“And your mother?”
“A total princess when it came to the kitchen. Her father—the Diamond District jeweler—could afford a housekeeper, which was just as well, as my grandmother did very little except play canasta, talk about how disappointing her life was, and tell my mother that she was worthless.”
“Did your mother believe her?”
“Absolutely, which was a big part of her tragedy. She was educated at the right schools. She was literate and by no means stupid. But she also married the wrong man as a small act of rebellion, then hated the fact that we were living in what was, for her, diminished status, though even telling you this makes me feel ridiculous, compared with the way you had to live in East Berlin.”
“You know, Thomas, there’s no need to feel you have to downplay the sorrows of your childhood because they don’t match up to the perceived horrors of the GDR. I knew friends who had very wonderful childhoods there. I knew friends who had unhappy ones. Decency, cruelty, happiness, unhappiness . . . all those facets of the human emotional palette, they are rather borderless, aren’t they? The important thing is how your childhood ends up making you feel about yourself. Are you someone who comes away furious at the world or able to handle everything it throws at you? Do you believe you deserve to be happy, or do you quietly do everything in your power to upend all possibilities of contentment? And if yours was difficult, sad . . .”
“I still believe in the possibility of happiness.”
She slid her fingers through mine.
“So do I, or, at least, I do since you walked into my life.”
“
Walked into my life
. That’s lovely.”
“And so accurate. It’s largely how life works, and, more specifically, how it changes. You’re going through your life—the day-to-day stuff, business as usual, all very routine. You’re trapped into thinking that this is how life is now. Then you walk into somebody’s office at work and there you are. I guess, the hardest thing for me was actually not knowing if you felt the same way about me.”
“You mean, you knew immediately, too?”
“Don’t sound so surprised.”
“But I am surprised. You were so reserved, so distant.”
“That’s because I was so anxious, so nervous that it might not happen, or that I’d run away from it because I feared it not happening, which, of course, I did in that restaurant.”
“But you came back. You chose happiness.”
“And now,” she whispered, “let’s go back to the bedroom.”
We could not get enough of each other. This was complete mutual intoxication, a physical totality that served to express the immense emotional totality of what we were both feeling. This is what they all talked about when using the phrase
true love
.
We fell asleep early that night. When I woke the next morning all the dishes were washed, breakfast was laid out on the table, and Bill Evans was on the Victrola.
“You didn’t have to do all this,” I said, wandering still half-asleep toward the table and kissing Petra good morning.
“Yes I did, and I am stopping by my room today and bringing back some records. So tomorrow you’ll be waking up to
Stop Making Sense
.”
We talked about the day ahead, and how she had to deal with a very long and dreary translation of an essay on Heinrich Böll: “A wonderful writer, but in the hands of the dry little English academic who wrote the piece,
The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum
comes across as the seven stations of the cross.”
“It’s an interesting choice of piece to discuss on Radio Liberty, given how it so thoroughly criticizes the Bundesrepublik, especially the intelligence services.”
“I think that was the point of commissioning the essay, showing how you in the West . . .”
Suddenly she caught herself and flinched.
“
We
in the West,” she said.
“You don’t have to correct yourself. You’re in exile.”
“Maybe one day I’ll feel part of this place.”
“Or elsewhere.”
“Would I like America? Would I fit in?”
“Now, if I were from some small town in Indiana or Nebraska, I think the culture shock would be extreme. But you and Manhattan? It would be love at first sight.”
“I adore your absolute certainty, Thomas.”
“I am going to bring you to Manhattan.”
“Can we leave today?”
“Absolutely.”
“You’d do that right now?”
“Say the word and I’ll get on the phone and find two seats.”
“Now I feel embarrassed.”
“Why?”
“Because even if I wanted to, I couldn’t just leave Berlin. My contract with Radio Liberty is, at least, for another year. The government department that deals with the integration of GDR citizens into the Bundesrepublik found me this job. Just as they also found me my room and gave me three thousand marks—a small fortune to me—to buy clothes, bed linens and towels, and generally ease my transition over here. To break the contract now . . . it would seem ungrateful, wouldn’t it?”
“They’d get over it. But hey, my book means I need to be here for many months to come, and I can stay in Berlin as long as you need to stay. So if Manhattan has to wait . . .”
“But not for too long,” she said, kissing me. Then starting to gather up the breakfast dishes she said, “After I deal with these, I’d best get off to work.”
“You go do what you have to do. I’ll take care of these.”
“A man who shops and cooks and does the dishes.”
“That’s not so wildly unusual, is it?”
“It’s just . . . my husband was rather ‘traditional’ in the domestic arena. He was a writer. He wrote plays that rarely got performed. One of them did get done a great deal in assorted theaters around the GDR. Another got him into considerable trouble. But that’s another story. And for all his talk of
kameradschaft—
comradeship—he was a very conservative man when it came to so-called sexual roles. I was his wife. He expected me to keep the apartment clean, and to cook and do the laundry. It didn’t matter that his plays were no longer getting staged anywhere, or that he was not even permitted to work . . .”
She cut herself off.
“But I really don’t want to say anything more about it, okay?”
Her tone had shifted to defensiveness, and she caught herself immediately, saying:
“Oh God, listen to me. I reveal all this to you of my own volition and then get cross at you.”
“You were hardly cross.”
“And you must stop being so
reasonable,
Thomas. You can call me on things when I get difficult, which I do from time to time.”
“I will never press you for details about your life over there. But, obviously, I do want to know everything about you, or at least everything you want to tell me . . . but in your own time. No pressure. None at all.”
“Except to go to work. What are you going to do today?”
From downstairs, there was the sound of a sander being fired up.
“It looks like Mehmet has already started. So I’ll help him. And then, well, I do need to start nosing around this city some more. So I might make a call to Tempelhof.”
“Oh God. I was there once, and it spooked me.”
“But it’s only an airport, albeit a Nazi one. And everyone says that, architecturally speaking, it is stunning.”
“That it is. But the place still is a throwback to a national horror which we in the GDR were told was perpetrated by the other Germany. Yes, we were told about the death camps, the madness of the Nazis. But in the eastern part of Germany—according to the teaching of the GDR—our victorious Communist brethren vanquished them all in the final days of the war and cleansed our blessed Democratic People’s Republic of the scourge of National Socialism. When I came to live in West Berlin I naturally read all I could about the era. The fact is, we were all guilty—and the horror done in our name was unspeakable. But I suppose what was most unspeakable for me was the discovery that we,
das Deutsche Volk,
allowed this monstrosity to happen. The entire division of Germany—the fact that more than fifteen million of its citizens ended up imprisoned in a totalitarian system—finds its origins in our embrace of Nazism. It’s strange, isn’t it, how when one nightmare is killed off, another replaces it immediately. It’s the way of the world, I suppose—but also a reflection of ourselves. We create nightmares. And so often we drop others into them.”
Is that what happened to you?
I so wanted to ask. Just as I simultaneously sensed there was a part of Petra that wanted to blurt out everything but perhaps feared how I might react to this story. I felt like saying: “Just get it over with and tell me. Because I love you. And because whatever happened over there happened under extreme circumstances.”
But, again, my instincts told me not to push here. Petra would tell me when she was ready to tell me about this dark recess of her life.
“I just want you to know one thing,” I heard myself saying. “Life will be better now. Or, at least, that’s what I want it to be for you, for us.”
She came over and buried her head in my shoulder, holding on to me tightly, whispering: “Thank you.” Then she took my face in her hands and kissed me.
“Another nine hours away from you,” she said. “That idea appals me.”
“I’ll be here when you walk in tonight. We could go to the ten p.m. gig at the Kunsthaus,” I said, mentioning an edgy jazz place a few streets away.
