The Moment

by Douglas Kennedy

  Mitte. The former East. Once forbidden territory. Now . . .

  Radar.

  “. . . when that signal hits the other object what is transmitted back is not the object itself. It’s the image of that object.”

  I was convinced by that postulation—because, in my outrage at having been cheated on, cuckolded, betrayed, I was thinking only of the image.

  But now I realized the “image” was anything but that. The love was not an illusion. It was profoundly real.

  Now my sense of shame was only surpassed by the thought: pride is the most destructive force in the world. It blinds us to anything but our hubristic need to be right, to defend our own fragile sense of self. In doing so, it stops us from seeing other interpretations of the narrative we’re living. Pride makes you take a position from which you cannot be budged. Pride makes you refuse to even consider the reason someone is begging you to hear them out. Pride insists that you toss away the one person you’ve met in the course of five decades who offered you the chance of real happiness. Pride murders the love of your life.

  I sat down at the table and stared again at Petra’s obituary notice—the photograph so cruelly delineating the devastation of the past decades. A devastation that started with Johannes being taken away from her, and continued throughout that horrifying year of servicing Haechen, and then culminated in my wholesale betrayal of her.

  Our child.

  I delivered her into the hands of the security services when she was pregnant with our child.

  Who was now where?

  And how did Petra manage to be reunited with Johannes?

  Our child.

  I was going to Berlin to find our child.

  * * *

  I tried to sleep, but failed. So, as first light broke, I stopped staring at the badly flecked paint on the bedroom ceiling. I got up. I packed a small bag. I checked my email. There was a reply from Johannes:

  Café Sibylle. Karl-Marx-Allee 72. Friedrichshain. 18h00 tomorrow. You need to take the U-Bahn to Strausberger Platz, then walk ten minutes. Don’t worry about finding me. I will recognize you.

  * * *

  Land. Fields. Buildings. The outline of a city on the curved edge of the horizon. And all refracted through the numbness of a night spent sleeping sitting up in a cramped seat.

  Those words came back to me as the flight from Munich banked and headed toward the city below. Only this time Berlin’s defining aerial landmark—the structure that cleaved the city in two—appeared to have been simply expunged from its cartography. Up here you could imagine some divine hand wielding an eraser and simply rubbing away that barrier—once so stark, so ruthless, so all-defining. And now? Now down below was just a metropolitan sprawl.

  Then we were on the ground in Tegel. When I piled myself into a taxi and gave him my hotel address in Mitte, the driver didn’t make any noises about having to go east. Berlin was a construction site. New buildings everywhere. A game of architectural one-upmanship as ultramodern designs competed with each other for audacity and über-style. Suddenly I was looking at the recently opened Hauptbahnhof—a huge glass and steel box, multileveled, in and out of which trains shunted with metronomic regularity. Then, looming up ahead was the television tower of Alexanderplatz. We were now no more than a kilometer from it. Somewhere within the last few minutes we had crossed the frontier that no longer existed. The remnants of The Wall were nowhere to be seen. All was free flow, unmarked. It was as if that thing had never existed.

  Alexanderplatz. As Stalinist and brutal as ever—with a few changes. A big sprawling fitness center on the second floor of the tower. A big shopping complex constructed nearby. There were some of the old GDR apartment blocks—like the one that Petra initially lived in when she arrived in Berlin—but all renovated, modernized. An attempt to make palatable the aesthetically grim. As the taxi swung down a street toward my hotel, I could see that a big pedestrian precinct had been opened, lined with the same brand names and food outlets that you find in any metropolitan concentration of people worldwide these days. In my mind’s eye I could flash back to that cold winter’s morning in 1984 when I first crossed over to “the other side,” when Alexanderplatz was as bleak and as forbidding as a Siberian steppe, when I felt as if I was staring at an emergency edition of life: hard, unvarnished, lacking all notions of beauty or comfort.

  And now you could shop here.

  Shopping: the great barometric gauge of our times.

