The Moment (34 page)

“Still, I did have this hope. For around four weeks, Jurgen started to show signs of finally wanting to be a father and a husband. He even cut down the drinking and tried to lose a little weight and actually began to pick up after himself. He seemed to relish, for a while, taking his son for walks in his carriage and playing house with us and making love with me again. I can’t say that sex with Jurgen was ever very satisfactory. He was fast; he didn’t understand tenderness or sensuality. Even when he wasn’t drinking heavily, he smelled. But I knew this all from the first night I ever spent with him. Yet I still decided to stay put. Why is it that we so often refuse to trust our instincts—and instead talk ourselves into situations we know are defective, impossible?

“But when you have a new child in your life—a child you simply adore more than anyone you have ever known, a child who has become the best thing ever to happen to you, and without whom you know life simply has no purpose—you can put up with all the defects and shortcomings of his father. Or, at least, that’s what I felt. Just as, during those four weeks of good feelings between us—I also felt that we had turned a corner, that we were becoming a family.

“Then a film that Jurgen had been writing for the state film company, DEFA, was suddenly halted two weeks before shooting was due to begin.

“The script was very brilliant and completely subversive—about a socialist writer who is imprisoned in the final months of the Nazi period and is so badly beaten by two SS guards that he goes into a coma and wakes up seven years later to find himself in a new country called the GDR. And he comes to find the socialist paradise of which he once dreamed a rather flawed one.

“I remember reading the script for the first time shortly before Johannes was born and telling Jurgen that I couldn’t imagine DEFA approving it for production. But this was a moment in 1981 when there was a hint of liberalism by the regime, and they seemed to be encouraging writers and directors to be a little critical of life as we lived it in our ‘humanistic system.’ So Jurgen was very confident the film would happen. They had a director and actors chosen, and locations scouted, when, suddenly, someone in the Ministry of Propaganda got hold of the script and the head of DEFA was called in and formally carpeted for even thinking that such a piece of ‘virulently anti-DDR propaganda’ could ever be made. The minister then turned the whole thing over to the Stasi. Jurgen suddenly disappeared for six days. I was frantic, thinking he’d had an accident or had gone on another bender. Out of nowhere, he showed up at dawn one morning—telling me that he had been held incommunicado in what he was certain was Hohenschönhausen, the famous Stasi prison. But he couldn’t be that certain of its location. As he explained to me, when they came for him, they put him into the back of a van, which had a small cell contained within it, and drove him around for several hours in an attempt to disorient him. We both knew about this Stasi strategy for confusing the people they arrested. Jurgen said that they kept him locked up in that van for hours, arriving at some prison well after nightfall. Beyond that he wouldn’t talk too much about what happened over the next few days, except to say he was interrogated twice daily—always during daylight hours, as ‘befits a “humanistic” police state’—and then he was kept alone in a cell with nothing to read, no paper and pen to write with, no stimulation whatsoever. When I asked him what they demanded of him during the interrogations, he became very tight-lipped, refusing to say anything. Everyone knew that the only way the Stasi would let you out so early is if you denounced somebody. When Jurgen informed me that I must never tell anybody that he was picked up by the Stasi—and did so in a manner that hinted he now regretted even mentioning this to me—I knew that he had been forced into naming names, even if there were no names to name. In fact he became so vehement, so paranoid about any word getting out whatsoever regarding his detention, that I had to promise him repeatedly I would stay silent about his arrest. Which, of course, I did.

