The Moment

by Douglas Kennedy

  “Will your father like me?” she asked.

  “I’ve no doubt about that . . . though when I tell him we’re engaged he will initially say something charming like, ‘Giving up your freedom so young.’”

  “Might he not have a point?”

  “Not at all. And I only mentioned that to underscore the fact that my dad is a rather gruff customer. But once he meets you, he will envy me.”

  “What I said before—about wanting to move to Paris or New York tomorrow—I truly mean it. And even though I know ‘tomorrow’ really means a few months from now . . . please, Thomas, take me out of Berlin.”

  “With pleasure,” I said.

  Much of that night—as we moved on to dinner in a brasserie on the Rue des Écoles—we began to talk seriously about our future life together. Petra knew about my studio apartment in Manhattan—and I said that, if we moved back, we could easily camp there for a couple of months while we found something bigger.

  “For around seven hundred dollars per month we could probably get two bedrooms up near Columbia University.”

  “Could we afford that?”

  “I’d need to get one more book review or magazine article a month.”

  “But say I couldn’t find any work?”

  “You’ll find work—teaching, translating. I bet you could talk your way into the German department of some private school, even find something at Columbia.”

  “But I have no advanced degrees.”

  “But you have been a professional translator for years.”

  “That doesn’t mean I can teach.”

  “Why not?”

  “You really are relentlessly optimistic.”

  “It’s an optimism for us.”

  “I don’t want to be dependent on you in New York.”

  “But say, five years from now, when you have a full-time post at some college or at the UN, and I can’t get a book published . . .”

  “That will never happen.”

  “It happens all the time in the wonderful world of letters. Two or three books into a career—bad sales, indifferent reviews—and suddenly nobody wants to know you anymore.”

  “But that is not you.”

  “How can you be so sure of that?”

  “Because I read your book—and all the essays of yours I’ve translated . . .”

  “‘You really are relentlessly optimistic.’”

  “Ouch.”

  “You take my point?”

  “It’s the old East German indoctrination kicking in. One should be optimistic about the future of revolutionary Communism. But when it comes to oneself . . .”

  “You’ll learn to be easier on yourself.”

  “Only when I finally get out of Berlin. Staying there has all been about being near Johannes. Now I realize that it’s all futile. I’ve lost him forever.”

  “I think that’s a very brave thing to admit.”

  “What? Accepting that there is no hope?”

  “Yes, that is exactly what I mean.”

  We fell silent.

  “Paris,” she finally said. “It once seemed as remote as the far side of the moon.”

  Three days later—as we boarded the bus to Orly and the flight back to Berlin—Petra held on to my hand so tightly it felt as if she was in desperate need of ballast.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  “I don’t want to go back.”

  “But it will only be for a couple of weeks.”

  “I know, I know. It’s just . . .”

  “We can expedite our exit by me booking an appointment with the US consul as soon as we’re home and finding out what we have to do to get you a green card.”

  “How long do you think that will take?”

  “I haven’t a clue, as I haven’t exactly had a string of foreign fiancées in the past.”

  “Let’s see if they can get it done as soon as possible.”

  “You mean, before you change your mind?”

  “I’ll never do that.”

  “Nor will I. So there’s nothing to worry about.”

  “I hope you’re right.”

  Back in Berlin that afternoon we found Alaistair sitting alone in his studio, staring at the three canvases that had been preoccupying him for weeks. The depth of color, the edginess of their geometric conceits, the darkness visible within them, the way they worked as a triptych that invited you to contrast the azure tonalities that enveloped the viewer and made you ponder the infiniteness so inherent in the color blue. They were clearly finished and clearly remarkable.

  “You’re done?” I asked.

  “As done as I can be,” Alaistair said.

  “Fantastic.”

  “That’s one point of view. But maybe I’m just suffering a touch of the postpartum blues.”

  “They’re brilliant, Alaistair.”

