The Moment

by Douglas Kennedy

  “Around this time we celebrated Johannes’s first birthday. I’d been back at work for nine months, leaving Johannes every day at a nursery in Prenzlauer Berg and picking him up after work, as Jurgen was now writing every night from ten until just before dawn, and drinking a bottle of vodka each evening in the process, as vodka was cheap in the GDR. He got even more wildly fat, and he rarely left the apartment. When he awoke at three in the afternoon, he started eating. The deeper he got into the plays, the more detached from reality he became, to the point where he virtually stopped acknowledging his family’s existence. I found him a camp bed he could put in the little alcove he called his study. As he retreated completely from his wife and child, I basically created my own wall between us. I would leave food for him to eat. I would wash his clothes. Once a week I would attempt to clean the chaos that was his alcove, remaking the bed with clean sheets. Other than that I was with Johannes. Bless my son. His presence in my life saved my sanity that year. He was such a quiet baby—and one who occasionally appeared withdrawn. But when I held him he always smiled, always cooed. Outside that first bout of colic, he was such a good little man. As his father had now taken over the alcove that was supposed to be his nursery, I was very happy to have him in our bedroom—and would so often put him next to me in bed and talk to him and make him laugh and help him play with the few stuffed toys that we had, all of which were made for me by the very wonderful Judit—who was always around the apartment, always happy to take him to her place for an evening if I wanted to go out to the theater or a cinema, always incredibly supportive when it came to Jurgen’s increasingly deranged behavior.

  “The thing was, I knew my husband was acting out some Prenzlauer Berg version of the Myth of Sisyphus, that this entire mad dramatic enterprise—‘The most important piece of German dramatic writing since Goethe’s Faust,’ he announced one evening when he was relatively sober, which made it all the more unnerving—was, at best, doomed. Everyone in our circle in Prenzlauer Berg largely began to steer clear of Jurgen—because it was clear that he had entered some zone where it was impossible for him to accept that he was on the blacklist. Unless he was willing to do a major public self-criticism and turn into a Party sycophant, his career as a writer was over. I was pretty damn certain that he privately knew the reality of his situation. Yet, like most of us, he retreated into a scenario—‘I will write a masterpiece . . . every theater in the country will produce it . . . I will be proclaimed a genius and win the Lenin Prize for Literature and be rehabilitated and publicly loved again’—that allowed him to dodge the terribleness of his situation and simultaneously function on a daily basis. Jurgen really spent that year working. I never saw him. We hardly talked. But his industry was wild. Each play ran to more than two hundred and fifty pages in manuscript, and he was compulsive about getting to his desk every night.

  “He finished the fourth part of this epic at three in the morning. It was around eighteen months ago. He started screaming at the top of his lungs when he wrote the last line. I know this because I was asleep with Johannes in the next room when he let rip. He woke us up, the yelps turning to hysterical sobs, Jurgen crying and telling me how we were now saved, how the brilliance of this work would change our lives, how we would be living in one of those dachas they gave to important writers by the Grosser Müggelsee on the outskirts of the city. ‘I will be the first GDR writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature!’ he proclaimed to me one night when we had a few friends over. ‘You will all brag about knowing me.’

  “What I knew was going to happen did happen. Jurgen did begin to unravel. Over three months rejection after rejection hit him. Not only that, but some of the theaters to which he submitted the play cycle felt duty bound to tell the Stasi about this ‘ill-disciplined, but profoundly antisocial piece of trash,’ as the policeman who first interrogated Jurgen told him. This time he was ‘invited’ to come in and speak to the police. This time they simply cautioned him to stop trying to get his play even read. ‘You should think about another line of work,’ the cop told him.

