“How many every day?”
“Two packets.”
“You’ve never tried to quit?”
“It’s the second biggest love of my life.”
“What’s the first?”
She paused for a moment, inhaling deeply.
“I’ll tell you when I know you a little better. But I do need that beer.”
I waved over to the waiter.
“Now I’m rather partial to
Hefeweizen,
” I said.
“Each to his own taste. For me, it’s far too Bavarian, far too
gemütlich
. I’m a Berlin girl by adoption, anyway. So for me it’s always a Berliner Pilsner.”
“You mean, they didn’t make beer in Halle?”
“My father did . . . at home. He was talented at it as well. Learned from his father, who’d worked at a brewery before the war.”
“And your father did what?”
“He worked as a producer at the regional station of
Der Rundfunk der DDR—
the national radio station. A very cultured man who was never that ambitious, and therefore seemed to miss out on the promotions that would have sent him to work in Leipzig or Dresden or—the great prize—Berlin. Of course, he was a Party member because, even in a place like Halle, you couldn’t get work at that level in DDR Rundfunk without having pledged fealty to the Workers Party. But his heart was never into it. I think his superiors knew this. Which is why they kept him stuck in the provinces, when his interests—classical music, books, the theater—were all elsewhere. Occasionally, he would get a trip to hear the Staatskapelle in Dresden or the Gewandhaus in Leipzig—two of our great orchestras—and he would come back to Halle a little melancholic. Because he felt as if life was passing him by and . . .”
She suddenly shook her head, scowling.
“I am now angry at myself,” she said.
“Why’s that?”
“I have talked too much about my small, little life.”
“But I want to know about you.”
“You do not have to humor me, Thomas.”
The first time she ever said my name.
“I’m hardly humoring you, Petra. I’m interested. Genuinely.”
“We need that beer,” she said, cutting me off.
“And your mother?” I asked.
“You pose far too many questions. A professional habit, I suppose.”
“I’m interested.”
“You keep saying that.”
“Because it’s the truth. And your mother?”
She looked at me quizzically, as if she was trying to convince herself that I wasn’t trying to be polite or faux-interested, that, verily, I
was
interested. Seeing her regard me this way—wary, yet hopeful—made me wonder: is she as smitten and nervous as I am right now?
“Okay, in brief, because we have work to do . . . my mother. A woman from Berlin who could read and write four languages, and wanted, I sensed, to write or edit or be a journalist. But then . . .”
She broke off to stub out her cigarette and shouted over to the waiter:
“Eine Berliner Pils und eine Hefeweizen.”
As soon as she had finished giving him our order, she turned back to me and said:
“Love.”
“Sorry?” I said.
“My mother. She fell in love. As she told me many times in the year before she died, it was the love of a good man, but one who also brought her to Halle and a life that was not what she envisaged.”
“What did she die of?”
“What most people in their forties die of: cancer. In her case, ovarian.”
“When was that?”
“Six years ago.”
“Around the time my mother died.”
“How old?”
“Forty-two. Cancer, too. Brought on by these.”
Now I stubbed out my cigarette.
“I’m sorry,” she said, momentarily touching my hand with hers. Her fingers were warm, but as soon as she covered mine with hers she pulled them away, as if she was worried about overstepping a boundary or perhaps sending out the wrong signal. How I wanted to reach over and thread my fingers in hers and pull her toward me . . . and simultaneously ruin everything in one badly judged nanosecond.
“She wasn’t the happiest of women,” I said.
“That sounds familiar. And your father?”
“A complicated guy. A businessman. An ex-soldier. Very rule conscious. Very ‘chain of command.’ Yet someone who always, I think, wanted to live a different life.”
“What does he think about his writer son?”
“I sense he doesn’t know what the hell to make of me. Just as, privately, I sense he thinks I’m having the life he wanted to have.”
“Ah, but he didn’t write books.”
“A book. That’s it, so far.”
“But a very good book.”
I looked at her with care.
“You’ve read it?”
“Don’t sound so surprised,” she said, reaching again for her cigarettes.
“How’d you get a hold of it?”
“Pawel had a copy. I asked him if I could borrow it.”
“That must have amused him.”
“He’s far too über-cool to show amusement. But he said the book was ‘not bad.’ Coming from Pawel, that is wild praise.”
“And coming from you?”
“Not bad,” she said with a small laugh, then added, “What does it matter what
I
think? You are the published writer. I am just a functionary.”
“That’s hardly the case.”
“Now you are humoring me.”
“But translators are hardly functionaries. You’re doppelgangers.”
“What a triumph—to be a shadow of someone else.”
“You put morning words into evening words.”
“Not a bad metaphor. But I bet a translator thought it up.”
Now it was my turn to laugh.
The beers arrived. We clinked glasses.
“And now, before we get talking any more about parents and professions,” she said, “we must deal with your essay.”
With that she reached into her shoulder bag and dug out a typescript in German, the margins annotated—in very precise, small handwriting—with multiple notes.
“It looks like you have a lot of questions,” I said.
“Mainly questions about word choice—mine for yours. We can dispense with these very systematically. But before we get to that . . . a few critical observations, if you don’t mind . . . and I should point out that I discussed these with Pawel this afternoon before meeting you, as he is the producer and I am the mere translator. But as an
Ossi . . .
and given that you are writing about the city in which I lived for ten years . . . well . . .”
“Go ahead. Tell me what you think.”
“It’s an intelligently argued piece. But let me say this one basic criticism—and then we can get down to the more mundane, semantical questions. The way you paint East Berlin as gray, barren, lacking in any human nuance or color . . .”
“All true.”
“But predictable.”
“It’s what I saw, what I observed, to use your word.”
“It’s what every Western writer
observes
about East Berlin or Prague or, God help us, Bucharest, which, thanks to that madman Ceaucescu, makes the GDR look like Sweden. My point, Thomas, is that you should rethink certain parts of the essay, and perhaps sidestep the usual ‘life in monochrome’ clichés which all our listeners in the GDR will have heard before.”
“But my essay doesn’t attempt to sell itself as anything
but
what Jerome Wellmann asked me to do: play ‘the American abroad in East Berlin for a day.’ The fact that I actually chose to center the whole piece on the idea of snow as metaphor . . . well, surely, you can’t accuse me of spouting clichés.”
I said all this with a certain vehemence that again surprised me. When I reflected on it much later on, I realized that it wasn’t just my need to defend my corner that spurred me into a debate with her, but also an instinctual sense that this conversation was part of the entire mating dance that was taking place as we sipped our beers and smoked our cigarettes and kept trying not to gaze too long into each other’s eyes. Or, to put it another way, I didn’t want to seem to be a pushover—because I also sensed that she didn’t want me to capitulate to her criticisms so easily.
“Sorry, but lines about ‘the Stalinist architectural blights that now decorate Unter den Linden’ or the description of the tasteless meal you had off Alexanderplatz . . . Thomas, your listeners in the East live it every day of their lives. But what you didn’t see—and how could you, given this was your Warsaw Pact loss of virginity—is the life that goes on behind the bad architecture, the poorly stocked shops, the life without easy access to Marlboros and cars that don’t sound like something with which you mow your lawn. Where I used to live with my husband . . .”
Did I noticeably flinch when I heard those last two words? Absolutely. And Petra saw me flinch, as she said:
“I’m no longer married.”
“Were you married for long?”
“Six years. But that’s another story, and not for now. What I was trying to say is: where I used to live in East Berlin—an area called Prenzlauer Berg—”
“I was there.”
“You were? Why?”
“I just walked up Prenzlauer Allee from Alexanderplatz because the architecture looked different.”
“Of course, it’s different. It survived the war. Where did you visit there?”
I explained the hour I spent poking around its environs. Every time I mentioned a street name, Petra’s face brightened, and she mentioned some landmark there—a little shop, an interesting building, even a quirky street lamp that was a holdover from another time—which she evidently remembered with great vividness. But when I told her about the playground at Kollwitzplatz—and how it was jammed with mothers and their children and how I found this scene of parent-child activity rather touching—her face tightened and she turned her gaze downward.
“Yes, I know that playground,” she said. My mentioning of this place threw her and naturally made me curious. But the way I could see her forcing herself out of this moment of darkness hinted to me that—along with further questions about the man who no longer was her husband—this too was, right now, a no-go area. So I tried to redirect the conversation back to safer territory.
“So . . . you were saying that when you lived in Prenzlauer Berg, not everything was gray and reinforced concrete?”
She exhaled a lungful of smoke, so evidently relieved to be back out of “the playground.”
“Actually it was the East Berlin
rive gauche
. If you knew how to play the system—and most of our artist and writer friends worked it out—you could get a big old apartment up there for next to nothing. It was like those lofts I once read about in Lower Manhattan. Of course, this being the ‘gray,’ the ‘ascetic,’ the ‘no comfort’ GDR, the basic amenities were just that. But we all knew somebody who knew somebody who was a plumber or an electrician and who would—for a modest sum—make the toilets flush and the lights work and get the heat up to a certain level where January indoors was tolerable. Still, there was an actual creative community in Prenzlauer Berg. The fact was, even if you couldn’t get your writings published or performed, or your canvases exhibited, even if you were simply doing art for yourself, the community there would support you. We staged readings of plays. We had private showings in apartments of photographs and paintings. We passed around each other’s manuscripts. And we had fantastic parties. Mad, crazy parties that would often start Friday night after work and continue until six a.m. Sunday. It was a proper bohemian existence, on our own terms, or as much of ‘our own terms’ as we could have given the way of things over there.”
“And you were a translator?”
“Yes, I did that sort of work, English to German, for a state publishing house. Of course, as I was not a Party member and was also considered to be part of a ‘quasi-degenerate’ group up in the wilds of Prenzlauer Berg, I was never given the big assignment: the new angry black American novel that the publishing board decided was sufficiently bleak about life in the US, or some English Communist’s rants against Mrs. Thatcher. No, they had me translating wildlife books, or geologic studies about the North American continental shelf, or technical manuals. Deadening work, but it filled the time. And now I’ve said enough about myself. I still can’t figure out why on earth you’re interested in me.”
“Because I think you’re wonderful.”
“Why did you say that?” she asked, her voice quiet and free of reproach.
“It’s what I think.”
“How can you think that? You’ve known me for half an hour, no more.”
“I can still think that—and know it.”