I talked Johannes into letting me treat us to a cab. En route, he told me that he was hoping to open his very own cartoon and graphic novel bookshop very soon. He had the premises picked out—on Prenzlauer Allee between Marienburgerstrasse and Christburger Strasse. The east side of the street, a five-minute walk from his own apartment on Jablonski Strasse.
“Prenzlauer Berg is all young bourgeois bohemian families. A great audience for cartoons and graphic novels. Now if I can convince a bank to front me some money.”
“How much do you make in the current bookshop?”
“Around two hundred and fifty euros a week before tax. Maybe one eighty to take home. But thanks to Mother, I’ve got no rent. And I don’t spend a lot on myself. I actually manage to save fifty of that a week. I’ve got maybe four thousand put aside now. If the bank could front me fifteen . . .”
“What would you envisage?”
“Nothing less than the most comprehensive and coolest graphic novel bookstore in the capital. I’ve got close to fifty meters in the premises I want. The landlord’s willing to rent it to me for less than one thousand per month, which isn’t cheap. But I’ve been doing my math. If I make this place
the go-to
bookshop of its kind in Berlin, I should be able to turn over three thousand a week easily.”
“And you’d be your own boss.”
“Exactly. That would be such a change. No answering to some petty little guy who really knows shit about Manga and is only in it because graphic novels sell. But he has no love of what he’s selling. That’s what Mother said about your books. They all have love in them.”
“She really said that?”
“Love of writing, love of traveling, love of running away.”
“That I’ve done a great deal of.”
“She said that, too.”
Jablonski Strasse was a street of venerable apartment buildings, all daubed with the ubiquitous graffiti that seemed to be an essential component of the new Berlin cityscape. Though many of the apartment blocks had undergone architectural plastic surgery, there were still several that remained unapologetically rooted in the GDR era. Johannes’s building was one of these. A faded brown pebble-dash exterior. Grubby windows, some of which had wood hammered over their smashed frames. A front doorway that was almost hanging off the hinges. A hallway that smelled of unfinished concrete and mold.
“We’re all being asked to pay three thousand each to have the entire façade and hallways renovated,” he said. “But no one who lives here has three grand to spend.”
His apartment was at the top of the house. I approached it, preparing myself for the worst. A toxic shambles. Dishes piled high in the sink. Toilets not cleaned in months. Dirty clothes everywhere. Spoiled food in the fridge.
Certainly, the stairwell up to this fourth-floor apartment boded badly, as it was poorly lit, half-painted, a single bare lightbulb providing the most nominal of illumination.
But as for the apartment itself, Johannes must have also decided that order was a solution against the world’s disorder. It was no more than five hundred square feet, half of which was given over to a living room with basic furnishings—a simple modern black sofa and armchair that Johannes told me he found (much to his mother’s delight) discarded outside a furniture showroom. Both objects had broken springs and bad padding, but Johannes knew a guy from school who worked in a furniture factory and renovated them both for one hundred euros. He mentioned this sum with particular pride, just as he explained the fifty or so Manga drawings that blanketed the walls. None of them were framed. “I don’t have that sort of money,” he explained. But they were all affixed to the walls of the apartment with the exact same sort of adhesive that gave the effect of four corners of a frame around each drawing. What was even more fascinating was that the drawings were lined up in immaculate rows, the distance between the cartoons perfectly measured so that none appeared farther apart than the others.
I took this all in, along with the simple kitchen, the piles upon piles of graphic novels on the apartment’s many shelves, all completely alphabetized. Johannes showed me his bedroom—a simple single bed, its hospital corners tight as a drum. He showed me his extensive CD collection of strange Scandinavian heavy metal bands. Then he opened a door and said:
“Here’s where Mother worked and slept.”
What I saw, as the door swung inward, blindsided me. The room was no bigger than a cell. Petra too slept in a simple single bed that took up one wall. There was an equally simple white veneered desk which took up part of the other wall, on which sat a dated computer. But then I looked up at the shelves above her work area. There—covering two long ledges, each perhaps six feet long—was copy after copy of all fourteen books that I had written. The original English versions—and their subsequent paperback incarnations—took up the top shelf. All the German and French and Italian and Greek and Polish and Swedish and Finnish translations were piled high on the shelves below.
Nearby there were also four big box files, on the spines of which had been written
T.N.: Journalismus
. Opening one of these for me Johannes showed me article after article I had written over the last twenty years for publications as wide ranging as
National Geographic, The New York Review of Books,
The Times Literary Supplement.
How had she managed to track all these down? And why,
why,
did she bother?
As soon as my brain posed that inane question, I found myself reaching for Petra’s desk chair, pulling it toward me, and collapsing into it just as I started to cry, my sorrow now without limits.
All these years . . . all that time when I so wondered about her, when I told myself it was all in the grim past, don’t revisit it, don’t open the Pandora’s box . . .
All that time, when I still privately longed for her, when I mourned what we had, what I had squandered and lost, and all the terrible things I knew must have been inflicted upon her in the wake of denouncing her . . .
All that time . . . she was still there. With me. Following my work, my career, collecting my books in as many languages as she could find, tracking down all my journalistic scribblings, making certain she was abreast of what I was always doing, what was preoccupying me professionally, what I was thinking and writing about the world and life as it was happening to me.
Seeing all those painstakingly sourced books and articles—all perfectly ordered, all a testament to the very minor oeuvre that I will leave behind when death finally comes calling for me—one simple but overpowering thought grabbed hold of me and wouldn’t let go:
She loved me. And I just couldn’t see it.
Johannes sat on the edge of the bed as I cried, watching me with almost clinical detachment. When I finally stopped, he said:
“I used to hate you. Every time Mother managed to spend money she didn’t have on one of your books, every time a package would arrive from New York or London or Lisbon with your new magnum opus—and she had to collect all your fucking translations as well—she would sit where you’re sitting right now. And she would do just what you’ve done. She would cry.”
He stood up and reached for something on a shelf above me. An envelope. Thick. Manila. He tossed it in front of me. My name was on it. In her writing.
“Mother said if you ever did make it over to Berlin—and only if you really did physically show up
here
—I was to give you this.
“But you can read it elsewhere. Because I don’t really want to be around you right now.”
He stood up. I picked up the envelope and followed him as he headed to the front door. He opened it. I stepped over its threshold, the envelope now tucked under my arm.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I’m so . . . sorry.”
Johannes stared into the empty distance. And said:
“Aren’t we all.”
TWO
D
EAREST THOMAS.
So. Finally. At last.
En fin. Endlich
.
Actually, the German synonym works best.
Endlich
. At the end of things. Which this is. A letter I should have written years . . . no, decades . . . earlier. And which I have dodged for so many reasons. Some complex. Some far too personal. Some just so commonplace.
Endlich
.
How to start? How to begin?
The facts:
For the past five years I have been in thrall to a form of blood cancer known by its rather long-winded but still impressive clinical name:
Precursor B acute lymphoblastic leukemia
. I have naturally been reading up a great deal on the thing that I have been fighting these sixty months and which seems determined to take my life away from me sooner than I’d prefer. There are about twenty different substrata of the disease, but I found the following definition online some time back. I quote it because it seemed to sum it all up:
“Acute leukemia is characterized by the rapid increase of immature blood cells. The crowding makes the bone marrow unable to produce healthy blood cells. Immediate treatment is required in acute leukemia due to the rapid progression and accumulation of the malignant cells which then spill over into the bloodstream and spread to other organs of the body.”
A part of me was blackly amused that it was the
immature
blood cells within my body that wreaked havoc upon me. So much that wreaked havoc on me took place when I was in my twenties, a time when I was rather immature about the ways of the world.
Or am I just striving for a metaphor here when none is needed?
Another thing about leukemia and its causes was listed on that same site:
“Among adults the known causes are natural and artificial ionizing radiation . . .”
Of course, smoking two packets of cigarettes per day, as I have done for the past three decades, can’t have helped things either. But the exposure to radiation is—as they say in bad English crime novels of a certain epoch—the smoking gun. I told you about being “photographed” at Hohenschönhausen after my first arrest. When I was deported from West Berlin in ’84 they also held me for a while in Hohenschönhausen—not that they ever told me which prison I was in, but I remembered it all from the previous experience. The reason I was held in the prison was the death of their beloved Herr Haechen. The Stasi were certain I was to blame. So when the
Bundesnachrichtendienst
and the Americans tossed me back to the Stasi—after me pleading with them to grant me asylum (but as one of your compatriots told me: “We did that already and look what happened”)—I was immediately incarcerated on suspicion of murder. The thing was, I had covered my tracks so well—and Haechen left no record of having arranged to meet me in Hamburg—that there was nothing they could directly pin on me. Of course, they tried all sorts of psychological coercion—denying me sleep, forcing me to endure, during one terrible week, eighteen hours a day of interrogation. But I realized from the moment I was locked up in a cell that I had the trump card. That card, quite simply, was my silence. If I confessed, I was doomed. A life sentence. A nightmare without end. If I refused to talk, if I said nothing, they could not get anything on me.
