The Moment

by Douglas Kennedy

  “Then don’t. You’ll be leaving that job pretty soon anyway.”

  “I owe Wellmann this favor. He’s been incredibly kind and decent to me.”

  “Then you have to go. But, as it turns out, I am going to have something of a busy weekend. Ever hear of Hans and Heidi Braun?”

  “The ballet dancers?”

  “You know them?”

  “Everyone in the GDR knows them. They’re the brother and sister stars of the Berlin State Ballet. When did they get out?”

  “Just a few days ago.”

  “But I’ve read or heard nothing about it.”

  “I gather they’re being very much debriefed, as you were. And the authorities here don’t want to release anything about their defection until they’re ready to go public with it, which I don’t think will be until the end of next week. But guess who’s been given the job of doing the first interview with them?”

  Then I told her all about how I would be brought to them “at an undisclosed location” late tomorrow afternoon and would have to work on the transcript of the interview over the weekend.

  “And Pawel handed you this?”

  “It was Herr Wellmann via Pawel.”

  “Well, it’s a fantastic coup. You say you’ll have the transcripts Sunday?”

  “That’s right.”

  “That will make interesting reading. And if you wouldn’t mind a few suggested questions you might want to pose to Hans . . .”

  With that, Petra gave me a long list of queries, telling me I should ask them about the alleged special camps to which gifted young dancers were shipped at the age of nine onward, in which they were groomed to become “immaculate state artists.” Then there was the gay bar scene in East Berlin—of which Hans Braun was undoubtedly an habitué—and which was frequently raided by the police. I took extensive notes as she talked, always impressed at the angry vehemence that took over her voice whenever she spoke of the inequities of life over there.

  “I so wish I could be at home all weekend to hear about it all,” she said.

  “You will get a blow-by-blow account Sunday night,” I said. “I’ll even let you see the transcript.”

  “Pawel will kill you.”

  “Pawel will never know.”

  “That’s the truth.”

  “I’ll miss you every minute you’re away.”

  “And I will be here, back in your arms, by early afternoon Sunday.”

  On the morning that she left, the alarm went off at eight. Before I was even able to reach for the button to shut the damn thing off Petra was all over me, pulling me immediately inside her, making love with such vehemence and need, as if we were about to be separated for months.

  “I don’t want to go,” she said afterward.

  “Then don’t. I mean, what’s the worst that can happen? He fires you. But since you’re about to give notice . . .”

  “And then, when I am in the States with you and a future employer asks him for a reference, he’ll say I’m no good.”

  “It looks like you’re convincing yourself that you have to go.”

  “You’re right. I am.”

  “So make your boss happy and translate him in Hamburg. Then hurry back to me. And have you checked out where we might get married next week?”

  “The Rathaus in Kreuzberg does marriages. They just need three days’ notice.”

  “So if we were to stop by together on Monday morning, we could set a date for Friday.”

  Petra bit down on her lip, her eyes brimming.

  “You’re too wonderful, Thomas.”

  “Is that a ‘yes’ then?”

  She nodded, then dried her eyes and said:

  “I will always love you. Forever.”

  An hour later—after seeing Petra off out the door with a long kiss good-bye—I threw on some clothes and headed out to the Café Istanbul for breakfast. Her departure had left me feeling empty and a little anxious, perhaps because it was our first time apart. Even though I was telling myself she’d be back in just over forty-eight hours, there was that low-lying fear that always accompanies love: the fear of it all being taken away from you.

  But the day was bright and clear. I kept replaying the way Petra told me, when she broke off the endless kiss in the doorway of the apartment, “I will marry you next week because I so want to be your wife.”

  I had a slow morning at home. After a run and a few hours at the desk, I showed up at Radio Liberty, as requested, at five p.m. When Pawel met me at reception, he was accompanied by a man I’d never met before. He was borderline short—around five foot seven—stocky, but with the build of a onetime linebacker now edging into fleshiness in midlife but still maintaining the gruff demeanor of a defensive lineman who had been schooled to maul the opposition. Or at least that’s what popped into my head the moment I was introduced to this gentleman, taking in his crew cut, the ultraconservative blue pinstripe suit, the button-down blue shirt and rep tie, the small American flag in the buttonhole of his left lapel. Then there was the way he smiled at me with a hint of superiority and lightly veiled contempt. Who was this guy?

  “I want you to meet a great fan of yours,” Pawel said. “Walter Bubriski.”

  “A fellow Pole?” I asked.

  “In name only,” Bubriski said in an accent redolent of the empty lowlands of the Midwest.

  “Walter is number two here at the USIA.”

  “I presume you’ve heard of us?” Bubriski asked me.

  Of course, I remembered what Wellmann told me when he first hired me as a Radio Liberty contributor: if I was ever to encounter someone who said he worked for the USIA, I should immediately assume he was a member of intelligence services. Because everyone knew that the USIA was, by and large, a front for the Central Intelligence Agency. And this Bubriski guy certainly looked like a spook.

