But if we can’t hold on to the moment, it becomes just that: a moment. And life, like recorded time itself, has its own ruthless logic, a forward momentum that is as implacable as it is unstoppable. Until it runs out for you.
The idea that my life is being taken away from me in my fifties . . . I think about those men and women at the prison who were told to train radiation guns on me and, nearly thirty years on, have precipitated my early death.
But fifty years from now—when they too have vanished from this life, when disease and old age and time have snuffed them out—will anyone even remember the fact that the security apparatus of a vanished state once used radiation to mark its political prisoners and bequeathed to them a fatal form of blood cancer? Do people now ever ponder the effects of mustard gas in the First World War? Or the spread of typhoid in the trenches? Was there a woman in Berlin in 1910 who had her one-year-old son unfairly taken away from her, and who (unlike me) never got him back . . . and for the rest of her life could never really get over her loss? Who is the witness to her story today? No one. Because her siblings, her friends, her work colleagues, her neighbors, the people she grew up with, the cousins she saw once a year, the man who sold her a newspaper every morning, have long since left this life. But think of the pain she carried with her—and how, at the time, it mingled with all the other pain of those who walked the earth during the same epoch as she did. All of them, like us now, struggling with things so difficult, so raw, so forlorn—during the moment in which it was all so lived.
But then, mortality wipes out an entire generation. And all the pain they carried? Vanished. Forgotten.
I do not consider mine to be an unfortunate life. On the contrary. Hans moved with me back here from Karl Marx Stadt and fought his way back into radio in the new unified Germany. Though we kept separate apartments in Berlin—at first because I needed to give Johannes time to readjust, but also because Hans and I were happier not cohabiting together—we remained a couple until his death from pancreatic cancer two years ago. Was it love? Not really. But he was my lover, my rock. When I myself started falling ill, it was he who insisted I again contact my Rottweiler lawyer, Julia. She won me a settlement from the state. Not vast—but enough to buy Johannes an apartment, so I can die knowing that, at the very worst, my son has a fully paid roof over his head for the rest of his life.
And it is the subject of Johannes which I need to raise with you now, my love. With Hans dead and me soon gone, he will be alone in the world.
Though he has enough practical skills to pay his bills and do his laundry and change the sheets on his bed once a week, I genuinely fear that he will be friendless. Isolated. Unable to connect.
Therefore, if it is at all possible, I ask just one thing from you:
Be his friend. He needs someone he can talk to, seek counsel from, lean on. The very fact that you are reading this letter now means you came all the way from your home in Maine to Berlin because you knew that we had unfinished business. And because the sense of loss never went away.
I know I should have contacted you years ago. I dreamed of that, just as I pushed away that hope. Because of my shame at having deceived you. Because I also believed that I deserved not to be forgiven. We’re all so preposterous, aren’t we? Holding on to our torments, our agonies, our small dramas—and using them to sabotage that which we so want . . . and actually deserve.
Loving you. Being loved by you. What a gift. I deserved you. You deserved me. The moment came. The moment went. And I still think of us and cry.
Ich liebe dich. Damals. Jetzt. Immer
.
Deine Petra.
THREE
I
CH LIEBE DICH.
Damals. Jetzt. Immer.
I love you. Then. Now. Always.
Deine Petra.
Your Petra.
I dropped the last page of the letter on the desk and sat there, motionless, for a very long time. It was well after midnight. Earlier I had eaten dinner alone in Prenzlauer Berg. I had wandered the gentrified streets around Kollwitzplatz, passing by Rykestrasse 33, where Judit once lived—and where, twenty-six years earlier, I had knocked on her door, inquiring about some photographs of a child taken away from her friend, a woman who happened to be the love of my life. A woman whom this woman betrayed. And whom, in turn, I betrayed. Because I thought she had betrayed me.
But all I had done was betray myself.
Petra. Meine Petra
.
I had the letter with me during dinner. It remained sealed in its envelope. It stayed there during a drink in a bar further down Prenzlauer Allee afterward. Only after a slow walk back to Alexanderplatz and a final nightcap in the hotel bar did I go upstairs and dare open it.
I read it once. I stood up and paced the room, feeling overwhelmed, lost. I read it again. I read it a third time—and found myself standing up, grabbing my coat and room key, heading for the door.
It was cold outside. New snow. I turned right and walked on past the old GDR housing blocks, then the building site on which once sat a concrete monstrosity that was called the Berlin City Palace. It was also the East German Parliament building. During its demolition in 2002, it was discovered to have toxic levels of asbestos crammed within its walls.
