For someone who has often been accused of being a little closed-off, I’ve always had a certain talent when it comes to pitching an idea, especially in the knowledge that it could get me on a plane somewhere. Having carefully thought through this spiel before heading out to lunch with Judith, I reeled it off with a fluency and a confidence that I hoped didn’t sound too rehearsed.
“Now don’t tell me all that came to you just now,” she said when I finished. “But it does sound like the makings of a damn good book . . . especially if you can do what you did with the Egypt book and make us interested in the people that you meet. That’s your greatest strength, Thomas: the fact you are fascinated by other people’s worlds, the way you really do get the idea that every life is its very own novel.”
She paused to take a sip of her wine.
“Now go home and write me a slam-dunk proposal that I can get past those stiffs in the sales and marketing department. And tell your agent to give me a call.”
The proposal was written and submitted within a week. I had a thumbs-up from my publisher three weeks later (oh, for the days when publishing was so straightforward, so willing to back a modest idea, so writer-centric). And my agent did well with the deal, garnering me a $9,000 advance—half of which was to be paid up front. Given that it was three times my first contract, I was elated. Especially as I was able to wave this new contract under the noses of several magazine editors and come away with three commissions from
Harper’s, National Geographic,
and
The Atlantic Monthly,
which added another $5,000 to my kitty. I started doing proper research about minor details like the cost of living and discovered that in a scruffy area like Wedding I could probably find a room in a shared apartment for around 150 deutsche marks a month—which, at the time, was around one hundred bucks. And thinking that it might give the book an interesting texture if I were to be somehow tangentially involved in the city’s Cold War complexities, I also sent my résumé and a copy of my Egyptian tome to Radio Liberty in Washington. They were the US-government-funded broadcasting network that beamed in news and the American worldview to all countries behind the Iron Curtain. Along with my book, I attached a résumé and a cover letter explaining that I was planning to spend a year in Berlin and might there be some sort of opening for a writer in their offices there.
I didn’t expect to hear back from them, filing the whole thing away under “long shot.” I also figured they were probably the sort of organization that only hired rabid anti-Communists who were also bilingual. But a letter did arrive from Washington one afternoon. It was from a gentleman named Huntley Cranley, the director of programming, who informed me that he found my book and my résumé most interesting, and he was dispatching them on to Jerome Wellmann, the head of Radio Liberty in Berlin. Once there I should inform him that I was in town. After that, it was all down to the discretion of Mr. Wellmann whether he granted me an audience or not.
A week later—my apartment sublet again, my one suitcase packed, a heavy army greatcoat on my back—I folded this letter into a German-English dictionary, which I then threw into my shoulder bag. After turning off the lights and double locking the door, I took the bus out to Kennedy Airport on a grim January evening when sleet simply wouldn’t transform itself to snow. There, I checked in my bag, accepted a boarding pass, passed through the usual array of detectors and security, squeezed myself into my assigned seat, watched the skyline of Manhattan recede into nocturnal midwinter gloom, and quietly drank myself to sleep as the plane achieved cruising altitude and journeyed east.
When I awoke many hours later, my head was still thick and gloomy after far too many miniatures of Scotch. I peered out the window and saw nothing but the gray density of cloud.
That’s the thing about finding yourself in the clouds,
I remember thinking at the time.
You are in somewhere which looks like nowhere. You are flying through a blank page . . . and you have no idea what’s to be written on it
.
Then the cloud turned to mist, the mist burned away, and down below there was . . .
Land. Fields. Buildings. The outline of a city on the curved edge of the horizon. And all refracted through the numbness of a night spent sleeping sitting up in a cramped seat. We had another ten minutes or so before touchdown. Reaching into my jacket pocket, I pulled out the bag of tobacco and rolling papers that had been my constant companion since my final year at college—and which had, without question, helped me negotiate all the nervy moments at my desk over the past year. Put simply, I had become a serious smoker during the course of writing my first book and needed at least fifteen cigarettes to carry myself through most days. And now—even though the “No Smoking” sign had been switched on—I was already pulling out my smoking paraphernalia and quickly fashioning a cigarette, which could be lit up as soon as I was inside the terminal building.