  “And the fucking London art vultures will write them off as ‘Yves Klein Light,’ not that there can be anything lighter than Yves-fucking-Klein and his fucking blue. And apologies, Petra, but I am usually like this when I cross the finish line.”

  “Thomas is right. They are wonderful.”

  “Well, considering they were done in the throes of withdrawal.”

  “People will see how astonishing they are,” she said.

  “Not the people who dictate taste.”

  “We got engaged in Paris,” I suddenly said.

  Alaistair genuinely looked thrown by the way I dropped this little tidbit of news.

  “Let’s have that again?” he said.

  “We’re getting married.”

  “So you’ve now said twice. But Mademoiselle is curiously silent on the issue.”

  “That’s because Mademoiselle isn’t as gregarious as Monsieur,” she said with a smile.

  “‘Gregarious’ being a synonym for ‘American,’” Alaistair added.

  “But as I love this American . . . ,” Petra said.

  “So, you confirm that what our gregarious friend says is true?”

  “Absolutely true.”

  “Well then . . . somewhere around here, I think in the back of my fridge, there is a bottle of French fizz I have been saving for an event of note. Like this one.”

  “That’s very kind of you,” I said.

  “Proper and right, given the momentousness of the occasion. Being a closet romantic, I must say that I do envy you both this, and only hope you won’t bloody squander it.”

  The bottle of champagne turned into a lengthy and very boozy dinner at some local Italian joint, during which Alaistair turned to me when Petra stepped away to use the bathroom and said:

  “What makes me happiest—and yes, this is the fucking drink talking—is the fact that you so wanted this. Needed this. That’s not a reproach or a criticism. Just an observational truth. Because, for years, I was like you. Singular. Solitary. Not willing to let anyone come too close. Then I met the right man. And it was totally mutual. And if the bastard hadn’t had the bad taste to die on me . . . The thing is, mein Freund: you’ve found her.”

  The next day I called the US consul and spoke with a surprisingly pleasant secretary with a flat, Midwestern accent who told me that, yes, if I was planning to marry a German woman and we were intending to settle in the States, it was best if I came by with her to meet one of the assistant consuls who could get the immigration wheels moving. Once we were legally married, as long as there were no snags, she should have her green card within a month tops.

  “So if you want to expedite things,” she said, “I’d get married as soon as possible!”

  When I mentioned this to Petra that night, she laughed and said:

  “We can ask Alaistair to officiate.”

  “I was thinking of asking him to be my witness.”

  “And mine, too, as there aren’t exactly a horde of people I’m close to here.”

  “Then let’s go to the registry office or whatever they call it here sometime next week,” I said.

  “I’ll research all
that tomorrow.”

  “We have the appointment with the consul at one fifteen. If you can make it down to the Ku’damm by then.”

  “I’ll be there. As soon as the consul informs us my green card is cleared, I’m giving notice at work, if that is okay with you.”

  “Absolutely. And I’m calling the guy who’s subletting my place in Manhattan tonight and telling him I’m back in a month. He might not like it—but four weeks’ notice was the deal we agreed on both sides, so if all goes well, we’ll be in New York just in time for August. Heat and humidity on a level you cannot imagine until experienced firsthand.”

  “I’ll be free of this place and with you. So, believe me, the heat will be a minor detail.”

  The next afternoon I dropped by the main Kreuzberg post office and asked the woman at the switchboard to put a call through to a New York number which I supplied on a piece of paper. It was eight in the morning on the East Coast of the United States. My subtenant was a fact checker for Newsweek named Richard Rounder who had already published a story in The New Yorker and seemed to have checked into the creative deep freeze since then. Unusually for a writer, he was an early riser, so he was up when I called. And he was surprisingly cool about vacating the apartment in a month, as he had just been accepted for a three-month residency at the Yadoo arts colony and would be heading there in early September.

  The US consul was a woman in her late thirties named Madeleine Abbott. She wore a severe civil service gray suit and was pleasant in an administrative sort of way. Petra had come to this meeting dressed soberly in a white blouse and a black skirt that stopped just above the knee. She seemed genuinely nervous when we met in front of the main entrance of the US Consulate in a wealthy suburban area called Zehlendorf.

  “Not having second thoughts?” I asked after kissing her hello.

  “I always get edgy whenever I have to deal with bureaucracy. They have such control over you.”

  “This will be very straightforward.”

  “I hope you’re right.”

  Actually the meeting was exceptionally businesslike. When I told the consul we were getting married, she offered perfunctory congratulations, then pulled out assorted forms that needed filling out. She asked Petra about her background. When she mentioned that she had been expelled from the GDR last year, the consul’s pen paused for a moment and she looked at her with interest.

  “Were you expelled for political reasons?” she asked.

  “That’s right.”

  “You will need to explain that on the application form. In fact, I would suggest that you write a statement explaining the details of your expulsion, not that this will count against you when the case is reviewed by the Department of State in Washington. On the contrary. But you must be very transparent about the whys and wherefores of your case. Are you okay with that?”

  Petra nodded, but I could see that her anxiety level had just jumped a notch or two.

  The consul then took down assorted details, studying both our passports, asking us both assorted questions about our professions, our parents’ birthplaces, any criminal convictions.

  “I was never convicted of anything,” Petra said. “But I was held in prison for several weeks in the GDR because my then-husband was engaged in political activity.”

  “Activity against the Communist Party?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And you were arrested in the wake of his activity?”

  “I think it’s called guilt by association.”

  “Is your husband is still in prison?”

  “He is no longer my husband because he died in prison more than a year ago.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. As I said earlier, I suggest you include all this information in the statement you will attach with your application form. One question for you both. How long have you known each other?”

  “Six months,” I said, staring directly at her.

  “I don’t think that should present a problem, as I will note in my letter to State that you met in Berlin. Had you met Miss Dussmann while she was visiting the US, the fact that you are getting married after such a short amount of time might lead the people in charge into questioning whether this was a marriage of convenience. Of course, they still might raise a few questions about that. But the very fact that you are, if I am not being presumptuous, planning to get married before arriving in the United States . . .”

  “Absolutely,” I said.

  “Well, I naturally cannot give you one hundred percent assurance that your application will be approved. But unless anything untoward is found in your background, I sense it will all be rather straightforward. Of course, the sooner you get your application back to me the sooner it will be processed.”

  And she wished us both well.

  Outside Petra immediately lit up a cigarette and seemed to be in the throes of a near-anxiety attack. Shaking her head rapidly, her shoulders scrunched up against her head, all sturm und drang, so evidently unnerved by it all.

  “My love,” I said, trying to take her in my arms. “What’s wrong?”

  “They’re going to find a reason to turn me down,” she said.

  “That’s not what she said.”

  “But that’s what these people do all the time. They work out an excuse to ruin your life.”

  “Maybe in the GDR. But in the States . . .”

  “They’ll think I’m a Communist.”

  “No, they won’t. And here’s why: because those people who debriefed you when you were expelled have an extensive file on you. What did that file say? Everything that you told them—and all the other details they had on your case, including the way that your son was taken away from you. Trust me, these people are Cold Warriors. Given how you were treated by the other side and the fact that you are marrying an American . . .”

  “Sorry, sorry. I just am so frightened of something going wrong now. Right when everything seems so happy, so possible, when there is finally a future for me, for us.”

  “Nothing, nothing, will go wrong. The consul was pretty damn clear about that. Let’s look at the absolutely worst-case scenario. If they found some sort of stupid technicality not to grant you a green card, we could still get married. As I would then be the husband of a European national we could easily get me a carte de séjour for France in a nanosecond. So we’d do Paris and appeal like hell to get you into the States. But this simply isn’t going to happen. If I may say so, I think you are understandably haunted by what they did to you over there.”

  “You’re right, you’re right. I’m just being absurd.”