And exposure to asbestos—like exposure to radiation—causes cancer.
Petra. Meine Petra.
I kept walking, past the renovated Berliner Dom, the renovated Kunsthistorisches Museum, the renovated Staatsoper, the renovated conglomeration of buildings that was Humboldt University, where Petra once studied. The end of Communism always means a new paint job, doesn’t it? Unter den Linden—East Berlin’s bleak, ceremonial boulevard—was now a touristic, mercantile showpiece. A Guggenheim Museum. A Ferrari dealership. Five-star hotels. Cities can do this. Cast off their onetime identity and—while wearing the same (but now reconstructed) exterior—become something new. We as individuals can also change physical shape. We can lose weight and gain muscle, or go the other way and give in to flab. We can wear clothes that speak volumes about the image we want to present to the world. We can display our wealth, our poverty, our sense of confidence, our sense of doubt. We can, like cities, change all the externals. But what we can never do is change the story that has made us what we are. It’s a story completely dictated by the accumulation of life’s manifold complexities—its capacity for astonishment and horror, for sanguinity and hopelessness, for pellucid light and the most profound darkness. We are what has happened to us. And we carry everywhere all that has shaped us—all that we lacked, all that we wanted but never got, all that we got but never wanted, all that was found and lost.
Petra was so right: there are certain things in life that change us so radically that they stay with us forever. And we can never really close the door on that which still haunts us.
Petra. Meine Petra
.
I turned left at Friedrichstrasse. Here the shops were even more upscale. Swiss timepieces. Parisian couture. Swedish design. Belgian chocolate. Everything was shuttered, closed. The street empty. The city all to myself. I kept walking, all of Petra’s words rebounding within me, the sense of loss not just acute but so profoundly immediate . . . even after twenty-six years.
Will I ever make my peace with what happened? Or will it always be there? Happiness found. Happiness lost. Happiness squandered. We control our destinies much more than we like to admit. Even when confronting a terrible tragedy we can choose to be hobbled by it or somehow carry on. More tellingly, we always have the choice to stay or walk away. To want domesticity and simultaneously fear its restraints. To know we are making a fundamentally flawed decision and still go through with it. To accept love or sidestep it.
I’ve been guilty of all of the above. Only now—with Petra’s voice fresh in my ear—do I see how the choices I made brought me here today. Traveling solo along a snow-swept street—bereaved, solitary, estranged from a wife I never really loved, missing my daughter, and musing endlessly about what could have been with Petra . . . and how the entire trajectory of my life would have been a different and (perhaps) sunnier one if I had only listened to her when she begged me to hear her out.
The moment came. The moment went. And I still think of us and cry.
I kept walking, my mind so awash in rumination and regret that I suddenly found myself at the Kochstrasse U-Bahn station. The realization that I was here threw me. How could I have walked down this street—and bumped into this U-Bahn station—without having first traversed Checkpoint Charlie?
Because Checkpoint Charlie had long vanished. Retracing my steps, I discovered that all that remained of that great ideological divide was its famous West Side sign:
“You Are Now Leaving the American Sector.”
All the other Cold War paraphernalia—the electrified gates, the barbed wire, the cinderblock bunkers, the sentries with binoculars, the snipers, The Wall itself—was long gone. There was, I noticed, a small museum dedicated to the checkpoint. Otherwise, The Wall was now office blocks—all shiny and mercantile and new. The divide that divided so much, the symbol of all that changed the entire course of my life.
Gone. Expunged.
And I’d just walked right past it, forgetting it was once there.
All personal histories largely vanish. Most geopolitical ones do, too.
* * *
When I returned to my hotel it was sometime after two. An email was awaiting me.
I’m heading out to my local bar—Vebereck on Prenzlauer Alle. Will be there until around three . . . Johannes.
I hopped a cab and arrived there ten minutes later. Vebereck looked vaguely vampiric—black walls, shadowy lighting, burning candles, and dripping wax at all the tables. Johannes was at a table in the corner, reading a Manga book. He had a beer in front of him.
“So you suffer from insomnia, too,” he said as I approached.
“All the time. Buy you another beer?”
“Why not?”
I signaled to the bartender for two more.
“So what’s keeping you up so late?” he asked. “Jet lag? A bad conscience?”
“Something like that, yes.”
“Did you read Mother’s letter?”
I nodded.
“And . . . ?”
“You mean, you didn’t see its contents?”
“Mother put it in a sealed envelope around five days before she died, with the request that I never read it, but that I try to get you to come to Berlin to read it here. Guess both her final wishes were fulfilled.”
“I suppose so,” I said quietly.
“Have you always been so guilty about stuff?”
I laughed and said:
“Absolutely.”
“Mother mentioned that often about you. The sense of regret that was everywhere in your books. The way you always seemed to be running away from yourself. She was your most astute critic, my mom.”
“That she was. And I loved her more than I have ever loved—”
Johannes put his hand up, like a traffic cop signaling for me to halt.
“I don’t need to hear any more of that. Because I’ve heard it all before. Mother was your greatest fan. Your greatest supporter. Your greatest reader. The way she talked about your books—
‘Did you see how brilliantly Thomas described the Costa Rican rain forest.’ . . . ‘I so wish he’d say a little more about his cold little wife in this book
’—it was as if you always were in the room.”
“She knew my wife was cold?”
“Well, it was there on the page, right?”
“She’s soon to be my ex-wife. We’re divorcing.”
“And Mother just died. Your timing is brilliant.”
I bit my lip, my eyes welling up.
“Did I say the wrong thing?” he asked.
“It’s okay,” I whispered.
“No, it’s not. I made you cry. So why not tell me I’m a shit or something like that?”
“Because it’s me who’s the shit here.”
“No—it’s you who’s the sad man in the room. From what I’ve been hearing, my impression is that you’ve been this way for years. Unless, of course, I’m wildly off-beam.”
“Anything but that.”
“So I’m right. You’re sad.”
“Yes,” I said. “That’s me. Sad.”
Johannes thought about all this for a moment. Then said:
“Mother always thought that about you, too. It always bothered her. ‘He’s so smart, so talented, so clever, he should be happy.’”
“I was happy. With her.”
“Yet you chose sadness.”
The comment hit me like a slap across the face. But I didn’t flinch. I just shrugged and said:
“Yes, that is exactly what I chose.”
The bartender kicked us out a few minutes later. Once on the street, Johannes said that he wanted to show me where his bookshop would be. We walked south to the next block. There was a storefront—a former salon, now empty, a “For Rent” sign in the window. The place had two large windows and, as I saw squinting in through the dirty window, seemed spacious enough for a good-sized bookshop.
“Tell me again how much they want a month?” I asked.
“Nine hundred.”
“That strikes me as pretty reasonable for a neighborhood like this one.”
“Yes, it’s a good deal. And I have some carpenter and painter friends who would do all the refurbishing stuff very reasonably. Of course, the main outlay would be stock. Because, as I told you, I plan to make this not just the best bookshop of its kind in Berlin, but in Germany as well.”
“And you need around fifteen thousand to get the whole place up and running?”
“If I can ever get a bank to listen to me.”
“I’ll give you the money,” I said.
Johannes looked at me with care.
“Are you serious?” he asked.
“Totally.”
“Even though the whole thing might fail?”
“It won’t.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Because you’re the brains behind the operation.”
“There are a lot of people in this city who would think because it’s my idea it’s doomed to fail.”
“I’m not one of those people.”
“I don’t want your charity.”
“Then we won’t call the fifteen thousand a gift. We’ll call it an investment.”
“And one which I plan to pay back with interest.”
“That would be nice, but it’s not essential.”
“It’s absolutely essential.”
“Fine by me then,” I said.
“Can you even afford fifteen thousand?”
“I have some savings.”
“But you’re hardly a rich guy.”
“Let me worry about the money.”
“You’re doing this out of guilt, aren’t you?”
“That’s part of the equation, yes.”
“What’s the other part?”
“She would have wanted this.”
Silence. Johannes lowered his head. Tears welled up in his eyes. Tears that he wiped away.
“I miss my mother,” he finally said.
“And I certainly know how much she loved you.”
For the first time since we’d met, Johannes looked directly at me. And said:
“You know what she told me the night she died? ‘I was always convinced that life was essentially unfair, especially during all those years that you weren’t with me. Then I got you back, and life never struck me as unfair again.’ That from a woman dying thirty years too young, from a cancer inflicted upon her.”
“You made her life, Johannes.”
“So did you.”
* * *
I returned to Maine the following evening, picking up my car in Boston and driving northward up the darkened interstate. Fresh snow had fallen while I was away, but the guy who plowed my driveway had also cleared out the path leading up to my door. As I stepped inside, the thought struck me that I hadn’t really slept in three days. Along with another reflection: it is still so hard coming home to an empty house.
I dumped the dirty laundry from my travel bag into the washing machine. I stood under the shower for a good quarter of an hour, trying to wash away the ten hours of flying and the three-hour drive. I poured myself a very small whiskey and checked my emails. There was one from my daughter: