacteristic: he got angry at me. He asked me who had placed such ideas in my head. When I tried to say I had been reading picture books about Paris, he said that he knew I was lying, for where would I have found picture books about Paris in Halle? That’s when he asked if Marguerite’s parents had such books. Again he was so furious. It was so unlike my father to be this way, I felt I had no choice but to tell him the truth: that we had been watching Western television during the weekend at their cottage. Now Papa was livid. He said that I must never, never, tell anyone about having seen Western television at the house of Marguerite’s parents, and that I must stop being her friend immediately. I started to cry—not just because I couldn’t understand why he was telling me to end things with my best friend in school, but also because I’d never seen my father like this.”
“And then?”
“He told me that if word ever got out about any of this, it could severely harm us. He swore me to secrecy, swore me to never tell a soul about this, and instructed me to begin cold shouldering Marguerite the next day at school.
“‘But all we did was watch television,’ I cried.
“‘You watched television that was verboten.’
“‘But I’m always hearing kids in school talk about their parents letting them watch Western television.’
“‘Their fathers don’t have an important job with DDR Rundfunk. Can you imagine the difficulties I would find myself in if it was discovered that my daughter was watching capitalist television? You must promise me you will never have anything to do with Marguerite again.’”
“Did you keep that promise?”
Petra hung her head and fell silent for a moment. Then:
“I don’t know why I told you this story. I’ve never told anyone this story.”
“Really?”
“Not even my husband.”
“So what happened?”
“Papa went off immediately to speak with Mother. And she then came to me, very shaken, very worried, and told me that I must do everything my father asked of me; that what Marguerite’s parents did was very wrong, very dangerous. I remember saying to her:
“‘But they aren’t going to tell anybody that they let us watch Western television. It was just a silly movie. And I do really want to learn French now and visit Paris soon.’
“‘That will not be possible,’ Mother said flatly. ‘If you are a good citizen, you might be allowed to go to Warsaw, or Prague, or maybe even Budapest. But Paris? That is the other side. We cannot go there.’
“It was the first time I was made aware of the fact that travel as people in the West know it—buying a ticket and getting on a plane to another country and coming back when you like, or, indeed, not coming back, or simply deciding to live elsewhere for a while—this was beyond the realm of possibility for us. In fact, like Western television, it was verboten.”
“What happened to Marguerite?”
She stared into her empty glass.
“I don’t know.”
“By which you mean . . . ?”
“She didn’t show up at school the next day. Or the day after. Or t
he day after that. My parents, meanwhile, never once questioned me whether I had seen or spoken to Marguerite—which struck me as strange, considering how vehement they were about me promising to have no further contact with her. But then, at the end of the week, I asked my form teacher what had happened to my friend. I can still remember the momentary look of unease on that woman’s face as she said: ‘I hear her father was transferred to a new job elsewhere.’”
“Did your parents denounce them?” I asked.
Her eyes didn’t move from her glass.
“I don’t know.”
“Did your parents ever talk to you about it?”
“Never.”
“Did you ask them?”
“How could I?”
“Did you ever see Marguerite again?”
She shook her head, then added:
“But something interesting did happen around six months after all this. My father was promoted to become head of cultural programs at DDR Rundfunk in Halle. Four years later, when I applied to study French and English at Humboldt University in Berlin—which I considered a long shot, as I was from the provinces and I was a half percentage point off their entrance exam requirements—I was offered a place.”
“They could have simply decided, on the basis of your application, that you were worth taking a risk. And your father’s promotion . . . who’s to say it wasn’t due to merit and many years of hard work?”
“Again, you are being far too nice. But nobody who hasn’t lived in the GDR understands how the system works and how everyone denounced each other. I don’t have definitive proof that my parents said anything to the Stasi about Marguerite’s family, but why else did they suddenly ‘move to another town’? The thing is, everyone lived under the ongoing creeping fear that some minor infraction could be reported to ‘the higher powers’ and used against them. As such, we were all self-censoring and knew there were limits to things we could discuss. Which is why, after it happened, I never brought up Marguerite again with my parents.”
“You said your mother passed away. Are you still in touch with your father?”
She shook her head slowly.
“Have you tried to make contact with him?”
“You don’t understand. The fact that I crossed over, got out . . . God knows what happened to his career in the wake of all that. But I also knew that, were I to try to contact him now, the implications for him could be grave.”
“Has he ever tried to contact you?”
“You still don’t comprehend. For him to survive over there, he must now regard me as dead. A nonperson. I no longer exist.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said, covering her hand with mine. She didn’t pull it away. Instead she entwined her fingers with mine and said:
“I shouldn’t have told you all that.”
“I’m glad you did.”
“But now you think me ‘compromised,’ a destroyer of other people’s lives.”
“You were a kid. You’d never seen Western television before. How were you to know? What’s more, surely Marguerite’s parents knew they were taking a risk.”
“I betrayed them,” she said, pulling her hand away.
“You did nothing of the sort. You have no concrete proof that your parents went to the authorities and—”
“Please, please, stop trying to cast everything in a reasonable light. The problem with that place is you had to betray others in order to survive. But in doing so you betrayed yourself.”
