“That’s a tough story,” Andreas said with feeling. “I’m sorry.”
“Not your responsibility. I didn’t come here to accuse you. I’m sure it wasn’t easy having Katya as a mother. I was destroyed after only six years of her. Or, no, that’s not fair. I was crazy about her the whole time. The side of her she’d never show a child was really something.”
“I think I saw some of that side.”
“She’s sublime in her way. But, of course, she also destroyed me.”
“So…”
With a trembling hand, his father pushed the manuscript across the table. “In my retirement, I’ve taken to writing. This is my memoir. Have a look.”
The Crime of Love. By Peter Kronburg. Andreas was sorry to see his father’s name. Without a name, his existence had been conveniently spectral.
“I want you to read it,” Peter Kronburg said. “It won’t be a chore—I’m a good, clear writer. Your mother always said so.”
“No doubt. And presumably there are detailed scenes of sex with her? The very title seems to promise it.”
Peter Kronburg reddened slightly. “Only as pertinent to a larger story about the private life of the Central Committee.”
“My mother wasn’t on it.”
“Her husband was. The descriptions of sex stay within bounds of good taste, and that’s only half the book anyway. The rest is about prison and socialist ‘justice.’”
“And me. You said it pertained to me.”
Peter Kronburg reddened further. “At the end, I tell the story of our first meeting, and I admit that I’ve mentioned this aspect in my inquiries to publishers. I’m told it’s important to describe a potential marketing plan in the query letter.”
“The untold story of Wolf’s sordid origins. And you want my help?”
“With your name attached to the marketing plan, I believe the book could be a bestseller. I have a disabled son to provide for when I’m gone. The book simultaneously partakes of Ostalgie and represents a searing critique of it. We’re at a perfect historical moment for publishing it.”
“It’s astonishing that you haven’t created a bidding war.”
Peter Kronburg shook his head. “I get the same answer again and again. It seems that every publisher already has too many East memoirs coming out. Only one publisher even asked to see the manuscript, and some very young-sounding woman sent it back with the comment that it wasn’t enough about you.”
Andreas was feeling sad for his father. For his smallness in relation to the largeness of his son. For his grasping after the main chance from a position of marginality, his talk of a marketing plan. It was heartbreaking to see old Ossis trying to ape the thinking of Wessis, trying to master the lingo of capitalist self-promotion.
“I met my son a second time, at the Amerika Haus library,” Andreas said. “This meeting itself could be the coda to your book.”
Peter Kronburg shook his head again. “The purpose of the book isn’t to shame you. I’m not angry at you. At your mother, at your father, at the Stasi, yes. But not at you. Unless you care about protecting Katya, the book won’t hurt you in the slightest. Quite the contrary, I think.”
“How does that work?”
“As I understand it, your own marketing plan is sunlight. If you endorse the book, if you help me present it to publishers again—to high-level editors, not frightened twenty-three-year-olds—you’ll demonstrate that no secret is so sacred that you won’t expose it. You’ll be even more famous. Your legend will only grow.”
And yours along with it, Andreas thought. Maybe his father wasn’t quite as clueless as he’d imagined. Not quite so different from him. Maybe not different at all, just less lucky.
“And if I don’t help you?” he said. “You’ll go to Stern and tell them I’m a hypocrite?”
“I’m doing this for my son—my other son—and for justice. And I’m not sure that justice is so important at this point. It isn’t news to anyone that the Stasi and people like your parents were evil. But in the world that’s come after them, money is very important.”
“I have no money for you.”
“I suspect in time you will.”
Andreas riffled the dot-matrixed pages of the manuscript. His eye fell on the sentence She was a wildcat on her hands and knees. No need to read any more of that. But he was curious, a little bit, about the red-turtlenecked man across the table from him. Had he always been on the make? Had he imagined that he could ride Katya’s coattails, as her lover, to power and prestige within the socialist system? To be sent to prison as a state-subverter wasn’t an injustice if you really were a state-subverter. Injustice was to have been an apparatchik and not received your promised reward.
“I won’t give you money,” he said. “I don’t want to see you again, either. I buried my father, and I don’t need another one. But I’ll read the book and do what I can.”
With evident emotion, Peter Kronburg extended a trembling hand across the table. Andreas grasped the hand, as a parting gift to him. Then he took the manuscript and left without another word.
A decade earlier, he’d carefully read his own Stasi file. It was mostly tedious, because he’d never been the target of a full operation, but there were some surprises. At least two of the fifty-three “at-risk” girls he’d slept with had been unofficial collaborators, confounding his theory that the Stasi rarely employed females and never such young ones. One of the informants had reported that he told inappropriate jokes at the expense of the state, sowed disrespect for Scientific Socialism among his counselees, and exploited his church authority to prey on them sexually; that after endeavoring to gain his more complete trust by submitting to relations with him and discovering that he had aberrant sexual tendencies (by which she’d presumably meant that he preferred eating her state-subverting pussy to kissing her state-sanctioned mouth), she’d feigned a strong interest in environmental activism; and that he’d laughed and said the only green thing that interested him was pickles. It turned out that this informant had been twenty-two; he remembered only her name, not her face. The other one, whom he remembered better, had been legitimately seventeen. She’d reported that he didn’t fraternize with other antisocial elements at the church, didn’t encourage questioning of the guiding principles of Marxist-Leninist thought, and presented himself as a monitory example of the consequences of frivolously counterrevolutionary behavior. Not coincidentally, she’d had no complaints about the sex, either.
The other small surprise in his file was that, until September 1989, his mother had received a visit from the Stasi on the first Friday of every month, simply to attest that she’d had no contact with her son. The reports on those visits, of which there were more than a hundred, were brief and basically identical, except that for the first three years they’d included annotations, typed on a different typewriter, confirming that the wiretap on her office telephone was negative for communication with AW. On the first report without an annotation, someone had scrawled telephonic monitoring of KW suspended at request of Undersecy W.
Andreas had been moved, in spite of himself, to learn of the extent to which Katya herself had been oppressed by the Stasi. He could never quite blind himself to the many ways in which she was a victim—of her own mental instability, of parents who’d dragged her back to the Republic instead of leaving her in England, of a secret police that had exiled and possibly killed those parents, of a husband she didn’t love but was compelled to obey, of a system that stifled her native brilliance, of a lover who’d come back to Berlin to turn her son against her, and, finally, of that son himself. Mostly he hated her, but the potential for compassion continued to lurk in him. Compassion for the broken, lost, victimized girl she’d been. Sometimes he even wondered if he’d seen a young Katya in the fifteen-year-old Annagret; if this was the real idea behind his idea of her.
As he carried Peter Kronburg’s manuscript home to his flat, his compassion was afoot. Although he could see that Kronburg was right, that ge
tting The Crime of Love published might help his own career, he could also see that he wasn’t going to read it himself. Partly he felt squeamish, but mostly he felt protective. The few friends Katya had nowadays were Brits and old Wessis—she wanted nothing to do with Ostalgie—and she would probably lose them if they read the book. Even in an era of forgive and forget, collaborating to put an innocent man in prison for ten years, as she must have done, could not, once remembered, be so easily forgiven. The proud mother of the Bringer of Sunlight would become the reviled mother.
And so, although he’d vowed to himself not to, he went to see her one more time. When she came to the door, she was pouty about his having avoided her for three months, but her pouting turned to anger after he’d sat her down and explained the situation.
“It’s because I refused to see him again,” she said. “He must have gone home and taken the only revenge he could.”
“My understanding is that money is his motive.”
“He preyed on me before, and now he’s doing it again.”
“It takes two to tango,” Andreas said in English.
“I’m not going to discuss this with you. I just shudder to think of you reading his version.”
“Truth is a tricky thing, isn’t it?”
“He had subversive levels of contact with the West. He was infatuated with America, the music especially. He’s lying if he says there was any other reason for his heavy sentence.”
“Oh, Mother.”
“What?”
“That’s the best you’ve got? He deserved ten years in prison for being an Elvis fan?”
Katya tossed her head. “It was a very frightening time, and he was disloyal. He wanted to leave the country with me, and then, when the Wall went up, he became desperate. He tried to destroy me. Destroy us, your father and me. I don’t imagine you read any of this in his version.”
Again and again, her dishonesty was the acid dissolving his compassion. He’d come to her with a wish to protect her from embarrassment. If she’d been authentic for just one moment, if she’d admitted that she’d made a mistake and regretted what she’d done to Peter Kronburg, he would have protected her.
“You loved him enough to keep his baby,” he suggested.
“Don’t say ‘his.’ You were my baby, not his.”
“Ha. If I could have resigned from that position, I’d have done it in a heartbeat.”
“You’re thriving. You’re magnificent. How bad a childhood could you have had?”
“Good point. I’m a famous credit to your mothering skills. But if I don’t help him publish his memoir, he can make me look like a hypocrite. Would you like that?”
She shook her head. “It’s an empty threat. He wouldn’t do that. Just burn the manuscript and ignore him. People have stopped caring about our dirty laundry. This will blow over.”
“Possibly. But here’s a thought experiment for you: would you rather that I look bad, or that you look bad? Think about it carefully before you answer.”
She stared straight ahead, her jaw set.
“Knotty little problem, right?”
She slumped against the rear cushions of her sofa, continuing to stare blankly. It was as if he were witnessing his question’s short-circuiting of her troubled brain. He imagined the fugue: A loving mother always puts her son’s welfare first, and to be a loving mother looks good, but in this case putting my son’s welfare first would entail my looking bad, and the whole point is not to look bad, and yet to worry about looking bad is not to put my son’s welfare first, and a loving mother always puts her son’s welfare first … Around and around like that.
“No-answer is an answer,” he said, standing up. “I’m going to leave now.”
She didn’t stop him; didn’t say anything at all. The last look he’d seen on her face had been so desolate that he wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d jumped out a window to her death. But the difference between him and her was her capacity for self-deception. She didn’t kill herself. Instead, after he’d worked his magazine connections and found a book publisher for The Crime of Love, and after it had spent twelve weeks on the Spiegel bestseller list and he’d reaped universal praise for promoting it, she moved to London and rented a flat near the house of her widowed sister. She published—in the London Review of Books, no less—a long and self-justifying and chokingly dishonest essay on the unreliability of East German memory. She kept living, living.
He did, too. There were plenty of women who really liked sex and wanted it with him, and there was global fame to be pursued. Both were compulsions but not pathological ones. For a long time, while talented young people flocked to the Sunlight Project, and while he applied his math and logic skills to becoming a crack technologist and a pretty good writer of code, and while the excitement of leaking increased with the pervasiveness of the Internet, until he had a bodyguard to protect him from crazies and a team of pro bono lawyers to defend him against the governments and corporations he lived to taunt, his ten years in prison with Annagret and the Killer seemed to him like a long bad dream that he’d awakened from. He never saw his mother, but in the great decade that followed the nineties, as he savored the ease of serial monogamy and the joy of consistently winning at the fame game, he sometimes thought back on her rhetorical question: how bad could his childhood have been? Even when he fled arrest in Germany, fled extradition from Denmark, found precarious refuge in Belize, luck was with him.
And then one day, in Belize, the Killer was back. Probably it had never been away, but he didn’t become aware of it until he was leaving the beachside compound of Tad Milliken, after a delicious lunch. Tad Milliken was the Silicon Valley venture capitalist who’d retired to Belize to avoid the inconvenience of a statutory-rape charge pending against him in California. He was certifiably insane, an Ayn Rander who fancied himself an Übermensch and “the Singularity’s chosen avatar,” but he was surprisingly good company if you kept him on topics like tennis and fishing. He considered Andreas the second-most world-historical person residing in Belize, a fellow Übermensch, and wanted to be his friend, but this was awkward. Andreas badly needed money and hoped that Tad might give him some, and Tad still had Internet apologists who remembered him fondly as a father of the Revolution and insisted that he had an airtight insanity defense on the rape charge, but Tad had recently been in the news again for shooting a neighbor’s pet macaw with the silver-plated Colt .45 he carried with him everywhere, and Andreas couldn’t afford to be seen in public with him. Creepy sex stuff had already tarred Assange’s reputation. Andreas imagined people googling “tad milliken,” seeing “Andreas Wolf” and “statutory rape” on the first page of results, conflating his blondness and his line of work with the unfortunate orthographic proximity of “Andreas” to “Assange,” and receiving the subliminal impression that he had a thing for fifteen-year-olds. Which he no longer did. And so he went to socially contortionate lengths to conceal from Tad his wish to see him only at his compound or on his fishing boat. It helped that, whenever they had a date, Tad sent a driver in a dark-windowed Escalade.
Tad was a self-documentarian. He had a self-activating camera in the Yankees cap he always wore and a tiny video device on a lanyard around his neck. At lunch, which was served poolside by a barefoot beauty named Carolina, conceivably as old as sixteen, Andreas had asked whether Tad might, for once, turn the cameras off. Tad, who was wearing a Hawaiian shirt unbuttoned to show off his sea-turtle belly, his tanned and heavily crunched abdominals, laughed and said, “You have something to hide today?”
“I’m just wondering where all this data goes.”
“Let the sun shine in, man. You’re on Candid Camera.” Tad laughed again.
“It’s not that I don’t trust you. But if something were to happen to you…”
“You mean, if I die? I’m never going to die. That’s the whole point of life-logging.”
“Right.”
“The data’s in the cloud, and the cloud is eternally self-re
newing. The error rate compared to DNA self-replication? Five orders of magnitude lower. Everything will be there, pristinely preserved, when they reboot me. I want to remember this lunch. I want to remember Carolina’s little toes.”
“I see what’s in it for you. But from my point of view—”
“You don’t care for the cloud.”
“Not so much.”
“It’s still in its infancy. You’ll love it when they reboot you.”
“I already spend every day fishing unsavory things out of it.”
“Ah, speaking of fish—”
Carolina had appeared with a platter of grilled fish on banana leaves. She moved Tad’s silver gun to one side and set down the platter, and he pulled her onto his lap and kissed the side of her neck. Her smile seemed somewhat pained. Pulling the low-cut bodice of her dress away from her chest, Tad pointed his video device down inside the dress. “I’m going to want to remember these, too,” he said. “These especially.”
Carolina slapped away the camera and wordlessly extricated herself.
“She’s still mad at me about the bird,” Tad said, watching her go.
“I can’t say it’s playing well in the press, either.”
“Oh, it wasn’t that she liked the bird. It was worse than living next door to a sheet-metal plant, the shrieking of that thing. She just didn’t think I could bag it without a shotgun. It was almost religious-superstitious. Thou shalt not use a revolver on a bird. She was deaf to my argument that a revolver is more sporting.”
Andreas took some fish. “Let’s talk about Bolivia.”
“The country has no coast,” Tad said. Possibly the most repellent thing about him was the dainty way he stabbed at food and poked it into his mouth, as if contact with it were a necessary evil. “It had a coast, but Chile stole it. Anyway, I can’t live there. I need the sea. But there’s a place in the mountains, Los Volcanes. Used to be owned by a German guy who does ecological survey work. I’d hired him when I was thinking I could corner the world market in lithium. He told me he’d been flying in a small plane and seen this little Shangri-la valley and said to himself, What the fuck? Bought it for thirty-five thousand American, unbelievable. I took an extra day to go and see it, and he was right. The place is unearthly. I offered him a million, he settled for one and a half. Some things you see and you just gotta have ’em.”
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