Granted, Pawel was relentless when it came to trying to get some personal information out of me, once challenging me in front of four other staffers at a lunch in a local pizzeria to explain what “angelic deed” I did to get myself evicted from the GDR, calling me a “tight-lipped Solzhenitsyn who probably wrote mediocre human rights poetry about the bourgeois dominion of her cunt.” That’s when I threw my beer in his face. His response was to just laugh.
Monica tried to get him fired after this—telling me she confronted Wellmann about him, stating that she was appalled that he would allow such a sexist, nasty little shit to remain on staff when he abused a woman colleague in such a vile, derogatory way.
“Wellmann said that he fully sympathized,” Monica told me, “and he would personally carpet Pawel, and insist that he write me a proper letter of apology and promise to never pull that sort of thing again. But he also told me,
categorically,
that Pawel couldn’t be fired. ‘My hands are tied here’—his exact words.”
With a knowing smile on her lips, Monica added:
“We all know what that means.”
So he too is an operative. One of theirs. And, as such, untouchable.
When I reported this all to Haechen several days later, he couldn’t have been more excited (and this from a man who, despite the vindictive veneer, never showed enthusiasm for anything), wanting to know every detail of the reported conversation between Monica and Wellmann. And when Pawel’s very formal—and, it must be said, contrite—letter arrived two days later, I made a photocopy and gave it to Haechen.
Yes, I was always trying to curry favor with him, to show him I was on board and wanting to please him and his masters. I even began to show the slightest bit of reciprocal movement when he fucked me—in the hope that he would, in turn, show a little kindness toward me.
But as the weeks turned into months, as he occasionally granted me five minutes’ custody with another snapshot of Johannes, I began to realize what I realized from the outset but kept trying to convince myself otherwise: the fact that he would, and could, string this along forever. On the one occasion when I dared to inquire when this all might end and I would be reunited with my son, he simply regarded his fingernails and said:
“That is not my decision. You should know better than to try my patience with such shit. You betrayed your homeland—and now you are trying to prove your worthiness to return there and,
perhaps,
regain responsibility for your son. Given the level of your betrayal the very fact that you are being offered this opportunity to redeem yourself speaks volumes about our humane system. But do not think for a moment that after a few mere months, you are going to be absolved and get handed the keys to the castle. Not a chance.”
After this dressing-down I went into a tailspin for days, suicide looming very large in my thoughts. It wasn’t as if Haechen had told me something I hadn’t already known from the outset. The truth was . . . there was no possibility of a reversal of fortune, no hope, no possible redemption or way out of this labyrinth of lies into which I had led myself.
One morning, after the third night in a row when I couldn’t sleep, my thoughts started turning to suicide again, only this time there was a calm logic to my deliberations. Pills versus slashing my wrists in the shower? Or maybe I should try to scale The Wall and get shot trying to repatriate myself back to the GDR (no, that would give those bastards some sort of propaganda victory:
She was so unhappy in the West, so despondent after having been stripped of her GDR citizenship, that she was willing to go to desperate lengths to return to the fatherland she had betrayed
).
Was I serious about taking my own life? Absolutely. A cocktail of despair, despondency, crushing insomnia, and the acceptance that all was lost, without possibility,
dead.
Which, I had decided, is what I wanted to be.
On the day in question, I first made a side trip to Kochstrasse and made inquiries about the viewing roof open to the public on the thirty-eighth storey of the building that housed Axel Springer’s publishing empire. The woman at the information desk on the ground floor joked with me that if I had fear of heights, I shouldn’t go up there, “as the guard rails are low and the view down very vertiginous.” The only thing that stopped me from buying a ticket to the observatory tower, and taking the elevator straight to the top and flinging myself off before I had the chance to change my mind, was the desire to write a long explanatory letter to Johannes, which I would somehow find a way for it to be given to him when he was older. It was a letter in which I told him . . .
Well, everything.
Looking at my watch and realizing, in my good German way, that I was going to be late for work, I hurried off to the U-Bahn, pondering a question all the way to Wedding: could I find somebody who would, upon receipt of this sealed envelope after my death, be trusted to carry out the instructions I left him or her to find a way of delivering this letter to Johannes when he turned eighteen?
More specifically, would Monica—the only quasi-friend I had here—do that for me?
