The Moment (16 page)

The offices of Radio Liberty were in a bleak industrial corner of the city with the decidedly ironic name of Wedding. The pharmaceutical giant, Bayer, had a massive 1930s office block near the U-Bahn station where I emerged. It towered over a landscape of grubby apartment blocks and industrial buildings. Chauseestrasse—a onetime border crossing, now closed—loomed up ahead, as did The Wall which defined the immediate eastern horizon. Radio Liberty was located two streets away on Hochstrasse, not far from the Volkspark Humboldthain. It was housed in a low-lying, unmarked plain brick building. You could have easily imagined that the premises once housed a small precision tool factory. There was nothing on the outside stating that this was the West Berlin home of a well-known broadcasting outfit. But it was clear to anyone walking by that the enterprise contained herein was rather security conscious. There was a high wire fence of the type that surrounded school playgrounds in New York. Topping it was barbed wire. A bolted swing door had been fitted into a lower corner of the fence. There was a security camera focused on the street side of the entrance. As I approached the doorway and pressed the bell that was to its immediate right, a hefty man in a blue security uniform emerged from a small hut just inside the fenced-off area.

“
Ja?
” he asked, staring at me warily.

I had my passport at the ready and explained that I had an appointment with Herr Wellmann. He relieved me of my travel document, saying: “You wait.” Then he went into the hut, leaving me outside, hopping from one foot to another, my gloved hands plunged deep into the pockets of my jacket, as a way of staving off the bitter subzero cold. After about ten minutes he reemerged and opened the gate, telling me: “You walk straight ahead to the door marked ‘Reception.’ Frau Orff will be there to meet you.”

“Who’s Frau Orff?”

“Herr Wellmann’s secretary.”

Oh, great.
Her
.

“Could I have my passport back, please?” I asked.

“You collect it on the way out.”

He pointed toward the reception area.

I had expected to find myself face-to-face with a gaunt, highly angular woman with the demeanor of a prison guard or a mother superior. Instead Frau Orff was a most striking woman in her mid-forties: tall, slim, with long flowing chestnut brown hair and an ironic smile on a face that could have easily graced a French movie actress. She was chicly dressed in a black leather skirt and a red silk shirt. I immediately noticed the wedding ring on her left hand. She saw me take that in. Just as she could also see that I was thrown by her beauty—hence the ironic smile—as she proffered her cool hand and said in an ultra-dry voice:

“Herr Nesbitt. What a pleasure.”

She led me out of the reception area, which looked much like a doctor’s waiting room, and in through an open plan area of several dozen desks, alcoved off with moveable dividers. This open area must have covered three thousand square feet, and we were walking far too briskly (I had to stop myself from watching the sway of Frau Orff’s hips as she strode ahead of me) for me to take in the inhabitants of this rabbit warren of desks. Up ahead, at the end of this open area, were several broadcast studios walls of soundproof glass allowing everyone in the immediate area to see who was in front of the microphone at a given moment. Between these two studios was a wall with a door. Outside of it was a sign:

Jerome Wellmann, Direktor

Frau Orff opened the door. We were now in an anteroom with a series of historic Radio Liberty posters dating back to the 1950s adorning the walls. Frau Orff’s ultra-tidy desk was positioned right next to a second doorway, upon which she now tapped twice with her knuckles, and then entered once a voice from inside said:

“Kommen sie doch herein.”

She went inside, then emerged a moment later to say:

“Herr Direktor will now see you.”

I’d dressed correctly for my interview with Jerome Wellmann, as he too was in a corduroy jacket (dark green) with suede patches on the sleeves and a dark brown turtleneck. He was in his early fifties, with a long narrow face and a well-sculpted beard. His office was book lined, with framed photographs of Wellmann with major politicians (Ford, Carter, Helmut Schmidt) and key cultural figures (Ayn Rand, Mstislav Rostropovich, Kurt Vonnegut, Leonard Bernstein) who’d evidently visited his operation while on a trip to Berlin. I found it intriguing that Wellmann would intermingle pictures of evidently left-leaning Americans like Vonnegut and Bernstein with the Philosopher Queen of the Libertarian Right, Ayn Rand. It informed all visitors that the occupant of this office was no mouthpiece for orthodox American conservatism. The fact that Wellmann himself looked like he’d be very much at home giving a tutorial on Kant at Columbia also sent out a signal that he wasn’t your typical Cold Warrior.

“As I’m certain you know,” he said after motioning for me to sit in the chair opposite his desk, “there are Radio Liberty operations in Vienna, in Hamburg, in Trieste, in Munich. In these facilities they often have separate divisions for, say, Polish or Bulgarian or Czech language broadcasts. But here, given our unique position in this city, we concentrate solely on programs designed for our listeners in the German Democratic Republic. Now an important question:
Wie flieβend ist ihr Deutsch ist
?”

How fluent is your German?

For the next half hour Jerome Wellmann probed that question, speaking exclusively to me
auf Deutsch.
I managed to keep up with him. He quizzed me about my college years, about my book on Egypt, about my life in Kreuzberg (I was rather selective about the details of my life chez Fitzsimons-Ross), and most specifically about my primary reactions to the day trip I made into East Berlin. Here the storyteller in me took over. I wove a tale about the woman I met in the bookshop, the Angolan engineer, but most of all my rather visceral response to The Wall as seen from the other side of the divide. Eventually he put up his hand and said:

“All right, you’ve sold me. We have a slot after the main nine o’clock evening news entitled, quite simply,
Notes from Abroad
. It’s an essay—in which we give a journalist, a writer, free rein to comment on a journey, a current event. We put it out on our two services: in German and in English. We have several translators here who will work with you once you’ve delivered the text and we use several local actors to read the text in German. But you’ll also read the original text yourself on our English-language broadcast. What I want you to do is essentially write something along the lines of what you just related to me—‘Crossing Over for the First Time,’ or whatever you want to call it. I never tell writers how to do their job, and you pretty much have carte blanche, especially as your take on things in East Berlin chimes in with our point of view. Make it smart and always know that we talk up to our audience. Instead of taking a Manichaean viewpoint of things—we’re right, you’re wrong—we prefer to see things in a more complex shade of gray. Of course this gets us into all sorts of trouble with the sort of rabid patriots back home who think we should be playing ‘God Bless America’ every five minutes. What they don’t get is the fact that we are a much stronger propaganda tool by not being so righteous about life in the West, by showing that we can look critically at ourselves.

“Anyway, if this works out, we can discuss other possible assignments with you. But do understand our budget isn’t the most robust imaginable. We pay public broadcasting rates. I can give you two hundred dollars for the piece—but that will also include your fee for recording it. If that isn’t enough, I’m afraid . . .”

Two hundred American dollars was around five hundred and sixty deutsche marks at current exchange rate. Rent and most of my living expenses for a month.

“That’s just fine,” I said.

“Excellent. Can you deliver this time next week? I’ll check with the producer I’m assigning you, Pawel Andrejewski. He’s Polish, as you may have gathered, but like everyone else who works here, his German is excellent. Anyway, he’s recording a program right now, but should be free in five minutes. If the two of you hit it off . . . and, I’m going to warn you now, Pawel can be tricky, though he is one of my best producers . . . but if you can work with the man, we have many slots that need filling. Our pool of contributors is, at best, erratic. So make a good impression with him and . . .”

The phone on Wellmann’s desk began to ring. He reached for it, answering it with a
Ja?
and then immediately said: “
Schicken sie sie herein
.” Send her in.

At which point the door opened and a young woman walked in. I guessed she was in her early thirties. Medium height. Short brown hair cut in a simple pageboy style. Wearing a denim skirt with black tights and a long sleeved black T-shirt. She was borderline thin, and currently had a lit cigarette in one hand and a sheaf of papers in the other. I quickly noticed that, like mine, her fingernails were rather chewed up. Just as I also noticed that there was a slight tear in the right knee of her stockings and that the black calf-high boots she wore really needed a shine. Her skin was clear, well scrubbed. Though there was a hint of sleeplessness in the slight dark moons beneath them, what struck me most about her brown eyes was the way they radiated need and sadness and a definite softness within. This was a woman who, I sensed, had known pain but who wanted to present a dignified face to the world. The very fact that she didn’t see the need to worry about minor sartorial details like a torn stocking—or could show her vulnerability by keeping her bitten nails unvarnished—immediately appealed to me. Possibly because I found her so beautiful. Not the sort of conventional beauty you associate with a model or a particularly winsome actress. Rather, a beauty that instantly emanated intelligence, vulnerability, a strong sense of self, a profound sense of loneliness.