“Only if you let me cook us dinner first.”
“Absolutely. But if you give me your shopping list now, I’ll pick everything up this afternoon.”
“But half the pleasure of cooking is doing the shopping beforehand. Just be here at six, please.”
“Where else would I be?”
We kissed again with such desire that we tumbled back into the bedroom and were naked within moments. Is there anything ever so extraordinary as the first months of a love affair? The rueful among us (and we are all, on a certain level, rueful) always talk about how love inevitably changes, how that initial burst of ardor downgrades, over time, into something more muted, more routine. But when you are in the midst of a new love that feels so right, so total, so very much your destiny, how can you think about five years on, when you are awake at four in the morning with a new baby in the throes of colic; when you haven’t slept in two days; when making love is, at best, a weekly event; when you are both beginning to fray a bit about the work-family balance and
Why aren’t you doing more on the baby front
?
But now all I was thinking was: love is actually possible. And it’s all due to this extraordinary person now in my arms.
Just as Petra was pondering the same thing. As we lay next to each other, she said:
“I never realized something until now.”
“And what is that, my love?”
“Happiness exists.”
SIX
M
EHMET WAS DOWNSTAIRS, sanding the last corner of the studio floor, as Petra and I emerged from my rooms. Seeing us he immediately turned off the raucous hum of the machine, removed the safety goggles, and smiled shyly at Petra. I introduced them.
“But we met already the other morning,” Petra said.
Mehmet nodded, his timidity in her company noticeable.
“You’ve done a beautiful job here,” she said, pointing to the refinished studio space—and, indeed, it really did look pristine.
“It’s Thomas’s work, too,” he said.
“He’s a man of many talents,” she said, squeezing my arm and then sliding her hand down to my own. “Very nice to meet you. No doubt we’ll be seeing each other around here.”
“Back in a moment,” I told him as I stepped outside the door with Petra.
“I want to drag you upstairs again,” I said.
“If it wasn’t for the fact that I am now thirty minutes late for work I’d happily let you drag me upstairs. However, there’s a lot to be said for
Vorfreude
.”
“Now there’s a word I’ve never come across.”
“It means: the anticipation of pleasure that must currently be postponed.”
“That is a very German word.”
“Indeed it is—but in our case the
Vorfreude
will only last nine hours.”
As always, it was hard to let her go. As always, we told each other over again how much we loved each other. As she headed down the stairs, she turned back toward me and beamed a smile of such radiance, such felicity, that I simply found myself considering the vagaries of luck, how if Petra hadn’t walked into Pawel’s office that day, the entire trajectory of my life would be a different one and that fortune had smiled on me.
Back in the apartment Mehmet had turned on the sander again and was finishing the last small corner of the floor. As I walked in, he clicked off the machine.
“We can put the first coat of varnish down in a few minutes,” he said.
“No problem. Just let me get changed into some work clothes. But afterward, why don’t we head up to the hospital and see Alaistair?”
Mehmet immediately tensed.
“Everyone will see,” he said.
“Everyone will see nothing except two men visiting a friend in a hospital ward. And he really wants to see you. I’m sure you want to see him. Anyway, there is a divider between his bed and the ones on either side of him, so there’s no chance that you will be spotted by anyone.”
“The world is sometimes very small.”
“The world is also very large. But, okay, say the strangest thing happens and you meet someone you know. So what? The man who asked you to redecorate his studio is in the hospital. You have visited him to discuss the progress of the work. End of story.”
“They would never believe me.”
“Why is that?”
“Because they would see the shame in my eyes.”
“They will not see that if you don’t show it to them.”
Mehmet shook his head, looking dubious.
“Do you want to see him?” I asked.
“Of course, I want to see him.”
“Then we’re going right after we finish the first coat of floor stain . . .”
“Thomas, please. You don’t know my family,
her
family.”