I only arrived five minutes late and had a note marked
Urgent
on my desk from Herr Wellmann. It was the translation of a piece explaining Reagan’s Star Wars program, which Wellmann said he needed by eleven. I grabbed a coffee from the communal pot. I lit a cigarette. I rolled a piece of paper into my typewriter. I went to work, finishing off this dry, concrete apologia for such an absurd weapons system just before the deadline. Then I proofed it and entered Herr Wellmann’s outer office.
“Oh good, you have it done,” Frau Orff said, seeing the copy in my hand. “I’ll send you right in.”
After phoning him, she pointed to the door. I knocked on it and walked in. In the moment I walked in I saw, sitting in the chair in front of Wellmann’s desk, a man in his mid-twenties. He stood up as I entered. I liked that. He was tall, with a big mop of brown hair and a very square jaw. Thin, lanky, interesting. A bookish man, but someone who, I sensed immediately, knew a bit about the world. Handsome, too. Very handsome . . . but not too aware of that. But what got me immediately about him were his eyes. They were sharp, observant eyes—yet also ones that radiated a certain forlornness. The eyes of someone worldly yet alone. The eyes of somebody looking for love and having yet to find it.
Then he saw me. And I saw the way he saw me. And, I sensed, he saw the way I saw him. In that instant . . . . it couldn’t have been more than a few seconds, but it seemed so much longer owing to the way we held each other’s gaze . . . in that instant, I fell victim to something that can only be described as febrile. Something I had never been hit with before. Something that I found perplexing and wondrous and wholly disconcerting at the same time.
Herr Wellmann introduced us.
Thomas Nesbitt. His name is Thomas Nesbitt.
And I have just fallen in love with him.
NOTEBOOK TWO
T
HOMAS NESBITT. THOMAS Nesbitt. Thomas Nesbitt.
In the hours, days, since meeting him I have said his name over and over again. I like the sound of it. So solid. So mature. So . . . . American.
He smiled at me as I left Wellmann’s office. Such a smile. So much behind that smile. Or am I being absurd and delusional here? Am I projecting onto this man—about whom I know nothing—all these possibilities that have passed through my head from the moment I first set eyes on him a few hours ago? What possibilities?
Love. Real love. Something—I have to admit here within the safe confines of this journal—that I have never known. Always felt myself rather unlucky in that department. Then again, for the people I knew who had fallen madly in love, it was either with the wrong person or someone who could not live up to the expectations, the hopes, that had been placed upon them.
As I am placing them on him now. What do I know about him but that he’s American and he writes? No doubt there’s a girlfriend or a fiancée. Or maybe he’s already married but doesn’t wear a ring.
No, he strikes me as one of those men who, if married, would wear a ring, would make his commitment to someone very clear.
But there I go projecting again.
Is this what it feels like? Unable to concentrate on anything else but
him,
even though he might just have been naturally flirtatious and always came on to women like he did with me.
But he didn’t come on to me. He looked at me in a way that mirrored exactly what I was feeling the moment I first saw him.
He knew
. Just the way
I knew
.
I saw something else there behind that look. A loneliness, a need, a sense of wanting so desperately to connect.
But there I go projecting again.
Thomas Nesbitt. Thomas Nesbitt. Thomas Nesbitt.
I keep saying his name over and over again. Like an invocation, an entreaty, a prayer.
* * *
I found out he writes books. Or, at least,
a book
. But how many people even write
one
book? And it’s a very good book, despite what Pawel says.
I saw it on Pawel’s desk this morning as I delivered a translation to him. Since that whole business some weeks ago—and his subsequent letter of apology—Pawel has stopped his campaign of harassment against me. Perhaps he also realizes that I now know who and what he really is, and why he can’t be fired—though I’m pretty certain the entire office has been quietly aware of this fact for some time. That’s one of the great unspoken rules about Radio Liberty: though we all realize that it’s funded by the US Congress and overseen by the CIA . . . and though occasionally we get a visit from USIA people (who are so clearly “operatives”) . . . the one thing no one ever discusses (except in very low tones—and in as fleeting a way as possible) is the “security service” aspect of the operation. But it is something I think about every moment I am there, as I cannot help but wonder if I am under surveillance. Then again, after so many months, surely if they knew what I was doing, they would have moved in on me by now.