  “Afterward Jurgen came home and drank a bottle of vodka straight down. Then grabbing the huge manuscript of his plays he took the tram and the U-Bahn to the Berliner Ensemble—the theater that Brecht himself created in the GDR. It was the first night of a new play by Heiner Müller and there were a considerable number of high-level people in the theater, including the minister for culture and several ambassadors of ‘fraternal socialist states.’ Our neighbors Susanne and Horst—both actors in the ensemble, but not cast in this play—were there. And Horst said that Jurgen had arrived with a wooden box and stood up on it outside the Berliner Ensemble, screaming at the top of his lungs: ‘I am a great German writer! I have written a masterpiece! I am being censored by the Stasi!’ Horst came over and begged him to stop this act of professional and personal suicide, but Jurgen shouted him down, stating that he was going to stand on this soapbox and read his play out loud until the directors of the Berliner Ensemble accepted it for production. Just then a big car drove up, accompanied by two police vehicles, and the minister of culture came out. At which point Jurgen unzipped his fly and began to urinate on the wall of the Berliner Ensemble, screaming:

  “‘I am a great German writer and I piss on the house that Brecht built!’

  “Then he turned and sprayed the minister with his urine. At which point the police tackled him and, according to Horst, beat him senseless right there on the street.

  “I learned about all this from Susanne and Horst, who came straight home, clearly distraught, and told me I should borrow their car—they were among the privileged few who had a Trabbi—and get out of town with Johannes immediately. They had a cottage on the Baltic Sea and they told me that I needed to pack and disappear, as the Stasi were bound to arrive before dawn. That was always the way when somebody committed a grievous offense against the state—their spouses or live-in lovers were inevitably picked up. The thing was, even if I did flee north to their cottage in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, it would only be a matter of time before the authorities found me. I insisted that it was best if I stayed put and answered their questions and explained to them that my marriage to Jurgen was a sham, and that he was—as far as I was concerned—someone in need of psychological and medical help. Also I knew that if I took Horst and Susanne’s car and borrowed their cottage, it would implicate them. Anyway I had led a blameless life to date. No political or dissident activity. No questionable behavior. No applications to ‘leave the Republic.’ I had always been a good citizen. Surely the authorities would see that.

  “Of course, I was horrified by what Jurgen had done. Horrified and depressed. But I knew it was coming—and there was also part of me that wished I had been strong enough to have reported him to our local doctor some time earlier, when it was clear he was heading for a major breakdown. But I also feared ratting on him and being the one who put him in the hands of the authorities. Now, however, I regretted not having taken such action earlier, as I knew that his fate would be, at best, one of those horrible asylums I’d heard about where ‘extreme’ political dissidents were kept.

  “Anyway the Stasi never came that night, which I took to be a good sign. The next morning—after just a few hours of bad sleep—I awoke and fed Johannes and got him changed, then showered and prepared to go to work. Again outside my door there were no unmarked cars, no men in trench coats awaiting me. When I reached the nursery with my son, the woman in charge, Frau Schmidt, greeted me with the usual pleasantries she exchanged with me every morning. Then I turned and started walking toward the tram at Prenzlauer Allee. That’s when a plain gray van suddenly pulled up alongside me, screeching to a halt. Two men in suits got out. They asked to see my papers. I demanded to know what this was about. ‘Crimes against the Republic,’ one of them told me. The other one said: ‘And we know exactly the nature of your betrayal, Frau Dussmann.’ This was before I had even shown them my identity papers, and a chill ran through me. The next thing I knew the t
wo men were frog-marching me into the rear of the van. I can remember its interior very clearly. Very low—less than one meter in height—and inside there were two small cells. I began to protest, saying I had done nothing wrong, never did anything wrong, that I was a loyal citizen. That’s when one of the men spat in my face. ‘You dare call yourself loyal after what you’ve done.’ He literally shoved me so hard into the cell that I twisted an ankle as I hit the floor. I screamed in pain, but he simply threw the cell door closed and attached a padlock to it, then told me:

  “‘Now you will see what happens to people who betray their Republic.’

  “I still had my watch on my wrist—and for the next eleven hours the van was in virtual nonstop motion. Occasionally, we’d park somewhere for ten or fifteen minutes. But largely it just kept driving around. As there were no lights in the interior of the van the effect was completely disorienting. There was also no toilet in this tiny locked cubicle—and they didn’t bother to offer me any food, let alone water, during all the hours I was being driven to . . .

