The Moment

by Douglas Kennedy

  I hung my head and said nothing.

  “But again I’m talking too much, ja? That’s what Dietrich always says. ‘You talk too much, Johannes. You start and you can’t stop. You say whatever comes into your head. You have a problem not shutting up.’”

  “I don’t have any problem with it.”

  “That’s because you’re feeling guilty. When Mother asked me to send you the journals, I said, ‘Why? Because all these years later you want the man to feel guilty?’ And she said: ‘No, because I want him to know how wrong I got things.’”

  “Your mother didn’t get anything wrong. I did.”

  “So what are you doing here?”

  “Meeting you.”

  “You traveled all this way just to meet me?”

  “How can I put this? You were so much a part of our life together back then. Your mother couldn’t bear the fact that they had taken you away from her. Everything, absolutely everything in her life, was about getting you back.”

  “I know. I’ve read the journals.”

  “And what did you think when you read them?”

  “What did I think? I thought: ‘Mom, you were crazy expending all that energy on me. I mean, I’m a guy who works in a bookshop. I read Manga all the time. I don’t have a lot of friends. I don’t have a girlfriend. And some shrink told me and Mother that I have this manic disorder where I talk all the time, say whatever comes into my head.’”

  “Your mother loved you more than anything.”

  “Yeah, and that was her problem. Along with loving you.”

  Again, I said nothing.

  “That hurt, right?” he asked.

  I just shrugged.

  “Tell me the truth,” he said. “Did that hurt?”

  “Yes,” I said. “It hurt.”

  “Good,” he said, his voice still that incessant monotone. “Come on. I’ll show you where she lived.”

  There was a taxi driving by as we stepped out into Karl-Marx-Allee. Johannes told me it was stupid to waste money on somebody driving us. But my head was swimming, the jet lag intermingling with Johannes’s unnerving delivery, his uncensored directness, his profound strangeness which also allowed him to sidestep decorum or standard-issue politesse and instead articulate everything that was in his brain at the moment you were speaking with him. What I found most unsettling about all this was the way he was also able to cut to the heart of the matter and express the truth as he saw it. A truth that—though totally subjective—had more than the weight of veracity to it.

  I talked Johannes into letting me treat us to a cab. En route, he told me that he was hoping to open his very own cartoon and graphic novel bookshop very soon. He had the premises picked out—on Prenzlauer Allee between Marienburgerstrasse and Christburger Strasse. The east side of the street, a five-minute walk from his own apartment on Jablonski Strasse.

  “Prenzlauer Berg is all young bourgeois bohemian families. A great audience for cartoons and graphic novels. Now if I can convince a bank to front me some money.”

  “How much do you make in the current bookshop?”

  “Around two hundred and fifty euros a week before tax. Maybe one eighty to take home. But thanks to Mother, I’ve got no rent. And I don’t spend a lot on myself. I actually manage to save fifty of that a week. I’ve got maybe four thousand put aside now. If the bank could front me fifteen . . .”

  “What would you envisage?”

  “Nothing less than the most comprehensive and coolest graphic novel bookstore in the capital. I’ve got close to fifty meters in the premises I want. The landlord’s willing to rent it to me for less than one thousand per month, which isn’t cheap. But I’ve been doing my math. If I make this place the go-to bookshop of its kind in Berlin, I should be able to turn over three thousand a week easily.”

  “And you’d be your own boss.”

  “Exactly. That would be such a change. No answering to some petty little guy who really knows shit about Manga and is only in it because graphic novels sell. But he has no love of what he’s selling. That’s what Mother said about your books. They all have love in them.”

  “She really said that?”

  “Love of writing, love of traveling, love of running away.”

  “That I’ve done a great deal of.”

  “She said that, too.”

  Jablonski Strasse was a street of venerable apartment buildings, all daubed with the ubiquitous graffiti that seemed to be an essential component of the new Berlin cityscape. Though many of the apartment blocks had undergone architectural plastic surgery, there were still several that remained unapologetically rooted in the GDR era. Johannes’s building was one of these. A faded brown pebble-dash exterior. Grubby windows, some of which had wood hammered over their smashed frames. A front doorway that was almost hanging off the hinges. A hallway that smelled of unfinished concrete and mold.

  “We’re all being asked to pay three thousand each to have the entire façade and hallways renovated,” he said. “But no one who lives here has three grand to spend.”

  His apartment was at the top of the house. I approached it, preparing myself for the worst. A toxic shambles. Dishes piled high in the sink. Toilets not cleaned in months. Dirty clothes everywhere. Spoiled food in the fridge.

  Certainly, the stairwell up to this fourth-floor apartment boded badly, as it was poorly lit, half-painted, a single bare lightbulb providing the most nominal of illumination.