So that was my tactic—and the war of nerves that followed over the five months I was kept at Hohenschönhausen was desperate. Every three days they brought me to be “photographed” again. Every time I came away with red welts on my back.
Radiation.
I finally outlasted my interrogators. They gave up on me. They also told me that any chance of me ever seeing Johannes again was gone. But you must know something else that happened early on in my incarceration. I was pregnant—maybe six to eight weeks—with our child. Upon being handed back, I was examined extensively by several doctors. A blood and urine test validated the pregnancy. As they knew—via Haechen’s reports about me—that you were the father of this child, they took action. One day in prison, I was brought to the hospital wing. I demanded to know why I was here. They said it was another routine examination. I sensed something terrible afoot. I demanded to see a senior doctor. I demanded a lawyer. I demanded . . .
But suddenly two male nurses were in the examination room. When I tried to break away from them, they held me down while the woman doctor on duty gave me an injection that knocked me out.
When I awoke some hours later, I was strapped down to a hospital bed. From the pain between my legs, I knew what they had done while I was under anesthetic. The woman doctor—her name was Keller—came in and actually smiled when she said:
“We scraped that capitalist filth out of you. Scraped it all away.”
At that moment I vowed that, someday, I would destroy this woman. Just as I settled matters with Haechen. Just as I was determined to find out the names of the people who had been given Johannes and destroy them. It’s horrifying to admit this now. But though I forgave Judit for what she did—because she did it out of weakness, out of fear, out of pressure so extreme on her to cooperate—I could never forgive those who allowed the system to simply augment their cruelty. As a woman only a week or so away from her death I can admit: I have never, for a moment, lost sleep over murdering Haechen. He was killing me slowly with his pitilessness—and I knew that when and if the order came for me to be eliminated, he would have executed it without a moment’s hesitation. The only reason I think that the Stasi didn’t do me in is that the Americans and the
Bundesnachrichtendienst
were aware of my existence. Even though they handed me back to them, had I been “suicided,” it would have looked bad. Better to try to break me psychologically. To abort the child of ours that I so wanted. To then ship me off to the bleakest corner of this bleak republic of ours—Karl Marx Stadt—as a form of internal exile.
Karl Marx Stadt was industrial. It had no character, no charm, no culture. But it had an outpost of DDR Rundfunk—the state radio station—and I was given the job of writing book programs. They found me a tiny apartment. I began to sleep with a colleague at the station—a quiet man named Hans Schygula who had been exiled from Berlin as well, only in his case for the crime of propagating free jazz and once playing Stockhausen on the national radio service. Hans was older than me, well into his fifties, divorced, bookish, decent. He helped me get through the day. Especially during those early days when I first arrived in Karl Marx Stadt—and was trying to cope with what they had done to me in that prison hospital. The loss of our child was so devastating that I realized the only thing I could do to survive was blot it out.
No doubt, you might think I hate you for turning me in. Yes, there were moments—especially early on, in the wake of being expelled back to East Berlin, and the months of incarceration, and the forced abortion—when I did hate you. But honestly, my love, I hated myself for not having the courage, early on in our story, to have told you everything. But everything in my background, the social conditioning that was intrinsic in formulating my worldview, taught me to conceal, to suppress. I always saw—and felt—the profound love you had for me. But I couldn’t completely trust it. I had to believe that if the truth willed out, you would have screamed betrayal and fled. Whereas by not telling you the whole story—how Haechen used Johannes as the ongoing bargaining chip—I destroyed everything. Had it been me in your position, I’ve no doubt I would have reacted the same way you did. And my one great hope over all these years is that you have not anguished too much about it all . . . though in each of your books (and I have read them all) you’ve always somehow made mention of life being a collection of sadnesses one frequently keeps hidden away. Along with all the other hints you’ve dropped in your more recent books about the shakiness of your own marriage, I always sensed that the damage of what befell both of us back then never fully cauterized.
And as for me . . . bless Hans. He made the years in Karl Marx Stadt just about bearable. Then The Wall came down. Within days of us being able to cross into the West without problem—I literally walked over to Kreuzberg and reclaimed the two journals I had hidden away before my arrest in the basement of my old building—I had also found a terrific civil rights attorney named Julia Koch. She took on my case after hearing me tell her everything about how Johannes was removed from me. I think Julia decided that mine would be a test case—and would demonstrate how the Stasi would be held accountable for their actions. It only took around six weeks of her applying the most relentless sort of pressure before the Klauses—the couple who had been “given” Johannes—were shamed publicly in the local press. There was something of a minor cause célèbre—especially as other people came forward, stating that both Herr and Frau Klaus had been among the most vindictive and excessive of Stasi interrogators. The fact that they had happily adopted a child taken away from a woman wrongfully accused of political activity . . . put it this way, I gather they were hounded out of their apartment in Friedrichshain and I have heard that they both finished their careers in clerical jobs in the local tax office.
And that doctor—the one who told me with pleasure how she had aborted our child—my lawyer also went after her. Once her name was made public, another thirty women—all interred at one time or another in Hohenschönhausen—came forward to say that she had performed abortions or (even in certain cases) sterilizations on them without their consent. The result of all this was that the doctor was struck off the medical record and ended up six months later plouwing her car off a bridge near Berlin while drunk.
I wish I could say I got any pleasure from her demise. All I could think was: people who commit savagery toward others must always justify their actions with phrases like: “I was only following orders.” Or: “I was told it was for the good of the Fatherland.” Or: “The system made me into the person I was then.” It’s like the way we believe that by eliminating an entire race of people, or putting up an “antifascist protection device” that walls in an entire country, or locking up anyone who voices a contradictory opinion against the system under which we live, we will solve our communal problems. Whereas the truth is: Walls fall down. Systems are discredited and come asunder. An entire collective reality is shown to be fatally flawed. And the entire human circus just keeps moving forward.
One day recently, when I could still walk a bit, I asked Johannes to bring me down to the Brandenburg Gate. Growing up I remember how The Wall was always
there,
just before its ceremonial entrance. How we could see the ruins of the Reichstag and the trees of the Tiergarten to the immediate west. How near and yet how wildly far it all was. The forbidden planet into which we would never be allowed to cross.
Then Gorbachev decided he didn’t want to prop up our sad little republic anymore. So things fell apart. The center did not hold.
Anyone can walk through that gate now.
So there I stood by the gate, just two weeks ago with my son. The son who was wrenched from me owing to all that Wall represented. Johannes is now nearly twenty-eight years old. A wonderful, original young man—yet also one whom so many people think of as strange, different. Yes, he is singular. Yes, he does live in his own world—a world of comics and graphic novels and Japanese cartoonists that has little to do with the nuts-and-bolts of everyone else’s reality. But isn’t he far more interesting for being that way? He has few friends, let alone a woman in his life. But he is a good man. A very good son. Every time I look at him, I keep thinking of the horror that took him away from me and the providence that brought us back together. It’s been more than twenty years since that reconciliation. He still tells me he remembers so little about the five years when he was apart from me and with “those people.” Just as he himself has no recollection now of the GDR.
“There really was a wall here?” he asked me as he held my arm by the Brandenburg Gate.
“You know there was,” I said. “I’ve told you enough times, and you studied all about it in school.”
“But they left none of it behind.”
“Because it was too horrible to be left behind.”
“Then they should have left some of it there,” Johannes said, “just so people would remember how bad it was.”
I couldn’t have put it better myself. I was so impressed with his analysis of it all. But what he will come to realize, when he’s a bit older, is that if we keep staring at the wall that divided us, that locked us in, we are still in thrall to the horror that it represents. Perhaps that’s the largest overarching question in life. Can we always really look forward, as everyone endlessly advises us to do? Or do we have to hold on to certain key vestiges of our past—as painful, as terrible as they might be—as a way of understanding that there are certain things in life that change us so radically that they stay with us forever? Can we ever really close the door on that which still haunts us?
I so wanted that child of ours. I know I shouldn’t have gone off the pill without informing you. And yes, if I had only had the courage to tell you about the shadows trailing me everywhere . . .
But I didn’t. Because—and I understand this only now—I didn’t believe myself worthy of the happiness you represented, of the life we could have given each other. Perhaps that’s been the hardest thing about the last three decades. Knowing that you were the man of my life, that I had never felt that way about anybody before or after. Knowing—and this is the sadness that I will take with me to the grave—that I had a moment, an extraordinary moment, with you.