Land. Fields. Buildings. Specifically: the high-rise outline of Frankfurt, that most mercantile and aesthetically flat of German cities. I had studied German since my freshman year at college. It had always been a complex relationship: a love of the language’s density of form and structural rigor coupled with the desperate grind of the dative case and the
longueurs
that accompany trying to drill a language into your head, especially when you are living largely outside said language. I had toyed with the idea of spending an entire year studying in Germany—but instead chose to spend my junior year editing the college newspaper. How could I have thought that being editor in chief of a student newspaper was in some way more important than having a year playing the student prince at Tübigen or Heidelberg and knocking around assorted European capitals? It was the last time I ever made a deliberately careerist decision, and it was one which taught me a lesson: whenever the choice was between doing something practical and self-advancing or the chance to disappear out of town, always go with the latter decision.
Now—as if to prove that point once more—I had again slammed the door on the life I was leading and jumped a plane heading eastward. After we touched down and dealt with the attendant frontier formalities in Frankfurt, I boarded another flight venturing even farther east. Less than an hour later, I peered out the window. There it was, directly below us.
The Wall.
As the plane dipped its wings and began to circle over the eastern front of Berlin, that long, snaking concrete edifice became more defined. Even from this high altitude, it was so formidable, so severe, so conclusive. Before the clouds broke and The Wall became a scenic reality, we had spent the previous thirty minutes bouncing through turbulence over German Democratic Republic airspace, brought about (as the American pilot explained) by having to fly at just 10,000 feet over this foreign country.
“They worry that if the commercial planes fly any higher,” the woman next to me said, “they’ll engage in surveillance. For the enemy. Who is everyone outside the Warsaw Pact and the ‘fraternal brotherhood’ of fellow socialist prison camps, like Cuba, Albania, North Korea . . .”
I looked at this woman. She was in her early fifties—dressed in a severe suit, slightly heavy in the face, puffing away on an HB cigarette (the pack displayed on the armrest between us), her eyes reflecting a tired intelligence; someone, I sensed immediately, who had seen a great many things she would have preferred not to have seen.
“And might you have had experience of such a prison?” I asked.
“What makes you think that?” she asked, taking a deep long drag off her cigarette.
“Just a hunch.”
She stubbed out her cigarette and reached for another, telling me:
“I know they will put on the no-smoking sign in two minutes, but I can never fly over this place and not light up. It’s almost Pavlovian.”
“So when did you get out?”
“Thirteen August, 1961. Hours before they sealed all the borders and began to build that ‘Antifascist Detection Device’ you see below you.”
“How did you know you had to leave?”
“You ask a lot of questions. And your German isn’t bad. You a journalist?”
“No, just someone who asks a lot of questions.”
She paused for a moment, giving me a quizzical look, wondering if she could trust me with whatever she was about to say, yet also very much wanting to impart her story to me.
“You want a real cigarette?” she asked, noticing that I was rolling yet another one on top of my Olivetti typewriter case.
“That would be nice.”
“Fancy typewriter,” she said.
“A going-away gift.”
“From whom?”
“My father.”
On the night before my departure, I’d arranged to see Dad at his favorite “Jap joint,” as he called the Japanese restaurant he frequently patronized in the Forties off Lexington Avenue. While there he threw back three saka-tinis (a martini make with sake), then asked the waiter to get him something he’d left in the cloakroom. He ended up presenting me with a fountain pen and a fancy new red Olivetti typewriter, an emblematic piece of modern Italian design. I was both thrown by his generosity and impressed by his good taste. But when I told him this, he just laughed and said:
“Doris—the broad I’m banging right now—she picked it out. Said a published writer like you needs a swanky machine like this one. Know what I told her? ‘One day I gotta read my kid’s book.’”
Suddenly he flinched, knowing he’d just revealed something he would have preferred to not have revealed.
“Shit, did I say something stupid or what?” he asked.
“It’s fine, Dad.”
“It’s just the booze talking, Tommy.”
“Of course it is. And thanks for the cool gift.”
“You write well with it, got me?”
I nodded, keeping my hurt to myself, wishing myself anywhere but here.
“He must be a nice man,” the woman next to me said, eyeing the seriously stylish red plastic case in which the typewriter was housed.
I said nothing. I just smiled. She noted that.
“So he’s not a nice guy?” she asked.
“He’s a complex guy.”
“And he probably loves you very much . . . and doesn’t know how to express it. Hence the nice gift. If you’re not a journalist, then you must be some sort of writer.”
“So who told you to leave the GDR?” I asked, quickly changing the subject.
“No one did. I overheard talk.”
She lowered her head, lowered her voice.
“My father . . . he was a senior member of the Party in Leipzig. And he was part of a top-secret group that had been briefed by the hierarchy in Berlin. I was thirty at the time. Married, no children, wanting to leave my husband—a functionary in a government bureau in which I had a job. As my father was high up, my position was considered glamorous by GDR standards: a senior receptionist at one of the big international hotels in the city. I had Saturday lunch every week with my parents. We were close, especially as I was their only child. My father doted on me, even though, given his Party connections, I could never express what I silently thought: our country was becoming more and more of a place where you were either with the Party or shut out of anything the society could offer you. I wanted to travel. That was simply impossible, except to other gray fraternal socialist states. But I articulated none of this to my parents, as they were both true believers. Until I heard my father, on that Saturday, tell my mother that she should stay indoors Sunday and not answer the phone, as there was going to be a ‘big change’ happening overnight.
“I had heard rumors for weeks, months, that the government was going to finally seal the borders—which, in Berlin, still remained porous. Walter Ulbricht—he was the general secretary of the Party at the time—was always going on about the ‘leakage’ at the frontier; the traitors who turned their back on our ‘humane, utopian’ society for the ‘nightmarish filth of the capitalist West.’
“I was returning from the bathroom when my father told my mother about staying inside the next day, and only overheard it as I approached the sitting room where we were taking coffee. I froze when my father’s voice whispered to her about the ‘big change overnight.’ I felt as if I was in free fall. Because I knew what this meant. And I knew that I had only hours to act if I wanted to . . .
“I checked my watch. It was twelve minutes to three. I steadied myself. I went back into the sitting room. I finished drinking coffee with my parents, then excused myself, telling them I was going swimming with a girlfriend at the public baths. I kissed them both good-bye and resisted the desire to hold them close, especially my father, because I sensed I would not be seeing them again for a very long time.
“Then I rode my bicycle home. Happily, Stefan, my husband, was playing football that afternoon with the other functionaries from the housing department where he worked. So he was away from the sad little apartment we shared together. I always thought that one of life’s greater ironies. Stefan worked in the department in charge of allocating apartments in Leipzig, and he could only get us this depressing little place. But that was Stefan. He always thought very small. Anyway, I let myself into our place. Once inside I collected a few small items: a change of clothes, a small stash of actual west deutsche marks, my passport, and whatever eastmarks I could find. I was there no longer than ten minutes. Then I rode my bike to the Hauptbahnhof and boarded the three-forty-eight express to Berlin. Within two hours I was there. I had a friend in the city, a man named Florian with whom—I can talk about this now—I was romantically linked. Not love. Just occasional comfort. But available whenever he came to Leipzig or on the rare occasions when I was in Berlin. He was a journalist with the party newspaper,
Neues Deutschland.
But, like me, he was also, in private, someone who had grown more and more doubtful about the regime, about the future. He also told me, two weeks earlier when he was in Leipzig, that he had a friend in Berlin who knew of a place where you could cross over from Friedrichshain to Kreuzberg without detection . . . not that the frontier between the two cities had been sealed off as of yet.