  “Yes, I know all about the USIA,” I said in a deliberately neutral voice.

  “Then you also know that we take a great interest in the output of Radio Liberty and its contributors. I have to say that I have been most impressed by your contributions to the service.”

  “Thank you.”

  “We’re very pleased that you’re the guy doing the first interview with the Brauns. But things are running a bit behind schedule, so we now have an hour or so to kill before going up to see them. And since I like to get to know our contributors, how about you letting me buy you a beer?”

  “You coming along?” I asked Pawel.

  “I have to get something finished before the weekend.”

  I immediately wondered if, from the outset, Pawel knew the interview with the two dancers wouldn’t be until after six, but called me in here early because Mr. Spook wanted to meet me. The reason he wanted to meet me, no doubt, was that he objected to something I had written and had decided to give me a directive about my content. Or maybe he just wanted to augment the file they had on everyone who contributed here and decided to sound out my sociopolitical thoughts over a couple of drinks.

  As much as I wanted to turn tail and tell him I wasn’t in the mood for such a conversation—that I would come back here at six to head off to the interview—the writer with a book to write simultaneously thought: but this could be a fantastic incident on which to report . . . the moment when my own side—in true Cold War style—decided to investigate where my true loyalties lay.

  “I’m happy to have a beer with a fan,” I said. “Especially if the fan is paying.”

  “You said he was a real New Yorker,” Bubriski told Pawel.

  “Where are you from, sir?” I asked.

  “Muncie, Indiana. That part of the world which you people back east call ‘the flyover states.’”

  Oh, this was going to be a very interesting conversation.

  The bar to which we adjourned was located just across the street from Radio Liberty. It was your classic Berlin Bierstube. Simple, unadorned, with no customers and a booth in a far corner to which Bubriski directed us, making me immediately think
: so this is where he always has these “talks.”

  The waitress came by and we both ordered Hefeweizen. As we waited for them to arrive, I pulled out my tobacco pouch and cigarette papers.

  “That makes sense,” Bubriski said.

  “What makes sense?”

  “The fact that you roll your own.”

  “And why does it ‘make sense,’ sir?”

  “It just fits in with the image I’ve been building up of you.”

  “Why have you been ‘building up’ an image of me?”

  “Because, as our Polish friend said before, I’m a big fan of yours.”

  The drinks arrived. As soon as the waitress had returned to the bar, he hoisted his and took a long sip. There was to be no clinking of glasses between us. I finished rolling up my cigarette and lit it, wondering what was coming next.

  “So you’ve read my book?” I asked.

  “Not only that. Like any fanatical reader I’ve found out so much about my newfound favorite writer.”

  I noted the irony that underscored those last two words. I took a sip of my beer. I asked:

  “And what have you found out?”

  “Lots. Such as his unhappy Manhattan childhood. The mother who was the frustrated hausfrau and always resented his presence in her life. The distant father who always considered his son a little too artsy. The way this kid spent much of his adolescence thinking of himself as some Parisian intellectual in the making. And when he got into that oh-so-elite eastern college up in Maine, how he was considered an uppity New York smarty-pants, marching around campus in his trench coat with his smelly French cigarettes, talking Proust and Truffaut and Robbe-Grillet . . .”

  “Your knowledge of twentieth-century French culture is impressive.”

  “You mean, for a guy from Muncie, Indiana, who went to Ohio State?”

  “I never said that.”

  “Yeah, but it’s there in the way you regard me. I’ve dealt with types like you my entire life. All those guys and gals in DC with their New England noblesse oblige and their big-deal diplomacy degrees from Woodrow Wilson and Fletcher and Georgetown.”

  “I’m not from New England, and I never went to Princeton.”

  “But you applied to Princeton, didn’t you?”

  I felt a shudder run through me. This man was an operative, and one who had subjected my life to extreme scrutiny.

  “What’s the point of all this, besides letting me know you know a great deal about me?”

  “Hey, as I said before, I’m just displaying my keen interest in the life and times of my favorite writer. And one who, in his Egypt book, refers to the Voice of America as ‘middling propaganda.’ A nice turn of phrase. The way you denude its mission—and the fact that, like the broadcasting system which has helped pay your bills in that apartment you share with that junkie faggot in Kreuzberg . . .”

  “This conversation is finished,” I said, stubbing out my cigarette.

  “You mean, you can’t handle a little banter?”

  “What I can’t handle is the sort of shit you peddle.”

  “Ever heard of radar?”

  “What?” I asked, thrown by this conversational change of direction.

  “Radar. Ever heard of it?”

  “Of course, I’ve heard of it. But what does this have to do with—”

  “Know how radar works?”

  “What’s the point of this?”

  “It’s just a ‘general knowledge’ question—and one which a smart guy like you must know.”

  “I’m leaving.”

  “Just hear me out. Radar. Do you understand its basic principle?”

  “Something to do with an electromagnetic field, right?”

  “My, my, they did teach you well at the elite eastern college of yours—even if you never took a science course there. Radar is an acronym created by the US Navy in 1940: Radio Detection and Ranging. But it was the Brits who perfected it once the Krauts starting bombing the shit out of them. What they discovered—and I want you, in that writerly way of yours, to consider the subtext of what I am about to tell you—is that 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. When that signal hits the other object, what is transmitted back is not the object itself. Rather, it’s the image of that object.”

  “Very interesting. I still don’t see the point of this little scientific lecture.”

  “You don’t?” he said, all smiles. “You really don’t?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Now that surprises me, Mr. Nesbitt. Because as a man profoundly in love with a woman, so profoundly in love with said woman that the happy couple have approached the US consul in this great city to inform the authorities that they are planning to marry . . . well, you should really think long and hard about radar and its ‘subtextual meanings.’ I mean, my first marriage collapsed after ten years and two kids. I fell in love at the same stupid age as yourself. But in the wake of the divorce a decade later, what I realized was that, from the outset, I wasn’t looking at who this woman really was. Rather, what I was seeing was the image of this woman that I had projected onto her amidst all that magnetic headiness that comes with thinking you’re in love.”

  “I’ve had enough of this,” I said, standing up.

  “You still don’t get it, do you?”

  “Get what? Besides the fact that you have so little to do here—and you people are so obsessed with knowing everything about everyone who even tangentially comes into your field of vision—that you have to go through their lives with the proverbial fine-tooth comb.”

  “You’re a man in love, Thomas.”

  “My, my, what brilliant intelligence-gathering operations you run.”

  “But the thing is, you’re in love with an image. An image that, in your adolescent romantic way, you’ve projected upon . . .”

  “How dare you.”

  “How dare I?” he said with a smile. “I dare because I know.”

  “Know what?”

  He paused and took a long sip of his beer. Then, fixing his cold gaze directly on me, he said:

  “I know that Petra Dussmann is an agent of the Stasi.”

  TEN

  FOR A MOMENT or two afterward, I experienced what could only be described as complete manic disorientation. I was in shock. But it was the shock that accompanies disbelief, a refusal to accept the news that had landed on me like a kick to the stomach.

  “You asshole,” I hissed at Bubriski. “You lying, sadistic asshole.”

  His smile grew wider. The smile of a chess player who has just made a sudden Black Knight move and checkmated you before you could even see what was coming.

  “I figured you’d react this way,” he said. “It doesn’t surprise me. Because you’re in stage one of Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief—and I bet you never expected some Ohio Stater to know cerebral shit like that. But I’m sure you remember—from the one sociology course you took at that fancy eastern school of yours—that stage one of grief is denial. That’s what you’re dealing with right now: the belief that what I’ve just told you is nothing more than a malicious falsehood designed to mess up your afternoon and generally destabilize you.”

  I shouted back:

  “They taught you this crap at spy school, right? How to put ‘the subject’ in a position of psychological disadvantage. Undermine their belief in the most important thing in their life.”

  “And Frau Dussmann is certainly that. Especially given the way you never received much in the way of love from your two parents and couldn’t exactly commit to that lovely willowy thing from Juilliard.”

  “I’ve had enough . . .” I said, standing up.

  “Sit down,” he ordered.

  “Don’t go fucking telling me . . .”

  “I could have your passport stripped off you tomorrow,” he said in an even, level voice. “I could have you deported back to the Un
ited States and held in a detention center indefinitely. I could have your name put on the blacklist of every Western European country. And the reason I could wreak such havoc with your life, your career as a roaming man of the world, is that you have been linked with an enemy agent. You can hire an entire truckload of lefty ACLU lawyers and they still won’t be able to get you traveling again—which, let’s face it, is what you live to do—because you will be classified a major security risk. So sit down now before I get really pissed and make good on my threat.”

  I sat down.

  “Smart guy,” Bubriski said.

  I felt my hands shaking. Bubriski saw that. He reached into his jacket pocket and tossed a packet of Old Golds onto the table.

  “Here, have a proper smoke—not one of those backpack specials you call a cigarette.”

  I reached for the packet, but my hands kept shaking.

  “Fraulein,” Bubriski shouted at the waitress. “Zwei Schnaps. Wir Möchten Doppelte.”

  Two double schnapps duly arrived. I managed to fish a cigarette out of the packet and accepted a light from Bubriski’s outstretched Zippo.

  “Get that into you,” he said, pointing to the schnapps. I lifted the little shot glass and tossed it back, wincing as it went down but welcoming its immediate balming effect.

  “Did that help?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “Now, just to get one thing clear,” he said. “I don’t think you’re in cahoots with this woman. If anything, I consider you nothing more than an innocent dupe—and your reaction just now reinforces my opinion. But that doesn’t mean you aren’t tainted by your association with Frau Dussmann—especially since, from what we can gather, you carried back microfilm in those photographs you collected on her behalf from her friend Judit.”