“I’ll be blunt here, Thomas. I love seeing you when I do. I love sharing a bed with you. I love walking a beach with you. I love talking into the night with you, but only on the basis that you then vanish for a few weeks. Perhaps that might strike you as self-limiting. But I believe the reason we have such a good thing between us—besides the fact that you never complain to me about your wife, even though it is clear to me how unhappy you are—is that we are not in each other’s lives all the time.”
“But if I did move to New York, we wouldn’t have to see each other every night.”
“But I might want that, and that spells trouble for me. There is only so far I’m now willing to travel romantically with you, or anyone else for that matter.”
“Even though you have just intimated to me that you might want that life together?”
“That’s right. And if that sounds like a major contradiction . . . well, it is. And so it goes. But as a real traveler, surely you know there are certain places you refuse to venture.”
“I did once turn down an assignment to Lagos.”
“Very witty. But I know that you understand what I’m talking about. Because I sense, like me, you were so hurt by something, or someone. You have spent much of the years since then in mourning for her, because you also realize that what you had might never come your way again.”
“Am I that transparent?” I asked with a sad smile.
“Intimacy does that, doesn’t it? And yes, when we are together—and especially when we make love—I feel that loss you carry, and your desire to have it erased by the love of someone else.”
“My love for you.”
“I know. I see it in your eyes all the time. But, sorry, I just can’t cross that line. I have my reasons, and I am also going to reserve my right not to explain them. Except to say I wish it were otherwise.”
Nothing more was said about this during the forty-eight hours we had left in the Costa Rican rain forest. When we returned to the States, and I kissed her good-bye at JFK before jumping a connecting flight back to Boston, her eyes welled up, she buried her head in my shoulder, and she said three words:
“I’m so sorry.”
The next morning I woke to an email written by Eleanor in the middle of that night, informing me that she had decided to “call time on us before it gets too serious, before it cuts too deep.”
I wrote back, telling her that love was always a risk but, in our case, so worth taking. I never received a reply. As this flash of possibility, this willingness to risk my heart again, was extinguished right at a moment when I knew that Jan was sleeping with a hard-driving mergers-and-acquisitions lawyer named Brad Bingley (in all American stories there is always a guy named Brad), I felt the loss even more acutely . . . even though, as someone who had also stepped beyond the “forsaking all others” boundaries of my marriage, I couldn’t exactly feel manic jealousy at the thought that Jan was twice a week in the arms of another man.
In the wake of Eleanor ending things between us, Jan informed me that she had been offered a two-month transfer to her firm’s Washington office. “Maybe it would be a good idea if we had a small break from each other, a period of reassessment,” she said. I spent that time she was away playing Dad to Candace. When she was at school or doing the half-dozen extracurricular activities that filled her afternoons, or spending half the weekend with a friend, I wrote the Berlin memoir that I had been ordered by Bubriski not to write all those years ago. I wrote it with a speed and a need that surprised me. Reading through all the notebooks again, what so amazed me was not just what a younger man I was back then—young not just chronologically, but also in terms of my understanding about life’s larger questions—but also just how, in my day-today accounting of the love that Petra and I shared, I never once expressed a doubt about the veracity of our feelings toward each other. Yes, the notebooks were filled with worries about the shadows in her past. Yes, I often articulated my fear of losing her. And yes, I detailed—with an almost forensic attention to detail—that horrible final night in Berlin, when my rage and hurt destroyed everything.
But most of all what emerged so profoundly from these notebooks, which I hadn’t opened in the eighteen subsequent years, but which I also kept locked up in the big fireproof cabinet I had in my office, was the sense of wonderment at the love I felt, the love I received, the belief that everything together was possible, the sense of hope permeating so much of our time together, and then the way it all just imploded in the most appalling and tragic of circumstances.
As I now reconstructed on the page all those extraordinary months in Berlin, I was very conscious of looking upon this time with the more weathered eye of a man in his forties—who, like anyone who has made it into his middle years, has been both bruised and deepened by everything that life has tossed in his path.
When, after six feverish weeks, I completed this memoir—stopping at that very moment when I wrote the words, I had never gotten over it—I got a call that same evening from my wife. She told me she was coming home earlier than expected from Washington and said that she had missed me while she was away.
This was a somewhat bemusing revelation, made all the more curious by the way she arrived back at midnight and essentially threw me onto the bed and made love to me with a passion that had been absent for more than a decade. Afterward she turned to me and—without saying that her fling with Mr. Mergers and Acquisitions was over—told me that she herself realized that many of the shortcomings in our marriage were down to her and that she wanted to make a strong effort to try to see if we could “find again the love that was once there.”
I felt like saying: “But the problem is, it started as a companionable romance with no real passionate depth. And can we now, after fifteen years together, really believe we can find untapped reserves of affection for each other?”
This was the thought that first came into my head as we lay sprawled and—for a change—satiated on the bed we had shared so distantly for so many years. But I stopped myself from articulating it as I was still stinging from the end of my involvement with Eleanor, and because, for the first time ever, Jan was displaying vulnerability and worry about losing this edifice of a life that we had built together. Perhaps part of me—the part that always traveled away from discomforting truths—thought that after all these years, we could find a proper fondness for each other. We were so used to each other’s quirks, and there was a wonderful fourteen-year-old daughter whose stability in the midst of the usual hormonal roller coaster of adolescence we both wanted to preserve. Surely, this was a moment of great possibility between us.
The Berlin memoir was the first thing to get shelved. I locked the manuscript away in my fireproof cabinet and took Jan and Candace on an assignment that brought me to Easter Island. I returned home and spent six months writing a travel memoir called The Door Marked Exit—which talked about the need to escape that had so shaped my life. During this time my marriage reverted back to the icy construct that it was, our era of good feeling lasting around six weeks before all the old habits and pathologies (both individual and shared) began to rear up again. When the book was published a year later, my father—now living in Arizona—wrote me a three-line letter after receiving his copy:
Glad to hear your screwed-up parents made you the writer you are today. I commend you for your lack of self-pity. Just as I am relieved that your mother is not around to read your drivel about your childhood.
I wasn’t surprised by this reaction—even though I thought myself pretty even-handed in the book about my father, painting him as a rather robust, larger-than-life mid-century American ad guy, trapped into doing what was expected of him but nonetheless blessed with a certain independent streak and no-bullshit charm. Mom came across as Mom: frustrated, disappointed, always thinking the denouement of her life should have turned out differently. And later on in the book, I also talked about a certain inherent loneliness that I always carried with me and never seemed able to shake.
Intriguingl
y, Jan had little to say about the book when it came out, though when we were out to dinner a few weeks later with some mutual friends and someone commented how we were one of the few couples they knew who had managed to remain married, given all my travel and Jan’s high-powered and professional legal career, my wife’s reply to this was:
“The reason we’re still together is that, over the past sixteen years of marriage, Thomas has only been here for a total of five of them.”
That certainly cast a momentary pall over the dinner. On the drive back home, when I tried to raise the issue with her, she said:
“Why even talk about the obvious? You have a life. I have a life. They are separate entities. We share a house. We share a bed. We share a daughter whom we both adore and who remains the only plausible reason we are still together.”
“What a romantic picture you paint.”
“I am just stating facts, Thomas.”
“So what do you want?”
“I’m too damn busy right now to think about major personal upheavals. But if you want to go, I won’t stop you.”
But I didn’t “go.” I just kept voting with my feet. Once Candace was accepted at college—and effectively away for eight months a year—I too was barely seen. Jan, having made senior partner and having all sorts of new high-end pressures to deal with, raised no objections. When I was in town, we would share meals together, make love on occasion, and do the family thing at Thanksgiving and Christmas, and the three weeks every August when we took a house in a remote corner of Nova Scotia. The curious thing about this detached marriage was that the era of withering looks and unspoken emotional frustration and the episodic blow-up had been replaced by an era of indifferent civility. Even the sex was conducted along the lines of two people who were fulfilling a need, but no longer had much in the way of any amorous connection with each other.