  My hotel was very designer. Wildly stylized, as if someone was trying to create a brothel in minimalist style. Intriguingly, it looked right out on the concrete precincts of Alexanderplatz, as if you were being given an aerie over reinvented Soviet-era realities from the vantage point of a glossy magazine. I took a shower. I checked my watch. I had several hours to kill. I wandered the immediate area. Mitte had become something akin to SoHo in New York. Interesting galleries. Interesting cafés. Interesting loft spaces. Designer boutiques. Hip tourists. Backstreet cinemas and theaters. Renovated apartment blocks. Discernment and money.

  I walked around, bemused. The lack of sleep had something to do with this. So too did the fact that I was still in shock after all that I had absorbed in the last two days, a renewed grief that now made me feel, in every sense of the word, so small.

  But the befuddlement was also due to the radical change to the Berlin cityscape, and the sense that, systematically, understandably, the eastern part of the city was expunging all that it could of its past. Even the area of Friedrichshain—with its dense collection of socialist realist tower blocks—was remodeling these grim-looking boxes, using bright primary colors and redesigned finishes to take the harsh, functionalist edge off them.

  Coming out of the Strausberger Platz U-Bahn station, I couldn’t help but now think that it was in one of these blocks that Johannes lived with the Stasi family to whom he was handed, one year old, as a gift. Just as I remembered that Petra insisted on living only a few streets—but another universe—away in Kreuzberg, because it was as geopolitically close as she could be to the son who had been taken away from her.

  The Café Sibylle was something of an anomaly. It was located on the ground floor of a vast building constructed in that proletarian palatial style favored by Muscovite architects in the 1930s. Inside the décor was retro East Bloc circa 1955—as if the current owners were trying to preserve a glimpse of GDR café life as it once existed at the height of the Cold War. The travel writer in me is always taking mental notes—and I immediately spotted a small corner of the café given over to Communist-era souvenirs. There was a quartet of elderly women with severe faces sitting around a Formica table, talking to each other in conspiratorial whispers. There were a couple of menacing-looking skinheads who exchanged civil greetings with one of the old ladies, and a very plump woman with a huge bouffant hairdo seated on a stool behind the cash register, looking as if she had been positioned there for the past thirty years. And sitting in a corner was a rather introverted guy wearing a Manga T-shirt and an electric-blue hooded sweatshirt, his hair gelled into spikes, his skin retaining scars from adolescent acne, his eyes hinting at ongoing preoccupation. He was currently engrossed in some Japanese graphic novel. Something within its visuals or its text amused him, as his lips formed a half smile that hinted at a certain ambiguous and suspicious take on everything.

  So this was Johannes.

  He glanced up from his book, saw me watching him, and knew immediately who I was as he nodded gravely at me. I came over and extended my hand. He took it reluctantly and favored me with the most feeble of grips before pulling away.

  “I’m Thomas,” I said.

  “I know.”

  “How did you know?”

  “I’ve seen your photograph in your books.”

  “You’ve read my books?”

  “Don’t flatter yourself.”

  “I never flatter myself into thinking that anyone reads my books, because so few people do. May I sit down?”

  He nodded, motionin
g toward the vacant seat opposite him. I noticed the empty beer glass in front of him.

  “May I buy you another?”

  A shrug. Then: “Okay.”

  “I appreciate you agreeing to see me at such short notice,” I said.

  “I’m not exactly running between meetings,” he said.

  “You a student?”

  “Hardly. Never went to university.”

  “Was that your own decision?”

  “Yeah, inasmuch as if you don’t study and don’t really care about passing exams, you generally end up not getting into a university. But did you actually come all this way from wherever you live to hear about my failure as a student?”

  He said all this in an unchanging monotone. I also noticed that he never once made eye contact with me, that his vision was always focused elsewhere.

  “I wanted to meet you,” I said.

  “Why is that?”

  “I think you know why.”

  “Your guilt?”

  Again, the comment was made without edge or anger.

  “Yes, my guilt has something to do with me being here.”

  “I read the journals. You should be guilty.”

  “I am.”

  “You should also know that she always talked about you.”

  “Really?”

  “You sound surprised.”

  “It’s just . . . well, it was more than a quarter of a century ago when—”

  “You turned her over to the CIA?”

  I fell silent, staring down at the table, thinking, I deserve this. All of this and more.

  “I won’t try to defend what I did. It was wrong. And even though I didn’t know the actual story itself before I read the journals—”

  “Mother killed a guy. That struck me as kind of cool. Especially as he was a bad guy. A Stasi prick liked the man who had custody of me for five years.”

  “It was just five years you were with him?”

  “Just five years? It felt like a lifetime. But why should this story interest you?”

  “Why do you think?”

  “So . . . the journals. They really got to you?”

  “Are you surprised?”

  “I don’t know you.”

  “You know certain things about me.”

  “I know what my mother told me about you. I know what she wrote in the journals. I know what you did. I know what that cost her.”

  “What did it cost her?”

  “That’s another conversation.”

  “How did she get you back?”

  “You are very direct. Are all Americans so direct?”

  “This one is. How did she get you back?”

  I also wanted to ask: and do you have a brother or a sister somewhere? But Johannes’s distracted manner made me hesitate. Especially as his response to my last question was:

  “Weren’t you going to order me a beer?”

  I raised my hand. A waitress came by. Johannes asked for a Hefeweizen. I said she should make that two. When she left, he stared ahead for a very long time, never once turning toward me. Finally, he said:

  “I didn’t want to do this.”

  “Meet me?”

  “Send you the journals. But Mother insisted. One of the last things she asked me. And she made me promise I’d do it.”

  “What did she die of?”

  “Cancer.”

  “Was it fast?”

  He shook his head, then added:

  “But she did continue smoking right up to the end, so you’ve got to admire the courage of her convictions.”

  “So it was lung cancer, throat cancer?”

  “It was cancer caused by the radiation she was subjected to while in prison. Or, at least, that was what the doctors thought—as around one hundred other prisoners who were kept at Hohenschönhausen around the same time as Mother also died of different kinds of blood cancer. Mother said that when she was first arrested, they photographed her in a special room—and after the session she had these red burns everywhere. Radiation. Hidden from view. The fuckers thought they could impregnate their prisoners with radiation, then keep tabs on them afterward with homing devises. It’s like something from a bad mad scientist movie. Everyone who got that treatment at Hohenschönhausen is either dead or on their way. Mother was one of the last.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “Are you?”

  “More than I can say.”

  Silence. Then:

  “I ran into my other ‘parents’ a few days ago on the street. They’re in their sixties now. Still together. Still looking as stiff as they always did. Hadn’t seen them in twenty-five years. Not since Mother got me back. I saw them walking toward me. I sort of smiled. They walked right on by, didn’t recognize me at all.”

  “Did that surprise you?”

  “It pleased me. Because when I was with them I never knew I had this real mother who was locked up somewhere.”

  “Your mother was locked up after—”

  “After you did what you did? That’s right. Locked up, then sent off to Karl Marx Stadt as a form of internal exile. That city—it was our Siberia. But you interrupted me. Five years with those people who called themselves my parents. They were very strict. I had to call my alleged father ‘sir.’ My ‘mother’ was also an officer in the Stasi and not comfortable with the whole idea of affection. Or, at least, that’s what I tell myself I remember from that time. The truth is, I remember so very little, except that my ‘parents’ were always distant with me, always so formal. But . . . from the start, I thought they were my real parents. So I also thought: this is how parents behave. Then, one day, some men in suits came to the door of our apartment not far from here in Friedrichshain. They were accompanied by two policemen. One of the men spoke with my ‘father.’ Then he spoke with me. Said he wanted to bring me somewhere to meet a woman who really wanted to get to know me. It was all just a little confusing. My ‘parents’ stood there, saying nothing, while one of the suits hissed at them and another handed them a bunch of papers.

  “What they were doing was telling these people—my ‘parents’—that they knew they had gotten this child . . . me . . . through illegal means. Just as they also knew that, in their ‘professional work,’ they were guilty of many crimes against humanity.”

  He paused, that half smile crossing his lips again.