  “Well, that was the big question. To where was I being driven? I knew from Jurgen’s recounting of this experience that I would probably end up in some prison at some hour of the night. But where exactly? Was I still in Berlin? Or down in Saxony, where I knew they had a women’s prison? And who was picking up my son tonight? That’s what was really terrifying me. The idea that five p.m. would come around and there would be nobody there to collect Johannes. I remember screaming repeatedly that I needed to speak to somebody in charge, that they had to call one of my neighbors—like Susanne or Judit—and tell them to pick up Johannes. But my screams were met with silence. So I screamed some more, literally asking that they stop the car and make a phone call. I even started shouting out Judit’s phone number, my screams mixing with a growing hysteria that came out of the realization: I was in a very bad place.

  “Finally, I could no longer hold my bladder anymore, and I used a bucket that had been left in the corner of the cell as a makeshift toilet. But then the van hit a pothole and urine went everywhere. This is when I started to weep. Because I knew that if I was being given this treatment early on, God knows what awaited me when they got me to prison.

  “My mind was racing wildly, wondering what horrible scenarios now faced me. But behind all this was also a crazed, absurd hope that somehow they would stop driving me around, drop me off in front of my apartment, tell me that I had now learned a lesson about marrying the wrong sort of man, and order me to go upstairs and comfort my son. That’s how deranged I was at this point—somehow thinking that they would let me go. I read somewhere that prisoners on death row often go through the same delusion. They’re being walked to the execution chamber and they still believe it’s not going to happen. I felt that as the van finally stopped and I heard a heavy door being pulled down behind me. Then the rear of the van opened and this yellow light streaked in. After eleven hours in the dark, even these fluorescent tubes stung my eyes. I was stinking of urine and my own sweat, so dehydrated by lack of water, and so frightened and so desperate to see Johannes, that as soon as they brought me out of the van I started to scream wildly again. These two women guards—they had faces like old cement—strong-armed me immediately, one of them yanking my hand halfway up my back while the other slapped me hard across the face and ordered me to shut up. Which I did immediately.

  “Then they marched me to some reception area where they took the few valuables I had—my watch, my wedding ring. They handed me a drab gray prison uniform and rudimentary underwear, and told me that I now had a number instead of a name, and said that if I cooperated with the authorities, my stay here mightn’t be a long one. Then I was marched to a shower. The two women guards watched me as I stripped off my clothes and stood under the lukewarm water. Suddenly I started to break down again, screaming for Johannes, begging them to let me see my son. One of them told me to shut up, or she’d have to slap my face again. I finished my shower. I dressed in the rough, sandpaperlike underwear and prison uniform. I was led to a cell, perhaps two square meters in total. There was a lightbulb that was on all the time. There was a single mattress on a concrete platform, a blanket, a pillow. There was a sink and a toilet. The guards told me to sleep. But I couldn’t sleep. I paced the small floor all night. I had nothing with which to occupy myself except my thoughts. All I could think of was Johannes . . . and who was watching him right now and when I would be able to see him again and why . . . my God, why? . . . was I being held here? Trying to calm myself down I said: I’m certain once I talk with the interrogator all will be cleared up and I’ll be home with my son by nightfall. I kept telling myself, They will be fair. They will be, as they always told us on news broadcasts and in the pages of Neues Deutschland, humanistic.

  But the next morning—having not slept at all and having been given a hard roll and a cup of weak tea for breakfast—I was brought down a series of corridors to another corner of the prison. They had this system of pull-cords in the corridors. The woman guard who was escorting me would pull a cord and then wait for someone in a nearby area to respond by yanking it back and thus ringing a little bell on the end of the cord. It took me a few days to work out why they used this rudimentary system of communication before walking me to my daily interrogation. They were letting other guards know that they were leading a prisoner down the corridors—and, as such, ensuring that there were no other prisoners in the hallways at the same time. That was the thing about this prison. As a captive you had no idea of anyone else who was being held there. We were all kept in isolation. Just as you had no idea if this prison was the infamous Hohenschönhausen—the Stasi’s remand center in Berlin—or another of their places of interrogation.

