The Moment

by Douglas Kennedy

  Though I was still trying to appear bewildered—as I had been instructed to appear—so much about all this was genuinely bewildering. The glare of the headlights turned on me on the bridge. Was that to ensure that the agents on the GDR side could not see the faces of their Western counterparts awaiting me? The fact that Frau Jochum was so well dressed. The leather interior of the most luxurious car I had ever entered (of course, it was a Mercedes). The low murmur of its engine as we drove off. The way Frau Jochum and Herr Ullmann spoke in low, comforting voices, designed to put me at my ease. But when I asked them about Jurgen I could see them exchanging glances, looking ill at ease, trying to communicate to each other with their eyes. That’s when I knew. When I pressed them to tell me what had happened to my husband. they said they’d rather talk to me after I’d had a good night’s sleep. He’s dead, I told myself. And those bastards over there—in the prison where they kept me—told me nothing about this. Nothing.

  I pressed Frau Jochum again. This time she told me that Jurgen had hanged himself in his cell. It was strange, my reaction. Yes, I was shocked. But because she had first hesitated before telling me, I was already prepared for such extreme news. While it still had a certain kick-in-the-stomach impact on me, it didn’t cleave me the way the death of a spouse should. Perhaps because, though he was officially my husband, he was a man with whom I shared an apartment and little more. But I sensed Frau Jochum and Herr Ullmann knew this from my file. Just as they would also know that it was his insane behavior that landed me in prison some weeks ago . . . or, at least, I thought it was weeks ago. They kept me so disorientated I could never work out how long I had been locked up. Whenever I asked Colonel Stenhammer—the Stasi man who interrogated me daily—if my husband had been saying mad things about me, he would always tell me not to ask questions, and then demand to know if I had something to hide.

  “If you come clean with us, the path back to Johannes will be an easier one.”

  But as I had nothing to confess . . .

  Weeks this went on. All the while they were keeping the light on in my cell twenty-four hours a day, letting me out only for a half hour of exercise in a concrete block topped with barbed wire, and for the five hours of interrogations that took up the mornings. In other words, they were rapidly grinding me down. All I could think about, day and night, was the fact that they had now taken Johannes from me and were telling me—as I was now classified as a traitor to the State—that they would never let my polluted influence infect “this child of our People’s Republic.”

  You will never see him again unless you cooperate with them, I told myself so many times. And the knowledge that Jurgen—his self-importance, his childishness, his lack of responsibility when it came to his wife and, most especially, his child—created this catastrophe that had seen Johannes taken away from me . . . well, when Frau Jochum told me of his death, all I could think (after the initial jolt that accompanied the news) was: at least you now do not have to live with the pain and consequences of your aberrant behavior.

  The windows of the Mercedes were tinted, which meant that all the neon of the city—neon like I had never seen before—appeared refracted through a darkened prism.

  Eventually we drove into a compound. Gates. Men in uniforms. Bright lights. Security everywhere. We pulled up in front of what seemed to be a small house within these grounds. A woman was standing outside. This was Frau Ludwig. Forties. Quiet. Professional. Kind in a professionally competent way.

  “You must be Petra,” she said as Frau Jochum handed me over, saying good-bye after informing me that we would continue our conversation tomorrow afternoon. I was suddenly feeling an exhaustion and a fear that almost matched the exhaustion and fear that I felt all those weeks locked up in that prison, being told I had to cooperate with the Stasi or I would be left dangling in this limbo for years, with no hope whatsoever of my son being returned to me.

  In the end, I did everything they asked of me. Including signing those fucking papers, allowing them to place Johannes with another family.

  But it was all entered into as “a deal.” A deal that would involve me doing some work for them.

  “Greatly serious, important work,” Colonel Stenhammer told me.

  “Work that will be of such benefit to our Democratic Republic that I can see no reason why you shouldn’t be honored to do it.”

  And then he presented his proposition to me. A proposition that, as he put it, “offers you the possibility of hope.”

  How could I say no, knowing that if I did, all hope would be quashed?

  So I said yes—and so quickly that Stenhammer insisted I be returned to my cell for forty-eight hours to truly ponder whether I was up to the task. Forty-eight hours in that cell without any contact. With the knowledge that my one and only chance was by doing exactly what he demanded?

  That’s when I broke down completely in front of him, begging him not to lock me up again, promising him my full and utter cooperation, my complete fealty. I even used that word, “fealty”—which in German is Lehenstreue. Stenhammer smiled when he heard it.

  “A very medieval word, Frau Dussmann,” he said. “Yet one with strong semantical connotations. Knights swore Lehenstreue to the realm. And although the feudalism of the medieval system runs so contrary to the democratic tenets of our Republic, I do acknowledge and appreciate—as one who has sworn to defend the Republic from its capitalist enemies—the metaphoric resonance of Lehenstreue as regards your response to our proposition. Just as I can also see that, having finally accepted your duty to the state that has given you so much, you wish to get to work as soon as possible, knowing that the faster things progress, the closer you will be to . . .”

