“Now you are embarrassing me.”
“No—I’m just telling you what
I
feel.”
At that moment I could see her briefly smiling. But she wiped it away with a shake of the head, a sip of beer, a fresh, steadying cigarette, and the directive:
“Can we please return to your essay?”
For the next twenty minutes we argued the points that she raised. All credit to Petra—if she disagreed with you, she did not yield to your point of view easily. In the end I gave way on six of the nine “observations” that were plaguing her, using more ambiguous language to make my critical points. Then we turned to her translation queries, all of which were bound up in semantic issues about certain Americanisms I used and how she was going to need to find a parallel phrase in German for an idiom like “out of left field.”
“We don’t play baseball in the GDR,” she said after I explained the etymological origins of the expression. “But, again, I like the way you use words.”
“Unless they’re directed against the architectural charms of Ost Berlin.”
“Which is when you descend into platitude. And you are far too smart a man for that.”
“Now you’re flattering me.”
For the first time during this entire dance of a conversation, she met my gaze straight on.
“But it’s how I feel, Thomas.”
“Good.”
“And now.”
She glanced at her watch.
“Now I have to go.”
“You what?” I said, sounding shaken.
“I have plans for this evening.”
“I see.”
“You sound disappointed.”
“Well . . . yeah, I’m disappointed. But if I was to suggest dinner sometime this week?”
“I’d say of course.”
“And if I was to come across as far too eager and suggest tomorrow night?”
“I’d say: there is a cheap and good Italian place two streets from here on Pflügerstrasse. It has an idiotic name: the Arrivederci, which isn’t a selling point for a restaurant, now it is?”
“Okay, the Arrivederci then. Say eight?”
“That’s fine.”
I threw some money down on the table.
“You don’t have to pay for me,” Petra said.
“But I want to.”
We stepped outside into the early evening.
“So what do you think about this dreary little quarter I call home?” she asked.
“It’s no worse than my corner of Kreuzberg.”
“I shouldn’t be living here. It’s all too gray.”
“Then why stay?”
She glanced briefly at the looming tower blocks of Friedrichshain on the far side of The Wall.
“I have my reasons,” she said.
Then, suddenly, without warning, she reached for me and pulled me close and kissed me on the lips, and then gently detached herself from me before I had a chance to pull her back toward me. But she did reach for my hand again and held it tightly, saying:
“Until tomorrow.”
“Yes, until tomorrow.”
She let go of me and turned away, walking quickly off. I stood there, my head still swimming from the brief but telling kiss, and watched her disappear down the street. When she reached the next corner, she turned back. Seeing me there, she looked relieved, but also as befuddled as I was right now. Still she smiled. And touching her fingers to her lips she blew a kiss toward me. Before I could respond, she turned a corner and was gone.
In the moments that followed, one thought haunted me:
it will be a whole day before I can see her again.
THREE
O
NE OF THE
complexities of falling in love is that you cannot help but look for subtext in everything said between the two of you. In that very early stage of a romance—when you know you are infatuated, when you sense (but don’t have definitive proof) that it’s mutual, and you so desperately want it all to come right—you turn into a specialist in advance semiotics, trying to decipher every meaning behind the words that pass to and fro.
Or, at least, that’s what I found myself doing after that hour with Petra in the Café Ankara. All that evening—as I headed back to my apartment, tried to read, then headed out and nursed a few beers in Die schwarze Ecke—I kept running through the gestures and counter-gestures that passed between us, the wordplay exchanged, the inherent tension of two people circling each other. And within all this their needs and desires and hopes—both shared and disparate—counterbalanced by self-protection, the fear of overplaying one’s hand, the dread of disappointment, the dread of getting burnt.
Surely the fact that she was more than willing to meet me tomorrow showed that, for her, this is serious.
But what about all the enigmatic talk regarding her ex-husband . . . if, that is, he was, indeed, her ex. And the way she went all sad when I mentioned the playground at Prenzlauer Berg. Had she wanted to get pregnant, but it never happened? Did her husband refuse to have children with her . . . and was it an ongoing sadness? Or did she have a miscarriage and was still subsumed with grief about it all?
And why the hell are you making such wild speculations when her reaction could be linked to a dozen different things, and might simply have sparked homesickness?
That was something that was so evident in Petra’s conversation about East Berlin—it was the city that she still regarded as her own. She referred to it in such intriguingly affectionate and defensive terms, with more than a whiff of nostalgia for the life she once had there amidst her fellow bohemians in Prenzlauer Berg. She missed all she had left behind, and yet she was also an émigré who had fled a repressive regime. Why she had left,
how
she had left, and how much all that still haunted her were questions that still begged answers and which I had no right to pose just yet.