  My interrogator was named Colonel Stenhammer. He was a man in his late thirties. Short but well built. And evidently very conscious of his appearance, as his hair was always slicked back, his face smooth, his fingernails immaculate, his uniform perfectly pressed, his boots shined to such a high gloss that the few rays of light that passed through the barred windows lit them up. He smoked Western cigarettes—Marlboros—and would keep them in a gold cigarette case that looked like a family heirloom. When I was first brought to his ‘office’—as he referred to this interrogation room—he was seated behind a desk and I was told to place myself in a chair that was located around two meters away from him and positioned so whoever sat there found himself in a corner. Officer Stenhammer informed the guard that she could leave us be. Once the door was closed behind her, Officer Stenhammer opened a sizeable file and ran through a basic checklist of questions about where I was born, my parents, my education, everywhere I had ever lived, every job I had held, even every man I had been involved with. I interrupted him once, telling him I had no idea why I was here and how worried I was about my son Johannes, especially as my husband Jurgen . . .

  “‘Do you really think that, given our humanistic system, we would think of allowing a thirteen-month-old child to be left on his own?’ he asked, his tone cool, unnerving. ‘Despite the fact that his mother is under suspicion of espionage and treason?’

  “‘What?’ I screamed. ‘I have never, never . . . ’

  “‘Be quiet now,’ he ordered, his voice as lethal as a wielded scalpel. Then he informed me that if I continued to interrupt him, he would have me brought back to my cell. And I would spend at least five days there without any contact or exercise as a punishment for being uncooperative and antisocial.

  I hung my head and started to weep, whispering ‘I’m so sorry, sir’ while trying to control the tears that were now flowing. ‘I just so miss my son and don’t understand . . . ’

  “‘And you have interrupted me again, so now I have no choice.’

  “‘Please, please, please . . . ’ I was wailing now.

  “‘Will you remain quiet and cooperate fully?’

  “I nodded my head many times.

  “Stenhammer said nothing. He just sat there and stared at me for a good two minutes. I f
elt myself becoming unhinged again—unhinged because I was so frightened. But I also told myself I had no choice but to try to maintain a veneer of sanity—and meet Stenhammer’s clinical gaze. Then he did something unexpected. He smiled at me and said:

  “‘Perhaps you would like a coffee and a cigarette. In fact, I am certain you could use both.’

  “I didn’t know how to reply to this act of kindness, except to say: ‘That would be very nice, thank you.’

  “He stood up and opened a cupboard, within which was a Western-style coffee machine. It looked very fancy.

  “‘How do you take your coffee?’ he asked. I told him milk, one sugar. He poured me a cup, added milk and a teaspoon of sugar and actually brought it over to me. Then he offered me a cigarette—and slyly added:

  “‘You won’t tell anyone I smoke an American brand, will you?’

  “‘No, sir,” I said. ‘And I am very grateful to you for . . . ’

  “He held his hand up.

  “‘I do not need your gratitude, Frau Dussmann. I need you to tell me what you think of the coffee.’

  “I took a sip. The aroma of the coffee was overpowering. So too was the sheer richness of its taste. In the GDR such coffee was unobtainable. It was like nectar. The cigarette, too. I’d smoked Western cigarettes a few times before. They were such rarities in the GDR, especially among my crowd, none of whom had contacts in the hard currency shops or in the higher levels of the Party. Of course, part of me knew that Stenhammer was now playing the Good Cop. But the other part of me that was desperate to get out of this nightmare, to get home to my son, also knew that this Stasi man was my one hope of salvation. The coffee and cigarette were meant to make me feel good at a terrible moment. Even though he was my captor, I was nonetheless beholden to him right now. So I said:

  “‘The coffee is wonderful. So too is the cigarette.’