I felt a sob strangle my throat as I gazed at the photograph. But I quelled it, as I didn’t want to allow this bastard the pleasure of watching me cry. Still, from the corner of my eye I could see him studying me, a slightly smug smile on his face—as if he knew that, as long as the possibility of reuniting with Johannes was there, he could virtually do what he wanted to me.
“May I please keep this photograph?” I asked him.
“Not allowed,” he said. “Say somebody saw it . . .”
“No one will see it. I would only keep it at home.”
“But you might feel compelled to carry it with you at all times.”
“I’m more disciplined than that.”
“I’m not convinced. And they know you were deported to the West without any photograph of your son on your person—because, trust me, they made a strict inventory of everything you arrived with. Should one of your coworkers see this photograph by accident, they might tell somebody who might tell somebody, and word would get back to them and questions would be asked about how she obtained these photographs, and with whom from over there she was making contact and . . .”
“I would never let that happen. No one ever comes to my room. So, please, just let me have that one photograph of my son. You can trust me.”
“You haven’t proved yourself worthy of trust yet.”
With that he snatched the photograph out of my hand.
“You can see these photographs every time we meet,” he said. “It will be your reward for fulfilling your duties as specified. Now go.”
* * *
I went to a public clinic in Kreuzberg yesterday and met with a woman doctor and said I wanted to go on the pill. She asked me a variety of straightforward questions, including: “Are you planning to have children?” To which I flatly said “No.” She just shrugged and told me I might just change my mind someday.
Ten minutes later I was outside with a prescription. I went to a chemist and got it filled. The chemist warned me that full protection would not be “in place” until a full week after I started taking the pill.
“So suggest to your boyfriend that he uses condoms in the meantime.”
I asked for a tube of spermicide.
The next day—before having to report to my meeting with Haechen—I stopped in a bathroom in Zoo Station and took the tube of spermicide out of my bag and lowered my jeans and my knickers and inserted the tube and emptied a good third of it into me. He didn’t notice the slightly chemical aroma of the spermicide when he was fucking me ten minutes later. I used the spermicide again before the next three visits while waiting for the pill’s efficacy to take. The idea of getting pregnant by this man is a nightmare beyond nightmares.
* * *
Weeks now since I wrote here. Life is, on the surface, straightforward, unchanging. I do my job. I translate what is demanded. I always meet the deadline. I am always punctual at work. I keep to myself. Twice a week I arrive with the camera in my boots. As winter is fading away, I have bought a lighter pair, also a half-size too big, to secrete the camera on those days when I need to photograph the documents. My system of bringing them into the toilet stall with me has been varied, as I also found a storage room downstairs in which stationery supplies are kept. Nobody ever goes in there at lunchtime. The light is better than the toilets (Haecher told me that he has had occasional complaints from his people that the quality of the photos could be improved). If I leave the door open while getting the photography done, no one can happen upon me, as the storage room is at the end of a long basement corridor. There is a metal door from the staircase leading into this corridor—it’s the only point of entrance—and even if you try to open it quietly, it still makes a very discernible noise. The floors are concrete—so even when walking in sneakers, your footsteps can be heard. I scoured the storage room everywhere to see if there were any hidden closed-circuit cameras—or an eye in the sky. Nothing found. So it has become the perfect spot during lunch hour to get my work for Haechen done.
We continue to meet twice a week in variations on the same dingy hotel room. The order of business is always the same. I arrive. I strip. He fucks me for the three minutes it takes him to ejaculate. We smoke cigarettes. I hand him the film. I leave.
I haven’t become inured to the degradation of it all. I still find him bestial and gross. But I have also accepted these twice-weekly events as a duty to be fulfilled. He never speaks about anything to do with himself. I know nothing about his own life—whether there’s a wife, a girlfriend, an ex, children, where he was born, where he was raised, whether his parents were kind to him or left him feeling permanently alone, whether he has a flat here in the city or moves clandestinely from dive hotel to dive hotel. He, in turn, asks no questions about me. However, he recently did make a point to question me at length about life at Radio Liberty—wanting to know as much as I could report about my colleagues.
Pawel particularly interests him, especially as he continues to plague me, often criticizing my translations on pedantic grounds, always making a point of looking down my shirt, endlessly asking me out for a drink, dinner, alternating flirtatious banter with invective, constantly unnerving me.
“I want to report him to Herr Wellmann,” I told Haechen one evening.
“Put up with him,” he said. “The more unpleasant he is, the better.”
“Why is that?”
“Because colleagues at work will see how detestable he is being to you—and how stoic you are being by withstanding it. It plays to your advantage.”
And does anybody see how stoic I am being by spreading my legs for you twice a week?
* * *
Time. It just drags along. I live such a circumscribed existence. The translation work is semi-interesting, frequently routine. A few of our writers have flair. A few are in love with their own cleverness. The vast majority are simply dead on the page. But Monica told me that Wellmann is a man who prefers the factual and the dull to the flamboyant and the talented. He is a real functionary, albeit one who will have his avuncular moments, asking me how I’m getting along, hoping that “you’re finding your way in this new world and that the past is starting to be a bit more manageable” (his first and only hint that he knew all about my personal situation), along with his reassurance, “Of course, I mention this only to you and have never and will never discuss this with anyone else.”
Granted, Pawel was relentless when it came to trying to get some personal information out of me, once challenging me in front of four other staffers at a lunch in a local pizzeria to explain what “angelic deed” I did to get myself evicted from the GDR, calling me a “tight-lipped Solzhenitsyn who probably wrote mediocre human rights poetry about the bourgeois dominion of her cunt.” That’s when I threw my beer in his face. His response was to just laugh.
Monica tried to get him fired after this—telling me she confronted Wellmann about him, stating that she was appalled that he would allow such a sexist, nasty little shit to remain on staff when he abused a woman colleague in such a vile, derogatory way.
“Wellmann said that he fully sympathized,” Monica told me, “and he would personally carpet Pawel, and insist that he write me a proper letter of apology and promise to never pull that sort of thing again. But he also told me, categorically, that Pawel couldn’t be fired. ‘My hands are tied here’—his exact words.”
With a knowing smile on her lips, Monica added:
“We all know what that means.”
So he too is an operative. One of theirs. And, as such, untouchable.
When I reported this all to Haechen several days later, he couldn’t have been more excited (and this from a man who, despite the vindictive veneer, never showed enthusiasm for anything), wanting to know every detail of the reported conversation between Monica and Wellmann. And when Pawel’s very formal—and, it must be said, contrite—letter arrived two days later, I made a photocopy and gave it to Haechen.
Yes, I was always trying to curry favor with him, t
o show him I was on board and wanting to please him and his masters. I even began to show the slightest bit of reciprocal movement when he fucked me—in the hope that he would, in turn, show a little kindness toward me.
But as the weeks turned into months, as he occasionally granted me five minutes’ custody with another snapshot of Johannes, I began to realize what I realized from the outset but kept trying to convince myself otherwise: the fact that he would, and could, string this along forever. On the one occasion when I dared to inquire when this all might end and I would be reunited with my son, he simply regarded his fingernails and said:
“That is not my decision. You should know better than to try my patience with such shit. You betrayed your homeland—and now you are trying to prove your worthiness to return there and, perhaps, regain responsibility for your son. Given the level of your betrayal the very fact that you are being offered this opportunity to redeem yourself speaks volumes about our humane system. But do not think for a moment that after a few mere months, you are going to be absolved and get handed the keys to the castle. Not a chance.”
After this dressing-down I went into a tailspin for days, suicide looming very large in my thoughts. It wasn’t as if Haechen had told me something I hadn’t already known from the outset. The truth was . . . there was no possibility of a reversal of fortune, no hope, no possible redemption or way out of this labyrinth of lies into which I had led myself.
One morning, after the third night in a row when I couldn’t sleep, my thoughts started turning to suicide again, only this time there was a calm logic to my deliberations. Pills versus slashing my wrists in the shower? Or maybe I should try to scale The Wall and get shot trying to repatriate myself back to the GDR (no, that would give those bastards some sort of propaganda victory: She was so unhappy in the West, so despondent after having been stripped of her GDR citizenship, that she was willing to go to desperate lengths to return to the fatherland she had betrayed).
Was I serious about taking my own life? Absolutely. A cocktail of despair, despondency, crushing insomnia, and the acceptance that all was lost, without possibility, dead.
Which, I had decided, is what I wanted to be.
On the day in question, I first made a side trip to Kochstrasse and made inquiries about the viewing roof open to the public on the thirty-eighth storey of the building that housed Axel Springer’s publishing empire. The woman at the information desk on the ground floor joked with me that if I had fear of heights, I shouldn’t go up there, “as the guard rails are low and the view down very vertiginous.” The only thing that stopped me from buying a ticket to the observatory tower, and taking the elevator straight to the top and flinging myself off before I had the chance to change my mind, was the desire to write a long explanatory letter to Johannes, which I would somehow find a way for it to be given to him when he was older. It was a letter in which I told him . . .
Well, everything.
Looking at my watch and realizing, in my good German way, that I was going to be late for work, I hurried off to the U-Bahn, pondering a question all the way to Wedding: could I find somebody who would, upon receipt of this sealed envelope after my death, be trusted to carry out the instructions I left him or her to find a way of delivering this letter to Johannes when he turned eighteen?
More specifically, would Monica—the only quasi-friend I had here—do that for me?
I only arrived five minutes late and had a note marked Urgent on my desk from Herr Wellmann. It was the translation of a piece explaining Reagan’s Star Wars program, which Wellmann said he needed by eleven. I grabbed a coffee from the communal pot. I lit a cigarette. I rolled a piece of paper into my typewriter. I went to work, finishing off this dry, concrete apologia for such an absurd weapons system just before the deadline. Then I proofed it and entered Herr Wellmann’s outer office.
“Oh good, you have it done,” Frau Orff said, seeing the copy in my hand. “I’ll send you right in.”
After phoning him, she pointed to the door. I knocked on it and walked in. In the moment I walked in I saw, sitting in the chair in front of Wellmann’s desk, a man in his mid-twenties. He stood up as I entered. I liked that. He was tall, with a big mop of brown hair and a very square jaw. Thin, lanky, interesting. A bookish man, but someone who, I sensed immediately, knew a bit about the world. Handsome, too. Very handsome . . . but not too aware of that. But what got me immediately about him were his eyes. They were sharp, observant eyes—yet also ones that radiated a certain forlornness. The eyes of someone worldly yet alone. The eyes of somebody looking for love and having yet to find it.
Then he saw me. And I saw the way he saw me. And, I sensed, he saw the way I saw him. In that instant . . . . it couldn’t have been more than a few seconds, but it seemed so much longer owing to the way we held each other’s gaze . . . in that instant, I fell victim to something that can only be described as febrile. Something I had never been hit with before. Something that I found perplexing and wondrous and wholly disconcerting at the same time.
Herr Wellmann introduced us.
Thomas Nesbitt. His name is Thomas Nesbitt.
And I have just fallen in love with him.
NOTEBOOK TWO
THOMAS NESBITT. THOMAS Nesbitt. Thomas Nesbitt.
In the hours, days, since meeting him I have said his name over and over again. I like the sound of it. So solid. So mature. So . . . . American.
He smiled at me as I left Wellmann’s office. Such a smile. So much behind that smile. Or am I being absurd and delusional here? Am I projecting onto this man—about whom I know nothing—all these possibilities that have passed through my head from the moment I first set eyes on him a few hours ago? What possibilities?
Love. Real love. Something—I have to admit here within the safe confines of this journal—that I have never known. Always felt myself rather unlucky in that department. Then again, for the people I knew who had fallen madly in love, it was either with the wrong person or someone who could not live up to the expectations, the hopes, that had been placed upon them.
As I am placing them on him now. What do I know about him but that he’s American and he writes? No doubt there’s a girlfriend or a fiancée. Or maybe he’s already married but doesn’t wear a ring.
No, he strikes me as one of those men who, if married, would wear a ring, would make his commitment to someone very clear.
But there I go projecting again.
Is this what it feels like? Unable to concentrate on anything else but him, even though he might just have been naturally flirtatious and always came on to women like he did with me.
But he didn’t come on to me. He looked at me in a way that mirrored exactly what I was feeling the moment I first saw him. He knew. Just the way I knew.
I saw something else there behind that look. A loneliness, a need, a sense of wanting so desperately to connect.
But there I go projecting again.
Thomas Nesbitt. Thomas Nesbitt. Thomas Nesbitt.
I keep saying his name over and over again. Like an invocation, an entreaty, a prayer.
* * *
I found out he writes books. Or, at least, a book. But how many people even write one book? And it’s a very good book, despite what Pawel says.
I saw it on Pawel’s desk this morning as I delivered a translation to him. Since that whole business some weeks ago—and his subsequent letter of apology—Pawel has stopped his campaign of harassment against me. Perhaps he also realizes that I now know who and what he really is, and why he can’t be fired—though I’m pretty certain the entire office has been quietly aware of this fact for some time. That’s one of the great unspoken rules about Radio Liberty: though we all realize that it’s funded by the US Congress and overseen by the CIA . . . and though occasionally we get a visit from USIA people (who are so clearly “operatives”) . . . the one thing no one ever discusses (except in very low tones—and in as fleeting a way as possible) is the “security service” aspect of the operation. Bu
t it is something I think about every moment I am there, as I cannot help but wonder if I am under surveillance. Then again, after so many months, surely if they knew what I was doing, they would have moved in on me by now.
How can I fall in love with anyone when I am living such a duplicitous existence? How can I even think of a life with Thomas when I have to keep seeing Haechen twice a week?
“Is it any good?” I asked Pawel, pointing to the copy of Thomas’s book on his desk, trying to sound casual.
“Superficial, far too self-assured, far too entertaining.”
“‘Entertaining’ is a sin?”
“The jacket blurb says he’s a writer in the ‘Graham Greene’ tradition of travel writers. But he’s far too American.”
“By which you mean?”
“He shows off his erudition all the time, the way all those New York intellectuals are always letting you know how much they’ve read. Just like your friend Monica. Her hyperliteracy is underscored by a need to quote Proust or Emily Dickinson at every damn opportunity. This guy, Nesbitt, does the same thing—using Egypt as a way of talking about himself.”
“At least he’s between hard covers,” I said.
“There are many minor writers ‘between hard covers,’” Pawel said. “And being a minor writer who happens to be in Berlin right now . . . of course, Herr Nesbitt is doing some work for us.”
“Can I borrow the book, then?” I asked.
“Keep it. I have no use for it. But as our fearless leader has assigned him to me, I’ll be producing his drivel.”
“And you are such an expert when it comes to drivel,” I said.
I took the book home and devoured it that night. Of course, Pawel was being his usual vicious self when it came to his criticisms of the book, and I could see why he felt such a stab of jealousy. I loved the way the entire book had the structure and drive of a novel. I loved the way Thomas drew out so many interesting stories from the people he met “on the road.” I loved the way he captured the exoticism of Egypt along with its contemporary extremities. More than anything—in the few moments that he dared to speak personally about himself in an otherwise “detached observer” narrative—the book revealed its writer to be a loner who was very good at getting people to talk about themselves, but was clearly rueful about his solitariness.
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