The next afternoon, after restripping all the floors with Mehmet and preparing them for restaining, I headed out in my track gear to pound the pavements. The running went reasonably well. Though I was a little stiff from yesterday’s jog, the fact that I had limited my intake yesterday to seven roll-ups and a mere three beers (a light evening for me back then) aided my progress. I was also simply now more conscious of how to pace myself, how to recalibrate my breathing, how to maintain a steady stride as I again followed The Wall north, turned left at the Brandenburg Gate, then made a U-turn and retraced my path all the way back to Kreuzberg. I was drenched and thoroughly winded by the time I fell into the Café Istanbul for a bottle of fizzy water and a coffee. As soon as I settled in Omar said, “A Mr. Pawel called for you at ten this morning.”
I checked my watch. It was now just before one p.m. I might just catch him before lunch. I asked for the phone and dialed Pawel’s number. He answered on the third ring.
“Ah, Thomas. I’m glad you called. I have a free studio slot at four this afternoon. I’m recording the German translation of your piece at three fifteen, but if you could be here by four, I’m certain we can get you on tape within forty-five minutes . . . that is, unless you make many mistakes reading your own material.”
“Well, I’ve never recorded anything I’ve written before.”
“Then it will, no doubt, be a disaster. So I will hold a two-hour slot for us.”
As it turned out, Pawel only needed an hour of my time to get the thing down on tape—because I went home after my coffee at the Istanbul, dug out the manuscript of the essay, and practiced reading it out loud five times before heading all the way up to Wedding for the recording. When I got there, I was kept waiting in reception for more than ten minutes, and naturally spent much of the time peering into the open-plan work area, trying to see if I could catch sight of Petra. No such luck. Eventually, Pawel emerged, accompanied by a dour-looking man in his mid-fifties, wearing a green anorak.
“Ah Thomas, meet Herr Mannheim—who has just recorded your essay in German. Herr Mannheim—here is the face behind the words.”
“A pleasure,” I said.
Herr Mannheim just gave me a shrug, then said something quickly to Pawel about being available for more work next week. With a curt nod, he headed for the exit.
“Is he always so charming?” I asked.
“Actually, you saw him in one of his better moods. The man is chronically depressed, but with the most wonderful speaking voice. He really should be playing Schiller at the Deutsche Theater, but he’s so spectacularly glum all the time no one wants to put him in front of an audience. Nonetheless, he did do a rather good job on your text—and I do think the changes Petra suggested improved it enormously. Then again, as an
Ossie,
she’s a little more invested in it all than I am.”
An
Ossie
. Again he used that pejorative term for an East German. I decided not to question his use of local argot, but instead asked, “Was she around for the taping with Herr Melancholic?” trying to make this question as casual as possible.
“She’s out sick today.”
Oh fuck
.
Fortunately, Pawel imparted this information as we were walking toward the studio. As he was a few paces ahead of me he didn’t see the way I flinched at this news, then quickly masked it as we sat down in the studio and he asked me to read through the piece. He had a stopwatch with him and timed me. When I finished, he depressed the button on top of the watch, glanced at its face, and informed me: “We have to lose two minutes, eight seconds.” This required going line by line through the script, excising a paragraph here, a sentence there, then me reading it out loud again and discovering that we were still thirty-eight seconds long, and cutting another two paragraphs.
It was rigorous work, and Pawel was extremely no-nonsense, announcing to me that he wanted the job done and me out of here in forty-five minutes. We succeeded in hitting that deadline. I was grateful to him for pushing me so hard, as it took my mind off of the fact that my date with Petra was undoubtedly off for tonight. At such an early stage in things, of course you want everything to move forward smoothly. When it comes to love, none of us takes a canceled evening lightly. Telling myself that I needed to stop into the Café Istanbul on the way home, I was certain that once I put my head in the door Omar would say, in his inimitable deadpan style, “A woman called. Said she can’t see you tonight. Bad luck, American.”
But when I reached the Istanbul at six, Omar shook his head when I asked if there were any messages.
“Do you mind if I pop in again around seven to check again?” I asked him.
“Why should I mind how you waste your time?”
Might the evening not be a write-off? Petra had left me a message at the Istanbul once before. Surely if she was ill she would get word to me . . . and why the hell didn’t I ask her for her phone number yesterday? More tellingly, maybe she had simply decided to play hooky from work today and used the “I’m sick” excuse as a means by which to give herself a little time off. So, feeling a little more optimistic, I headed home and showered again and shaved. I changed into a dark blue work shirt, jeans, my biker boots, and my ever-reliable black leather jacket. Then I returned to the Istanbul.
“No message, American,” Omar said. So I headed to the U-Bahn, then found my way to Pflugerstrasse: a street that must have been named back when there were still agrarian bits to Berlin, as a
pfluger
is a ploughman, though around here the only green space was a small rectangular park that had been bisected by The Wall.
The Arrivederci was one of two restaurants on an otherwise half-abandoned street of boarded-up buildings, many of which looked like they were being used as squats. Graffiti adorned most of the corrugated fencing that had been pried away from the entrances to these dwellings. The two or three elderly apartment blocks that appeared occupied here were in dismal condition. Outside of the Arrivederci and a small sad-looking grocery store the only other business on this street was a takeout kebab place. It had a huge rancid slab of lamb on a revolving spit in its front window. It looked like a rotating penicillin culture.
The Arrivederci was your standard-issue local Italian joint. There were around nine tables, all of them empty when I arrived. There were framed yellowing touristic posters of Napoli and Rome and Pisa and Venice on the walls, Chianti bottles with candles on the Formica tables. Woven bread baskets with packaged breadsticks, and a Muzak system playing Neapolitan favorites on the accordion. There was one waiter—a man in his forties, wearing a white shirt and bow tie that were both dappled in food and wine stains. He had lost most of his hair, but the four large strands that remained had been pasted across his otherwise bald pate with some heavy-duty adhesive. But he smiled as I crossed the threshold and told me to take any table. I parked myself in a booth upholstered in red Naugahyde. The waiter asked if I was waiting for somebody. I said I was—and was relieved when he didn’t make mention of a message that had been left for a Herr Nesbitt, but instead asked if I’d like an aperitif of Prosecco “on the house.” I asked if he could hold it until my friend arrived. Then, checking my watch and seeing that I was about seven minutes early, I pulled out my notebook and began to scribble away.
I was on the fourth page of notes and the second roll-up when I heard the door open and saw Petra come in. She was dressed in the same tweed overcoat, jeans, and a chunky brown cardigan beneath which she wore a white T-shirt. Though she managed a smile as she came in, when I leaned over to kiss her, she turned to make certain that it landed away from her lips and on her cheek. Looking into her eyes, I could tell that she’d had a very bad day.
“I’m sorry to be late,” she said.
“You’re hardly late,” I said. “In fact, I was wondering if you would make it tonight.”
“I told you I’d be here.”
“Yes, but when I was at Radio Liberty this afternoon, Pawel mentioned you’d phoned in sick.”
“You didn’t tell him we were meeting tonight.”
“Of course not.”
“Sorry, sorry. It’s just . . . well, I don’t like him. As such, I don’t like him knowing my business out of work.”
“Fear not, he knows nothing. But are you all right? I mean, if you’re not feeling well, we can do this another night.”
“You’re very sweet. But I’m here because I want to be here. And because I can be here now. A few hours ago . . . well, things did not look so good then.”
“That sounds serious.”
“Not serious. Just life. And I could use a drink, please.”
I mentioned that the waiter had offered us two Proseccos on the house. Petra nodded her ascent, then fished out her pack of HB cigarettes and lit one up, telling me that when she woke this morning, she felt as if someone had pierced the cornea of her left eye with a particularly sharp needle, a pain that was so virulent, so excruciating, that she couldn’t even make it to the medicine cabinet in the bathroom where she kept the ultra-potent pills that her doctor had prescribed as an antidote to these ferocious attacks.
“They only happen once or twice a year,” she said.
But the vortex of pain kept her pinned to her mattress for a good hour. When it subsided for a few minutes, her equilibrium was restored enough for her to make it to the medicine cabinet. A further half hour after downing the requisite pills, the horror began to subside.
“And now, having bored you with this dreary little tale of my absurd, thermonuclear headaches, you are thinking: my God, this woman is troubled.”
“I’m just glad you’re better.”
“You’re being too nice.”
“Is that a problem for you?” I asked with a laugh.
“It’s just unusual. It makes me wonder what you do with all the dark stuff stalking you.”
“How do you know there’s a great deal of shadowy crap following me around?”
“Everyone has their dark recesses. Especially writers. But something I noticed about your book intrigued me—the way the reader comes away knowing so much about Egypt and the stories of the people you met while traveling. You tell all those stories wonderfully, and frequently with great compassion. Especially that young woman—the university lecturer—you met on a bus in Cairo who’d lost her husband and three-year-old son in a car accident. You had me in tears. But what surprised me was how, coming away from the book, I knew so little about the writer.”
“But that was the strategy behind the book. My little life is less interesting to me than the lives of those I meet.”
“Now, you don’t really believe that yours is a ‘little life’?”
“Hardly. But a reader picking up a narrative travel book about Egypt doesn’t want to read about my parents’ unhappy marriage.”
“Was it an unhappy marriage?”