And her reaction to the sight of me? I saw her fix on me. I saw her register the same brief moment of seismic surprise as we looked at each other for the first time. Then she immediately turned away and said to Wellmann:

“Herr-Direktor hier ist die Übersetzung die Sie wollten.”
Here is the translation you wanted.

“Thank you, Petra,” he said, accepting the papers. “And I want you to meet someone. An American writer—and a good one at that.”

I was now on my feet.

“Thomas, meet one of our translators. Petra Dussmann.”

She turned to face me. She took my extended hand. There was a brief instant when our eyes again met. She didn’t look at me with rapture or romantic longing. But in that very moment of having her hand in mine and facing each other for the first time . . . well, quite simply,
I knew
. Just as, I sensed, she knew, too.

Then she disengaged her hand and turned back to Wellmann, saying:

“Wenn Sie Fragen zu der Übersetzung haben, Herr Direktor
. . .” If you have any questions about the translation, Herr Direktor . . .

“I doubt I will,” he said. “And you’ll probably be working with Thomas here very soon.”

Did I detect the smallest of smiles on her face as he said that? If so she masked it quickly and simply responded with a quick nod to Herr Direktor.

“I look forward to that,” I said.

“
Ja,
” she replied. Not looking back at me, she headed for the door.

As it swung behind her all I could think was: life as I know it has just changed.

PART
THREE

ONE

L
IFE AS I
know it has just changed.

I wrote that line later that night in my notebook, nursing a beer on my kitchen table, my pen flying across the page. When I woke late the next morning and reread it my initial reaction was:
Oh please. It was a glance between you, nothing more.

As I kept telling myself this while waiting for my coffee to percolate, another competing voice between my ears was asking: . . .
then why are you still rerunning that first meeting, frame-by-frame, inside your head? Why can’t you wipe her face clear of your mind’s eye?

After Petra left the office, Wellmann was all business—making me immediately think that either he hadn’t seen all that had just passed between us, or he chose to not comment about it, or it was all in my head, and I was guilty of an overactive romantic imagination. Picking up the phone, he summoned Pawel Andrejewski to meet us. As we waited for him, Wellmann informed me that, prior to my arrival, he’d had to put me through another security clearance.

“I’m not obliged to inform you of this, but I prefer to be as transparent as possible about such matters. I’m certain you know that no one works for us, even on a freelance basis, unless they have been cleared by the powers-that-be at our local branch of ‘the brethren.’ If you ever happen to meet around here anyone who identifies himself as connected with the United States Information Agency, do know that you are also dealing with spooks. Why am I telling you this? Because why should you work for us and not know this?”

There was a knock on the door. Frau Orff put her head in to inform us that Herr Andrejewski was awaiting us outside. Wellmann informed her that she could send him in.

Pawel Andrejewski appeared in the doorway. He was a fantastically tall, thin man with dense black hair and tinted rectangular glasses, dressed in black jeans and a black turtleneck sweater. He had a lit cigarette in one hand—and I could see him immediately sizing me up with a certain ironic detachment.

“I am needed, Herr Direktor?” he asked, giving a certain acerbic weight to the expression,
Herr Direktor
(unlike Petra, who used the title respectfully).

“Meet Thomas Nesbitt. I will pass on to you his book about Egypt. It’s actually rather good. He’s here in Berlin writing another book . . . about what exactly, Thomas?”

“About Berlin, I suppose.”

“You mean, you are not certain what the book will be about?” Pawel asked me.

“I’m never certain about such things until I’ve done time somewhere.”

“‘Done time,’” Pawel repeated back to me. “It sounds like a jail sentence.”

“Is that your way of looking at Berlin?”

“I am just repeating what you said.”

“And I am thinking that you are misreading what I’m saying.”

“You have written how many books?”

“Just one.”

“So you are still a neophyte.”

“Sorry?”

“One published book hardly makes you a proper author.”

“Do you always play the agent provocateur on meeting someone for the first time?”

“Absolutely,” he said with a smile.

“Well, as I am assigning you to produce Thomas’s first essay for us,” Herr Wellmann cut in, “I expect you to be professional and collegial. And I now want you to take Thomas around the operation, Pawel, and show him the proverbial ropes.”

“Whatever you demand, Herr Direktor.”

“One of these days you will lose your acerbity, Pawel, and the world will be a better place for it. I’ve told Thomas that he is to write us an essay about his first day in East Berlin.”

“Shall we call it ‘I Meet the Communists’?” Pawel asked.

“That’s a brilliant title,” I said. “You’re a most imaginative guy.”

“And I can see that this is a marriage made in heaven,” Wellmann said.

“No, in Wedding,” Pawel added.

“Now, both of you, get the hell out of here and leave me in peace. Thomas, welcome aboard. Don’t let Pawel capsize you.”

“As if I would do such a thing,” Pawel said. “Okay, neophyte. I now show you the ropes.”

As we left the office, Frau Orff stopped me, clipboard in hand.

“Your contract, Herr Nesbitt.”

I was going to ask her how she knew what I had agreed with Herr Wellmann while in his office. But Pawel posed that question for me:

“Have you been listening in again to Herr Direktor’s conversations, Frau Stasi?”

To her credit Frau Orff responded to this comment with a shrug and a sneer.

“You are the ultimate oxymoron: a Polish comedian.”

“And you are a humorless woman.”

I took the clipboard from Frau Orff, glanced at the sections about the fee, the delivery date, and the fact that Radio Free Europe would have first broadcast rights for this “on-air essay,” then signed it.

“You are a very trusting fellow, signing
anything
this woman hands you.”

“I regret, Herr Nesbitt, that you have been assigned to this ‘gentleman,’ who is anything but a ‘gentleman.’”

“You still cannot get over me, can you?” Pawel asked, his tone bone-dry. Frau Orff shook her head and seemed to be suppressing a laugh.

“Let us be definitive about this, Herr Andrejewski. I have never slept with you.”

“Are you sure?”

“Good day, Herr Nesbitt,” she said, relieving me of the clipboard.

As soon as we were out the door, Pawel turned to me and said:

“Even if the Stasi were interrogating her, she would deny having slept with me.”

“That makes it sound like an experience she wants to forget at all costs.”

“She has a husband who’s a serious fascist; that’s why she can’t say a word about it.”

“Describe ‘a serious fascist,’” I said.

“A Christian Democrat who is a senior executive for Krups, and who bears a striking resemblance to Wotan.”

“You’ve evidently had the opportunity to check him out.”

“He came to our Christmas party last year. I was very tempted to approach him and tell him that his wife is a rather robust fuck. But executives like him . . . they always have hit men working for them.”

This repartee, I came to discover, was classic Pawel. He always spoke in a low, rational voice. Even when he was furious at the world, which he frequently was, he had a surface calm that was preternaturally spooky. As I later came to discover—like so many of the other denizens of Radio Liberty—he was also obsessed with the idea that there were others conspiring against him and that he was a possible target for assassination.

“Now, this is a woman you need to avoid at all costs,” he whispered to me as he steered me into the main open-plan work area adjoining the studio. With a rapid movement of the head he pointed to a rather large and puffy woman in her forties with shock black hair, wildly rouged lips, and a gold ring on every finger. She was dressed in something that resembled a caftan and had a cigarette attached to a plastic gold filter. She looked like she belonged in some souq. Seeing us approach, she favored Pawel with a deep and profound sneer.

“Hello, lover boy,” she said to him as we approached, her German heavily accented.

“Soraya, always a pleasure.”

“You are, per usual, a dreadful liar.”

“Say hello to one of our new contributors, Herr Nesbitt.”

“Is he a friend of yours?”

“Does that matter?”

“If he is, I will have nothing to do with him.”

“I’ve known Pawel all of two minutes,” I said.

“If I were you, I would avoid his acquaintance from this moment on.”

“That will be a little difficult, as Herr Direktor has assigned me to be his producer.”

“My condolences,” she said to me.

As we moved off, I turned to Pawel and said:

“Another of your big fans. Don’t tell me you slept with her as well.”

“Now that would be a taste crime. Though it will not surprise you to discover that she is Turkish, her husband is a Bulgarian midget who used to be secret police.”

“And now?”

“He runs a business leasing portable toilets to building sites. I am certain it is all a front.”

“For what?”

Pawel gave me an all-encompassing shrug, indicating a wide range of conspiratorial possibilities.

“Soraya is the Middle Eastern monitor around here. Speaks Arabic into German and Turkish, and was allegedly sleeping with an Ethiopian diplomat last year . . .”

I found myself laughing, as I began to sense a theme-and-variation developing in Pawel’s repartee. Everyone around here ended up at this station not simply because they were in the market for a broadcasting job. Rather they were here because they were questionable characters with past or present histories that were, at best, shady.

“How is Robert today?” Pawel asked, approaching a rotund, jovial man with a huge Johannes Brahms-style beard and a formidable beer belly. He was dressed in a style that the Germans refer to as
länder
—i.e., the sort of green tweed jacket with leather collar and heavy green tweed pants that made him appear to be a cross between a Westphalian pig farmer and a Bavarian leprechaun.

“Robert is good,” he said, stuffing tobacco into his pipe with the sort of vehemence that I imagined a chicken sexer applied to his chosen craft. “And my Polish friend, he is good?”

“Your Polish friend, he is
sehr gut,
” Pawel said, faultlessly mimicking Robert’s accent. Robert himself seemed to take no notice of this or, if he was cognizant of it, he seemed to be willing to ruefully ignore it. “And your Polish friend has a new colleague to whom he would like to introduce you.”

After exchanging names, I watched as Robert Mütter pulled out a single match from the brown leather vest he wore beneath his jacket, struck it against the corner of his jacket, and ignited his bowl of tobacco, puffing away happily as he asked:

“A real American?”

“One hundred percent,” I said.

“We only have one of those around here—Herr Direktor—unless you count our ‘friends’ from USIA.”

“They are not our friends,” Pawel said. “They are our secret masters.”

“Are you certain our young friend isn’t one of them?” Robert asked, all smiles.

“He writes books,” Pawel said.

“So did Bukharin.”

“Until he was purged by Stalin.”

“And all because he opposed agricultural collectivism,” Pawel said. “They shot everybody back then for speaking up against anything collective, even collective in-grown toenails, of which there were more than a few cases, especially in the Urals.”

“Do you oppose agricultural collectivism, young man?” Robert asked me.

“Not if I am going to get shot for it,” I said.

“A smart chap,” he said, using the German for this anglicism—
ein Bursche
. “Welcome to our little club.”

As soon as we were out of earshot, Pawel said:

“Don’t let his Village Idiot fool you. He is the editor of all German news for our service—which means that, outside of Herr Direktor, he is the final frontier when it comes to deciding how and what we transmit in terms of ‘Bundesrepublik’ and ‘Deutsche Demokratische Republik’ news to our avid listeners in that prison across the street from us. With a job like that—and the fact that he’s a Franz-Joseph Schmidt-style Catholic from Garmisch-Partenkirchen, the spiritual home of repressive Gemütlichkeit
—
it’s clear he is also in the employ of the
Bundesnachrichtendienst
. . . not that a new arrival like yourself would know of such organizations.”

“The West German Secret Police?”

“Most impressive. Let me guess—you are here in Berlin to gather material for that most specious form of postwar literary entertainment, the spy novel.”

“I’m not a novelist, and I do think that your fellow Pole, Mr. Conrad, would object to your wholesale dismissal of espionage fiction, as he wrote
The Secret Agent
in . . .”

“1907. And I now also acknowledge a certain autodidacticism on your part.”

We approached the next desk. Sitting there was a young woman with spiked hair and a face that had been covered in white pancake makeup. She was listening to a reel-to-reel tape recorder on a pair of oversized headphones, the connecting band of which seemed to float atop the highly gelled peaks of her hair. She was smoking a cigarette and had three open bottles of Coca-Cola on her desk. Pawel addressed her in Polish. At first she glanced at him with a smirk, but then deliberately closed her eyes and began singing along, in jagged English, to whatever she was listening to on tape. It took a moment for me to decipher the lyrics: “Is She Really Going Out with Him?” by Joe Jackson. Again Pawel tried to address her. Again her smirk broadened as she closed her eyes even tighter, choosing to ignore him further. Now he tapped her on the shoulder. With great deliberateness she removed the headphones and made a big deal about letting her finger slowly descend onto the button that stopped the tape reels from turning. There followed a rapid-fire exchange in Polish between them, the young woman regarding Pawel with the amused look one possibly gives to a reprobate. Then Pawel nodded toward me and broke into German: