“Disgustingly wonderful.”
“So I can see. I’d advise you to be careful. Too much happiness is catastrophic for an artist. No sense of loss, no sense of creative frisson.”
“That’s a bunch of theoretical bullshit, and you know it.”
“How many genuinely happy people do you know who work in the so-called creative professions?”
I thought this one over for a moment.
“None,” I finally said.
“My point exactly.”
“Then again,” I asked, “how many genuinely happy people do you know outside of the so-called creative professions?”
Without hesitating, Alaistair said:
“None. But look at you. You’re actually in the process of becoming happy, even though you still have all that childhood
merde
shadowing your every move.”
“I’m sure it will recede in time.”
“No, stay angry at it all. It will help you counterbalance all the sunshine that you will have with Fraulein Dussmann. From my very passing acquaintance with her over the past few weeks, I sense that you, sir, are actually doing a great deal of good for her as well. She does have shadows, doesn’t she?”
“We all have shadows.”
“I’ll say no more.”
“Good,” I said—because unless the relationship is disintegrating and you need to talk things out with a good friend, one of the key unspoken rules of love is that you never discuss the anxieties, the distresses, the fears of the person you adore with anyone else. Not only is it a betrayal of trust, it also subverts a key facet of love at its most profound: the fact that the two of you create a rampart against the world’s attendant malignancies. Or, at least, that’s the romantic hope.
But this hope found reality in the life that Petra and I shared together. Whenever she returned home in the evening—frustrated and bored by the work at Radio Liberty—I would hand her a glass of wine and she would slam the door on that increasingly fraught and contentious workplace. Just as, if I’d had a bad day at the desk or was worried that the book seemed rudderless, the moment she arrived home I would be transformed out of my funk, and by the end of the evening, I’d also be edging back into an optimistic frame of reference about my work, perhaps because, with Petra, I simply was reminded of the fact that life was also about possibilities.
One ongoing topic of conversation was Pawel. Petra had continued to be very insistent about keeping our relationship quiet within the confined little world of Radio Liberty. So on those occasions when I would show my face there—either for a meeting or a taping session with Pawel—we would acknowledge each other with a friendly formality if we happened to run into each other in a corridor or an office.
“People have so little to talk about,” Petra said, “they’d love to spend hours gossiping about how I was involved with a contributor and all that sort of petty stuff.”
“Well, unless someone sees us kissing in the street, who’s to ever know that we are a couple?”
But that’s exactly what happened. One evening we went to see a showing of Billy Wilder’s
The Apartment
at the Delphi near Zoo Station. Afterward, as we stepped out onto the street, I pulled Petra close to me and we kissed, at which point I heard a voice behind me say:
“How charming.”
Pawel was standing right by us, on his way into the cinema. Immediately we disentangled. At first Petra looked caught out, a deer in the headlights. Then her shock turned into profound discomfort, as Pawel was regarding us with an enormous smirk. He appeared rather drunk.
“How very interesting,” he said. “And here I was thinking that dissidents had no talent for the clandestine.”
“That’s enough,” I said.
“Ah, the macho American defends the sad émigré.”
“We’re out of here,” I said to Petra.
“‘
We’re out of here,
’” Pawel repeated, imitating my accent. “Thus spake the writer of glossy magazine prose who thinks himself serious.”
“You’re a shit,” Petra said.
“And you are a mediocrity who thinks herself—”
That’s when I hit him. Directly in the stomach. My action stunned me. I’d never hit anyone before. As he doubled over and began to retch up all the booze that he’d been evidently imbibing most of the evening. Petra and I hurried off to the U-Bahn. We said nothing until we were seated on a train, at which point I shook my head and said:
“Jesus Christ, I can’t believe that just happened.”
“You pack a punch,” she said.
“I hope he’s okay.”
“He deserved it.”
“I’m still a little shocked.”
“He’s a petty little despot, and thank you for hitting him on my behalf.”
“Do you think he’ll try to . . .”
