“You a student?”
“Hardly. Never went to university.”
“Was that your own decision?”
“Yeah, inasmuch as if you don’t study and don’t really care about passing exams, you generally end up not getting into a university. But did you actually come all this way from wherever you live to hear about my failure as a student?”
He said all this in an unchanging monotone. I also noticed that he never once made eye contact with me, that his vision was always focused elsewhere.
“I wanted to meet you,” I said.
“Why is that?”
“I think you know why.”
“Your guilt?”
Again, the comment was made without edge or anger.
“Yes, my guilt has something to do with me being here.”
“I read the journals. You should be guilty.”
“I am.”
“You should also know that she always talked about you.”
“Really?”
“You sound surprised.”
“It’s just . . . well, it was more than a quarter of a century ago when—”
“You turned her over to the CIA?”
I fell silent, staring down at the table, thinking,
I deserve this. All of this and more.
“I won’t try to defend what I did. It was wrong. And even though I didn’t know the actual story itself before I read the journals—”
“Mother killed a guy. That struck me as kind of cool. Especially as he was a bad guy. A Stasi prick liked the man who had custody of me for five years.”
“It was just five years you were with him?”
“Just five years?
It felt like a lifetime. But why should this story interest you?”
“Why do you think?”
“So . . . the journals. They really got to you?”
“Are you surprised?”
“I don’t know you.”
“You know certain things about me.”
“I know what my mother told me about you. I know what she wrote in the journals. I know what you did. I know what that cost her.”
“What did it cost her?”
“That’s another conversation.”
“How did she get you back?”
“You are very direct. Are all Americans so direct?”
“This one is. How did she get you back?”
I also wanted to ask:
and do you have a brother or a sister somewhere
? But Johannes’s distracted manner made me hesitate. Especially as his response to my last question was:
“Weren’t you going to order me a beer?”
I raised my hand. A waitress came by. Johannes asked for a Hefeweizen. I said she should make that two. When she left, he stared ahead for a very long time, never once turning toward me. Finally, he said:
“I didn’t want to do this.”
“Meet me?”
“Send you the journals. But Mother insisted. One of the last things she asked me. And she made me promise I’d do it.”
“What did she die of?”
“Cancer.”
“Was it fast?”
He shook his head, then added:
“But she did continue smoking right up to the end, so you’ve got to admire the courage of her convictions.”
“So it was lung cancer, throat cancer?”
“It was cancer caused by the radiation she was subjected to while in prison. Or, at least, that was what the doctors thought—as around one hundred other prisoners who were kept at Hohenschönhausen around the same time as Mother also died of different kinds of blood cancer. Mother said that when she was first arrested, they photographed her in a special room—and after the session she had these red burns everywhere. Radiation. Hidden from view. The fuckers thought they could impregnate their prisoners with radiation, then keep tabs on them afterward with homing devises. It’s like something from a bad mad scientist movie. Everyone who got that treatment at Hohenschönhausen is either dead or on their way. Mother was one of the last.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Are you?”
“More than I can say.”
Silence. Then:
“I ran into my other ‘parents’ a few days ago on the street. They’re in their sixties now. Still together. Still looking as stiff as they always did. Hadn’t seen them in twenty-five years. Not since Mother got me back. I saw them walking toward me. I sort of smiled. They walked right on by, didn’t recognize me at all.”
“Did that surprise you?”
“It pleased me. Because when I was with them I never knew I had this real mother who was locked up somewhere.”
“Your mother was locked up after—”
“After you did what you did? That’s right. Locked up, then sent off to Karl Marx Stadt as a form of internal exile. That city—it was our Siberia. But you interrupted me. Five years with those people who called themselves my parents. They were very strict. I had to call my alleged father ‘sir.’ My ‘mother’ was also an officer in the Stasi and not comfortable with the whole idea of affection. Or, at least, that’s what I tell myself I remember from that time. The truth is, I remember so very little, except that my ‘parents’ were always distant with me, always so formal. But . . . from the start, I thought they were my real parents. So I also thought: this is how parents behave. Then, one day, some men in suits came to the door of our apartment not far from here in Friedrichshain. They were accompanied by two policemen. One of the men spoke with my ‘father.’ Then he spoke with me. Said he wanted to bring me somewhere to meet a woman who really wanted to get to know me. It was all just a little confusing. My ‘parents’ stood there, saying nothing, while one of the suits hissed at them and another handed them a bunch of papers.
“What they were doing was telling these people—my ‘parents’—that they knew they had gotten this child . . .
me
. . . through illegal means. Just as they also knew that, in their ‘professional work,’ they were guilty of many crimes against humanity.”
He paused, that half smile crossing his lips again.
“Do I talk too much?” he asked.
“Not at all.”
“You’re lying. I know I talk too much. My teachers all told me that. My friends all tell me that, not that I have many friends. Dietrich tells me that all the time.”
“Who’s Dietrich?” I asked.
“My boss.”
“Where?”
“A bookshop a few streets away from here. I work there. Have been for seven years. We specialize in comics, graphic novels. Especially Japanese stuff. Manga.”
“We got off the subject of you going back to your mother.”
“You really want to hear it all, don’t you?”
“I do.”
“My alleged parents—when they understood what the suits were telling them, and which I didn’t understand myself at the time—well, my ‘mother’ began to sob. My ‘father’ . . his name is not important . . . stood there all tight-lipped. The man in the suit who had talked to me—he was actually very kind—asked me:
“‘Would you like to meet your real mother, Johannes?’
“‘But this is my mother,’ I said, pointing to the woman who always played that role. At which point she began to cry. Loudly. Her husband hushing her. Telling her to behave.
“‘No, the Klauses looked after you while your real mother was unwell. But she is very much better now and she wants to meet you.’
“‘But . . . these are my parents.’
“Even my ‘father’—who I learned later helped pioneer psychological torture methods against dissidents—sobbed when he heard me say that.
“‘I’ll tell you what,’ the suit told me. ‘Let’s go meet your real mother and see how you feel after you’ve met her.’
“They drove me to this place—it was like a school, and there was this room with all these games and toys to play with. I remember coming in with the suit and being met by this woman who was very kind. She got me some juice and asked me what I liked to play with the most. I told her I liked puzzles. She found me a puzzle. I think it was a puzzle of the Brandenburg Gate—big pieces, suitable for a kid. And I sat in a corner, working on this puzzle for a long time. When I looked up, I saw this woman still watching me. She had short hair. I can’t say if I remember she was as thin as she always was after that. But I looked up and she smiled at me. I smiled at her. I don’t remember much else that happened after that, though when Mother was dying a few weeks ago and I asked her all about that first time she’d seen me after all those years, she told me that she had to work so hard not to cry. Because she was terrified of frightening me. But she did come over and help me make the puzzle. And she then told me things about when I was first born, and how my father wrote stories, and how she herself used to sing me to sleep, and . . .
“The thing is, I remember none of this. But Mother recounted it all just three weeks ago like it was yesterday. She said that the more we talked that first day, the more I seemed to trust her. There was a point, after around an hour, when I got tired and laid my head against her shoulder. She said that even the suits in the room—all of whom were members of the
Bundesnachrichtendienst
—began to sob.
“They put us up in this halfway house for a few nights to make certain I was adjusting. But I just accepted that this was my real mother, maybe because she was so kind and affectionate to me. Then, after around a week, they allowed Mother to bring me home.”
“And home was . . . ?”
“Prenzlauer Berg. The same apartment in which she lived with my father. After his death and her expulsion, they gave it to some people. But once The Wall came down and Mother didn’t have to stay in exile in Karl Marx Stadt any longer, she became quite the attack dog. Or, at least, that’s what I heard from her friends after the funeral. Within a week of the GDR collapsing, Mother had found some very tough lawyers in West Berlin who got me back to her. And the Klauses didn’t dare put up a fight. The lawyers also got the apartment back. When she started getting sick around five years ago, they were able to get her a settlement from the state, given that she was made sick by all that radiation in prison. Not a bad amount of money. I think it was one hundred thousand euros. Mother bought the apartment for us, for me. She said she needed to leave me some sort of heritage. What was left over . . . she had free health care from the state and a small pension. But she had no work, so it all went over the five years she was sick. But even so, she also insisted, twice a year, to take me somewhere interesting. London. Paris. Istanbul. A week in Sicily. A week in Marrakesh. We traveled cheaply. But we still saw places. She told me that her dream when she was young—and couldn’t travel beyond the GDR—was to move freely around the world. ‘Like my Thomas.’ That’s a direct quote. ‘Like my Thomas.’”
I hung my head and said nothing.
“But again I’m talking too much,
ja
? That’s what Dietrich always says. ‘You talk too much, Johannes. You start and you can’t stop. You say whatever comes into your head. You have a problem not shutting up.’”
“I don’t have any problem with it.”
“That’s because you’re feeling guilty. When Mother asked me to send you the journals, I said, ‘Why? Because all these years later you want the man to feel guilty?’ And she said: ‘No, because I want him to know how wrong I got things.’”
“Your mother didn’t get anything wrong. I did.”
“So what are you doing here?”
“Meeting you.”
“You traveled all this way just to meet me?”
“How can I put this? You were so much a part of our life together back then. Your mother couldn’t bear the fact that they had taken you away from her. Everything, absolutely everything in her life, was about getting you back.”
“I know. I’ve read the journals.”
“And what did you think when you read them?”
“What did I think? I thought: ‘Mom, you were crazy expending all that energy on me. I mean, I’m a guy who works in a bookshop. I read Manga all the time. I don’t have a lot of friends. I don’t have a girlfriend. And some shrink told me and Mother that I have this manic disorder where I talk all the time, say whatever comes into my head.’”
“Your mother loved you more than anything.”
“Yeah, and that was her problem. Along with loving you.”
Again, I said nothing.
“That hurt, right?” he asked.
I just shrugged.
“Tell me the truth,” he said. “Did that hurt?”
“Yes,” I said. “It hurt.”
“Good,” he said, his voice still that incessant monotone. “Come on. I’ll show you where she lived.”
There was a taxi driving by as we stepped out into Karl-Marx-Allee. Johannes told me it was stupid to waste money on somebody driving us. But my head was swimming, the jet lag intermingling with Johannes’s unnerving delivery, his uncensored directness, his profound strangeness which also allowed him to sidestep decorum or standard-issue politesse and instead articulate everything that was in his brain at the moment you were speaking with him. What I found most unsettling about all this was the way he was also able to cut to the heart of the matter and express the truth as he saw it. A truth that—though totally subjective—had more than the weight of veracity to it.