When we got back home, I excused myself to spend an hour working on the transcript. Not once did Petra approach me. Not once did she look over my shoulder or ask if she could peruse the transcripts. Instead she sat on our bed, editing the statement she was writing to support her green card application. I pushed on until ten o’clock, then gathered up the transcript pages and deliberately left them on the table. I went into the bedroom. Petra looked up from her notepad.
“Done already?”
“I’ll get back to it tomorrow before I go in to work on the editing of the actual tapes with Pawel.”
“You must be tired.”
“That I am.”
“But not too tired, I hope.”
She opened her arms to me. We pulled off each other’s clothes again and made love with a deliberateness so slow, so intimate, that I couldn’t help but sense that Petra’s love for me was still as deep and as profound as mine for her. Afterward, she whispered in my ear:
“I will always love you, no matter what happens.”
Then, turning off the light, we fell asleep in each other’s arms.
Except, of course, I was wide awake with my eyes shut. I was actually damn tired, but I fought the urge to pass out, while simultaneously hoping that in ten or fifteen minutes I would open my eyes and find Petra there beside me, fast asleep. Then I too would drift off into unconsciousness, knowing that I had the answer I so wanted.
If she sleeps, life goes on as planned.
But if she gets up . . .
Ten minutes later, she did just that. Disengaging herself from my arms. Sitting up in the bed and then not moving for at least sixty seconds (was she making sure I was fast asleep?). Then I heard her quietly scooping up her clothes and heading out the bedroom door, closing it behind her as soundlessly as possible.
I counted to sixty before silently getting out of bed. I pulled on my jeans and a T-shirt, relieved that the bedroom blinds were partly open and the room half-lit by moonlight. I waited another five minutes, standing absolutely still, my eyes focused on the second hand of my watch. When the three hundred seconds had passed, I crept toward the closed bedroom door. But during those five motionless minutes, I tossed aside Bubriski’s directive to squat down and put my eye to the keyhole. To do so would be to spy, to engage in the surreptitious. Instead I just opened the door as quietly as possible.
There was Petra, leaning over the kitchen table. My work light was now focused down upon several transcript pages that had been spread out across the sanded pine surface. And she was using a tiny camera to photograph each page. For several moments I didn’t move. Even though I expected this from the moment I felt her get up and leave the bed, the shock of seeing her engaged in this “work” . . . all I could do was stand there and watch everything disintegrate. Love is, among other things, about hope. Hope is such a fragile entity—so charged with meaning, so delicately balanced on the frontier between great possibility and an even greater sense of loss—that you always fear the moment when you have definitive, concrete proof that things are now hopeless.
“You need to leave,” I heard myself saying.
Petra was so caught unaware by the sound of my voice that she lost her balance, breaking her fall by hitting the table with her hand and sending the lamp crashing to the ground, its bulb smashing on impact.
“Thomas . . . ,” she whispered.
“Get out,” I said, my voice still quiet.
“There is an explanation for all this.”
“I know there is. You work for them, don’t you?”
“Thomas . . .”
“Don’t you?” I now shouted.
She put her hand to her mouth, her eyes filling up with tears.
“You have to let me explain.”
“No, I don’t. Because you’ve betrayed me, you’ve betrayed us, you’ve betrayed everything.”
I could hear her strangle a cry in her throat.
“I love you,” she whispered.
“And you were with another man this weekend in Hamburg.”
Now it was she who looked as if she had been slapped across the face.
“How did you—?”
“Know? That’s my business. But I found out. Just as I found out that you’ve been fucking him all the time that you were telling me—”
“You are the man I love, Thomas. And you have to let me—”
“What? Explain? Give me some excuse why you had to service that evil little monster?”
“Please, please, let me try to—”
“Did you fucking hear me?” I screamed. “I want you out of here, out of my life now.”
When she came toward me, weeping, her arms open, repeating just one word, “Please . . . please . . . please,” I found myself edging into the sort of irrational anger where all past grievances—all the accumulated personal betrayals dating back to childhood—coalesced into a rage that I had never experienced before, a rage that terrified me. But I couldn’t apply the brakes, couldn’t quell the fury that propelled me toward her, Petra crying wildly, cowering in a corner as I scooped up the transcript, flung it all at her, yelling:
“Take it, take the fucking thing! You’ll probably get the Order of Fucking Lenin for it!”
“Please . . . please . . . please . . . ,” she cried again, the words hardly getting out.
“You destroy everything, and you want fucking mercy? Out.”
As I screamed that last word, I lashed out, flinging a kitchen chair across the room, watching her howl with grief as she still managed to scrabble together all the pages of the transcript.
“You see! You see!” I shrieked at her as I saw her gather up the pages. “You’ve got what you wanted, now fuck off and . . .”
She raced for her shoulder bag, stuffing the camera and the pages into it, then ran for the door, hysterical, frightened, crying uncontrollably. The door slammed behind her with a huge thud. I went charging to the window. The rage still in full throttle, I pulled the cord, lowering the blinds immediately, sending whatever operative posted outside the agreed signal that she was coming downstairs. That action—it was if I had given the firing squad the order to shoot—instantly sent me in a different direction, as I started barreling down the stairs, yelling at Petra to stop, to wait, to . . .
What was I thinking? I had no idea, except that having gone mad with fury I now suddenly found myself overwhelmed by the realization that I had acted irrationally, logic scrambled in the middle of wrath, so enraged at her that I didn’t even let her explain. And now . . .
I ran as fast as I could, slamming myself against the main door of the apartment, careening out into the darkened street, screaming Petra’s name as I saw her being bundled into a car by two men in suits. As I raced toward the car, which was now pulling away at speed, yelling at them to stop, to let me explain, someone stepped out of the shadows and, with a fast right to my stomach, sent me flying toward the pavement. As my knees hit the concrete, I was suddenly yanked up by the collar and found myself face-to-face with Bubriski.
“The fuck are you doing?” he said.
“You didn’t say you were going to arrest her on the street!” I yelled. “You said you were going to use her to get—”
His fist slammed again into my stomach. This time he hauled me up, dragged me inside the lobby of my building, and pushed me against a wall, hissing:
“You shut up now unless you want to end up in indefinite custody, and I am totally fucking serious about that. Understand?”
I nodded my head, many times, thrown by the ferocity of his tone.
“Your role in all this is finished. You did the right thing. Now it is over. Here’s the deal I am willing to cut you. You pack your bags and you get out of Berlin now—and if I never read or hear anything by you about any of this, I will let you get on with your life. But if you make trouble . . . if you start raising shit . . .”
“I’ll make no trouble,” I said.
He let go of my shirt.
“Smart guy.
Now go upstairs and start packing your bags. There’s a BA flight to Frankfurt at seven tomorrow morning. It connects with a Lufthansa flight at ten twenty-five a.m. to New York. You have an open round-trip ticket, don’t you?”
He knows everything about me. Everything.
“I am going to have my people call the two airlines and book you on those flights. No objections?”
And no choice in the matter.
“No objections,” I said.
“You’re a truly smart guy. On behalf of the US government, I thank you for your sterling work. She was a piece of shit, and you got duped and then you settled the score, which is the way I like to see these stories turn out, not that they ever really do. Still . . .”
I lowered my head and said nothing. All I felt right now was shame and horror. “Please, please, please,” she’d said to me over and over again, begging me to let her tell her side of things. Instead, all full of righteous rage, I had thrown her into the clutches of these men whose games were as dirty as those played by the other side.
“If you’re feeling guilty—and I’m a good read of these things,” Bubriski said, “lose it now. She knew what she was getting into when she got into bed with those people. She’ll be traded in a few weeks for some people they have imprisoned over there and will probably be awarded with a bigger apartment and a Trabbi. Until then we won’t deprive her of sleep or try to break her down—because there’s little she can tell us that we don’t already know. She’s just a minor pawn in all this. Just like you.”
“And how about Haechen? Will you be arresting him?”
“That’s confidential. My advice to you is: go back to New York. Write your Berlin book. Find some interesting neurotic junior editor at the New York Review of Books to sleep with. Never mention any of this to anybody, but I told you that already, and I sense you’re a fast learner. Just be thankful you walked away relatively unscathed. My report about you will praise your cooperation and the fact that you delivered the ‘package’ to us. But it will also insist that a close eye be kept on your literary output. By all means continue to be somewhat snide about your country in print. It shows we don’t clamp down on creative types who play the critical card. But if word ever reaches us that you have told this story . . .”
“What story?”
“I’m actually beginning to moderately like you.”
“If my roommate asks why I’m leaving in a hurry?”
“Tell him you broke up with your girlfriend and it’s too hard to bear remaining in Berlin. Then be on that plane tomorrow morning at seven.”
He stepped back from me.
“So this is where I wish you Auf Wiedersehen und gute Reise—as I doubt our paths will ever cross again. Once again, good work, comrade. You’re one of us now.”
And he turned and disappeared back into the shadows.
I went upstairs—my brain so rattled that I had to grasp the railings all the way up to keep myself steady. But when I reached the door to the apartment I found Alaistair standing outside it. He looked at me with cold contempt.
“What have you done?” he asked, his voice hard, disdainful, full of scorn. “My God, Thomas. What have you done?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I was in my bedroom. I heard everything upstairs. I was about to intervene when Petra ran down the stairs. Then peering through the blinds I saw what happened in the street. And when that compatriot thug of yours dragged you back in here I quietly stepped out onto the landing and eavesdropped. I got it all. Everything.”
“And what are you going to do about it?”
“Nothing . . . except to tell you that if you weren’t being ordered to leave Berlin in a few hours I’d be ordering you to clear out of my apartment. I want nothing to do with you again.”
“You don’t understand what she did, how she betrayed—”
“The biggest betrayal here—after turning the woman you loved over to those bastards—is the one you have perpetrated on yourself. You’ve ruined your life, Thomas. Because you’ll never get over this. Never.”
Three days later I sat up half the night with my mathematician friend Stan in his tiny apartment near MIT in Cambridge. With several weeks left to go before my subletter vacated my place in Manhattan and in desperate need of a friend, I rang Stan from Kennedy, saying I needed refuge. He said the lumpy pull-out bed in his living room was mine for as long as I needed it—and I grabbed the bus to La Guardia and the shuttle to Boston. I showed up at his place around ten that night, having not slept in more than thirty-six hours. He saw the exhaustion etched on my face and asked no questions. He just made up the bed for me and managed to leave the next morning without waking me up. When I finally came to, it was approaching one in the afternoon—and though rested I felt as if I were locked into some manic vortex without exit. For the next two days I never left the apartment, terrified of the world beyond these secure walls. Stan let me be, never trying to engage me in too much conversation or find out why I had turned into an agoraphobic. Then, on the third night, I turned to him and said:
“If I tell you a story do you promise . . . ?”
“You know you don’t have to ask,” he said.
So I told him everything. And when I finished, he said nothing for a very long time. Then:
“Don’t blame yourself. That Bubriski fellow was right when he said that you and Petra were just minor pawns in a very large game.”
“But I went crazy and destroyed everything.”
“You went crazy because you loved her more than you have ever loved anyone. She will know that. Believe me, for the rest of her life, she will not think that you were a demon for going mad when you found out the truth about her. She will think: ‘That man so loved me his whole world was upended when he found out who I was.’ And it will haunt her forever.”
“And will it haunt me forever?” I asked.
“You already know the answer to that question.”
I hung my head. I said nothing. But Stan filled the silence.
“You’re never going to get over this, Thomas. Try as you might, it just won’t happen.”
When Stan died suddenly many years later, his words filled my inner ear and refused to be dislodged for days. Not that they had ever really vanished from my consciousness in the decade and a half since they were first spoken. On the contrary, they were always there. Just as she was always there. Every day. That part of my past which I shared with one good friend and then banished from any further mention. Because to share it with another person would be to admit the one thing I didn’t want to articulate, even though I knew it to be so profoundly true.
I had never gotten over it.
ELEVEN
THE MANUSCRIPT ENDED there. As I turned the last page over, I pushed it away. Just as I had done back in December 2000, when I finished writing it all—six breathless weeks of solid work for a book that would never make its way into print, because I would never let it. And having gotten it all down on paper, I immediately locked it away in my manuscript cabinet, certain that I would never read it again. It wasn’t as if, at the time, I was still taking Bubriski’s threat of retribution seriously. After all, The Wall had fallen eleven years earlier. The Cold War was in the past tense. The city—to which I had never returned from the moment I was ordered out of it all those years earlier—was now a reunified construct. And, of course, I had published, in mid-l986, a book about my time in Berlin . . . but one that dodged all that I knew could never be made public.
In fact, I started that book just a week after my atrocious exit from Berlin in the summer of ’84. After spending a few catatonic days at Stan’s place in Cambridge, he said, “I’m ordering you out of Dodge and to somewhere where you can recuperate while looking at wide open spaces.” He threw me the keys to his family’s summer cottage on the shores of Lake Champlain just outside of Burlington. His parents had died two years earlier in a car accident. He was their only child. Since he was now back finishing hi
s doctorate at MIT while teaching there fulltime, the cottage was empty.
“Hang out there as long as you like,” he said. “If you even try to pay me rent I won’t ever talk to you again.”
I took the bus north to Vermont. The cottage was simple but livable. It was three rooms right on the shores of the lake and just a ten-minute bike ride from downtown Burlington. It had a decent bed, a decent desk, a comfortable chair for reading, books, records, a shortwave radio, and a small desk with an impeccable view of the lake and the looming presence of the Adirondack Mountains that defined the far shoreline. There was even a bicycle with panniers—which meant I could bike down into Burlington to buy groceries, sip coffee, haunt bookshops, watch a movie, and generally fill the time that I wasn’t spending writing.
Yes, I started writing immediately. Within a day of getting there, I set up my typewriter on the desk in Stan’s cottage. In that mad rush to get to the airport for that seven a.m. flight I had taken with me just some basic clothes, my typewriter, and my all-important notebooks. Everything else I had acquired in Berlin—books, records, additional clothes—I left behind with two hundred dollars on the kitchen table and a note to Alaistair with my New York address.
If you can bring yourself to pack up what remains for me, please ship it all. The $200 should adequately cover costs. If you decide to simply dump it all into the nearest charity shop, I will understand.
I could have gone on, saying how this was not the ending I wanted. But I simply signed it and stuffed what remained in my two suitcases, then hauled everything downstairs. Alaistair was there, an open vodka bottle on the table, a cigarette in hand, staring at the empty blank walls behind him.
“So you really are running away,” he said.
“That’s right.”
“Story of your life, isn’t it?”
Then he swiveled around in his chair and showed me his back, letting me know that there was to be no further conversation between us.
I struggled with my bags onto the street, waiting more than twenty minutes until a cab came along. At the airport I discovered that, yes, I had been reserved a seat on the seven a.m. Frankfurt flight and the onward connection to New York. Some hours later, well over the Atlantic, I locked myself in one of the toilets and lost it for the better part of ten minutes. I was crying so loudly that one of the flight attendants banged on the door and asked if I was all right. That snapped me out of my sobbing jag. I opened the door. The attendant eyed me with concern.
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