And as for me . . . bless Hans. He made the years in Karl Marx Stadt just about bearable. Then The Wall came down. Within days of us being able to cross into the West without problem—I literally walked over to Kreuzberg and reclaimed the two journals I had hidden away before my arrest in the basement of my old building—I had also found a terrific civil rights attorney named Julia Koch. She took on my case after hearing me tell her everything about how Johannes was removed from me. I think Julia decided that mine would be a test case—and would demonstrate how the Stasi would be held accountable for their actions. It only took around six weeks of her applying the most relentless sort of pressure before the Klauses—the couple who had been “given” Johannes—were shamed publicly in the local press. There was something of a minor cause célèbre—especially as other people came forward, stating that both Herr and Frau Klaus had been among the most vindictive and excessive of Stasi interrogators. The fact that they had happily adopted a child taken away from a woman wrongfully accused of political activity . . . put it this way, I gather they were hounded out of their apartment in Friedrichshain and I have heard that they both finished their careers in clerical jobs in the local tax office.
And that doctor—the one who told me with pleasure how she had aborted our child—my lawyer also went after her. Once her name was made public, another thirty women—all interred at one time or another in Hohenschönhausen—came forward to say that she had performed abortions or (even in certain cases) sterilizations on them without their consent. The result of all this was that the doctor was struck off the medical record and ended up six months later plouwing her car off a bridge near Berlin while drunk.
I wish I could say I got any pleasure from her demise. All I could think was: people who commit savagery toward others must always justify their actions with phrases like: “I was only following orders.” Or: “I was told it was for the good of the Fatherland.” Or: “The system made me into the person I was then.” It’s like the way we believe that by eliminating an entire race of people, or putting up an “antifascist protection device” that walls in an entire country, or locking up anyone who voices a contradictory opinion against the system under which we live, we will solve our communal problems. Whereas the truth is: Walls fall down. Systems are discredited and come asunder. An entire collective reality is shown to be fatally flawed. And the entire human circus just keeps moving forward.
One day recently, when I could still walk a bit, I asked Johannes to bring me down to the Brandenburg Gate. Growing up I remember how The Wall was always there, just before its ceremonial entrance. How we could see the ruins of the Reichstag and the trees of the Tiergarten to the immediate west. How near and yet how wildly far it all was. The forbidden planet into which we would never be allowed to cross.
Then Gorbachev decided he didn’t want to prop up our sad little republic anymore. So things fell apart. The center did not hold.
Anyone can walk through that gate now.
So there I stood by the gate, just two weeks ago with my son. The son who was wrenched from me owing to all that Wall represented. Johannes is now nearly twenty-eight years old. A wonderful, original young man—yet also one whom so many people think of as strange, different. Yes, he is singular. Yes, he does live in his own world—a world of comics and graphic novels and Japanese cartoonists that has little to do with the nuts-and-bolts of everyone else’s reality. But isn’t he far more interesting for being that way? He has few friends, let alone a woman in his life. But he is a good man. A very good son. Every time I look at him, I keep thinking of the horror that took him away from me and the providence that brought us back together. It’s been more than twenty years since that reconciliation. He still tells me he remembers so little about the five years when he was apart from me and with “those people.” Just as he himself has no recollection now of the GDR.
“There really was a wall here?” he asked me as he held my arm by the Brandenburg Gate.
“You know there was,” I said. “I’ve told you enough times, and you studied all about it in school.”
“But they left none of it behind.”
“Because it was too horrible to be left behind.”
“Then they should have left some of it there,” Johannes said, “just so people would remember how bad it was.”
I couldn’t have put it better myself. I was so impressed with his analysis of it all. But what he will come to realize, when he’s a bit older, is that if we keep staring at the wall that divided us, that locked us in, we are still in thrall to the horror that it represents. Perhaps that’s the largest overarching question in life. Can we always really look forward, as everyone endlessly advises us to do? Or do we have to hold on to certain key vestiges of our past—as painful, as terrible as they might be—as a way of understanding that there are certain things in life that change us so radically that they stay with us forever? Can we ever really close the door on that which still haunts us?
I so wanted that child of ours. I know I shouldn’t have gone off the pill without informing you. And yes, if I had only had the courage to tell you about the shadows trailing me everywhere . . .
But I didn’t. Because—and I understand this only now—I didn’t believe myself worthy of the happiness you represented, of the life we could have given each other. Perhaps that’s been the hardest thing about the last three decades. Knowing that you were the man of my life, that I had never felt that way about anybody before or after. Knowing—and this is the sadness that I will take with me to the grave—that I had a moment, an extraordinary moment, with you.
But if we can’t hold on to the moment, it becomes just that: a moment. And life, like recorded time itself, has its own ruthless logic, a forward momentum that is as implacable as it is unstoppable. Until it runs out for you.
The idea that my life is being taken away from me in my fifties . . . I think about those men and women at the prison who were told to train radiation guns on me and, nearly thirty years on, have precipitated my early death.
But fifty years from now—when they too have vanished from this life, when disease and old age and time have snuffed them out—will anyone even remember the fact that the security apparatus of a vanished state once used radiation to mark its political prisoners and bequeathed to them a fatal form of blood cancer? Do people now ever ponder the effects of mustard gas in the First World War? Or the spread of typhoid in the trenches? Was there a woman in Berlin in 1910 who had her one-year-old son unfairly taken away from her, and who (unlike me) never got him back . . . and for the rest of her life could never really get over her loss? Who is the witness to her story today? No one. Because her siblings, her friends, her work colleagues, her neighbors, the people she grew up with, the cousins she saw once a year, the man who sold her a newspaper every morning, have long since left this life. But think of the pain she carried with her—and how, at the time, it mingled with all the other pain of those who walked the earth during the same epoch as she did. All of them, like us now, struggling with things so difficult, so raw, so forlorn—during the moment in which it was all so lived.
But then, mortality wipes out an entire generation. And all the pain they carried? Vanished. Forgotten.
I do not consider mine to be an unfortunate life. On the contrary. Hans moved with me back here from Karl Marx Stadt and fought his way back into radio in the new unified Germany. Though we kept separate apartments in Berlin—at first because I needed to give Johannes time to readjust, but also because Hans and I were happier not cohabiting together—we remained a couple until his death from pancreatic cancer two years ago. Was it love? Not really. But he was my lover, my rock. When I myself started falling ill, it was he who insisted I again contact my Rottweiler lawyer, Julia. She won me a settlement from the state. Not vast—but enough to buy Johannes an apartment, so I can die knowing that, at the very worst, my son has a fully paid roof over his head for the rest of his life.
And it is the subject of Johannes which I
need to raise with you now, my love. With Hans dead and me soon gone, he will be alone in the world.
Though he has enough practical skills to pay his bills and do his laundry and change the sheets on his bed once a week, I genuinely fear that he will be friendless. Isolated. Unable to connect.
Therefore, if it is at all possible, I ask just one thing from you:
Be his friend. He needs someone he can talk to, seek counsel from, lean on. The very fact that you are reading this letter now means you came all the way from your home in Maine to Berlin because you knew that we had unfinished business. And because the sense of loss never went away.
I know I should have contacted you years ago. I dreamed of that, just as I pushed away that hope. Because of my shame at having deceived you. Because I also believed that I deserved not to be forgiven. We’re all so preposterous, aren’t we? Holding on to our torments, our agonies, our small dramas—and using them to sabotage that which we so want . . . and actually deserve.
Loving you. Being loved by you. What a gift. I deserved you. You deserved me. The moment came. The moment went. And I still think of us and cry.
Ich liebe dich. Damals. Jetzt. Immer.
Deine Petra.
THREE
ICH LIEBE DICH. Damals. Jetzt. Immer.
I love you. Then. Now. Always.
Deine Petra.
Your Petra.
I dropped the last page of the letter on the desk and sat there, motionless, for a very long time. It was well after midnight. Earlier I had eaten dinner alone in Prenzlauer Berg. I had wandered the gentrified streets around Kollwitzplatz, passing by Rykestrasse 33, where Judit once lived—and where, twenty-six years earlier, I had knocked on her door, inquiring about some photographs of a child taken away from her friend, a woman who happened to be the love of my life. A woman whom this woman betrayed. And whom, in turn, I betrayed. Because I thought she had betrayed me.
But all I had done was betray myself.
Petra. Meine Petra.
I had the letter with me during dinner. It remained sealed in its envelope. It stayed there during a drink in a bar further down Prenzlauer Allee afterward. Only after a slow walk back to Alexanderplatz and a final nightcap in the hotel bar did I go upstairs and dare open it.
I read it once. I stood up and paced the room, feeling overwhelmed, lost. I read it again. I read it a third time—and found myself standing up, grabbing my coat and room key, heading for the door.
It was cold outside. New snow. I turned right and walked on past the old GDR housing blocks, then the building site on which once sat a concrete monstrosity that was called the Berlin City Palace. It was also the East German Parliament building. During its demolition in 2002, it was discovered to have toxic levels of asbestos crammed within its walls.
And exposure to asbestos—like exposure to radiation—causes cancer.
Petra. Meine Petra.
I kept walking, past the renovated Berliner Dom, the renovated Kunsthistorisches Museum, the renovated Staatsoper, the renovated conglomeration of buildings that was Humboldt University, where Petra once studied. The end of Communism always means a new paint job, doesn’t it? Unter den Linden—East Berlin’s bleak, ceremonial boulevard—was now a touristic, mercantile showpiece. A Guggenheim Museum. A Ferrari dealership. Five-star hotels. Cities can do this. Cast off their onetime identity and—while wearing the same (but now reconstructed) exterior—become something new. We as individuals can also change physical shape. We can lose weight and gain muscle, or go the other way and give in to flab. We can wear clothes that speak volumes about the image we want to present to the world. We can display our wealth, our poverty, our sense of confidence, our sense of doubt. We can, like cities, change all the externals. But what we can never do is change the story that has made us what we are. It’s a story completely dictated by the accumulation of life’s manifold complexities—its capacity for astonishment and horror, for sanguinity and hopelessness, for pellucid light and the most profound darkness. We are what has happened to us. And we carry everywhere all that has shaped us—all that we lacked, all that we wanted but never got, all that we got but never wanted, all that was found and lost.
Petra was so right: there are certain things in life that change us so radically that they stay with us forever. And we can never really close the door on that which still haunts us.
Petra. Meine Petra.
I turned left at Friedrichstrasse. Here the shops were even more upscale. Swiss timepieces. Parisian couture. Swedish design. Belgian chocolate. Everything was shuttered, closed. The street empty. The city all to myself. I kept walking, all of Petra’s words rebounding within me, the sense of loss not just acute but so profoundly immediate . . . even after twenty-six years.
Will I ever make my peace with what happened? Or will it always be there? Happiness found. Happiness lost. Happiness squandered. We control our destinies much more than we like to admit. Even when confronting a terrible tragedy we can choose to be hobbled by it or somehow carry on. More tellingly, we always have the choice to stay or walk away. To want domesticity and simultaneously fear its restraints. To know we are making a fundamentally flawed decision and still go through with it. To accept love or sidestep it.
I’ve been guilty of all of the above. Only now—with Petra’s voice fresh in my ear—do I see how the choices I made brought me here today. Traveling solo along a snow-swept street—bereaved, solitary, estranged from a wife I never really loved, missing my daughter, and musing endlessly about what could have been with Petra . . . and how the entire trajectory of my life would have been a different and (perhaps) sunnier one if I had only listened to her when she begged me to hear her out.
The moment came. The moment went. And I still think of us and cry.
I kept walking, my mind so awash in rumination and regret that I suddenly found myself at the Kochstrasse U-Bahn station. The realization that I was here threw me. How could I have walked down this street—and bumped into this U-Bahn station—without having first traversed Checkpoint Charlie?
Because Checkpoint Charlie had long vanished. Retracing my steps, I discovered that all that remained of that great ideological divide was its famous West Side sign:
“You Are Now Leaving the American Sector.”
All the other Cold War paraphernalia—the electrified gates, the barbed wire, the cinderblock bunkers, the sentries with binoculars, the snipers, The Wall itself—was long gone. There was, I noticed, a small museum dedicated to the checkpoint. Otherwise, The Wall was now office blocks—all shiny and mercantile and new. The divide that divided so much, the symbol of all that changed the entire course of my life.
Gone. Expunged.
And I’d just walked right past it, forgetting it was once there.
All personal histories largely vanish. Most geopolitical ones do, too.
* * *
When I returned to my hotel it was sometime after two. An email was awaiting me.
I’m heading out to my local bar—Vebereck on Prenzlauer Alle. Will be there until around three . . . Johannes.
I hopped a cab and arrived there ten minutes later. Vebereck looked vaguely vampiric—black walls, shadowy lighting, burning candles, and dripping wax at all the tables. Johannes was at a table in the corner, reading a Manga book. He had a beer in front of him.
“So you suffer from insomnia, too,” he said as I approached.
“All the time. Buy you another beer?”
“Why not?”
I signaled to the bartender for two more.
“So what’s keeping you up so late?” he asked. “Jet lag? A bad conscience?”
“Something like that, yes.”
“Did you read Mother’s letter?”
I nodded.
“And . . . ?”
“You mean, you didn’t see its contents?”
“Mother put it in a sealed envelope around five days before she died, with the request that I never read it, but that I try to get you to come to Berlin
to read it here. Guess both her final wishes were fulfilled.”
“I suppose so,” I said quietly.
“Have you always been so guilty about stuff?”
I laughed and said:
“Absolutely.”
“Mother mentioned that often about you. The sense of regret that was everywhere in your books. The way you always seemed to be running away from yourself. She was your most astute critic, my mom.”
“That she was. And I loved her more than I have ever loved—”
Johannes put his hand up, like a traffic cop signaling for me to halt.
“I don’t need to hear any more of that. Because I’ve heard it all before. Mother was your greatest fan. Your greatest supporter. Your greatest reader. The way she talked about your books—‘Did you see how brilliantly Thomas described the Costa Rican rain forest.’ . . . ‘I so wish he’d say a little more about his cold little wife in this book’—it was as if you always were in the room.”
“She knew my wife was cold?”
“Well, it was there on the page, right?”
“She’s soon to be my ex-wife. We’re divorcing.”
The Moment Page 57
