The Moment

by Douglas Kennedy

  “It’s fine, Dad.”

  “It’s just the booze talking, Tommy.”

  “Of course it is. And thanks for the cool gift.”

  “You write well with it, got me?”

  I nodded, keeping my hurt to myself, wishing myself anywhere but here.

  “He must be a nice man,” the woman next to me said, eyeing the seriously stylish red plastic case in which the typewriter was housed.

  I said nothing. I just smiled. She noted that.

  “So he’s not a nice guy?” she asked.

  “He’s a complex guy.”

  “And he probably loves you very much . . . and doesn’t know how to express it. Hence the nice gift. If you’re not a journalist, then you must be some sort of writer.”

  “So who told you to leave the GDR?” I asked, quickly changing the subject.

  “No one did. I overheard talk.”

  She lowered her head, lowered her voice.

  “My father . . . he was a senior member of the Party in Leipzig. And he was part of a top-secret group that had been briefed by the hierarchy in Berlin. I was thirty at the time. Married, no children, wanting to leave my husband—a functionary in a government bureau in which I had a job. As my father was high up, my position was considered glamorous by GDR standards: a senior receptionist at one of the big international hotels in the city. I had Saturday lunch every week with my parents. We were close, especially as I was their only child. My father doted on me, even though, given his Party connections, I could never express what I silently thought: our country was becoming more and more of a place where you were either with the Party or shut out of anything the society could offer you. I wanted to travel. That was simply impossible, except to other gray fraternal socialist states. But I articulated none of this to my parents, as they were both true believers. Until I heard my father, on that Saturday, tell my mother that she should stay indoors Sunday and not answer the phone, as there was going to be a ‘big change’ happening overnight.

  “I had heard rumors for weeks, months, that the government was going to finally seal the borders—which, in Berlin, still remained porous. Walter Ulbricht—he was the general secretary of the Party at the time—was always going on about the ‘leakage’ at the frontier; the traitors who turned their back on our ‘humane, utopian’ society for the ‘nightmarish filth of the capitalist West.’

  “I was returning from the bathroom when my father told my mother about staying inside the next day, and only overheard it as I approached the sitting room where we were taking coffee. I froze when my father’s voice whispered to her about the ‘big change overnight.’ I felt as if I was in free fall. Because I knew what this meant. And I knew that I had only hours to act if I wanted to . . .

  “I checked my watch. It was twelve minutes to three. I steadied myself. I went back into the sitting room. I finished drinking coffee with my parents, then excused myself, telling them I was going swimming with a girlfriend at the public baths. I kissed them both good-bye and resisted the desire to hold them close, especially my father, because I sensed I would not be seeing them again for a very long time.

  “Then I rode my bicycle home. Happily, Stefan, my husband, was playing football that afternoon with the other functionaries from the housing department where he worked. So he was away from the sad little apartment we shared together. I always thought that one of life’s greater ironies. Stefan worked in the department in charge of allocating apartments in Leipzig, and he could only get us this depressing little place. But that was Stefan. He always thought very small. Anyway, I let myself into our place. Once inside I collected a few small items: a change of clothes, a small stash of actual west deutsche marks, my passport, and whatever eastmarks I could find. I was there no longer than ten minutes. Then I rode my bike to the Hauptbahnhof and boarded the three-forty-eight express to Berlin. Within two hours I was there. I had a friend in the city, a man named Florian with whom—I can talk about this now—I was romantically linked. Not love. Just occasional comfort. But available whenever he came to Leipzig or on the rare occasions when I was in Berlin. He was a journalist with the party newspaper, Neues Deutschland. But, like me, he was also, in private, someone who had grown more and more doubtful about the regime, about the future. He also told me, two weeks earlier when he was in Leipzig, that he had a friend in Berlin who knew of a place where you could cross over from Friedrichshain to Kreuzberg without detection . . . not that the frontier between the two cities had been sealed off as of yet.

  “So as soon as I reached Berlin I called Florian. As luck would have it, he was in. He’d just been recently divorced, and had been spending the afternoon with his five-year-old daughter, Jutta. He’d just returned home after dropping her back to her mother’s when I called. His apartment was in Mitte. I walked over from Alexanderplatz to his place. When I arrived, I asked him to step out into the street, because I was worried his place might have been bugged. Then I told him what I knew, that a ‘big change’ was going to happen late tonight and I was certain this meant the border would be sealed. Like me, Florian went into immediate panic when he heard my news. The thing was, his editor must have been also informed by the Party hierarchy, as all staff leave had been canceled for the weekend and he had been told to report to work by eight a.m. Sunday morning—rather than midday, which was when everyone started work on the Monday morning edition.

  “Florian never once said to me, ‘Are you sure about this?’ He believed me one hundred percent. And he started thinking out loud. ‘You know that my ex-wife is very high up in the Party. If I went back for Jutta now, she might get suspicious. But when they close the border tomorrow . . . Then again, what is better? That my daughter comes with me to the West or stays here with her mother?’

  “This monologue went on for several minutes. Night had fallen. It was almost eight in the evening. Time was running out. I looked at my watch and told him that we had to go now. He nodded and told me to wait outside. It was a warm August night. I smoked two cigarettes and looked at the street. Gray buildings, all in a run-down state, all painted in the bleak, functional palette of Communism. I thought about my father and whether my departure would hurt his career. I thought about Florian and hoped that he would invent some excuse to pick up Jutta and bring her with us. But when he came outside, he looked ashen.

  “‘I just called Maria’s apartment. They’ve gone out. If we wait until they get back . . . well, there’s no way she will hand Jutta over to me at eleven at night without wondering what is up. So . . . ’

  “He hung his head—and I could hear him catch a sob in his throat. Then, wiping his eyes, he said:

  “‘I have an extra bicycle here. We ride to Friedrichshain.’

  “And we cycled the twenty minutes from Mitte to a place near a road that ran on both sides of the frontier. There were two Volkspolizisten standing guard on the GDR side—and a simple gate separating the East from the West. But we could see that the Volkspolizisten were checking papers very thoroughly and holding people up and not letting anyone through, even though it was still marginally legal to cross from one sector to another. So we slipped down a side street and up to a block of apartments that faced onto a street that ran parallel with the border. Florian’s friend had told him the key to the apartment was atop a fuse box in the hallway. I held my breath as Florian searched for it. When he found it and opened the door, we found ourselves in a place that had been abandoned: a few mattresses on the floor, a filthy toilet, and a cracked window. There was a rope ladder attached to the window frame. Florian peered outside. He said the coast was clear. He threw the ladder outside and told me that I had to go down it now.

  “I was terrified. I hate heights—and we were three floors up. The ladder was so feeble, so dangerous, that as soon as I put my weight on it I knew it wouldn’t hold me . . . and I only weighed fifty kilos at the time. I told Florian that I couldn’t do it . . . that I was just too scared. He literally grabbed me by the scruff of my neck and forced me out t
he window.

  “The descent only took perhaps thirty seconds—because once I had grabbed hold of the ladder it was clear that I only had a few moments before the rope gave away. When I was about ten meters above the ground, the whole thing collapsed. I was suddenly falling—and, believe me, a ten-meter fall is a long one. I landed on my left foot and completely broke my ankle. The pain was indescribable. From up above, Florian began to hiss:

  “‘Run. Run now!’

  “‘You have to come with me,’ I hissed back.

  “‘I need to find another rope. You cross now—I’ll meet you in a few hours at the Kaiser Wilhelm Gedächtnis-Kirche on the Ku’damm.’

  “‘I can’t move,’ I yelled back. ‘My ankle.’

  “‘You have no choice. You go now.’

  “‘Florian . . . jump!’

  “‘Now. Now.’

  “And he disappeared. My ankle was killing me. I could put no weight on it. But somehow I managed to drag myself the thirty meters across the barren area that was no-man’s-land and into the West. As there was still no Wall—still no trip wires or armed guards that would shoot to kill—there were also no Western soldiers awaiting me as I staggered into Kreuzberg. Just a Turkish man who was walking home and found me collapsed on the street, sobbing in pain. He crouched down beside me and handed me a cigarette. Then he told me that he would be back as soon as possible with help. It must have been a good hour before I heard the roar of an ambulance, by which time I was drifting in and out of consciousness. The next thing I knew, I was waking up in some hospital ward. There was a doctor there, telling me I hadn’t just broken my ankle, but also tore my Achilles’ tendon, and I had been knocked out with anesthetics for over eight hours. Beside him was a policeman who welcomed me to the Bundesrepublik. He also told me that I was a most lucky young lady, as the GDR had sealed the borders just after midnight.

  “‘Did a man named Florian Fallada make it over?’ I asked the policeman. He just shrugged and said: “‘I don’t have any knowledge of who crossed over last night. What I do know is that it is absolutely impossible to leave the GDR now. It has become a hermetically sealed state.’”

  Our plane banked suddenly, its nose headed toward the ground. Then, suddenly, the cloud cover lifted and I could see that we were moments from touching down . . . the last ten minutes of this flight blurred from my memory by the narrative force of this woman’s story.

  “So what happened next?” I asked as the plane’s engines entered reverse thrust mode and our forward progress began to slow.

  “What happened? I was in hospital for a week. During that time several Bundesrepublik functionaries visited me and, with great ease, facilitated my passage into their country. I asked several of them if they had any news of Florian Fallada. One of them actually wrote his name down and promised me that when she returned to see me again in several days’ time she would have some news for me.

  “When she did come back, she had with her my Bundesrepublik identity card and the following information: no one by the name of Florian Fallada was registered as having crossed the frontier before it was sealed on thirteen August 1961.”

  “And do you know what happened to Florian?” I asked, sounding a little too eager, like a reader who—having been plunged deep into a story—wanted to skip a hundred or so pages to find out what happened next.

  “I had no word of him for over ten years,” the woman said. “Myself, I found a job in Frankfurt in the hotel business—and within ten years was married and divorced. I also became the sales director of Intercontinental Hotels in Germany. During the Leipzig Trade Fair in 1972, I returned to my former country on business. And although he wasn’t there the only newspaper available at my hotel was the Communist Party rag, Neues Deutschland. On the masthead, whom did I discover was the new editor in chief? Florian Fallada.”

  The plane had come to a halt. Snow was falling outside. Steps were being pushed toward the forward door of the aircraft.

  “And you never tried to contact him? Never tried to find out what happened to him when he didn’t cross over with you?”

  She looked at me as if I was the most naïve man in the world.

  “Had I contacted Florian I would have destroyed his career. And as I did rather love him . . .”

  “But surely you wanted to know why he didn’t make it over?”

  Again she regarded me with a sort of amused skepticism.

  “Florian didn’t make it over because the ladder broke. Perhaps he didn’t have enough time to find another rope to get him down into no-man’s-land. Perhaps he couldn’t bear to leave his daughter behind. Perhaps he simply decided that he had a duty to remain in the place he called home, despite all the limitations that decision imposed. Who knows? But that secret—the secret that he was minutes away from escaping—stayed with only one other person: me.

  “But now you know that secret, too. And perhaps you are wondering why this stranger—this middle-aged woman who is smoking and talking far too much—decided to tell you, Mr. Young American Writer, this very private story? Because I read today in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that Florian Fallada, the editor in chief of Neues Deutschland, dropped dead two days ago of a heart attack at his office in East Berlin. And now, I say good-bye to you.”

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  “My name is my business. But I’ve given you a good story, ja? You’ll find many stories here. The conundrum for you will be discerning which tales are true, and which are built on sand.”

  A telltale bing was played over the loudspeaker system. Everyone began to stand up and ready themselves for the world beyond here. I hoisted my typewriter while putting my army greatcoat back on me.

  “Let me guess,” the woman said. “Your father acts as if he doesn’t approve of you, but brags behind your back about His Son, the Writer.”

  “My father lives his own life,” I said.

  “And you will never get him to appreciate yours. So don’t bother. You’re young. Everything is still a tabula rasa. Lose yourself in other people’s stories and gain perspective on your own.”

  With that, she nodded good-bye to me, heading off back into her own life. But once we were inside the terminal building—and waiting by the luggage carousel for our bags—she caught sight of me again and said:

  “Willkommen in Berlin.”

  TWO

  KREUZBERG.

  The woman on the plane fell from a ladder in the East Berlin district of Friedrichshain and then staggered the thirty yards or so into Kreuzberg. Whereupon a Turkish gentleman came across her, crumpled in the street, writhing in pain. Within hours of this one small incident, the terrain she had just crossed became the most contentious border on the planet.

  Friedrichshain to Kreuzberg. Just steps.

  Until a wall is put up. And the steps become impossibilities.

  On my third morning in Berlin I took the U-Bahn to Moritzplatz and found myself looking at the border crossing that now existed at Heinrich Heine Strasse. Heinrich Heine. I’d read him in college. One of the patron saints of German Romanticism—and now the name of the principal border crossings between East and West. No doubt, the GDR authorities latched onto Heine’s antibourgeois poems as proof of his impeccable “workers of the world unite” credentials. No doubt, there were those in the West who simply looked upon him as one of those flighty nineteenth-century literary personages whose work was largely divorced from quotidian realities and, as such, had to be dismissed as the height of bourgeois narcissism. Whatever the interpretation, when I came upon the Heinrich Heine Checkpoint, all I could think was—as it was for him in life, so it continues one hundred and twenty-eight years after his death. For he remains a writer who traversed the contradictions of the German consciousness—and, as such, deserved to belong to both sides of this now-divided land.

  However, upon arriving in Berlin three days earlier I was geographically far away from Heinrich Heine Strasse, as I’d taken up temporary residence in a pension off the Ku
’damm . . . right in the heart of an elegant square called Savignyplatz. The place was recommended in a “Berlin on the Cheap” guidebook I’d found in New York. It was a small, immaculate bed-and-breakfast place with rooms for forty deutsche marks a night—which, in 1984, worked out at around $12—affordable for a week or so, but not a long-term prospect for a writer with a small advance, working on a tight budget. Facing the green leafy plaza that was Savignyplatz, the Pension Weisse was a soft landing into Berlin. My room—with its firm single bed, its simple, Scandinavian-style furniture, its spotless en-suite bathroom, its ample heating, its spacious desk upon which I parked my typewriter, its soundproof windows—was a delight. I was punch-drunk after thirteen hours of travel via New York and Frankfurt, but the matron at the reception desk—none other than Frau Weisse—immediately endeared herself to me by letting me have access to the room a full three hours before check-in time.

  “I have given you a room with a very nice view,” she told me. “And knowing you were arriving today we turned up the heating in it early this morning. Berlin has been arctic for days. Please do not risk frostbite and venture outside. I would hate to have to rush you to hospital on your second day here.”

  Of course, I did venture outside—around three hours later when the wind and the blowing snow subsided. I made it out to the newspaper kiosk right next to the Savignyplatz S-Bahn station where I bought an International Herald Tribune, a packet of Drum rolling tobacco and cigarette papers, and a half-bottle of Asbach Uralt brandy (the idea of buying alcohol at a newspaper shop always pleased me). I then ducked into a pasta place. I ate a bowl of spaghetti carbonara, washed back with a glass of rough red wine. I read the newspaper and smoked several roll-up cigarettes with two espressos. I studied my fellow clientele. They were divided into two groups. There were businesspeople in suits who worked in the offices that lined the nearby Kurfürstendamm. There were also—judging from such standard-issue urban art house gear as their leather jackets, their black turtlenecks, their Bertolt Brecht eyeglasses and their packets of Gitanes—well-heeled members of the creative classes. I’d no doubt these were the sort of people who spoke the same lingua franca in which all cultured metropolitan people were fluent. And after lunch—when I was able to manage twenty minutes out of doors before the cold sent me back to my room—my walk around the quarter brought me past the elegant left-behinds of nineteenth-century burgher apartment blocks, and expensive, amply stocked local delicatessens, and fashionable clothing boutiques, and excellent bookshops and emporiums of classical music. The result of this hurried arctic dance around these well-heeled streets was to inform me that I had landed myself in one of West Berlin’s most pleasing neighborhoods. Coupled with the ease and comfort of the Pension Weisse, it was clear to me that I would have to get out of here fast. I wanted to write a book that reflected the edgy rhythms of this edgy city. But how could I simply commute into such edginess, then return home to an area that exuded the good life? I needed to wash up in a tough part of town.