“After this, two things happened. The first was that, over the next year, Jurgen discovered that he had gone from being the hottest young playwright in the GDR to someone who couldn’t get his work put on anywhere. He approached several theaters about commissions they had promised him in the wake of the success of
Die Wahl
. Not one of them would now go near him. Nor would any television or radio drama producers, with the result that Jurgen had his professional identity—the writing that maintained his fragile equilibrium—taken away from him. At first he went all inward, not talking to anybody for days. Then, right after some tiny theater company refused him a commission, he disappeared again and didn’t return for two weeks, showing up in the same bloated, disheveled, catastrophic state as when he had disappeared before. When I demanded to know where he was, his response was: ‘Everywhere.’ And he recounted fourteen days of simply drifting around the country, sometimes crashing on the floors of a friend’s apartment, sometimes sleeping in cheap hotels, sometimes sleeping on trains, sometimes not knowing where he was, sometimes thinking about throwing himself in front of the next oncoming train. But then, so he told me, he had an epiphany while standing on the platform in Frankfurt an der Oder, right on the Polish border. He was going to write his own epic Ring Cycle on the history of the GDR. It was going to have a cast of one hundred and would play out over five nights at a length of around four hours per night. For the better part of an hour he described, in incessant detail, just how all the parts would weave together. He was on creative fire and spoke with such passion, such ferocious commitment, that I felt as if he was in a trance. Every time he could corner me over the next week, he would continue going on about the masterpiece, the East German epic that was assembling itself in his head. As this monologue became more and more of a rant, I really began to fear for his sanity.

“Around this time we celebrated Johannes’s first birthday. I’d been back at work for nine months, leaving Johannes every day at a nursery in Prenzlauer Berg and picking him up after work, as Jurgen was now writing every night from ten until just before dawn, and drinking a bottle of vodka each evening in the process, as vodka was cheap in the GDR. He got even more wildly fat, and he rarely left the apartment. When he awoke at three in the afternoon, he started eating. The deeper he got into the plays, the more detached from reality he became, to the point where he virtually stopped acknowledging his family’s existence. I found him a camp bed he could put in the little alcove he called his study. As he retreated completely from his wife and child, I basically created my own wall between us. I would leave food for him to eat. I would wash his clothes. Once a week I would attempt to clean the chaos that was his alcove, remaking the bed with clean sheets. Other than that I was with Johannes. Bless my son. His presence in my life saved my sanity that year. He was such a quiet baby—and one who occasionally appeared withdrawn. But when I held him he always smiled, always cooed. Outside that first bout of colic, he was such a good little man. As his father had now taken over the alcove that was supposed to be his nursery, I was very happy to have him in our bedroom—and would so often put him next to me in bed and talk to him and make him laugh and help him play with the few stuffed toys that we had, all of which were made for me by the very wonderful Judit—who was always around the apartment, always happy to take him to her place for an evening if I wanted to go out to the theater or a cinema, always incredibly supportive when it came to Jurgen’s increasingly deranged behavior.

“The thing was, I knew my husband was acting out some Prenzlauer Berg version of the Myth of Sisyphus, that this entire mad dramatic enterprise—‘The most important piece of German dramatic writing since Goethe’s
Faust,
’ he announced one evening when he was relatively sober, which made it all the more unnerving—was, at best, doomed. Everyone in our circle in Prenzlauer Berg largely began to steer clear of Jurgen—because it was clear that he had entered some zone where it was impossible for him to accept that he was on the blacklist. Unless he was willing to do a major public self-criticism and turn into a Party sycophant, his career as a writer was over. I was pretty damn certain that he privately knew the reality of his situation. Yet, like most of us, he retreated into a scenario—
‘I will write a masterpiece . . . every theater in the country will produce it . . . I will be proclaimed a genius and win the Lenin Prize for Literature and be rehabilitated and publicly loved again’
—that allowed him to dodge the terribleness of his situation and simultaneously function on a daily basis. Jurgen really spent that year working. I never saw him. We hardly talked. But his industry was wild. Each play ran to more than two hundred and fifty pages in manuscript, and he was compulsive about getting to his desk every night.

“He finished the fourth part of this epic at three in the morning. It was around eighteen months ago. He started screaming at the top of his lungs when he wrote the last line. I know this because I was asleep with Johannes in the next room when he let rip. He woke us up, the yelps turning to hysterical sobs, Jurgen crying and telling me how we were now saved, how the brilliance of this work would change our lives, how we would be living in one of those dachas they gave to important writers by the Grosser Müggelsee on the outskirts of the city. ‘I will be the first GDR writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature!’ he proclaimed to me one night when we had a few friends over. ‘You will all brag about knowing me.’

“What I knew was going to happen
did
happen. Jurgen did begin to unravel. Over three months rejection after rejection hit him. Not only that, but some of the theaters to which he submitted the play cycle felt duty bound to tell the Stasi about this ‘ill-disciplined, but profoundly antisocial piece of trash,’ as the policeman who first interrogated Jurgen told him. This time he was ‘invited’ to come in and speak to the police. This time they simply cautioned him to stop trying to get his play even read. ‘You should think about another line of work,’ the cop told him.

“Afterward Jurgen came home and drank a bottle of vodka straight down. Then grabbing the huge manuscript of his plays he took the tram and the U-Bahn to the Berliner Ensemble—the theater that Brecht himself created in the GDR. It was the first night of a new play by Heiner Müller and there were a considerable number of high-level people in the theater, including the minister for culture and several ambassadors of ‘fraternal socialist states.’ Our neighbors Susanne and Horst—both actors in the ensemble, but not cast in this play—were there. And Horst said that Jurgen had arrived with a wooden box and stood up on it outside the Berliner Ensemble, screaming at the top of his lungs: ‘I am a great German writer! I have written a masterpiece! I am being censored by the Stasi!’ Horst came over and begged him to stop this act of professional and personal suicide, but Jurgen shouted him down, stating that he was going to stand on this soapbox and read his play out loud until the directors of the Berliner Ensemble accepted it for production. Just then a big car drove up, accompanied by two police vehicles, and the minister of culture came out. At which point Jurgen unzipped his fly and began to urinate on the wall of the Berliner Ensemble, screaming:

“‘I am a great German writer and I piss on the house that Brecht built!’

“Then he turned and sprayed the minister with his urine. At which point the police tackled him and, according to Horst, beat him senseless right there on the street.

“I learned about all this from Susanne and Horst, who came straight home, clearly distraught, and told me I should borrow their car—they were among the privileged few who had a Trabbi—and get out of town with Johannes immediately. They had a cottage on the Baltic Sea and they told me that I needed to pack and disappear, as the Stasi were bound to arrive before dawn. That was always the way when somebody committed a grievous offense against the state—their spouses or live-in lovers were inevitably picked up. The thing was, even if I did flee north to their cottage in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, it would only be a matter of time before the authorities found me. I insisted that it was best if I stayed put and answered their questions and explained to them that my marriage to Jurgen was a sham, and that he was—as far as I was concerned—someone in need of psychological and medical help. Also I knew that if I took Horst and Susanne’s car and borrowed their cottage, it would implicate them. Anyway I had led a blameless life to date. No political or dissident activity. No questionable behavior. No applications to ‘leave the Republic.’ I had always been a good citizen. Surely the authorities would see that.

“Of course, I was horrified by what Jurgen had done. Horrified and depressed. But I knew it was coming—and there was also part of me that wished I had been strong enough to have reported him to our local doctor some time earlier, when it was clear he was heading for a major breakdown. But I also feared ratting on him and being the one who put him in the hands of the authorities. Now, however, I regretted not having taken such action earlier, as I knew that his fate would be, at best, one of those horrible asylums I’d heard about where ‘extreme’ political dissidents were kept.

“Anyway the Stasi never came that night, which I took to be a good sign. The next morning—after just a few hours of bad sleep—I awoke and fed Johannes and got him changed, then showered and prepared to go to work. Again outside my door there were no unmarked cars, no men in trench coats awaiting me. When I reached the nursery with my son, the woman in charge, Frau Schmidt, greeted me with the usual pleasantries she exchanged with me every morning. Then I turned and started walking toward the tram at Prenzlauer Allee. That’s when a plain gray van suddenly pulled up alongside me, screeching to a halt. Two men in suits got out. They asked to see my papers. I demanded to know what this was about. ‘Crimes against the Republic,’ one of them told me. The other one said: ‘And we know exactly the nature of your betrayal, Frau Dussmann.’ This was before I had even shown them my identity papers, and a chill ran through me. The next thing I knew the two men were frog-marching me into the rear of the van. I can remember its interior very clearly. Very low—less than one meter in height—and inside there were two small cells. I began to protest, saying I had done nothing wrong, never did anything wrong, that I was a loyal citizen. That’s when one of the men spat in my face. ‘You dare call yourself loyal after what you’ve done.’ He literally shoved me so hard into the cell that I twisted an ankle as I hit the floor. I screamed in pain, but he simply threw the cell door closed and attached a padlock to it, then told me: