The Moment

by Douglas Kennedy

  “Sorry, sorry,” I said, dropping the chair. “Something terrible has happened.”

  “Where’s Alaistair?”

  “In the hospital. There was an attempted robbery last night. And he was stabbed repeatedly. I was upstairs asleep when it happened—and had drunk so much last night that I slept through it all.”

  “Is he alive?”

  “Just about. When I found him . . . well, put it this way, if I hadn’t found him he would have died within a half hour. Or, at least, that’s what the ambulance team told me.”

  “And the man who did this? Did they catch him?”

  “No. But I gather he climbed in through an open window while Alaistair was asleep. There was a struggle. And . . .”

  Mehmet began to shake his head very slowly. Turning away from me, he said in a voice barely above a whisper:

  “There is no need to lie to me. I know it wasn’t a thief who broke in here and did this. I know how Alaistair lives.”

  I looked squarely at Mehmet and saw in his face the same look that a constantly betrayed wife often has, especially if she has decided to accept the fact that her husband is someone who has repeatedly strayed and will continue to do so for as long as they are together. Anyway, who was I to speculate what the nature of their relationship actually was, or whether there were any bonds beyond the three afternoons they spent together every week? What was clear was that Mehmet was so profoundly shaken by the sight of such destruction, and by the fact that I couldn’t tell him more about his lover’s condition.

  “Why didn’t they tell you the name of the hospital?” he demanded.

  “Because the medic rushed him off and the cops spent all their time getting a deposition from me.”

  “How will you know where to find him?”

  “I’ll start phoning around. Once I’ve found out, we can go see him together.”

  “No, that is impossible for me,” he said.

  “I understand,” I said.

  “No, you don’t understand. Nobody understands. If it was to be made public—our ‘friendship’—my life would be over. I would be finished. A dead man.”

  We fell silent. Mehmet reached into his jacket and fished out his packet of cigarettes. Flipping one into his mouth, he tossed me the packet. I took a cigarette and tossed the pack back to him, hunting around my pockets for my Zippo and lighting up. After a few deep drags, I said:

  “One thing we could do for Alaistair . . . we could repaint the studio and deal with the blood on the floor and the furniture.”

  This idea immediately caught Mehmet’s attention.

  “You know, this is my part-time job. I run the family dry cleaning business, but I have a sideline in home decoration. Of course, I can’t bring any of my crew around here to help.”

  “I’m handy with a paintbrush,” I said.

  “Can you get up early tomorrow?”

  “After the night I had last night, I think I’ll fall into bed around nine tonight.”

  “Okay, I’m here at eight tomorrow morning with everything we need.”

  “I’ll be up and ready.”

  “Thank you.”

  “There’s no need to thank me,” I said.

  “Yes, there is. Because I know I can trust you. Because you have his best interests at heart. And because he told me he liked you—and Alaistair likes very few people.”

  Before he left, Mehmet inspected the bedroom and informed me he’d order a new mattress in the next few days. He also gathered up all of Alaistair’s blood-splattered clothes and dumped them into a large plastic bag, saying he’d get his laundry to handle it all. Then he headed off into the night.

  I was suddenly hit with a wave of tiredness—not surprising, considering the manic events of the past twelve hours. I checked my watch. It was now seven p.m. Though I hadn’t eaten all day I felt no hunger, no need for food, drink, or anything else except sleep. I got myself upstairs, took a long very hot shower, and then fell into bed, setting my alarm for four that morning.

  I slept a sleep so deep, so sound, that when I awoke with my alarm clock well before dawn, there were a few delightfully befuddled moments when all I could think was: my God, I feel positively born-again. Then the events of the previous day came flooding in, and I found myself haunted by the idea that Alaistair might not have survived the night. What had happened to him had been so monstrous, so unfair—and, truth be told, I did think of him now as my friend. I so wanted to ring the cops and demand to know the state of his condition—whether he’d pulled through and, if so, when I could see him. But as it was in the middle of the night—and phoning the police right now might just make them regard me as a crank, or someone with an obsessively guilty streak (that is, if I could find a working phone on a chilly street corner, as all the public phones in Kreuzberg were inevitably out of order or recently vandalized, and the Café Istanbul didn’t open until six)—there was only one solution: go to work. So I made coffee and ate some cheese on pumpernickel bread, and then, sharpened pencil in hand, went to work on my essay—attacking its descriptive excesses and its badly drawn observations, smoothing over its passages of stylistic roughness, and honing its readability. By the time I worked my way through it again it was just after six a.m. Making myself a fresh pot of coffee I set up my typewriter, rolled a clean sheet of paper into it, lit my first cigarette of the morning, and began to hammer away. It took just under two hours to retype the revised eight-page essay—which included the time needed to dab Wite-Out on the paper and wait for it to dry whenever I made a typo. I had just finished when I heard a key in the door. Mehmet had arrived.

  “Can you please help me in with a few things from my van?”

  The few things included four gallons of white emulsion, paint trays, rollers and brushes, a larger sander for the floor and a small handheld one for furniture, a dozen industrial-strength garbage sacks, and two ladders.

  “Good God, how did you manage to round all this up since yesterday afternoon?” I asked.

  “I have a cousin who owns a paint shop near here.”

  As I made us coffee, Mehmet told me that he felt it best if we started with the walls. But first there was the matter of cleaning up the debris from his studio. I excused myself for a moment to change into the shabbiest T-shirt and jeans that I owned, then returned to find that Mehmet was already stuffing all the snapped brushes and upended paint cans from Alaistair’s worktable into one of the sacks. I joined in—and we had much of the rubble cleared up in a half hour. When it came to the ripped canvases, Mehmet wanted to throw them out, insisting that Alaistair wouldn’t want them around—that it would be too much for him to bear. But I finally convinced him to leave them stacked in one corner until I spoke to Alaistair about them.

  “Let him decide whether he wants them here or not,” I said.

  Mehmet thought that idea over, eventually giving his consent.

  “No news?” he asked quietly.

  I shook my head.

  He fell silent again and began to open a gallon of paint, pouring it into two trays. For the next three hours little in the way of dialogue passed between us. I asked him once if we could listen to some music while we worked. He said, “No problem,” and I worked my way through his four-record set of Glenn Gould playing Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier as we managed to get two of the four walls painted.

  At ten, I took a ten-minute break, running out to the Café Istanbul to call Pawel at Radio Liberty. He answered on the fifth ring.

  “To what do I owe this honor?” he asked dryly after hearing my voice.

  “I have your essay.”

  “My, my, you are the eager beaver.”

  That’s because I cannot get Petra Dussmann out of my head.

  “You told me you wanted it quickly.”

  “Can you bring it over this afternoon?”

  “No problem.”

  “Say three.”

  And he hung up.

  Then I asked to borrow a phone book and called all of the
six hospitals located within the confines of West Berlin. Every time I spoke with someone at the reception desk I was told that they could not confirm if they had admitted someone named Alaistair Fitzsimons-Ross. And I was told that I would have to present myself in person with my papers in order to be told whether or not they had a patient by that name with them. “This is how the system works,” I was told repeatedly when I complained that I simply wanted a yes or no that he was in their hospital. “We cannot change the system.”

  I returned to the apartment and told Mehmet about my hospital ring-around and how it yielded no results, no information about Alaistair. He just shrugged and we continued painting until noon—when Mehmet announced he now had to get to work but would return here tomorrow at eight for another redecorating session.

  “We should have everything done within three, four days,” he said.

  “If I hear anything from the police before tomorrow . . . ?”

  “It will have to wait until I arrive in the morning. No one can know anything about my presence here. No one.”

  “You have my word on that.”

  After Mehmet left, I went back upstairs and showered, changing into blue jeans and a black turtleneck sweater. Then I reread the essay one more time, thinking to myself: He’ll probably hate it, and that will be the end of things. And word will get back to Petra that the essay was no good, and why would she want to go out with a would-be contributor whose work was rejected?

  A few hours later, however, as I emerged from the Wedding U-Bahn station and began to cross the street, there walking toward me was Petra. She was dressed in a beat-up black leather jacket, zipped up against the cold, a short black corduroy skirt, black tights. A rare sighting of a midwinter sun caught the auburn wave of her hair and made her look luminous. She didn’t initially see me. Instead she was walking along with her head bowed and a look on her face that hinted at some terrible distress within, a deep preoccupation that was causing her considerable grief. I wanted to shout her name. Instinctually I knew this to be a bad idea, given whatever she might be grappling with at this very moment. But as we both approached the entrance to Radio Liberty, she caught sight of me and immediately favored me with a shy, hesitant smile.

  “Ah, it’s you,” she said. “And what brings you back here?”

  “Delivering my essay to Pawel.”

  “You work fast.”

  “A deadline always focuses the mind.”

  “Nice seeing you again,” she said, walking ahead of me.

  “Listen, I’ve got a pair of tickets for the Philharmonie tomorrow night. It’s all Dvorak, conducted by Kubelik, who being Czech, knows his Dvorak . . .”

  “Sorry, I’m busy,” she said, walking on. “But thank you.”

  And turning a corner she was gone.

  The sense of letdown, of utter disappointment, was vast. There it was. She was telling me in a clear, transparent manner: I’m not interested. Or: There’s somebody else in my life. Or, quite simply: No thanks. As much as I tried to rationalize this comment—maybe she is genuinely busy tomorrow, maybe she was rushing off to a meeting just now, which is why she was so abrupt with you—I couldn’t get around the fact that I had just been given the kiss-off. Perhaps the hardest thing to come to terms with in life is when another person punctures a fantasy that you have been building up in your head. What makes this even more painful is when said person is the subject of said reverie, and you now have to face up to the death of a dream. And you simultaneously wonder why you had such absurd romantic thoughts in the first place.

