by Marc Levy
“Thank you for that,” murmured Julia.
“So? What’s the plan now?”
“I have no idea. I’m just glad to know that Thomas is actually living out his dreams.”
“And what would you know about that?”
“All he ever wanted was to be a reporter.”
“Do you really think that’s his only dream? Do you really think that, when he looks back at his life, he’ll be content flipping through old newspaper clippings? Many men—so I’ve heard—come to realize in moments of great solitude that the success they spent their entire lives chasing after only served to drive them farther away from their loved ones. From themselves.”
Looking at her father, Julia could only guess at the sadness hidden behind that wistful smile.
“Let me ask again, Julia. What’s our next move?”
“Going straight back to Berlin. That’s the wise thing to do.”
“Don’t you mean New York?”
“Yes, I do. That was a simple mistake.”
“Funny . . . just yesterday you would have called that a sign.”
“Like you said: a lot can change in one night.”
“You have to be sure you’re getting it right, Julia. You can’t move forward when your life is full of memories that feel like regrets. The foundation of a happy life is built on a few key certitudes. The choice before you now is yours and yours alone. I can’t make it for you. Fact is, I gave up on making your choices for you a long time ago. But let me just say: watch out. Loneliness can be a prickly thing.”
“Something you’ve had experience with?”
“Extensive experience, yes. I was alone for a great many years. But the mere thought of you would send my loneliness running for the hills. Let’s just say I became aware of certain truths a bit too late. But who am I to complain? Most jerks like me don’t get a second chance, even if mine only lasts a handful of days. And while I’m being honest, I have to tell you: I missed you, Julia. And I can’t do a single thing to get back those lost years. I let precious time slip through my fingers—because of work. Because I thought I had an important role to play, was convinced I had obligations to attend to. But my only real obligation was to you. The most important obligation there is. But enough rambling. All this blathering on isn’t really our style.
“Truth be told, I would have liked to watch you teach Knapp a lesson, or even hold back his arms while you show him what happens when you mess with a Walsh, but I’m too tired for all that now. And besides, like I said: it’s your life.”
Anthony leaned over and plucked a newspaper off a nearby table. He opened it up and began to flip the pages.
“I thought you didn’t read German,” said Julia, her voice cracking.
“Oh. You? You’re still here?” Anthony said dismissively, turning a page.
Julia folded her napkin, pushed back her chair, and rose to her feet.
“I’ll call you first thing after I see him,” she said as she walked away.
“Forecast says thunderstorms early this evening!” Anthony called out to his daughter.
But Julia was already too far away to hear, in the midst of hailing a taxi down the street. Anthony folded the newspaper with a sigh.
The car pulled up to the main terminal at Rome-Fiumicino Airport. Thomas paid the driver and walked around to open Marina’s door. They quickly checked in and passed through security. Thomas, bag hanging off his shoulder, glanced at his watch. Their flight took off in one hour. Marina was hanging around in front of the shop windows. He took her by the hand and led her to a bar.
“Anything special you want to do tonight?” he asked, ordering two coffees at the counter.
“I’d like to see your apartment. Ever since I met you, I’ve been wondering what it’s like.”
“Not much to see. One big room, a work table by the window, and a bed shoved up against the opposite wall.”
“Sounds good to me. What more could you need?”
Julia pushed open the front door of Der Tagesspiegel building and gave her name at the front desk. She asked to see Jürgen Knapp. The receptionist picked up the phone.
“And tell him that I’ll be here waiting in the lobby until he comes down, even if it takes all day.”
As the elevator slowly descended to the first floor, Knapp leaned against the glass with his eyes locked directly on his visitor. Julia paced back and forth in front of window displays showing mounted pages from that day’s edition.
The elevator doors finally opened, and Knapp crossed the lobby.
“Hello, Julia. What can I do for you?”
“You can start by telling me why you lied to my face.”
“Follow me. Let’s go somewhere a bit quieter.”
Knapp led her toward the staircase and into a little room near the cafeteria, where he offered her a seat and dug through his pockets for loose change.
“Coffee? Tea?” he asked, moving toward the vending machine.
“I’m not thirsty.”
“Why did you come back to Berlin, Julia?”
“Don’t tell me you’re really thick enough to be asking me that.”
“It’s been twenty years, Julia. How should I know?”
“I came for Thomas!”
“After all these years?”
“Tell me where he is.”
“I already told you. He’s in Italy.”
“With his wife and children, and he’s given up journalism, I know. Beautiful little story, except I can’t tell which parts are true. I know he changed his name, and I know he’s still a reporter.”
“So why waste your time here?”
“I have a right to know. Why did you lie?”
“If you want us to start putting our cards on the table, I have a few questions for you first. Did you ever stop and wonder if Thomas actually wants to see you again? What right do you have to come barging back into his life like this? On a whim, twenty years later, the mood strikes you, and you come flying in straight from another decade! I’m afraid Berlin is fresh out of walls to knock down. No more revolution, no ecstasy, no wonder . . . all that madness is behind us. Get out of here, Julia. Leave Berlin and go home. Haven’t you done enough damage here?”