  But as for the apartment itself, Johannes must have also decided that order was a solution against the world’s disorder. It was no more than five hundred square feet, half of which was given over to a living room with basic furnishings—a simple modern black sofa and armchair that Johannes told me he found (much to his mother’s delight) discarded outside a furniture showroom. Both objects had broken springs and bad padding, but Johannes knew a guy from school who worked in a furniture factory and renovated them both for one hundred euros. He mentioned this sum with particular pride, just as he explained the fifty or so Manga drawings that blanketed the walls. None of them were framed. “I don’t have that sort of money,” he explained. But they were all affixed to the walls of the apartment with the exact same sort of adhesive that gave the effect of four corners of a frame around each drawing. What was even more fascinating was that the drawings were lined up in immaculate rows, the distance between the cartoons perfectly measured so that none appeared farther apart than the others.

  I took this all in, along with the simple kitchen, the piles upon piles of graphic novels on the apartment’s many shelves, all completely alphabetized. Johannes showed me his bedroom—a simple single bed, its hospital corners tight as a drum. He showed me his extensive CD collection of strange Scandinavian heavy metal bands. Then he opened a door and said:

  “Here’s where Mother worked and slept.”

  What I saw, as the door swung inward, blindsided me. The room was no bigger than a cell. Petra too slept in a simple single bed that took up one wall. There was an equally simple white veneered desk which took up part of the other wall, on which sat a dated computer. But then I looked up at the shelves above her work area. There—covering two long ledges, each perhaps six feet long—was copy after copy of all fourteen books that I had written. The original English versions—and their subsequent paperback incarnations—took up the top shelf. All the German and French and Italian and Greek and Polish and Swedish and Finnish translations were piled high on the shelves below.

  Nearby there were also four big box files, on the spines of which had been written T.N.: Journalismus. Opening one of these for me Johannes showed me article after article I had written over the last twenty years for publications as wide ranging as National Geographic, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement.

  How had she managed to track all these down? And why, why, did she bother?

  As soon as my brain posed that inane question, I found myself reaching for Petra’s desk chair, pulling it toward me, and collapsing into
it just as I started to cry, my sorrow now without limits.

  All these years . . . all that time when I so wondered about her, when I told myself it was all in the grim past, don’t revisit it, don’t open the Pandora’s box . . .

  All that time, when I still privately longed for her, when I mourned what we had, what I had squandered and lost, and all the terrible things I knew must have been inflicted upon her in the wake of denouncing her . . .

  All that time . . . she was still there. With me. Following my work, my career, collecting my books in as many languages as she could find, tracking down all my journalistic scribblings, making certain she was abreast of what I was always doing, what was preoccupying me professionally, what I was thinking and writing about the world and life as it was happening to me.

  Seeing all those painstakingly sourced books and articles—all perfectly ordered, all a testament to the very minor oeuvre that I will leave behind when death finally comes calling for me—one simple but overpowering thought grabbed hold of me and wouldn’t let go:

  She loved me. And I just couldn’t see it.

  Johannes sat on the edge of the bed as I cried, watching me with almost clinical detachment. When I finally stopped, he said:

  “I used to hate you. Every time Mother managed to spend money she didn’t have on one of your books, every time a package would arrive from New York or London or Lisbon with your new magnum opus—and she had to collect all your fucking translations as well—she would sit where you’re sitting right now. And she would do just what you’ve done. She would cry.”

  He stood up and reached for something on a shelf above me. An envelope. Thick. Manila. He tossed it in front of me. My name was on it. In her writing.

  “Mother said if you ever did make it over to Berlin—and only if you really did physically show up here—I was to give you this.

  “But you can read it elsewhere. Because I don’t really want to be around you right now.”

  He stood up. I picked up the envelope and followed him as he headed to the front door. He opened it. I stepped over its threshold, the envelope now tucked under my arm.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I’m so . . . sorry.”

  Johannes stared into the empty distance. And said:

  “Aren’t we all.”

  TWO

  DEAREST THOMAS.

  So. Finally. At last. En fin. Endlich.

  Actually, the German synonym works best. Endlich. At the end of things. Which this is. A letter I should have written years . . . no, decades . . . earlier. And which I have dodged for so many reasons. Some complex. Some far too personal. Some just so commonplace.

  Endlich.

  How to start? How to begin?

  The facts:

  For the past five years I have been in thrall to a form of blood cancer known by its rather long-winded but still impressive clinical name: Precursor B acute lymphoblastic leukemia. I have naturally been reading up a great deal on the thing that I have been fighting these sixty months and which seems determined to take my life away from me sooner than I’d prefer. There are about twenty different substrata of the disease, but I found the following definition online some time back. I quote it because it seemed to sum it all up:

  “Acute leukemia is characterized by the rapid increase of immature blood cells. The crowding makes the bone marrow unable to produce healthy blood cells. Immediate treatment is required in acute leukemia due to the rapid progression and accumulation of the malignant cells which then spill over into the bloodstream and spread to other organs of the body.”

  A part of me was blackly amused that it was the immature blood cells within my body that wreaked havoc upon me. So much that wreaked havoc on me took place when I was in my twenties, a time when I was rather immature about the ways of the world.

  Or am I just striving for a metaphor here when none is needed?

  Another thing about leukemia and its causes was listed on that same site:

  “Among adults the known causes are natural and artificial ionizing radiation . . .”

  Of course, smoking two packets of cigarettes per day, as I have done for the past three decades, can’t have helped things either. But the exposure to radiation is—as they say in bad English crime novels of a certain epoch—the smoking gun. I told you about being “photographed” at Hohenschönhausen after my first arrest. When I was deported from West Berlin in ’84 they also held me for a while in Hohenschönhausen—not that they ever told me which prison I was in, but I remembered it all from the previous experience. The reason I was held in the prison was the death of their beloved Herr Haechen. The Stasi were certain I was to blame. So when the Bundesnachrichtendienst and the Americans tossed me back to the Stasi—after me pleading with them to grant me asylum (but as one of your compatriots told me: “We did that already and look what happened”)—I was immediately incarcerated on suspicion of murder. The thing was, I had covered my tracks so well—and Haechen left no record of having arranged to meet me in Hamburg—that there was nothing they could directly pin on me. Of course, they tried all sorts of psychological coercion—denying me sleep, forcing me to endure, during one terrible week, eighteen hours a day of interrogation. But I realized from the moment I was locked up in a cell that I had the trump card. That card, quite simply, was my silence. If I confessed, I was doomed. A life sentence. A nightmare without end. If I refused to talk, if I said nothing, they could not get anything on me.

  So that was my tactic—and the war of nerves that followed over the five months I was kept at Hohenschönhausen was desperate. Every three days they brought me to be “photographed” again. Every time I came away with red welts on my back.

  Radiation.

  I finally outlasted my interrogators. They gave up on me. They also told me that any chance of me ever seeing Johannes again was gone. But you must know something else that happened early on in my incarceration. I was pregnant—maybe six to eight weeks—with our child. Upon being handed back, I was examined extensively by several doctors. A blood and urine test validated the pregnancy. As they knew—via Haechen’s reports about me—that you were the father of this child, they took action. One day in prison, I was brought to the hospital wing. I demanded to know why I was here. They said it was another routine examination. I sensed something terrible afoot. I demanded to see a senior doctor. I demanded a lawyer. I demanded . . .

  But suddenly two male nurses were in the examination room. When I tried to break away from them, they held me down while the woman doctor on duty gave me an injection that knocked me out.

  When I awoke some hours later, I was strapped down to a hospital bed. From the pain between my legs, I knew what they had done while I was under anesthetic. The woman doctor—her name was Keller—came in and actually smiled when she said:

  “We scraped that capitalist filth out of you. Scraped it all away.”

  At that moment I vowed that, someday, I would destroy this woman. Just as I settled matters with Haechen. Just as I was determined to find out the names of the people who had been given Johannes and destroy them. It’s horrifying to admit this now. But though I forgave Judit for what she did—because she did it out of weakness, out of fear, out of pressure so extreme on her to cooperate—I could never forgive those who allowed the system to simply augment their cruelty. As a woman only a week or so away from her death I can admit: I have never, for a moment, lost sleep over murdering Haechen. He was killing me slowly with his pitilessness—and I knew that when and if the order came for me to be eliminated, he would have executed it without a moment’s hesitation. The only reason I think that the Stasi didn’t do me in is that the Americans and the Bundesnachrichtendienst were aware of my existence. Even though they handed me back to them, had I been “suicided,” it would have looked bad. Better to try to break me psychologically. To abort the child of ours that I so wanted. To then ship me off to the bleakest corner of this bleak republic of ours—Karl Marx Stadt—as a form of internal exile.

 
Karl Marx Stadt was industrial. It had no character, no charm, no culture. But it had an outpost of DDR Rundfunk—the state radio station—and I was given the job of writing book programs. They found me a tiny apartment. I began to sleep with a colleague at the station—a quiet man named Hans Schygula who had been exiled from Berlin as well, only in his case for the crime of propagating free jazz and once playing Stockhausen on the national radio service. Hans was older than me, well into his fifties, divorced, bookish, decent. He helped me get through the day. Especially during those early days when I first arrived in Karl Marx Stadt—and was trying to cope with what they had done to me in that prison hospital. The loss of our child was so devastating that I realized the only thing I could do to survive was blot it out.

  No doubt, you might think I hate you for turning me in. Yes, there were moments—especially early on, in the wake of being expelled back to East Berlin, and the months of incarceration, and the forced abortion—when I did hate you. But honestly, my love, I hated myself for not having the courage, early on in our story, to have told you everything. But everything in my background, the social conditioning that was intrinsic in formulating my worldview, taught me to conceal, to suppress. I always saw—and felt—the profound love you had for me. But I couldn’t completely trust it. I had to believe that if the truth willed out, you would have screamed betrayal and fled. Whereas by not telling you the whole story—how Haechen used Johannes as the ongoing bargaining chip—I destroyed everything. Had it been me in your position, I’ve no doubt I would have reacted the same way you did. And my one great hope over all these years is that you have not anguished too much about it all . . . though in each of your books (and I have read them all) you’ve always somehow made mention of life being a collection of sadnesses one frequently keeps hidden away. Along with all the other hints you’ve dropped in your more recent books about the shakiness of your own marriage, I always sensed that the damage of what befell both of us back then never fully cauterized.