How can I fall in love with anyone when I am living such a duplicitous existence? How can I even think of a life with Thomas when I have to keep seeing Haechen twice a week?
“Is it any good?” I asked Pawel, pointing to the copy of Thomas’s book on his desk, trying to sound casual.
“Superficial, far too self-assured, far too entertaining.”
“‘Entertaining’ is a sin?”
“The jacket blurb says he’s a writer in the ‘Graham Greene’ tradition of travel writers. But he’s far too American.”
“By which you mean?”
“He shows off his erudition all the time, the way all those New York intellectuals are always letting you know how much they’ve read. Just like your friend Monica. Her hyperliteracy is underscored by a need to quote Proust or Emily Dickinson at every damn opportunity. This guy, Nesbitt, does the same thing—using Egypt as a way of talking about himself.”
“At least he’s between hard covers,” I said.
“There are many minor writers ‘between hard covers,’” Pawel said. “And being a minor writer who happens to be in Berlin right now . . . of course, Herr Nesbitt is doing some work for us.”
“Can I borrow the book, then?” I asked.
“Keep it. I have no use for it. But as our fearless leader has assigned him to me, I’ll be producing his drivel.”
“And you are such an expert when it comes to drivel,” I said.
I took the book home and devoured it that night. Of course, Pawel was being his usual vicious self when it came to his criticisms of the book, and I could see why he felt such a stab of jealousy. I loved the way the entire book had the structure and drive of a novel. I loved the way Thomas drew out so many interesting stories from the people he met “on the road.” I loved the way he captured the exoticism of Egypt along with its contemporary extremities. More than anything—in the few moments that he dared to speak personally about himself in an otherwise “detached observer” narrative—the book revealed its writer to be a loner who was very good at getting people to talk about themselves, but was clearly rueful about his solitariness.
As I finally closed the book at three that morning two words kept preoccupying my thoughts:
Thomas Nesbitt. Thomas Nesbitt. Thomas Nesbitt.
I don’t deserve him.
Thomas Nesbitt. Thomas Nesbitt. Thomas Nesbitt.
I know it’s all the stuff of reverie. And like all such romantic musings, the stuff of imagination, not reality.
* * *
I saw him briefly on my way into work. We made eye contact. And, oh God, I think he asked me out to a concert, but I was so nervous I could barely hear anything over the pounding of my heart. And now I’m speaking in clichés. I’m sure I was too distant, too diffident. He just beamed at me. Like a man in love.
Stop inventing again. It was another of his nice smiles, that’s all. He’s new to Berlin and probably casually asks people out all the time. He probably smiles that way at every woman he sees. And I should have smiled back.
* * *
His first essay arrived today! And I was asked to translate it.
I read it through immediately. It described a day he spent in East Berlin. The first time he’d ever “crossed over.” Of course, I was intrigued by his take on things. I sometimes worried that he stated the obvious a little too often—especially when it came to the fundamental drabness of the place. But I loved his use of snow as a metaphor. The way he described East Berlin in the throes of a blizzard . . . strangely it made me homesick. This is what they don’t get in the West, and what Thomas himself didn’t pick up: the fact that we accepted the gray, concrete realities of the place as a given. The fact that not all of us dreamed of Levi’s jeans and a new Volkswagen. The fact that, despite its limitations, it was
our
city, our society, our world. We loved so much about its peculiarities. It made us form communities. It made our friendships all that deeper.
And it made us inform on each other, too.
Homesick, yes. Heartsick, yes. Full of conflicting emotions about whether I should make a move in Thomas’s direction or stay clear of him altogether and keep everything simpler.
I had to see Haechen this afternoon. He couldn’t get an erection and made me go down on him with my mouth. Even then, he remained limp, impotent. I took silent pleasure in this.
“I think you need to do better next time,” he said as he pulled up his Y-fronts. I wanted to scream and shout and tell him that I found him nothing less than revolting.
But as always, I held my tongue like the subservient creature I must be in his presence. There is nothing worse than knowing someone has you in a place out of which you cannot negotiate, that their power over you is a near-absolute.
But he couldn’t stop me from having a life out of these biweekly degradations. And he wasn’t—to the best of my knowledge—having me followed.
Thomas, I decided, would be my escape hatch out of all this horror. Thomas would make this other humiliating part of my life somehow bearable.
If, that is, Thomas was even interested in me.
But think about that look he gave you
yesterday
.
It was just a look. And it could have been nothing but that.
You don’t trust others, do you?
Can you blame me?
* * *
I decided to be bold this morning. I picked up the phone at work and called the number Thomas had written on the cover sheet of his essay, only to discover I was speaking to a man with a decidedly non-German accent. When I asked for Thomas Nesbitt he explained that he took messages for Thomas—and that he was probably due in later that morning. I gave him my name and number, thanked him, then hung up, feeling rather stupid about having called. Would Thomas think I was harassing him? Would he even return the call? Maybe I overplayed my hand here. How would I react if he called back and actually asked if we could meet? That was a growing concern of mine, the worry that I couldn’t handle it if he was interested.
I want him. I fear I can’t have him. I fear everything else will conspire to make me unable to even consider getting to know him.
And I am building all this up into something that may not happen at all.
Then, late that afternoon, my phone rang and . . . there he was. All charming and pleasant . . . and did I also hear a certain nervous catch in his voice as well? We bantered a bit. He made a joke about how he didn’t have a phone at home. Then when I said I had a couple of questions about his text, he asked if we could meet for a coffee. Instead of saying an instant “yes,” I had to go all hesitant and strange. It was a good thirty seconds before I got up the courage to say: “All right.” I felt so silly afterward. And so hopeful. And so afraid. Afraid of it happening. Afraid of it not happening.
* * *
He agreed to meet me at a café of my choice. I proposed the Ankara, right near my room. I made some lame joke about the place where he picks up his phone messages being called the Istanbul. And how he was now exchanging Istanbul for Ankara.
God, how I hated myself for that stupidity afterward. And my inane banter, as in asking him if he didn’t mind coming to the wrong side of Kreuzberg. He must now think me idiotic.
I could hardly sleep last night, wondering, worrying, fretting. The desire for love to be reciprocated is the most quiet sort of agony. I tried to prepare myself for everything from his last-minute cancelation to the discovery that he had a woman back home in the States who was joining him here next month. I couldn’t accept the idea that, somehow, what I felt for him—in all its sudden, ferocious force—could be in any way reciprocated. Who would want to fall in love with me?
When sleep finally came it was five in the morning, and I had spent the last three hours going through Thomas’s essay several times, outlining the points I felt needed addressing. Then I woke with my alarm at nine. I showered and dressed, wondering if the brown cardigan and the green corduroy skirt I chose made me look like I was trying too hard to play the Kreuzberg bohemian. I somehow got through the working day—and made certain I arrived five minutes later than agreed at the Café Ankara. He was already sitting there, at work in his notebook, so engrossed that he initially didn’t see me enter. I was pleased about that, because at the sight of him I felt that exact same surge, that sense of accelerated pulsation, of absolute certainty, which hit me a few days ago. If I wanted confirmation, here it was.
I approached his table.
“So viele Wörter,”
I said. So many words.
He looked up at me and smiled. God, how I wanted to throw myself in his arms at that instant.
“So viele Wörter,”
he repeated to me—and reached out to take my hand, covering mine with both of his. The first time he touched me. He sat down and we started to talk about his essay, but he also wanted to know so much about my life in Prenzlauer Berg. He was so interested in
me
—and I found out some things about his life as well, like the fact that his father was a man who didn’t live the life he wanted to lead. And he made the most beautiful comment about my work as a translator, saying that all translation was putting morning words into evening words. Far too poetic in terms of the dreariness of my métier, but I loved the fact that he wanted to tell me he saw value in what I did.
And then . . .
then . . .
out of nowhere he told me I was wonderful. I was so thrown by this—so privately overwhelmed—that I did a stupid, coy thing. When he asked me to have dinner with him tonight, I made up some absurd excuse about having other plans. Why did I make that up? What was I thinking? I know the answer to that question. His praise—a near-declaration of love—so disconcerted me that my first reaction was to create a diversion, an excuse, anything to mess it up. Once that stupidity about being otherwise engaged was out of my mouth, I wanted to take it all back, to tell him that, yes, I was free but so scared he might now think me emotionally unpredictable. But—oh, God, what a relief—he asked if I was free tomorrow night. I tried to keep my cool as I said yes.