  “No, you’re just reacting to bureaucracy in the same way that someone who has been butchered by a dentist reacts when told that he has to get another tooth filled.”

  “Thank you, thank you,” she whispered, putting her arms around me.

  Petra had to return to work that afternoon. I stopped by the Café Istanbul and found I had an “urgent” message from Pawel. I rang him. He answered immediately.

  “Is this ‘good urgent’ or ‘bad urgent’?” I asked.

  “Always the catastrophizer,” he said. “Actually it’s a plum assignment for you, but one I’d prefer not to discuss on the telephone. I am looking for an excuse to duck out for a late afternoon beer, as I am working late tonight. So you can be my excuse for the beer. Do you know that café around the corner from the station? Could you be there in forty-five minutes?”

  “How plum an assignment?”

  “Very prestigious—and I’ll even make it lucrative again. Forty-five minutes.”

  And the line went dead.

  Naturally I was intrigued. Naturally I continued to be amazed at Pawel’s ability to pretend that our relationship had always been a most collegial one.

  Even when he was being atrocious, the man maintained the most calm of outward expressions. Today was no different. A fast greeting, two beers ordered, and he got right down to business.

  “What I am about to tell you is highly c
lassified. Last week two very leading East German dancers—Hans and Heidi Braun, they’re brother and sister—managed to get themselves smuggled out of their fair city by being loaded into two duffel bags that were part of an entire armory of gear that had been brought into the GDR by a Bundesrepublik dance troupe. The directors of this troupe have impeccable socialist credentials, and were therefore granted permission to tour the Workers’ Paradise. However, it seems that one of the directors fell in love with Hans. The fact that Hans had already been harassed over there repeatedly for being such a high-profile dancer and gay . . . well, the GDR authorities are now furious and embarrassed that this dancer and his sister were smuggled out in duffel bags piled up among all the scenery and gear of this company from Freiburg. Then there’s the whole ‘homosexual persecution’ dimension to the story—which will also have the GDR stooges squirming. And Hans Braun is something of a garrulous character who just loves to talk. So far he’s still here in West Berlin with his sister. He insisted that she be brought along. They are still being debriefed. So we’d like you to be the one who first interviews them. It was Wellmann’s idea, as you fit the bill perfectly: American, fluent in German, and a New Yorker who, I hope, knows his dance.”

  “I grew up with Ballanchine and the New York City Ballet.”

  “That’s what we reckoned. And that’s perfect, as it turns out that Hans Braun has been offered a place at the City Ballet. Of course, Hans’s lover wants him in his company in Freiburg. But New York . . . how can he say no? Anyway, can you get here at five tomorrow? We’ll have a car arranged to take you to the place where they’re being put up. You’ll do the interview and then we’ll get it all transcribed and back to you on Sunday, as you’ll need to start making some suggested cuts—as I will simultaneously do—and also write a spoken introduction, which we’ll then record on Monday morning. So you will have a long weekend. But I will pay you fifteen hundred deutsche marks, if that is acceptable.”

  “Most acceptable.”

  “The plan is to go public with their defection exactly a week from now—and ruin the weekend of the GDR propaganda people. Of course, not a word about this to anyone.”

  Petra didn’t get home until well after eight that night.

  “Bloody Pawel kept me late on some translation he said was absolutely urgent,” she said. “Then I got a summons to Herr Wellmann’s office, asking me if I could accompany him to Hamburg this weekend. All very last minute, but there’s a big Radio Liberty conference there and the usual translator he brings along on these things, Frau Koenig, is down with a very bad flu. He needs someone who can do a simultaneous translation of the speech he’s giving there. And though Hamburg says they can supply someone, he’s very picky about such things. Personally, I think his German is more than adequate, but he feels that, though he can hold his own conversationally, the idea of talking for an hour auf Deutsch truly worries him. As such, he was very emphatic that I travel with him. Believe me, I don’t want to go.”