I felt like saying: we all betray ourselves, but knew it would sound naïve and simplistic. Seeing her so distressed—yet also being so heartened by the fact that she trusted me enough to want to share this painful secret with me—simply deepened everything I felt for her. So what I did do was extend my right hand and placed it on her own. It was still kneading the napkin—and when I first touched it, she stiffed and continued agitating this piece of overwashed linen. So I clutched it tightly—and after almost instinctually trying to pull it away, Petra slowly tightened her fingers around my own. I looked up at her and saw that she was fighting tears.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry.”
“There’s nothing to be sorry about,” I said. “Nothing.”
“You are a lovely man,” she said, still not able to look up at me.
“And you are a lovely woman.”
“No, I’m not.”
“I’m telling you: yes, you are.”
“But you hardly know me.”
“You are wonderful.”
“Thomas, please.”
“You are wonderful.”
“You said that yesterday.”
“Well, I haven’t changed my mind since then.”
She laughed a small laugh, then fell quiet for a moment, grasping my hand tighter.
“Nobody ever said that to me,” she finally said.
“Really?” I said, trying not to sound shocked.
“My marriage . . . it was a curious business.”
I said nothing, waiting for her to continue. But she suddenly reached for the menu and her cigarettes.
“I’m starving,” she said.
“Let’s order then,” I said, smiling at her.
“Thank you,” she said, and I knew that what she was actually thanking me for was not asking any further questions about her marriage.
The waiter came over. We both ordered pasta. I suggested a bottle of white wine. She nodded her okay, adding:
“I only discovered Italian food after I was evicted from the GDR. Parmesan cheese, linguini, clam sauce, real meatballs—all foods from another planet. But you, growing up in New York, you must have had access with every possible food on offer.”
For the next half hour or so she quizzed me intently about my childhood in Manhattan—wanting to know all about my neighborhood, the little restaurants (like Pete’s Tavern or Big Wong King on Mott Street in Chinatown) where I ate regularly with my dad, the sorts of Broadway shows I was taken to as a kid, the funkiness of the East Village in the early seventies, even getting me to demonstrate the difference between a Brooklyn and a Bronx accent, making her laugh as I mimicked my father saying expressions like Howyadoin’? in his original Prospect Heights intonations.
Petra relaxed considerably during the meal—eating the very good spaghetti carbonara and matching me, glass for glass, with the house white. When I once pointed out that she’d gotten me talking about New York for far too long, and surely it was my turn to bombard her with questions about her childhood, she said:
“But I want to know everything about you . . . everything except your past girlfriends. Or, at least, not yet.”
“There’s not much to tell in that department.”
“When it comes to that part of life—the intimate part—there is always much to tell. And yes, this is the wine talking now.”
“But you said we weren’t going to talk about that just yet.”
“All right, be mysterious.”
“No more mysterious than you.”
“Ah, but I sense your story is a happier one than mine.”
“Is your story that sad?” I asked.
“Yes. It is that sad.”
And fishing out a cigarette she said:
“And I wouldn’t say no to another half liter of wine if you don’t object.”
“Object?” I said, reaching over and stroking her face with my hand. “This is so . . .”
But before I could finish the sentence she put her index finger on my lips.
“You don’t have to tell me, Thomas. I know. I truly know.”
Then, without warning, she put her head in her hands and looked stricken, as if everything was suddenly too much to bear.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“I can’t . . .”
I heard her shudder. She pressed her fingers to her eyes. I reached for her again, but she pushed away my hand.
“I can’t . . .” she said again, her voice now a whisper.
“Can’t what?
”
“Thomas, please do yourself a favor and leave now.”
“What?”
“Just go and spare yourself.”
“Go? There’s no way I’m going. There’s no way I’ll let you push me . . . us . . . aside. Not when I know . . .”
“And I know, too. I knew it the first moment I saw you. That’s why I have to ask you to go. Because this can’t be—”
“Why can’t it be? Why? You are everything to me.”
She suddenly stood up, grabbing her cigarettes. Out of nowhere she said three words:
“Ich liebe dich.”
I love you.
Then she raced toward the door.
Immediately I threw some money down on the table and ran out into the street. But Pflügerstrasse was empty. I shouted her name several times. I charged up and down the street, checking in the few doorways that weren’t boarded up, peering down alleyways, still calling out for her. But there was no response. Just the wind blowing up against the corrugated iron sheeting covering all the condemned buildings. I charged down to the main thoroughfare, scanning the street. But, like everywhere else in this no-man’s-land of a neighborhood, there was not a soul to be seen. Petra had vanished.
My head was swimming, not just courtesy of her abrupt departure, but all that had transpired in such a mad rush beforehand. Then there were those three words she had spoken to me before fleeing. She meant them—of that I was absolutely certain. Just as the way everything that had come suddenly spilling out between us—“I knew it the moment I saw you last week” . . . “You are everything to me”—was simultaneously irrational and so profoundly true.
Sleet began to fall—insidiously cold and glutinous. I needed shelter in a hurry, but I didn’t want to head to the U-Bahn and home. I wanted to find Petra. But without her address, without her phone number . . .
The Moment Page 23