  “Do I talk too much?” he asked.

  “Not at all.”

  “You’re lying. I know I talk too much. My teachers all told me that. My friends all tell me that, not that I have many friends. Dietrich tells me that all the time.”

  “Who’s Dietrich?” I asked.

  “My boss.”

  “Where?”

  “A bookshop a few streets away from here. I work there. Have been for seven years. We specialize in comics, graphic novels. Especially Japanese stuff. Manga.”

  “We got off the subject of you going back to your mother.”

  “You really want to hear it all, don’t you?”

  “I do.”

  “My alleged parents—when they understood what the suits were telling them, and which I didn’t understand myself at the time—well, my ‘mother’ began to sob. My ‘father’ . . his name is not important . . . stood there all tight-lipped. The man in the suit who had talked to me—he was actually very kind—asked me:

  “‘Would you like to meet your real mother, Johannes?’

  “‘But this is my mother,’ I said, pointing to the woman who always played that role. At which point she began to cry. Loudly. Her husband hushing her. Telling her to behave.

  “‘No, the Klauses looked after you while your real mother was unwell. But she is very much better now and she wants to meet you.’

  “‘But . . . these are my parents.’

  “Even my ‘father’—who I learned later helped pioneer psychological torture methods against dissidents—sobbed when he heard me say that.

  “‘I’ll tell you what,’ the suit told me. ‘Let’s go
meet your real mother and see how you feel after you’ve met her.’

  “They drove me to this place—it was like a school, and there was this room with all these games and toys to play with. I remember coming in with the suit and being met by this woman who was very kind. She got me some juice and asked me what I liked to play with the most. I told her I liked puzzles. She found me a puzzle. I think it was a puzzle of the Brandenburg Gate—big pieces, suitable for a kid. And I sat in a corner, working on this puzzle for a long time. When I looked up, I saw this woman still watching me. She had short hair. I can’t say if I remember she was as thin as she always was after that. But I looked up and she smiled at me. I smiled at her. I don’t remember much else that happened after that, though when Mother was dying a few weeks ago and I asked her all about that first time she’d seen me after all those years, she told me that she had to work so hard not to cry. Because she was terrified of frightening me. But she did come over and help me make the puzzle. And she then told me things about when I was first born, and how my father wrote stories, and how she herself used to sing me to sleep, and . . .

  “The thing is, I remember none of this. But Mother recounted it all just three weeks ago like it was yesterday. She said that the more we talked that first day, the more I seemed to trust her. There was a point, after around an hour, when I got tired and laid my head against her shoulder. She said that even the suits in the room—all of whom were members of the Bundesnachrichtendienst—began to sob.

  “They put us up in this halfway house for a few nights to make certain I was adjusting. But I just accepted that this was my real mother, maybe because she was so kind and affectionate to me. Then, after around a week, they allowed Mother to bring me home.”

  “And home was . . . ?”

  “Prenzlauer Berg. The same apartment in which she lived with my father. After his death and her expulsion, they gave it to some people. But once The Wall came down and Mother didn’t have to stay in exile in Karl Marx Stadt any longer, she became quite the attack dog. Or, at least, that’s what I heard from her friends after the funeral. Within a week of the GDR collapsing, Mother had found some very tough lawyers in West Berlin who got me back to her. And the Klauses didn’t dare put up a fight. The lawyers also got the apartment back. When she started getting sick around five years ago, they were able to get her a settlement from the state, given that she was made sick by all that radiation in prison. Not a bad amount of money. I think it was one hundred thousand euros. Mother bought the apartment for us, for me. She said she needed to leave me some sort of heritage. What was left over . . . she had free health care from the state and a small pension. But she had no work, so it all went over the five years she was sick. But even so, she also insisted, twice a year, to take me somewhere interesting. London. Paris. Istanbul. A week in Sicily. A week in Marrakesh. We traveled cheaply. But we still saw places. She told me that her dream when she was young—and couldn’t travel beyond the GDR—was to move freely around the world. ‘Like my Thomas.’ That’s a direct quote. ‘Like my Thomas.’”