“I sense this is all far too colonial and bourgeois for me,” she said as we shared the huge bathtub in the room, soaking our bedbug-ravaged bodies. “Eric would not approve.”
“Who’s Eric?”
“The man I live with in Paris.”
“I see.”
“Does that bother you?”
“Not at all,” I said.
She reached over and stroked my head, smiling wryly.
“Try not to be so sad, Thomas.”
“Who said I’m sad?”
“You are always sad, Thomas. Just as you are also so amusing and engaging. It’s an intriguing combination: so bright, yet so vulnerable and alone. It’s been a fantastic quinze jours. I’ve loved traveling with you, being with you. When you get back to the States, you should look up the woman you left behind. You obviously miss her a great deal.”
“I never said anything to you about someone back in the States.”
She gave me a small kiss on the lips.
“You didn’t need to,” she said, then reached over and pulled me on top of her.
Stephanie caught a plane back to Paris the next day. The last I saw of her was when she boarded a taxi to Khartoum Airport. After a light final kiss on the lips, she wished me a good future and vanished off into her own. Life has many such encounters, an individual who comes into your existence courtesy of the music of chance, with whom you are intimate for a short moment or so, and who then drifts out of your ongoing narrative, never to appear again. You travel down this ever-changing line of human geography known as your life. People fall into your path. Some do you good. Some do you bad. Some become friends. Some become people you never want to see again. You fall in and out of love. You reach out for certain people and they reject you. Others reach for you and you flee. Often you are ignored, just as you ignore others. And in the midst of all these missed and made connections, you try to travel hopefully, always in search of that person who might just make you feel less alone in the world, always cognizant of the fact that, in searching for love, you are also opening yourself up to the possibility of loss. Sometimes these losses are tolerable and you can justify them with bromides like: “It was never meant to be.” Or: “Better that it ended quickly.” But sometimes you find yourself facing up to a regret that—no matter how hard you attempt to negotiate with it—simply will not leave you in peace.
I had no such lasting regrets about Stephanie. But when I headed to Khartoum Airport a few days later—and began a series of flights via Cairo and Rome that eventually deposited me in New York twenty-four hours later—the sense of emptiness hit me. I returned to my apartment—sublet in my absence for six months to an actor friend—to discover that this gentleman had the personal hygiene of a water rat. I spent the first week fumigating the place and solving a ferocious cockroach problem. Once the apartment was habitable again, I then killed another two weeks repainting it, resanding the floor, and retiling the entire bathroom. I knew the underlying purpose behind all this home renovation: it allowed me to dodge the obligation to kick-start the book into life, and it also stopped me from phoning up Ann Wentworth and gauging whether she wanted me back.
The truth was, I myself didn’t know what I wanted. I missed her, but I also knew that a single phone call to her would indicate a desire to accede to her wish. The temptation was a profound one, for so many obvious reasons. A lovely, talented, and (above all) truly nice woman who adored me—and only wanted the best for me, for us. No wonder I stared at the phone so many nights and willed myself to call her. But to do that, I told myself, would be a form of surrender.
Only now do I see the younger man convincing himself that further adventures were awaiting him in the big churning world, that stability and happiness were two synonyms for entrapment.
So the phone remained in its cradle and Ann’s number at her little apartment near Columbia was never dialed. Anyway I had a book to write. So once my apartment was freshly painted and general order restored to my tiny slice of Manhattan real estate, I began to work. I had around thirty-five hundred dollars in the bank and figured it would take six months to reshape my many notebooks into something resembling a cogent narrative. Back then, you didn’t have to be a corporate player to afford a Manhattan life. My studio set me back $380 a month in rent. You could still go to the movies for five dollars. You could get cheap seats at Carnegie Hall for eight bucks. You could eat breakfast at the local Ukrainian coffee shop on my corner for two-fifty. Knowing that the money I had in the bank would, at best, pay for four months of life, I found a job at the now-vanished Eighth Street Bookshop. Four dollars an hour, thirty hours a week. The pay covered food, utilities, even a couple of nights out every week.
I mention all this because the eight months it finally took me to write Sunstroke: An Egyptian Journey now strikes me as a time of great simplicity. I had no commitments, no debts, no ties that bind. When I typed the last line of my first book—on a January night while a blizzard was raging outside—I celebrated with a glass of wine and a cigarette, then fell into bed and slept for fourteen hours. There followed several weeks of excising all the repetitions, misfired ideas, hackneyed metaphors, and all other testaments to bad writing that always make their way into my first drafts. I delivered the manuscript by hand to my editor. Then I took off for two weeks to a college friend’s place in Key West: a cheap break in the American tropics, in which I sat in the sun, drank in bars, avoided all novels by Ernest Hemingway, and tried to keep my worry about the book at bay (a worry that has since plagued me every time I’ve submitted a manuscript, and based on a simple fear: my editor is going to hate it).
As it turned out, Judith Kaplan, my editor of the era, thought the book “most accomplished for a debut” and a “good read.” Its publication eight months later resulted in around six reviews nationwide. However, there was a crucial, positive “In Brief” notice in the New York Times. It got me several phone calls from assorted editors at good magazines. The book sold four thousand copies and was quickly remaindered. But the fact was: I had published a book. And Judith—deciding that I was worth encouraging (especially in the wake of the mention in the Times)—took me out for a good lunch at an expensive Italian restaurant a week after I had come back from Addis Ababa for National Geographic.
“Do you know what Tolstoy said about journalism?” she asked after finding out that I was flush with magazine commissions and had long since quit my bookshop job. “It’s a brothel. And like most brothels, once you become a client, you keep returning regularly.”
“I’m not looking upon magazine writing as anything but an excuse to travel the world at somebody else’s expense and get paid a dollar a word.”
“So if I was to inquire if you were thinking about a new book for us . . .”
“I would say: I already have an idea.”
“Well, that’s an excellent start. And what may this idea be?”
“It’s one word: Berlin.”
Over the next half hour I sketched out how I wanted to spend a year living in the city—and write a book that would be very much “a fiction that happened . . . twelve months in that western island floating within the Eastern bloc; the place where the two great isms of the twentieth century rubbed up against each other like tectonic plates; a town that prided itself on its anarchism, its demimonde credentials, its ongoing whiff of Weimar Republic decadence. Yet it was also a center of gravity for a certain kind of outsider who wanted to exist amidst the edgy, walled-in realities of a metropolis with a storied and hideous past, now rubbing shoulders daily with the monochromatic bleakness of Communism.”
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.
The Moment Page 5