Of course, Candace—being a more than perceptive young woman (and also someone who, from the age of fifteen onward, sparred constantly with her mother)—picked up early on the fact that her parents’ marriage had become putative. The summer before she started college I bought her a transatlantic air ticket and an InterRail pass, handed her two thousand dollars, and told her to knock around Europe for a month. I received an email from her on the Greek island of Spetses, telling me she’d finished my travel memoir and “though I was, of course, flattered by everything you wrote about me, what really got to me was the way the whole book was really about trying to cope with the idea of being alone in the world, which, I suppose, we all are. But I do want you to always remember that you have me, just as I always remind myself that I have you.”
I actually teared up upon reading that email. Just as I also had a moment’s pause some weeks later when an email arrived from my father, saying that his new girlfriend had just read my memoir, “and she thought the way you depicted your old man was both affectionate and interesting . . . so what the hell do I know, right? And yeah, I guess I went for the jugular the last time I wrote you. My hard-ass style, right? What can I say, son? I’ve never done touchy-feely very well. So don’t expect me to start now. Holly—that’s the girlfriend’s name—thinks you can write, but also that you tend to show off your smarts for all to see. But, hey, she isn’t exactly Madame Curie.”
I had to smile while reading this. My father—who never apologized or paid me a compliment in his life—was doing both in that backhanded way of his. Though our contact was nominal in the subsequent years—a phone call every few weeks, an annual three-day visit to the tacky retirement village to which he had retreated in the Arizona desert after things went all wrong for him professionally in New York—his death in 2009 rattled me so deeply that on the way home from his funeral, I jumped in my car and ended up in some hotel outside of Edgecomb, Maine.
And thus began the trajectory of events that saw me buy this cottage, lose my marriage, and fall into a melancholy that I refused to acknowledge for months afterward and which I only accepted after I stopped myself, at the very last minute, from a fatal encounter with a very large tree while on a cross-country ski hill in Quebec. And upon returning from Canada—psychically and physically bruised, but quietly relieved to be alive—the box from Berlin was waiting for me. The box with her name in the upper right-hand corner and her address in Prenzlauer Berg. Though I couldn’t go near the box after bringing it home, the fact that I noted that her address was in Prenzlauer Berg made me want to know everything about her life since that final night together in Berlin some twenty-six years earlier. Then again, that desire to make contact had never left me. Why hadn’t I fulfilled it? For the same reason I had never once returned to Berlin in all those years. Perhaps because I had known something so extraordinary with Petra—and once it was taken from me, once I learned of her treachery and then felt propelled to respond with an act of willful destructiveness (which, I realized only moments after it was perpetrated, was also an act of self-destructiveness), I couldn’t bear to set eyes on the place again . . . let alone on the woman with whom I once thought I would spend the rest of my life.
Over the years, whenever the ache returned, I would try to reason that, of course, it had all just been youthful intoxication, passionate infatuation at its most open-throttle, something that was too fever-pitched, too intense, to survive on a long-term basis. Just as I would also remind myself that she was a woman living a double life and, because of that, all further trust between us would have been impossible.
But these statements were designed to dull the unresolved ache of it all. Why then did I feel compelled today to pull the Berlin manuscript down off the shelf and, for the first time in ten years since its composition, sit down and reread it?
Because of the goddamn box from Germany, that’s why. Because of the sight of her name and her address. Because . . .
I checked my watch. It was well after midnight now. I’d been reading for more than six hours. Moonlight lit up the bay. I went into the kitchen, poured myself a small Scotch, opened the side door that led to my deck, braved the night-time boreal wind coming off the water, downed the Scotch, and told myself: There’s no use trying to dodge things any further. You have to open the damn box.
So I went back inside and did just that. Reaching in I found myself first in possession of two large notebooks, of the type used in schools. Brown cardboard covers, spiral bindings, thinly lined inexpensive paper. On each cover was drawn in ink a large number indicating their sequence—and in the space that allowed the owner of the notebook to write his name were simply two initials: P.D. I opened the first notebook and saw page after page of her tightly wound handwriting. Each entry was undated, a series of asterisks indicating the end of a statement, a thought. Many of the pages had a residual gray smudge, hinting at fallen cigarette ash that was embedded on the page when the notebook was closed. Occasionally there was the long-dried watermark from a glass that had been used to prop the book open. The sight of her immaculate penmanship unsettled me further. It was all so intimate, so private, that I could only begin to wonder what had possessed her to send me these notebooks so many years later.
Until, that is, I pulled the second of the notebooks out and found myself staring down at a newspaper clipping attached to a single sheet of paper on which a brief letter had been written. A woman’s face filled half the clipping. Picking it up I could see that the woman looked well into her sixties, given the grayness of her hair, the puffiness of her face, the deep lines that even the graininess of the newspaper print seemed to accentuate. The face of a woman I had never seen before.
But then my eyes moved to the name above the photograph. And I realized that I was staring at a recent photograph of Petra.
And below this was a small headline:
Petra Dussmann Stirbt am 2 Januar in Berlin.
Petra Dussmann dies in Berlin 2 January.
Her death notice.
My eyes swam over the few short German sentences that followed:
. . . daughter of the late Martin and Frieda Du
ssmann of Halle. Mother of Johannes Dussmann. Worked as a translator at Deutsche Welle in Berlin. Died at the Charité Hospital in Berlin after a long battle with cancer. Funeral at the Friedrichshain Crematorium at 10:30 am, 5 January.
And behind this clipping was a line scrawled in German on a piece of plain white paper:
Mother wanted you to have these.
Below this—after a home address, an email address, and a phone number—there was a signature: Johannes Dussmann.
I sat down slowly in my desk chair. Have you ever noticed how—when first presented with dreadful news—the world goes so profoundly quiet? It’s as if the shock of the appalling deadens all ambient sound and forces you to hear the great empty chasm that it the beginning of grief.
Only in this case, the grief had begun twenty-six years ago.
And now . . .
Three words kept repeating themselves in my head:
Petra. Meine Petra.
I sat in that chair motionless for I don’t know how long. I simply had no cognizance of time. Just:
Petra. Meine Petra.
This can’t be.
But there it was. In black and white. Like the inked words that cascaded across the thin watermarked lines of the two notebooks in front of me.
Mother wanted you to have these.
Because she wanted you to read these. Now.
PART FOUR
NOTEBOOK ONE
LIPSTICK. THAT’S THE first thing she handed me when she welcomed me. She introduced herself as Frau Ludwig—and said she would be looking after me during my stay here. And then Frau Jochum and Herr Ullmann—who had collected me from the hand-over point—wished me a good night’s sleep and said they would see me tomorrow afternoon.
I had no idea where I was. I had been turned over to Frau Jochum and Herr Ullmann in the middle of some bridge—what I learned later was the Glienicken Brücke, which spans the River Havel between Potsdam and Berlin, and which I found out later from Herr Ullmann is known as the Bridge of Spies, because that’s where they often trade agents who’ve been imprisoned by “the other side.” Frau Jochum introduced herself as a representative of the West German intelligence service. Ullmann—thin, tall, dressed in a severe suit, wire-rimmed glasses, very American looking—introduced himself in good German. He said he was from “the American mission here in West Berlin” . . . but I knew that, if he was in this car with an agent from the Bundesnachrichtendienst, he was definitely CIA. What surprised me was how he told me that he was so pleased to meet me, as he had been following my case for several weeks now. He also said that I was the sort of person they were working to get out. I emphasized the fact that I wasn’t a dissident, a politico. They said they knew all that—and that they had much to talk about with me, but would wait until I had a good night’s sleep.
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