“Get me fired? I doubt it. Herr Wellmann knows that Pawel made advances at me and harassed me repeatedly when I wouldn’t sleep with him. Wellmann cautioned him at the time and the harassment stopped. He wouldn’t dare do anything against me. Against you, however . . .”
“I don’t need Radio Liberty to survive.”
“That you don’t, and I’ve never had a man defend me before. So if that bastard Pawel does try to get you dropped as a contributor, I’ll talk to Wellmann. Of course, the fact that we are together will now be the talk of the office.”
“Is that such a bad thing?”
“I don’t care who knows now. If anyone asks, I will tell them the truth: you’re the man I love.”
As it turned out, there was no need for Petra to make such proclamations at the office, as Pawel called in sick for several days after this incident. When he did return to his producing duties and did knock on the glass of Petra’s office cubicle, he was all business, handing her a script to be translated, telling her he’d been out with “a bad gastric flu,” asking if she was well, and essentially showing her a professional cordiality that he had never demonstrated before. That same day he left a message for me at the Café Istanbul, asking me to call him back. When I did, he was civility itself, wondering if I could turn around an essay on the von Karajan legacy at the Berlin Philharmonic in three days. The fee he offered was two thousand deutsche marks—almost four times what he usually paid me.
“That’s a most generous sum,” I said.
“Well, I think you merit it,” Pawel said, not a hint of sheepishness or contrition in his voice. “Anyway, you are such a regular and first-rate contributor.”
Of course, I did the von Karajan essay. Petra translated it. When I came up to record it at Radio Liberty with Pawel, I just happened to pass Petra in the corridor. We all exchanged pleasantries. That night, back home, she said:
“I think you hitting him was the best thing that ever happened to Pawel. Even though no one at the office knows what happened, everyone is still saying the same thing: the man has become civilized, for the moment anyway.”
“Well, when that two thousand deutsche marks comes through, why don’t we blow it all on a trip to Paris?”
“You mean that?” she asked, sounding amazed.
“Of course, I mean it,” I said. “We’re together three months today. It’s an anniversary of sorts. And we should do something extravagant and special. So tell me when.”
“It would be great to do four or five days there. So maybe I could take a few days off.”
“Just let me know and I will get it all in motion.”
“Paris. I can’t believe it.”
The next morning—it was a Saturday—Petra was up early. When I awoke the entire apartment had been cleaned thoroughly—a task we usually shared together—and she was back from the laundromat with the clothes I had dropped off yesterday, now ironing our spare set of sheets.
“There was no need to do all this,” I said as I stirred awake and was handed a demitasse of espresso.
“I just couldn’t sleep and needed to keep busy.”
Now I was wide awake, reaching for her.
“Is something wrong?” I asked, taking her hand. She sat down on the edge of the bed but didn’t seem able to look at me.
“Just worried about work, that’s all,” she said, digging out a cigarette in the pocket of her work shirt and simultaneously biting down on her lip.
I sat up and reached for her.
“This isn’t about work.”
“It’s something that I should have told you weeks, months ago, but was too afraid to discuss.”
“But why?”
“Because I was scared that, if you knew . . .”
“Scared if I knew what?”
Now she stood up and walked to the other side of the room, sitting down in an armchair, her eyes welling up, shaking her head as she tried to forestall the sobs that were welling up within her. Immediately I raced over to her, taking her in my arms, rocking her back and forth.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered through the tears. “I’m so sorry.”
“Sorry about what?”
“The reason it’s all so hard this morning . . . it’s because . . .”
“Yes?”
“It’s his birthday.”
“Whose birthday?”
She pulled back from my embrace, looking away from me.
“It’s the birthday of my son, Johannes. He’s three years old today.”
SEVEN
F
OR THE NEXT hour Petra spoke nonstop—the entire story coming out in a long and terrible cascade.
“I need to first tell you about me and Jurgen. Yes, he was my husband. Yes, we lived together for five years. I was very young when I met him. I had been in a relationship for two years prior to this with a man named Kurt, who was twenty years my senior and produced classical music programs for the state radio station. Kurt was very quiet, very cultured, very married. I had just finished university. I had just been awarded the post of translator at the state publishing house. I was living in a tiny room in Mitte. My room was no more than nine meters. One minuscule window. An alcove with a hot plate, a sink, and a very small fridge. A bathroom the size of a narrow closet. No natural light. A single bed. A table and a chair. I had a radio and some books and little else. But it was my first place. I found someone who got me a few small pots of paint and some brushes—never easy to find—and painted my very own mural—very Alice in Wonderland—on one wall. But even with this dash of color, the place was drab, sad, a cell, and only enlivened when Kurt came by three days a week from six to eight. Kurt was hugely intelligent—a near concert-grade pianist who should have gone on to great things, but always seemed to come up short in life. He was sent to the big music conservatory in Moscow, but his teachers there considered him just ‘moderately gifted’ and not destined for the great concert halls. So when he returned to the DDR he got a job in the state broadcasting system and occasionally played recitals and concertos in small provincial halls. He also met a rather overbearing woman named Hildegarde. They had three children. They all lived in three rooms way up near Pankow. He felt trapped. Then he was introduced to me when he had to come to the state publishing house one day to consult on a book of musicology by a Canadian academic. Over a cup of tea in a café on Unter den Linden, I remember Kurt telling me he was brought in to make certain that the book’s ‘interpretative analyses were ideologically acceptable.’ I remember laughing and being rather amazed at such blunt sarcasm. I was just twenty-two and didn’t have a boyfriend.
“It lasted two years. Like all such arrangements, it was a half-life for the third party—which was me. Kurt was, in the end, far too melancholic and permanently stuck in his bad marriage. You know how it is with so many people. They believe there is no way out, even if life is hell. And I was wondering how I could get myself out of my terrible one-room life and this sad affair with a very bright, but very sad man.
“Then I met Jurgen at a
vernissage
in someone’s apartment up in Prenzlauer Berg. He wasn’t the best-looking man in history. Stocky, a big beard, a big appetite, and, oh my God, how he smoked. Three packs a day. But at the time, he was an important young playwright in the DDR. I’d read an article about him in
Neues Deutschland
and one of the literary magazines about this brilliant first play of his—
Die Wahl
—which, as the title indicated, was all about human choice. It was set in a munitions factory after an explosion that has killed several workers. And it turns out the manager—under pressure to fill quotas—had cut corners when it came to safety.
“Though it didn’t come out and say accusatory things directly, it was clear that Jurgen was pointing a big finger at state bureaucracy and the maniacal need to meet quotas in order to convince everyone that the Five-Year Plan was working. The thing was, the play worked brilliantly as a character study, also showing the way everyone attempted to abnegate responsibility for actions that resulted in the death of ten workers. That was the cleverness of the play. It played the proletarian card, yet also was a riveting study of individual versus collective choice. It made Jurgen, for a time, hugely regarded.
“Naturally I’d seen the play in its original Berlin production. Given how much attention he’d received—and how he had any woman he wanted—I was rather surprised that he would be interested in me.
“But, much to my amazement, he was. He also had a rather big apartment for Berlin—sixty square meters—in Prenzlauer Berg. Of course, he had no talent for housekeeping, and the place was rather squalid. But after my cell of a room, Jurgen’s apartment on Jablonski Strasse seemed like a villa. And he had all these interesting artist friends who lived nearby. So, suddenly, I was part of a community. These friends of his had almost created a state-within-the-state. Yes, we knew we were being frequently observed. Yes, we sometimes privately wondered who among us might be informing to the Stasi about our lives, because in any group you could be sure that several people had been turned. It was an accepted fact of life.
“Anyway, I loved this new life in Prenzlauer Berg, loved being part of this artistic group. There was only one problem. I never really loved Jurgen. Nor, truth be told, did he love me. He made a fuss about me at first. Then I moved in. We shared a bed. We had sex the nights of the week he wasn’t drunk. Beyond that, it was as if we were two people who had fallen into a life together that was strangely utilitarian but not unreasonable. One thing about our bohemian existence in Prenzlauer Berg: it was never boring.
“But then, out of nowhere, I was pregnant. It was an accident. My diaphragm had a tiny tear in it which I had never seen. ‘Must have been manufactured in Halle’ was Jurgen’s only comment about it. After making that bad joke, he just shrugged and said: ‘If you want to keep it, that’s fine, but it will be your responsibility entirely.’
“The thing was, in the GDR abortions were used all the time as an alternative form of birth control. They were very simple to obtain. I wrestled with this idea for no more than five minutes. I was pregnant. I had so little in my life. As sad and hurt as I was by Jurgen’s reaction—he called our baby ‘it’—I so wanted this child.
“‘I’m keeping the baby,’ I said.
“‘That’s your business,’ Jurgen said in response.
“As it turned out, he meant what he said. For the next nine months, he acted as if this pregnancy was an ancillary event in our lives. When I had morning sickness, when I had to go in for a test to see if I was suffering from jaundice, when I was so pregnant that getting up the four flights of stairs with our groceries was a major burden, when my waters broke and I had to be rushed to hospital, when the delivery was complicated and our son spent his first five days on a respirator and there were fears about his survival . . . during all these dramas and anxieties that accompanied the birth of our son, Jurgen was largely elsewhere. Yes, he was still in the apartment. Yes, he was still eating the meals he expected me to cook for him and wearing the clothes he expected me to wash and iron for him. And yes, one Saturday when I was three months pregnant, we went to the registry office on Unter den Linden and, with all our friends from Prenzlauer Berg present, were legally declared man and wife. Why did we go through this charade when there was no real love between us? I insisted on it, because it guaranteed me residence in the apartment we shared and also gave me certain maternal benefits that I would have otherwise been without had I remained single. Yes, I put on a happy face for the ceremony. Afterward, this wonderful sculptor named Judit—who lived near us and did brilliant abstract work that was never officially sanctioned—had a party for us in her apartment. Again I acted happy, even when Jurgen drank so much that he fell asleep on the sofa and began to snore wildly.
“I remember two men in our crowd—they were both novelists who could no longer get published—having to help him home that night. I accompanied them as they literally struggled to keep Jurgen—who was, at this point, turning fat—belching and singing absurd songs and, at one point, shouting: ‘I’m too young to be sentenced to fatherhood!’ They blanched at such drunken awfulness, whispering to me: ‘Don’t listen to him. He’s just being stupid.’ But I knew there was more than a profound grain of truth in what he said. When they finally got him home and he pitched forward into bed, I remember curling up in this broken-down armchair we had and crying nonstop for about an hour. Why was I shedding tears? Because I realized that I was alone in the world, in this farce of a marriage, in this farce of a country that had to keep its citizens imprisoned and under constant surveillance because, at heart, it knew that it was a sham, a counterfeit version of a state. Even my father couldn’t be bothered to come up to see me getting married. He had a program he simply had to produce that day. I didn’t even put up a fight about it. I just accepted his disinterest, which had only increased since my mother’s death. Just as I accepted Jurgen’s disinterest. Just as I accepted my small limited life over there as nothing less than my due. That’s what really troubled me: the realization that my choices were all against happiness, against possibility. Yes, it’s true the horizons were hardly limitless in the GDR. But I knew people, friends, who had happy marriages, happy relationships. What did I choose? Indifference, apathy, aloofness—all for sixty square meters in Prenzlauer Berg.
“Judit became my savior. She all but got me through the pregnancy. She was a shoulder to cry on. She even confronted Jurgen on two occasions and forced him to do the shopping once a week or pick me up at the hospital after an examination. But on the night that Johannes arrived, my husband was down in Dresden at the opening night of a local production of his play. Judit, however, was at the hospital with me.
“The birth itself was complicated, and they gave me an anesthetic that made me so groggy I couldn’t recall the moment when my son actually arrived in the world. When I was cognizant of the world around me again, I panicked, for there was no child by my side. One of the nurses came in and informed me that during the delivery, the umbilical cord had wrapped itself around my son’s neck. That was the first time I learned what sex he was and that he was on a respirator. I insisted on being taken to see him. This was the middle of the night and Judit had already gone home. They brought me to this machine that looked like something out of a mad scientist movie, with this tiny creature sucked into its vortex, a tube down his throat and his nostrils, the machine heaving so loudly as it kept my baby ventilated, alive. When they insisted I return to my ward and get some sleep, I refused. The nurse on duty was a hugely officious type who essentially ordered me back. When I said I wasn’t going anywhere, she threatened me, telling me she could have me reported for antisocial behavior. That’s when I began to scream at her that she could bring the fucking Stasi in here, but I would still not leave my baby alone.
“Fortunately, there was a young doctor—his family name was Mühl—who walked in just as this bitch of a nurse threatened to denounce me to the secret police. He immediately ordered the nurse into an adjoining room. Once they were there, I could hear her getting angry, informing the doctor that, though he was ‘hierarchically senior’ to her, this had been her ward for the past twenty years and no young medico was going to give her orders. The doctor turned out to be made of sterner stuff. He said that she’d behaved in a completely reprehensible way toward—and I always remember the language he used—‘a brave young woman who has given our Democratic Republic a new son.’ At that point I sensed that this doctor was very clever when it came to the sort of ideological attack language that intimidated people and allowed you to get your way. Because he then informed the nurse that she was being reactionary and bourgeois, and he would report her to her trade union for ‘authoritarian behavior.’ Immediately she acted contrite. The doctor returned to the ward and informed me that, from this moment on, a bed would be brought in so I could sleep next to my son, and that he thought he would pull through.
“Well, Johannes—that was the name I gave him—did pull through. Five days later we were home. Bless Judit. She herself had no children. But she’d found me a crib that belonged to one of her neighbors and an old baby carriage. While I was in the hospital she arranged for a bunch of her artist friends to come over and paint little stars and moons in the tiny alcove that was to be Johannes’s nursery.
“But when I came home with our son, Jurgen was still nowhere to be found. He only showed up three days later, unshaven, dirty, smelling of other women, looking like he’d been drinking for around a week. He also didn’t seem to have slept in a very long time—and perhaps that’s the reason his emotions were so raw. When he saw his son—and took him in his arms for the first time—he burst into tears and couldn’t stop crying for around half an hour. I decided not to say anything or do anything, as he was holding Johannes correctly. When he finally subsided, what did he do? He handed me the baby and kissed me on the head and told me he knew he had acted atrociously and would now change his ways. Then he went into our bedroom, left his sweat-soaked, booze- and lipstick-smudged clothes everywhere on the floor, crawled into our bed, and slept for the next twelve hours.
“When he awoke, it was five in the morning and I had been up already with Johannes for three hours, as he was suffering from colic. Jurgen insisted I go back to bed, especially as I had just finished feeding Johannes. He said he would stand watch with him for the rest of the night. I actually slept five hours straight—a new record since the birth of my son—and woke to find Jurgen passed out on the sofa and Johannes curled up in his arms. Seeing this father-son scene—and how peaceful Johannes was next to him—I couldn’t help but hope that Jurgen had come to his senses, that paternity would make him assume just a little responsibility, that we could find a way of becoming a couple, a family. Maybe I also hoped that the tears he shed when he first saw his son were a reflection of some sort of love he had for me but could never express. That’s the most dangerous dream you can have in a relationship that you know is fundamentally flawed—the belief that someone will
come
to love you and that you will
come
to love that person. Such thinking is catastrophic, because you are grasping at a hope which, in private, you really know is an illusion.