Then, lowering his head, he suddenly began to pace around the room, whispering to himself. I wasn’t at all thrown by this behavior as I talk to myself all the time (it’s a tic that many writers possess). I could also see that Mehmet was using this self-directed monologue as a way of calming himself down. After about a minute he seemed to shake himself out of his distress. Then turning to me he said:
“You get into your work clothes, I finish sanding.”
When I returned five minutes later, Mehmet had already set out the pots of stain and brushes and was using a vacuum cleaner to remove the remaining dust. As I walked into the main body of the studio, he snapped off the vacuum cleaner and said:
“Okay, I go to the hospital with you. But first we finish this.”
Two hours later we were on the U-Bahn, heading toward Zoo Station. Sitting in the smoking carriage, Mehmet puffed away on an unfiltered Lucky Strike, wolfing it down in less than three minutes, then lighting another off the end of the one he’d been smoking. His head was lowered, his apprehension palpable. When his shoulders began to shake—and I could sense him beginning to feel overwhelmed—I put an arm around him and said one word:
“Tapferkeit.”
Courage.
He nodded several times, then took a few long deep drags off his cigarette and whispered:
“It’s impossible, it’s all impossible.”
Of course, it’s easy to think,
But it’s not impossible. All you have to do is act in your own best interests and walk out on a life you don’t want
. But that’s so profoundly facile and sidesteps not just the huge social ramification of this decision, but also the way we talk ourselves into lives we don’t want, largely out of fear of change.
Even if Mehmet couldn’t, in the end, bring himself to run away from all that his society expected of him, at least he was making love three times a week with Alaistair, and that was a great act of defiance. We’re always answering to a larger authority, aren’t we? Social expectations, familial expectations. As such, to even dabble in the zone of dangerous personal liberty—as Mehmet was doing now—required extraordinary strength of character. Just as to somehow cross an impenetrable political divide as Petra had done.
Well, I didn’t know all the details of her flight as yet. But I knew that she had paid some sort of huge price by getting out. This, in turn, also made me think that she too had phenomenal courage. As such the choice she made was a huge, impacting one, riddled with regret and infinite sadness. Is change—especially of the most primal and personal variety—ever anything less than cataclysmic?
As we emerged into the pale light of the street, Mehmet proffered his pack of Luckys.
“You should marry that girl,” he said as he held a match to my cigarette.
“What makes you think that?”
He just shrugged, his face his usual mask of seriousness.
“You just look happy together.”
Walking into the hospital ward ten minutes later, Mehmet eyed every person we passed as if they were a member of the Turkish secret police sent here to find out his terrible secret and upend his life. He was so agitated as we approached Alaistair’s bedside that I stopped him and put my hand on his arm and said:
“Have you seen anyone so far who knows you?”
He shook his head.
“Well, we are now ten steps away from Alaistair’s cubicle. Once we are inside it no one will see you. So you are scot-free. Please, for Alaistair’s sake, pull yourself together and get that look of terror off your face. He needs to see you in reasonable shape. So please . . .”
Mehmet nodded many times and went into another internal monologue for several moments, pulling out his pack of cigarettes and twirling it between his fingers, evidently desperate for a smoke and using the pack as a form of substitute worry beads.
“You okay now?” I finally asked.
He nodded again many times, and I pushed him toward the cubicle. When we reached its entrance I stuck my head in and found Alaistair sitting up in bed, reading
The New Yorker.
“Back again?” he asked. “You
are
a glutton for punishment.”
“That I am, but I’m not staying. Because I’ve brought a visitor.”
I reached behind me and literally had to pull Mehmet into the cubicle. Alaistair looked genuinely stunned to see him, while Mehmet’s eyes kept darting from him to the floor.
“I’ll come back in an hour,” I said. Before Mehmet could raise a nervous objection, I turned and walked quickly down the ward corridor.
I left the hospital and found a little Italian café on a neighboring street. I drank two espressos and worked on my notebook, writing down all that had happened in the last twenty-four hours, Mehmet’s comment,
“You should marry that girl”
still ringing in my head. After writing for fifteen minutes, I asked the guy behind the counter if there was a phone I could use.
“One mark for ten minutes,” he said, placing a phone on the counter.
“That’s expensive,” I said.
“No,” he said. “That is the price.”
I shrugged, pushed a mark toward him, and dialed the number for Radio Liberty. When the switchboard operator answered, I asked to be put through to Petra Dussmann. Her line rang and rang—and by the seventh ring I was beginning to lose hope of speaking with her when, suddenly, she answered.
“Dussmann,” she said, sounding out of breath.
“Did I make you run across the office?”
“You did.”
“I hope you don’t mind me calling you at work.”
“It is lovely to hear your voice,” she said in a near-whisper, “but if I am sounding clandestine, it’s because Pawel is hovering around.”
“No problem. The only reason I called is that I can’t stand the idea of not hearing
your
voice until tonight.”
“I love you,” she whispered. “In fact, if I could, I’d dash out of this damn building right now and run into your arms.”
“I could be in front of the Wedding U-Bahn station in fifteen minutes.”
“I have a lunch meeting with two producers in twenty-five minutes.”
“Well, that would give us five minutes together.”
“I’ll be awaiting you outside the station.”
I actually made it to the Wedding U-Bahn station in eighteen minutes. She was standing at the top of the stairs as I headed up them—and raced down toward me, meeting me on a landing halfway below the street, throwing her arms around me, pinning me against a wall as we kissed. Finally, she broke away.
“You . . . ,” she whispered. “You . . .”
“And you . . . and
us
.”
“I’m now late,” she said.
“Then you really should go.”
“The fact that you came up here for just five minutes . . .”
“I’ll come here for five minutes every day if you like . . .”
“Tell me you love me.”
“I love you.”
“And I love you.”
Then, after another very long kiss, she stepped back from me and ran up the stairs. I leaned against the wall, feeling like one of those cartoon characters who gets to kiss the girl and, in the aftermath, is hit with a visual swirl of stars and exclamation points over his head. I forced myself back onto the U-Bahn, wearing an absurd lunatic grin all the way back to Zoo Station. Half-jogging my way to the hospital, I reached Alaistair’s ward just fifteen minutes shy of the end of visitor hours. Mehmet was no longer in the cubicle, but Alaistair was seated up in bed, his hands behind his head, staring up at the ceiling.
“Lover boy returns,” he said as I entered. “Let me guess. You slipped away for an assignation in a room above a Chinese laundry to avoid detection by her Iranian fascist husband, Abbass—who drives a cab by day, but has a flourishing career as a professional wrestler by night.”
“You should really be writing novels, Alaistair.”
“So you
did
have an assignation?”
“Not exactly. But . . .”
“Oh I get it. A quick cuddle in a public park. She dashed out from work to meet you, and within moments the earth was moving.”
I felt myself blushing. Alaistair’s smile widened.
“I’ve evidently hit the bull’s-eye. So, young man,
details, details
.”
“You’ll meet her eventually.”
“Mehmet certainly has, and he informed me she was rather lovely. Very tall—which, for Mehmet, means anyone taller than him. And rather beautiful, with . . . how did he put it . . . sad eyes. Is Petra sad?”
“Aren’t we all, to some extent, sad?”
“Ah, I share an apartment with a philosopher prince. But you dodge the question. Mehmet—who is always sad—also said that you both looked most in love.”
“We are.”
“Congratulations.”
“You don’t exactly look dejected today.”
“Perhaps because some American writer did me a good turn. Thank you.”
“He loves you.”
“That’s a rather presumptuous thing to say.”
“It’s just the truth.”
“In matters of the heart there is no such thing as the truth. There are only moment-to-moment realities. And it can all change tomorrow, especially given the complexities of Mehmet’s situation.”