  He didn’t finish this sentence, because he knew it was more effective to let this “payoff’ dangle. It was the bait—and I had no choice but to swallow it.

  Perhaps that was what was so unnerving about these first hours in the West. The civility of Frau Jochum and Herr Ullmann. Their evident decency. The way they were so solicitous toward me. And all the while, me feeling like a bad provincial actor forced to play the role of Faust at the Deutsches Theater in West Berlin—and wondering endlessly if they were accepting my performance.

  Frau Ludwig also could not have been more hospitable—and, in her own controlled way, truly compassionate. The apartment into which I had been ushered was so plush, so beautifully furnished, so redolent of security and safety, that I was nothing less than overwhelmed by the way they were trying to cushion me. Then, after telling me she was going to run me a bath, she said that she had a small gift for me—and placed in my hand a very elegant chrome lipstick. My eyes immediately welled up. For I remembered instantly something I had read once in a book about the Second World War by an English academic, a book that had been briefly considered by the state publishing house where I worked as a translator. It was only considered, I learned later, because the man had impeccable socialist credentials. But it was tossed into that pile of books that had been rejected and were to be incinerated, for that is what we did with foreign books from outside the fraternal socialist nations which we knew we wouldn’t publish and which we didn’t want to fall into the wrong hands. I saw this book at the top of one of those bins. It looked interesting and—from a GDR perspective—revisionist. So I took a risk and snuck it into my shoulder bag and brought it home, hiding it in a hole in a kitchen cupboard in my room. This was just a month before I moved in with Jurgen. Late at night, when I couldn’t sleep, I would take the book out and learn that everything we had been taught about Nazis coming from the west of Germany was a fantasy. They came from all corners of Das Vaterland. Although we knew certain things about the concentration camps, the details were never spelled out in all their horror. This historian did so graphically, but with great technical control. He didn’t try to embellish the monstrosity perpetrated there. He simply let the facts speak. Just as he also made the parallel with the much less documented horrors of the Stalinist gulags which, of course, we o
nly knew about in a sort of hearsay way.

  It’s strange, isn’t it, how, amidst all the accounts of children being forcibly separated from their parents, and the hideous medical experiments (women having liquid concrete shoved up their uteruses) and the gassings, and the harvesting of teeth for their gold fillings, a small detail suddenly illuminates everything. And it was the mention, made by this Oxford historian, that when the British troops liberated the concentration camp at Belsen, they handed lipsticks to all the surviving women inmates. Those women broke down at this small gesture—a materially tiny but psychologically huge bit of luxury that acknowledged the femininity of women who were, at best, lice-ridden, emaciated.

  So when Frau Ludwig handed me that lipstick, I was so overcome that I had to excuse myself to go to the bathroom. Once I had the door closed I began to weep. I cried because I couldn’t bear being separated from Johannes, because the ache I felt without him was limitless. But I also cried at the simple humanity of the gesture that Frau Ludwig just made to me—and all that it implied.

  But the weeping was also bound up in the fact that I would now have to betray everyone I encountered in this new world. To realize that in the face of such a simple act of kindness . . .

  I can’t live with myself.

  I have to live with myself. It is the only way back.

  * * *

  I can lie to others. I cannot lie to myself. Jurgen lied to himself constantly. He told himself he was the great playwright. The great radical thinker. The great subversive. What he was—what he saw in those sad moments when I could see him catch furtive glances at himself in the mirror—was a man who had squandered his early success. Instead of taking steps to recapture the brilliant spark that illuminated that one extraordinary play of his, he gave in to all those voices that told him he was a genius and that simultaneously whispered to him that he would never fulfill the promise he briefly showed.

  But who am I—a woman of no creative talent whatsoever, a minor little translator who hasn’t ever even been given the privilege of applying her craft to a major novel—to disparage a man who did write one significant play that, until he landed himself in trouble with the authorities, was performed everywhere in our strange little country.

  So yes, I see myself with a certain hard clarity. Just as I know that this is but a half truth, that a very large part of the human condition involves having to modulate truth in order to make living with yourself possible.

  So I try to justify my actions to myself all the time. Just as the other more brutal side of me grabs me by the scruff of the neck, shoves me in front of a mirror, and says: stop the self-deception, the pretense, the fraud. Look at yourself—and don’t be magnanimous.

  That voice—it’s my mother’s. She always had the hard words for me. Praise, she once told me, is an overrated tendency. It creates narcissism and self-absorption. Whereas self-criticism, fault-finding, keeps you grounded, bona fide, principled.

  I could have added one last word here: joyless.

  Am I joyless? I think back to all the joy I had with Johannes—how he made every day worthwhile, and his presence in my life so counterbalanced everything else. It’s what I once said to Colonel Stenhammer: Johannes is my entire reason for living. To which he dryly replied: “Then you will, I am certain, do everything in your power to convince the state that you merit his return to your care and custody.”

  Of course, I said I would do whatever was asked of me.

  I can lie to others. I cannot lie to myself.

  And so I must admit a chronological truth here. I am writing this four weeks after that first night I was handed over to Frau Jochum and Herr Ullmann. Before tonight I never put pen to paper and attempted to assemble my thoughts about all that had happened to me, all that I had to hide. A day or so after I was brought to the West, Frau Ludwig had asked me if I wanted “writing materials.” Perhaps she understood—given everything I’d been through—the need to write things down, to set out my version of events on the page and, in the process, try to sort out my feelings about everything . . . even vent my anger, my agony at having lost my son, and the fury I felt at Stenhammer never telling me, before my departure, about Jurgen’s suicide . . . if it really was a suicide. But he knew that to inform me of that before I left would have been destabilizing—and, perhaps, I might not have accepted the Faustian bargain he proposed. He also knew that, once handed over, I would ask his Western counterparts—or they would have to tell me—about my husband’s fate. This would undoubtedly devastate me—even if my feelings toward Jurgen were, at best, mixed ones. Stenhammer was counting on this devastation to make me feel even more isolated even more fearful of the fact that, if I didn’t now cooperate . . .

  So . . . the truth. Or, at least, my version thereof.

  I am writing this in a room they found for me in Kreuzberg. Before now I scribbled banal things in another notebook I left closed on my little desk here in my room. I had inserted three hairs in the pages of this closed notebook—and every day, when I went out for a few hours, I always returned, prepared to discover that Frau Jochum’s and Herr Ullmann’s people had been snooping around my room and reading what I had written.

  But the notebook remained closed and untouched.

  Once convinced that my room wasn’t being swept on a regular basis, I then did a little inspection of the basement in my building—and found a disused ventilator shaft in a particularly dark corner of this cavern. Reaching up into the shaft I discovered there was a small shelf just above its point of entry, one that could comfortably house a few journals.

  That same day I went out and bought a second similar notebook to the one I had been leaving on my desk as a decoy. That night I began to write the journal I am scribbling in just now, trying to get down on paper everything that had happened to me since I was brought to the West. Every few days since that first night, I retrieve the journal from its hiding place and commit to paper all that I can never tell anyone.

  I am vigilant about the fact that this journal never leaves this building, that when I finish writing in it, I always bring it straight down to its hiding place in the cellar, and do so after midnight when there is nobody around. And I keep on writing that rather prosaic decoy journal, jotting down thoughts about my work, my impressions of West Berlin, my loneliness and (yes) how much I miss my son. Once I start work, I plan to make a point of bringing it out with me and also continue to leave it on my desk at home.

  And the hairs I continue to hide in its pages remain unmoved.

  And when it comes to my “actual” journal, the one in which this sentence is being written right now, the journal I keep stashed in the basement . . .

  Despite so carefully hiding it away—and never allowing it to remain in my room for longer than the period in which I am writing in it—I know I am still taking an immense risk in chronicling the lie I am forced to live. But writing it down means it is not just existing inside my head, that there is a place in which I can disclose what is happening to me, the deceit and fraudulence that now underscore everything about my life here. If I didn’t have the refuge of this journal, I would go under. I don’t seek absolution, but I do need confession.

  I only write in this journal every few days. I always do it late in the evening—retrieving it from the basement after ascertaining that no one is in the hallway, secreting it under my shirt or sweater as I head back to my room, then returning it to its ventilator shaft hiding place as soon as I have finished my entry. I never go near it during daylight hours, no matter how much I want to get something down in it.

  Kreuzberg. It is such a sad place. But I insisted on living here because, during one of our many daily “conversations,” Frau Jochum revealed, after I demanded the information, that Johannes had been placed with a Stasi family who lived in Friedrichshain. That’s when I also demanded a map of West Berlin and saw that the district closest to Friedrichshain was Kreuzberg—The Wall cleaving the two areas like a surgeon who had the shakes when making an incisi
on, leaving a scar that looks like a demented crescent moon.

  “I want to live here,” I said, pointing to Kreuzberg.

  “Is that, psychologically speaking, a good idea?” Frau Jochum asked me. “After all, you will be in proximity to where Johannes lives.”

  “That’s the idea,” I said. “I want to be close to my son.”

  “Personally, I do not think this wise.”

  “Personally, I think it essential for me,” I said.

  I could see Frau Jochum pondering all this, then saying:

  “All right, in time, when you are ready to go out into the world . . . yes, we will help you find an apartment in Kreuzberg.”

  The “apartment” was this room. Frau Ludwig brought me out apartment hunting the next week. She said she just wanted to help me find my way around the city, but my feeling is they felt they had to chaperone me, to make certain I was stable, capable of being out on my own. I couldn’t help but wonder if they were thinking about keeping me under surveillance for the first weeks that I was an independent entity.