“How dare you!” replied Julia, her lips quivering with rage.
“Oh, am I out of line? Because question time isn’t over yet. Where were you when that land mine blew up in Thomas’s face? And I didn’t see you there, waiting for him at the gate in the airport when he arrived, injured from Kabul. I must’ve somehow missed you on the way to taking him to physical therapy every single morning. For the life of me, I can’t remember seeing you once. Your absence tore him apart. Do you even have the faintest notion of how much pain you caused? Of how long it lasted? Can you imagine that my friend, that idiot, his heart broken into a million pieces, went on defending you after he had every reason to hate you?”
Even with tears flowing freely down Julia’s cheeks, nothing could stop Knapp now.
“Take a guess, try, just tell me: How many years before he accepted the truth and turned the page? How long do you think it took him to get over you? When every damn corner of Berlin was haunted by a memory of the two of you together, memories he would recount to me outside of cafés, on park benches, along the banks of canals. And all the new people he met in vain, the number of women who tried to be with him, only to find themselves sabotaged by your perfume, or one of the stupid things you said to make him laugh.
“I’ve heard it so many times I’ve got you memorized. The feel of your skin, your bad moods in the morning, which he of course found adorable for reasons I’ll never quite grasp, your favorite things for breakfast, the way you wore your hair, the way you put on your makeup, the clothes you liked to wear, the side of the bed you slept on. I had to hear the pieces you learned at your Wednesday piano lessons a thousand times over, because he continued to play them, week after week, year after year, with the man’s soul shredded down to nothing. I had to look at all you
r drawings, the watercolors of those stupid animals he knew by name. I can’t count the number of times he stopped in front of shop windows at the sight of a dress, a painting, a bouquet, and God knows what else, things that Thomas thought you might have liked. And all that, while constantly asking myself what you’d done to him to make him miss you so much.
“And when he finally started to get over you, I feared all it would take was running into somebody who looked like you to put him right back where he was before. It was a long road for him. You wanted to know why I lied to you. Now you know.”
“I never meant to hurt him, Knapp. Never,” Julia sobbed, overwhelmed with emotion.
Knapp picked up a paper napkin and handed it to her.
“What do you have to cry about? Where are you at with your life, Julia? Married? Divorced, maybe? Children? A recent transfer to Berlin?”
“Are you . . . enjoying being this cruel?”
“Oh, please. Don’t tell me you of all people are about to lecture me on cruelty.”
“You don’t understand . . .”
“You’d be surprised. Let me take a guess. Twenty years later, you just changed your mind. Well, you’re too late. That letter, the one he wrote you right before leaving Kabul, I helped him come up with the right words, I remember it like it was yesterday. I was there when he came back from the airport the last day of every month, crushed. You made a choice, and he respected it, like he said he would. If that’s what you came here to find out, well, now you know. And you can leave.”
“But . . . I never made a choice, Knapp. I couldn’t. Thomas’s letter . . . I only got it three days ago.”
The plane glided through the sky over the Alps. Marina had dozed off with her head on Thomas’s shoulder. He lowered the shade on the window and closed his eyes in an attempt to sleep. One more hour before they would land in Berlin.
Julia recounted the whole story without a single interruption from Knapp. While Thomas had mourned the death of a relationship, Julia had spent years mourning the loss of a man she believed to be dead. After her tale had been told, she rose from her chair and apologized once more for the pain she had unwittingly caused. She said goodbye to Knapp and made him swear never to tell his best friend about her visit to Berlin. Knapp stood frozen watching her walk down the hall toward the stairs. As Julia started down the stairs, Knapp called out to her and added one last thing.
“I can’t keep that promise. I don’t want to lose my best friend. Julia . . . Thomas is on a plane, coming back from Rome right now. He lands in forty-five minutes.”
19.
The cabdriver told Julia that the trip to the airport typically took about thirty-five minutes. She promised she’d double the price on the meter if he could get her there faster. At the second red light they hit, she suddenly opened her door and leaped out, advancing to the front seat and sliding in beside the driver, just as the light turned green.
“Passengers stay in the back!” the man exclaimed.
“Unless I can tear off this mirror, I’m here to stay!” she said, lowering the sun visor for a look at herself. “Go on, drive! Beeil dich!”
Julia winced at her reflection: swollen eyes, with the tip of her nose still red from her crying fit. She wasn’t going to show up after twenty years and expect Thomas to just take her into his arms with her looking like some kind of albino rabbit. She sighed—this was hopeless! A sharp turn ruined her first attempt at putting on mascara. Julia asked the driver to be more careful, but he only snapped back at her that he could either pull over so she could finish dabbing her face, or he could try to have her there in fifteen minutes. One or the other.
“Just keep driving!” she shouted with urgency, returning to her makeup.
The highway was clogged with traffic. Julia begged the driver to use the right lane for passing, despite the solid line forbidding it. When he explained that he could lose his license for that kind of move, Julia promised she’d pretend to be giving birth if they were pulled over. The driver gave one look at her less-than-convincing belly and scoffed at the notion. In response, Julia stuck out her stomach, moaning and wailing theatrically with her hands pressed to the small of her back.
“Fine, fine, that’s more than enough,” said the driver, pressing down harder on the accelerator.
At 6:22 p.m., she leaped out of the taxi onto the sidewalk before the car had even come to a complete stop. The entire length of the terminal stretched before her.
Julia searched around in a frenzy for the international arrivals area. A passing airport employee directed her to the far western end of the building. Breathless after her harrowing run, Julia scanned the arrivals screen. No flights from Rome were listed. After a deep breath to brace herself, she took off her shoes, and the footrace kicked into gear once more, now in the opposite direction. Julia blazed a trail through the crowd of people waiting for arriving passengers to emerge from behind the sliding doors. She wiggled and bumped her way through the masses until she could claim a spot just behind the railing. The first wave of passengers came through the exit, the doors sliding open and shut each time a new group came from baggage claim. Tourists, vacationers, sales reps, business professionals . . . all of them dressed by function. People waved their hands in the air, some ran forward to hug each other, others were happy to say a simple hello. She picked up chatter in French, then Spanish, and a little later, English.
During the fourth wave of people, Julia finally picked up traces of Italian. Two hunched-over college students walked arm in arm, looking like tortoises. A priest clutching his missal made a perfect magpie. A copilot and flight attendant amicably exchanging contact info must have been giraffes in their past lives. A conference delegate stretching out his neck and searching back and forth for his group was a worried owl. A little butterfly of a girl fluttered right into her mother’s waiting arms. A father bear wrapped his thick arms around his wife. Then, suddenly, she saw him. Thomas’s face shined from amid the sea of a hundred others, standing out from the crowd just as it had so many years before.
Twenty years had carved a few new lines around his eyes and made the cleft in his chin more pronounced, the effect only further accentuated by a few days’ stubble. But those eyes . . . soft like sand, with that same gaze that had lured her across the rooftops of Berlin and turned her knees to jelly under the full moon in the Tiergarten . . . Looking at those eyes, she could see some things hadn’t changed at all. Julia held her breath, stood on her toes, and leaned out over the barrier. Just as she was raising her arm to wave in his direction, Thomas turned away, eyes drawn to the young woman by his side, who curled an affectionate arm around his waist. As they passed right by Julia, her heels and heart sank to the ground. The couple walked straight out of the terminal and disappeared.
“Do you want to stop by my place first?” asked Thomas as he slid into the backseat of the taxi beside Marina and closed the door.
“Your apartment can wait. We should probably go to the office first. It’s late, and Knapp may have already left. It’s important that I pop in so he can see me, for the good of my career. Wasn’t that the whole reason you convinced me to come to Berlin?”
“Potsdamer Strasse,” Thomas told the driver.
Ten cars behind them, a woman got into a different taxi and headed for her hotel.
The concierge told Julia that her father was waiting for her in the bar. She found him sitting at a table near the window.
“Well, you look like you’ve seen better days. That bad?” he asked, rising to greet her.
Julia slumped right down into an armchair across from her father.
“That bad. Not everything Knapp said was a lie.”
“You saw him? Saw Thomas?”
“At the airport. Coming back from Rome . . . with his wife at his hip.”
“Did you talk to him?”
“He didn’t even see me.”
Anthony called the waiter over.
“Would you like something to drink?”
&
nbsp; “I’d like to go home.”
“Let me ask: Were they wearing rings?”
“She had her arm around his waist. You expect me to waltz up and ask to see a marriage certificate?”
“Well, just a few short days ago, someone had his arm around your waist—so I assume. I wasn’t there to see it, of course, it being my own funeral and all. Though, in a way, I suppose I was there.” Anthony chuckled to himself. “There I go again. But you have to admit, it is a bit amusing.”
“I don’t find it the least bit amusing. That was supposed to be my wedding day. And thank God that, come tomorrow, this absurd trip of ours is finally over. It’s probably for the best. Knapp was right. What was I thinking, barging back into his life?”
“Perhaps you were thinking of second chances.”
“For who? For him? You? Me? The whole thing was a selfish delusion, bound to turn into a train wreck from the start.”
“In that case, what’s next?”
“I pack my bag and go to bed.”
“I meant once we get back to New York.”
“I’ll have to take stock of my life. Pick up the pieces and try to fix everything that’s broken. Find a way to forget all of this and start living my old life again. This time, I don’t have a choice.”
“Of course you do. The choice is clear: see this through to the end and leave Berlin with a clear conscience, or leave with a shadow hanging over you.”
“It’s really something, hearing you lecture me on matters of the heart.”
Anthony looked at his daughter attentively and scooted his chair toward hers.
“Do you remember, when you were a little girl, what you used to do every single night, for hours on end, until you finally collapsed with exhaustion?”
“Yes. I read under the covers with a flashlight.”
“Why didn’t you just turn on a light?”
“So you would think I was still sleeping. The whole operation was a secret.”
“And this flashlight of yours. Was it special? Magical perhaps?”