  Because we all want to love and be loved. And, more tellingly, because we are all so in love with the idea of being in love.

  “You look morose.”

  I glanced up as Pawel walked into the reception area, smiling. As I came to know him, I realized that the few times Pawel ever smiled was when he saw other people’s discomfort.

  “Momentary weltschmerz,” I said.

  “In my experience it’s never momentary. Follow me.”

  I did just that, walking with him toward his office cubicle, keeping my head lowered in case I caught sight of Petra again. When we reached his lair, he motioned for me to sit in his spare chair.

  “The copy?” he asked,

  I handed it over. Much to my bemusement he immediately started reading it. Now this was a first. Though I kept trying to avoid staring at him, I did find myself repeatedly glancing over in his direction, attempting to gauge his reaction. But his was a true poker face. It revealed nothing. Until, after ten long minutes, he tossed the pages onto his desk and said:

  “Okay. You can write. In fact, you can write well. But I have a few suggestions . . .”

  It took him exactly three minutes to outline the changes he wanted me to make. Most of them had to do with my observations about East German society—which he felt were a little too “broad-stroked” and needed to be more subtle. And he also wanted me to cut down on “the sub-le Carré stuff” upon my departure via Checkpoint Charlie.

  “I’ve heard that all far too often,” he said. “Otherwise, it’s fine. Can you get these changes to me by tomorrow morning?”

  “Sure.”

  “If you could hand them in to the security guard before nine a.m. . . . then I’ll be in touch when we need you for the recording. And I’ll also get the translation started.”

  “No problem. You’ll have it by then.”

  Actually he had it by seven that next morning. Having done the rewrite upon arriving home—and having again fallen into bed early—I was up and on the U-Bahn by six thirty. After delivering the copy to the security guard at the front entrance, I hopped the underground train back to Kreuzberg and was atop a ladder by eight, covering bloodstains with white primer. As before Mehmet worked opposite me and refused all attempts at conversation. So, bar two breaks for coffee and cigarettes and a general chat about the redecoration progress, little talk passed between us. He was, as before, gone by noon. After a shower and a change of clothes, I was at the Café Istanbul by twelve thirty.

  “I have a message for you,” Omar said when I entered his premises. “A call about twenty minutes ago from a Fraulein Dussmann.”

  “Are you serious?” I heard myself saying.

  “Of course I’m serious. I took the message. She wants you to call her back.”

  While handing me the phone, he also gave me the scratch pad on which was written her name and number.

  The phone answered immediately. It was her. She’d given me her direct line.

  “So they did give you my message,” she said after answering. “Pawel told me this was the only way of contacting you.”

  “One of these days I really must get a phone.”

  “But then you will be contactable. And you will lose the romance of a Turkish café answering service.”

  Her tone surprised me. It was light and wry. Again I found myself thinking: she is wonderful.

  “Pawel also gave me your essay to translate. I have a few questions. Do you have a couple of minutes now?”

  “Have a cup of coffee with me.”

  “But my questions aren’t that many.”

  “Have a coffee with me, Petra.”

  A long silence followed. It’s just a cup of coffee, I felt like telling her. But it was hardly just that. The length of this pause now indicated to me that she knew what I knew, that this was momentous. Or, at least, I kept trying to convince myself she understood this, too.

  I let the silence linger, not daring to rush the moment, waiting for her response. A good thirty seconds must have passed before she finally spoke.

  “All right,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. “Let’s meet for coffee.”

  TWO

  WE AGREED TO meet in a café on the other side of Kreuzberg—“my side,” as she informed me when I mentioned I wasn’t far away from Heinrich Heine Strasse.

  “Can you come over to the wrong side of the tracks?” she asked, an amused dryness underscoring the delivery of th
at question.

  “Always.”

  “I was, of course, referring to geographical matters. You live in the more chic part of Kreuzberg.”

  “Now that’s news to me, as my corner of this district isn’t exactly the Rue Saint-Honoré.”

  “Never been to Paris. Never been in any cities except Berlin and Leipzig and Dresden and Halle.”

  “The latter of which I never even heard of.”

  “Nor have most people outside the German Democratic Republic. Even most people in the GDR have never been to Halle, for good reasons.”

  “But you have been to Halle.”

  “Worse than that. I was born and raised there.”

  “And it’s worse than even the wrong side of the tracks in Kreuzberg?”

  “What is the worst city you’ve ever been to in the United States?”

  “There’s quite a competition for that prize, but I would have to say Lewiston, Maine—a depressing mill town with ugly architecture, a flatlined economy, and a general air of decay.”

  “Sounds like Halle, though being the GDR, it was always promoted as a great triumph of proletariat-industrial productivity.”

  “In Lewiston there were just French Canadian Catholics who drank.”

  “Oh, everyone drank in Halle, which was the only antidote against the toxic chemical fumes that were exhaled by all the factories there.”